Wildlife Rescue Series!

IMG_9299

Originally uploaded by Jane Ray’s Wildlife Rescue Series

Sarah McLachlan loves animals and she’s not afraid to show it. In fact, she has lent her support to both the BC SPCA and the Wildlife Rescue Association of BC in the past, and is about to do so again.

Next week, Sarah will shoot a new television commercial for the SPCA, following on her moving and powerful “Angel” commercial that has been airing over the past couple of years. I’m hoping to be invited to the shoot!

Although it was the Beatles who wrote “Blackbird,” and Paul McCartney who first made the song famous, in my head I always hear it sung in Sarah McLachlan’s voice, and her rendition always turns my thoughts to animals I’ve rescued or helped to heal over the past seven years.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

 Black bird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
you were only waiting for this moment to be free…

I’m creating my first board game. I’m getting paid to do this. [insert incredulous laughter here]

The upcoming fall issue of the BC SPCA’s Bark! Magazine, published for the Kids’ Club, will focus primarily on two topics: small dogs (big dogs in small bodies! … and with the same issues and training problems!); and wildlife.

Since it’s fall, we’ve decided to write about bird migration, and that’s when the board game idea came up. Why not make it so the kids could choose to be a bird, and could choose a migration route south across North America, and then roll the dice, choose a card, and see who gets to their destination first!

Playing cards will have all kinds of obstacles on them: storms, skyscrapers and predators, for example. But they’ll also have boons: warm updrafts, flying in V-formation to save energy, catching a tailwind, finding an abundant food source.

The cards will be downloadable from the Kids’ Club website, which will also feature a Google map of the full route, complete with specially chosen clickable sites, such as a pass through the Rockies; Reifel Bird Sanctuary; the staging ground at Boundary Bay.

Did I mention I’m getting paid to do this “work?”

Life is good.

Stay tuned for more info about the upcoming issue of Bark!

So I was up til 11:30 last night reading through the second page proofs of Gaia Wild. This is the stage where we’re not reading for content any more, but for mistakes — typos, dropped words, extra words, changes from the last round that have been missed, dropped folios, chapter-page number correlations … that sort of thing.

By the time the author is looking at second pages, changes should be minimal to nil. This is generally the last time an author sees his or her book. The publisher will then go through a couple more revisions in-house, correcting the minutiae. But as far as the author is concerned, this is it.

HOWEVER … that wasn’t the case last night. What I found were numerous “introduced errors” — mistakes made by a [probably exhausted, deadline-rushed] typesetter in the process of inputting the corrections from round one.

So it looks like we’ll go to round three. Sigh. It feels to me as though this book has been a long time coming — it was part of my original series proposal in the fall of 2003. So it’s been a five-year gestation period. Even elephants don’t carry their pregnancies that long–about 22 months, whereas this will be 60!

Funny though, it’s always worth all the work and struggle and mess-ups, all the detours and stalls and delays.

Sigh. Did I say that already? Sigh.

I WANT MY GAIA WILD!

Bark! Magazine for Kids!

Originally uploaded by Jane Ray’s Wildlife Rescue Series

Can you say “Dream Job” ???! Dear blog readers and Jane Ray’s Wildlife Rescue Series fans, I’m pleased as punch to announce that I am the new Humane Education Supervisor with the BC SPCA!

This means that I get to work with the Kids’ Club, in which there are almost 3,000 members now throughout British Columbia … AND I get to write and edit Bark! Magazine, which comes out four times a year and is filled with amazing facts and stories about all kinds of animals!

After seven and a half years of self-employment, I made the decision to return to the regular workforce once I realized that by this fall, I would have three books under my belt. You see, I’d heard from publishers and agents alike that once a series reaches three books, it begins to take on a life of its own.

I decided I could have a bit of a life of MY own once that happened. And here I am!

More Kids’ Club and Bark! news to come. AND … more Gaia Wild news soon, too! Stay tuned!

I won the lottery … I’m a workshop leader at this year’s Canadian Book Camp at the Vancouver Public Library! Running from August 11 through August 15, all day every day, young aspiring writers and avid readers will gather ‘below the books’ to hear authors speak, to participate in interactive workshops, and, of course, to write. By the end of the week, campers will have completed at least one piece that will be published in the camp’s annual anthology.

My workshop is entitled INSPIRATION STUDIO: Tap into your own powerhouse of inspiration! It runs every afternoon in the Alice MacKay room from 1pm-2:45pm. Participants will be amazed to discover what they can use as sources of inspiration for some of their best writing ever!

Watch here for more information leading up to the start of the Canadian Book Camp 2008. See you there!