While riding with a group of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, Geoffrey Chaucer makes plans for the writing of his next poem, the Canterbury Tales.

Raskolnikov: Murder with an Axe - a novel This novel is an imaginative re-creation of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. After killing the old pawnbroker, Ilyona Ivanovna, and her sister, Lizabeta, the young student, Raskolnikov, is haunted by the savagery of the double-murder. As he tosses and turns in his misery - reviewing his situation, his motives and his view of himself as an "Extraordinary Man" - Raskolnikov's preconscious mind forms the image-patterns by which he seeks to understand what he has done. The Making of Murder with an Axe - a reflective journal This journal records my reflections on the process of the crafting of the novel as it evolved through the stages of planning, writing, editing and polishing. It constitutes an effort to be as conscious as possible of the process whereby the single idea that suggested the topic of the novel was expanded into a complex work of art. Topics range from the nuts and bolts of novel-building to the nature of the novel as an art-form. Planning Murder with an Axe - a planning notebook During the writing of the novel, I kept a hand-written notebook which records the day-by-day development of the novel as it found its shape and style. The notebook - now in print form - reveals how a vast cluster of thoughts was sifted, selected, structured and polished into novel-form. The Project Together, this novel, journal and notebook comprise the tenth installment in an on-going novel-writing project in which I am exploring the concept of form and meaning in the novel, and of the novel as a form of expression in the 21st Century. All of the published journals and notebooks are available for free download at www.johnpassfield.ca.

Water Lane, the last stop on Medieval pilgrimages to Canterbury, is located in the ancestral village that John Passfield shares with the, Elizabethan playwright, Christopher Marlowe. In this novel, the water in the lane becomes a central image in an imaginary pilgrimage that the dying artist recalls as he lies bleeding from a stab wound on the floor of Eleanor Bull's house in Deptford, in May of 1593. Amid the footsteps and murmurs of his murderers, as they rehearse their version of the scuffle, Marlowe's preconscious mind attempts a final structuring of the images of his life. The overt mystery -- who has arranged the death of Christopher Marlowe? --frames the covert mystery: what are the influences that shape, an artist's work?

This journal, a companion book to the novel, Inside the Wright Brothers: Flight is Possible, is a record of the thoughts that occur to a writer while in the process of writing a novel. In recording these thoughts, the journal provides an exploration of a number of topics: the working out of a pattern, in novel form, to reflect the author's conception of the meaning of the Wright Brothers' experience; a consideration of the achievement of the Wright Brothers as an example of the creative process at work; and a step-by-step record of the writing process, which includes the planning, writing, editing and polishing of a novel about the Wright Brothers. In addition, the journal presents the challenge of matching form and meaning in the novel genre as a response to the complexities of life, and a discussion of the possibilities of the novel as an art form. This journal is the seventh in a series of companion books - pairing novel and journal - which explore the concept of form and meaning in the novel.

HOW does an idea become a novel? What are the minute-by-minute decisions and discoveries that lead to the realization of an artistic vision? In this companion book to the novel Water Lane: The Pilgrimage of Christopher Marlowe, the reader of the novel is invited to look over the shoulder of the writer at the process whereby a cluster of related images evolves into a realized work of art, and at the on-going exploration of the techniques that will allow us to process the bombardment of images that is life as we experience it in the 21st Century.

This novel, Inside the Wright Brothers: Flight is Possible, presents the Wright Brothers as idealists who build a dream out of the nuts and bolts of their everyday reality. There is a hard core of steel in the Wrights that, however compassionate, polite, accommodating and modest they appear to be to other people, is the straight arrow that allows them to see their life's work clearly, to make every decision and action move towards the achievement of their goal, and to seldom make false judgments or false gestures that would cause them to deviate from their true course. The assurance that guides the brothers is that quality in creative people that allows them to work towards their life's goal no matter who or what encourages or discourages them, advances them or retards them, promotes them or disparages them. Familiarity with the Wright Brothers story has made the invention of the world's first airplane seem to have a fairy-tale ambiance which is divorced from the sweat and anxiety of everyday life. This assumption of an effortless invention process is actually a hold-over from the initial response to their accomplishment by the people of the Wright Brothers' own time. While suitably impressed with the achievement of the Wright Brothers, the people of the early 20th Century remained unaware of the complex process that the Wright Brothers had actually gone through in order to produce such amazing results. The lack of appreciation of the complexity of the invention process is a result of the pronouncements of "aviation experts" of the time who failed to appreciate the magnitude of the Wright accomplishment for two reasons: an inability to imagine the number and complexity of the challengesthat the Wrights had found solutions to, and a desire to limit the Wright's legal hold over their inventions in light of what promised to be a great financial future for the new innovation. In effect, while the public of the early 20th Century marveled at the invention of the airplane, and gave full credit to the Wright Brothers, many "aviation experts"assumed that the Wright Brothers' contribution to the invention process had involved nothing more complicated than a little tinkering with the ideas of those who were better qualified - by education and by academic eminence - to invent the airplane. True appreciation of the wonder of the Wright Brothers' contribution to the invention of controlled, human-piloted, powered flight has been reserved for the detailed historical and aeronautical researches and studies of our own time. It is here, a century after the Wright Brothers' accomplishment, that the mythical story - of small-town bicycle mechanics astonishing the world with a feat as impressive as the boy Arthur pulling the sword from the stone - and the modern story of painstaking scientific research and development - of problem, theory, experiment and solution - come together. The novel explores the tenacity which allows the Wright Brothers to cling with an eagle's talons to the single idea that human flight is possible.

Raskolnikov: Murder with an Axe - a novel This novel is an imaginative re-creation of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. After killing the old pawnbroker, Ilyona Ivanovna, and her sister, Lizabeta, the young student, Raskolnikov, is haunted by the savagery of the double-murder. As he tosses and turns in his misery - reviewing his situation, his motives and his view of himself as an "Extraordinary Man" - Raskolnikov's preconscious mind forms the image-patterns by which he seeks to understand what he has done. The Making of Murder with an Axe - a reflective journal This journal records my reflections on the process of the crafting of the novel as it evolved through the stages of planning, writing, editing and polishing. It constitutes an effort to be as conscious as possible of the process whereby the single idea that suggested the topic of the novel was expanded into a complex work of art. Topics range from the nuts and bolts of novel-building to the nature of the novel as an art-form. Planning Murder with an Axe - a planning notebook During the writing of the novel, I kept a hand-written notebook which records the day-by-day development of the novel as it found its shape and style. The notebook - now in print form - reveals how a vast cluster of thoughts was sifted, selected, structured and polished into novel-form. The Project Together, this novel, journal and notebook comprise the tenth installment in an on-going novel-writing project in which I am exploring the concept of form and meaning in the novel, and of the novel as a form of expression in the 21st Century. All of the published journals and notebooks are available for free download at www.johnpassfield.ca.

While riding with a group of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, Geoffrey Chaucer makes plans for the writing of his next poem, the Canterbury Tales.

This novel, Inside the Wright Brothers: Flight is Possible, presents the Wright Brothers as idealists who build a dream out of the nuts and bolts of their everyday reality. There is a hard core of steel in the Wrights that, however compassionate, polite, accommodating and modest they appear to be to other people, is the straight arrow that allows them to see their life's work clearly, to make every decision and action move towards the achievement of their goal, and to seldom make false judgments or false gestures that would cause them to deviate from their true course. The assurance that guides the brothers is that quality in creative people that allows them to work towards their life's goal no matter who or what encourages or discourages them, advances them or retards them, promotes them or disparages them. Familiarity with the Wright Brothers story has made the invention of the world's first airplane seem to have a fairy-tale ambiance which is divorced from the sweat and anxiety of everyday life. This assumption of an effortless invention process is actually a hold-over from the initial response to their accomplishment by the people of the Wright Brothers' own time. While suitably impressed with the achievement of the Wright Brothers, the people of the early 20th Century remained unaware of the complex process that the Wright Brothers had actually gone through in order to produce such amazing results. The lack of appreciation of the complexity of the invention process is a result of the pronouncements of "aviation experts" of the time who failed to appreciate the magnitude of the Wright accomplishment for two reasons: an inability to imagine the number and complexity of the challengesthat the Wrights had found solutions to, and a desire to limit the Wright's legal hold over their inventions in light of what promised to be a great financial future for the new innovation. In effect, while the public of the early 20th Century marveled at the invention of the airplane, and gave full credit to the Wright Brothers, many "aviation experts"assumed that the Wright Brothers' contribution to the invention process had involved nothing more complicated than a little tinkering with the ideas of those who were better qualified - by education and by academic eminence - to invent the airplane. True appreciation of the wonder of the Wright Brothers' contribution to the invention of controlled, human-piloted, powered flight has been reserved for the detailed historical and aeronautical researches and studies of our own time. It is here, a century after the Wright Brothers' accomplishment, that the mythical story - of small-town bicycle mechanics astonishing the world with a feat as impressive as the boy Arthur pulling the sword from the stone - and the modern story of painstaking scientific research and development - of problem, theory, experiment and solution - come together. The novel explores the tenacity which allows the Wright Brothers to cling with an eagle's talons to the single idea that human flight is possible.