Tagged: literary

Looking ahead (2011 & Beyond the Infinite)

This is the view from my window.  Notice the old, dessicated oak tree struggling for life alongside our big maple.  It’s a “witch tree”, all right, look at it.  Entangled in the strangling roots of its neighbor but somehow surviving, year after year.

Cold this morning, with a nut-cutting wind chill.  A good day to stay inside, build a fire and read.  Yesterday, I finished the new Lee Child novel, Worth Dying For, in about five hours.  Just tore through it.  Give Child credit, he’s got a sweet franchise going.  Sometimes his “Jack Reacher” novels are suspenseful, sometimes they slip into formula.  Reacher the unstoppable superman (yawn).  This one is better.  The story hums along and there are good supporting players.

January 1st, if you recall, I start my “100 Book Challenge”.  I’ve already set aside 18 first-rate tomes, fiction and non-fiction, that I’m hoping will get me going, build up some momentum that will carry me through the year.  These include some of the smashing great books Sherron, er, Mrs. Santa left under the tree for me.  Stuff I’ve wanted to read for ages.  Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Jim Shepard’s Love and Hydrogen, Ken Kalfus’s first short story collection, Thirst,  and Huston Smith’s autobiography, Tales of Wonder.

I’ll be spending most of the next two days finishing my year-end cleanup.  A ritual that goes back many years.  Remove all material related to last year’s projects and prepare for new work.  New Year’s Eve, sometimes pretty close to midnight, I clean and vacuum the crappy old carpet in my office and that’s it:  I’m ready for whatever comes.

I know, my family thinks it’s weird too.

And there are my resolutions to prepare, a roster of promises I try very hard to keep (and usually end up batting around .500).  Then I write out a list of “pending projects”, big and small jobs I’d like to focus on in the coming year.  Need to straighten up in the basement too; the workbench overflowing with crap that has to be put away (or shit-canned).

I find I’m feeling pretty good as 2010 draws to an end.  Two books released this year, a number of solid shorter efforts…plus there’s the music I’ve created with Garageband, two disks of weird ambient tunes that still make me smile.  I’ve discovered I love noodling around and experimenting with different media—Sherron has infected me with her belief that making art shouldn’t always be work, there can also be an element of play involved.  In 2011, I want to do some photography, stills and short videos.  Sometimes I get tired of working exclusively with words and need a break.  A chance to explore non-verbal, non-narrative concepts.  I’ve even tried my hand at painting.  I hope to do more visual experiments in 2011 (and beyond).

But the main focus, of course, continues to be improving as a writer, growing and developing,  moving the bar ever higher with each book or story I take on.  I’m certain the “100 Book Challenge” will introduce me to different influences/perspectives and it will be interesting to see how that affects my work.  God, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I started writing more like Italo Calvino or with the ferocity and power of a Celine?

Er, I forgot.  Louis Ferdinand Celine’s not exactly a popular figure these days.  Very difficult to find his work.  Awful man…but even Beckett  admired his writing and those two were miles apart, ideologically speaking.  Celine’s malign nature is as undeniable as his genius.  They probably went hand in hand.  But anyone who denies themselves the opportunity to read Death on the Installment Plan or Journey to the End of the Night because of his personal failings (however despicable) is missing out on some of the finest writing of the 20th century.

All that said, the first book I’ll likely tackle in the New Year is Michael Palin’s Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980-88.  A volume I can zip through in less than a day.  Something fast and breezy and fun to get me started.

And then only 99 more to go…

Happy Birthday…From me

Every year my birthday rolls around and I do my level best to ignore it, dismissing its significance.  This drives my wife crazy (that awful epithet “fun-killer” fired at me like a curare-tipped dart) but, on the other hand, it definitely simplifies gift-buying.

“Anything you want?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

Firmly:  “Nothing.”

And so forth.  But this year, okay, I have to admit, there’s a lot to be thankful for.  We had a health scare in our family recently and that really put things in perspective.  My daily mantra of “health, happiness and wisdom” assumed new relevance…and poignancy.  Fortunately, it turned out to be a false alarm and we all breathed a huge sigh of relief.  But we had a renewed appreciation for the frailties of the flesh and the bonds of family.

Then there are the two books I’ve released this year—yeah, sure, the e-books had been bouncing about for awhile, but to walk into a bookstore and see my work sitting there, waiting for some curious reader to happen along…well.  Sends a shiver through me just thinking about it.

Yeah, it’s official.  We’ve cleared the proof and Of the Night is good to go.  For sale as of…NOW.  You’ll find pricing and shipping info in my Bookstore.  Click on the book cover (above) and ogle the artwork, browse the jacket copy.  If you order your copy from me, I’ll be happy to sign it.  Otherwise, you can get it through your local bookstore, from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

I love this book–it’s a fitting companion piece to So Dark the Night.  Scary, darkly humorous, a short novel you’ll zip through in one or two sittings.

To accompany the release of Of the Night, providing a kind of fanfare, is a CD worth of new  instrumental/ambient music I’d added to my Audio page.  I call this selection of musical oddities Language With No Vocabulary and I’m making it available to you free—play it, download it to your heart’s content.

Here’s a sample cut, a luvly little number I call:

Cidades Fantasmas (Ghost Cities)

(Photo by Jason Minshull)

Job Satisfaction

A good day of work yesterday:

I think I nailed down the final version re: the jacket copy for Of the Night.  That’s one of the great things about being an indie writer and publisher, I have complete control over every aspect of my book, from the title and cover art to the selection of layout, fonts, even the composition of promo copy.  Some authors may not want the responsibility, the expenditure of time and effort, but I sure as hell do.  I have final say over the content and how it’s presented to readers.  I love it.

I’d decided to add an Afterword to Of the Night but for some days had been stymied as to what I wanted to say.  Yesterday the dam broke and the Afterword came in a rush.  Spent most of the day editing and cleaning it up and last night, just before bed, read it to my wife and sons.  They had some suggestions for revisions, small corrections, but for the most part they loved it.  So I’ll be adding the short essay to the end of the manuscript in the next day or two.

The book itself is close to completion, really just little niggling things that need to be touched up and smoothed over.  98% of it is finished, in the can, and I pronounce myself delighted with the end result.  Of the Night is a stand-alone effort but it’s set in the Great Lake city of Ilium, just like So Dark the Night, so it’s a short and sturdy companion piece to that longer tome.  It is not a sequel; it features a new cast of characters and an entirely different storyline.  Perhaps not as ambitious or immediately endearing as its predecessor, but Of the Night possesses a special charm of its own and readers are going to fall in love with it.  Take my word for it.

And since I mentioned So Dark the Night, let me say that it’s doing quite well, sales-wise, though it seems to be selling better in the e-book and Kindle editions than as a physical book.  The times they are a-changing.  The new technologies (e-readers et all) leave me cold and, candidly, I’ll keep buying books until the last forest is felled and converted to pulp.  Sorry, but it’s the truth.  When you buy my book, the actual “dead tree edition”, you can hold it in your hands, ogle that gorgeous cover, feel the rasp of the pages with your fingertips.

Sorry, techno geeks, your gadgets just can’t compete with that sensation.

But I’ve said my piece, given you an update so I’ll leave it there.  Gadgets/technology (pro and con) is a discussion for another time, another place.

The important thing for you to know is that Of the Night is on schedule and it looks very much like I’ll meet my self-imposed deadline and will be holding a proof of the book in my arthritic hands by my 47th birthday (end of October).  A short time later, it will be ready for ordering and reading.

Thrilling times ahead.

Watch this space…

It’s spacey! It’s ambient! It’s weird! (More free music)

In between stints of editing my novel Of the Night, I’ve put together another l’il musical offering, this one called (ironically, methinks) “Verisimilitude”.

Some cool layering of sound here and occasionally I manage that “3-D” effect I love, where the music seems to be hovering in the air all around the listener.

Click on the link below, close your eyes and let this piece wash over you:

Verisimilitude

Well, what do you THINK I’ve been doing?

I’ve been working, what else?

Plowing my way through Of the Night, polishing a bit here, snipping a word or two there, prepping the manuscript to send off to the printer by the first week of October.  Which means I’ll have achieved my goal and published two books this year.  I thought it was important to do something, well, special to mark my 25th anniversary as a pro writer and getting my two “Ilium” novels out to readers and fans in the same calendar year seemed like just the thing to do.  It’s been crazy hectic, frustrating and maddening…but it looks like we’re going to manage it.

Of the Night is a far shorter novel than So Dark the Night—I like to call So Dark my “A” movie and Of the Night my “B” picture.  One is a bigger, bolder project, the other smaller and more modest.  But I love ’em both and you will too.  We’ll be using Adrian Donoghue’s cover art for Of the Night and Chris Kent (as far as I know) will be designing the look of the book once again.  We’ll have it out in time for Christmas and the novel will likely retail in the $10-11 region.  There will be further progress reports so keep checking in periodically for more details.

Wild summer here in Saskatchewan, the weather verging on freaky.  Rain, rain, rain.  We have an old house and a basement with a stone foundation so I’ve had a fan running constantly downstairs because of the damp seeping in from outside, the surrounding soil saturated.  I have several hundred books down there, my boys have a TV and their XBox set up so they can have their own little space.  Must work to keep the area habitable, no killer mould growing in the walls, etc.  The lousy weather has made it abundantly clear the roof tiles and eaves need replacing, the trees trimming back (again); yikes, when I think about the pending expense, it makes me wanna cry.

Ah, well, we’ll get by.  Somehow.  We always do.  Just when I think we’re going under, some respite arrives in the nick of time.  But there are some periods, nerve-stretching intervals, when things look pretty bleak and occasionally I am brought face-to-face with the very real risks and terrors that accompany life as a full-time independent writer and publisher.  I’m 46…is life ever going to get easier, will there be some kind of reward waiting at the end of the rainbow?  Or just a tarnished piss pot?

“Theirs not to reason why…” and all that.  Thanks, Alfie, but all those guys died, as I recall.

Hasn’t been much time to kick back and indulge in my other passions:  films and reading.  Watched a few cool flicks like Samuel Fuller’s “Shock Corridor” and “Pickup on South Street”, two Herzog efforts (“Grizzly Man” and “Bad Lieutenant:  Port of Call New Orleans”) and Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket” but not too many more.  And I haven’t yet gotten around to reviewing those few movies I have watched for my film blog.  Sigh.

As for reading, I’ve just finished Michael Palin’s Diaries (1969-79) and I’ve completed almost all of Denton Welch’s books, marveling at what a magnificent writer he was (no wonder William Burroughs revered him).  Presently absorbed by Charles Simic’s The Monster Loves His Labyrinth, which is composed of entries from his writer’s notebook(s).  Wonderful, wonderful stuff.  If you haven’t read any Simic, rush out and find some.

Lots of music playing while I work—some ambient stations I found on ITunes, as well as albums like The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s “Who Killed Sergeant Pepper”, the definitive Joy Division compilation, “Heart & Soul”; old favorites like Interpol and Elbow and Black Rebel Motorcycle are always on hand to get me revved up.  Soundtracks (“The Thin Red Line” and “The Fountain”) to give me mood music to write to.

That’s enough for now.  I have to get back to, y’know, editing.  Of the Night awaits my full attention.

In the meantime, why not take a few minutes to browse through this site, check out some of the stories, essays, excerpts, spoken word and music I’ve posted here over the past 3+ years?  All of it FREE to read and download.  Honest.  No strings attached.

C’mon, whaddaya say?  You wanna hang out for awhile?

Great, make yourself at home.

If you need me, I’ll be upstairs, first door on the left…

Cut-up story…and accompanying artwork

My, my, how time flies.

It seems like only yesterday we were having the book launch but I see that a significant amount of time has passed since then, the summer well in progress…and I’m overdue for an update.

You know how it is, when this blog goes silent, that means I’m working.  So deeply immersed in a project, I’m thinking of nothing else.   Including food, water and most of the other basic necessities of life.

I’ve been feeling in a rut, writing-wise, which sometimes inspires me to bend my brain in other directions.  I know very little about visual art, theory or practice, but every so often I like to pick up a paintbrush, find an old slab of board and have at it.  This time around, my medium of choice was collage.  I keep files of visual images and dozens of issues of old magazines lying around just in case I get it into my head to try something like this.  Collage is a cumulative process; I moved the images here and there, tried them against different backdrops…but the key for me came when I decided to incorporate small blocks of text, usually relating to economic theory (the most savage form of social Darwinism imaginable).

It struck me as I was going through the literally hundreds of images I’ve collected over the past X amount of years, that I am an astonishingly morbid person.  I mean, Jesus, click on the image (above), you should get a larger sized version.  Would you trust someone who saves pictures like this to babysit your kids or date your daughter?

This is some sick, sick shit.

But as I was piecing everything together, as it all started to fall into place, I realized that what I was creating was a depiction of humanity run amok, the awful, indescribable damage we, as a species, have inflicted with our ideologies, our stupidity and greed.  Depressing, yes; sick-making?  Undoubtedly.  But is this vision inaccurate, flawed or misleading?  Well, like any creative endeavor, it’s up to each individual to decide for themselves.

The end result of that little experiment pleased me to some extent but I didn’t feel like I was quite done with cutting things up.  My eyes happened on a pile of books I’ve snagged from various thrift shops and library book sales over the years.  I decided I wanted to create an homage to one of my literary heroes, William Burroughs.  I’m sure you know all about the “cut-up method” that was developed by Burroughs and his mentor, Brion Gysin.  Take any number of literary texts, carve them up, piece them together and marvel at the wonderful word collisions and strange juxtapositions that are created.

My project started out as a noble venture but, as with most activities that involve me creatively, my Muse took over and things quickly got out my control.

I used scissors to pare out sections of a 1960 thriller called Operation Terror! I then snipped out various portions of the other books I had lying around:  an anthology of detective fiction that included Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, a forgotten novel by Ngaio Marsh, etc. etc.  Found a heavy sheet of black cardboard, set up on our basement workbench and proceeded to play with the various passages I’d selected.

At one point I realized I was probably defeating the purpose of the whole intention of “cut ups”, that my method was too conscious and controlling but by then it was too late.  I was caught up in creating an all new narrative, trying to come up with a satisfactory climax–

Good Lord.

Once I’d arranged the text into a coherent storyline, I decided I wasn’t done:  I would then write a story based on the outline I’d created using the borrowed snippets.  A completely original work utilizing pre-existing text.  And I’d frame it as a teleplay for a long-forgotten TV series…

I repeat:  Good Lord.

But there’s no use trying to talk sense to my Muse:  she simply won’t be reasoned with.  Once she gets an idea into her head, I am powerless to resist her.

So at the conclusion of this article you’ll find a link to the PDF version of my weird, whacky “mashup”.   It’s an homage to Mistah Burroughs in the form of a script from a 1950’s crime drama that never was.  Go figger.

I make no apologies for this story and predict it might annoy a significant proportion of readers.  But fans of Burroughs and Gysin might be more inclined to give grudging approval to the thought behind this bizarre creation.  They would see it, quite rightly, as a labour of love and even if they found fault with its execution, they’d think kindly of me for at least making the attempt.

Click on the link directly below for a free download of my story:

G-Man (PDF)

Scenes from the book launch (June 17, 2010)

Sorry, these pics are long overdue.

Scenes from our evening at the library here in town.  The official launch of my new novel.  My pal Laird Brittin and I performed to an appreciative audience of about seventy and, afterward, I was set up at a table near the door and chatted with a long line of folks who waited patiently to get a book (or two) signed.  Sold 35 copies of So Dark the Night and that doesn’t include the three extra copies the library region ordered the next day.

It was, as promised, a terrific evening of words and music.  Folks were still buzzing about it afterward.  Let’s face it, when most people come to readings, they have pretty low expectations.  And with good reason; the majority of writers, however skilled they might be with the printed word, are dreadful readers.  Dull, no energy or charisma.  We were determined to add some theatricality to our evening; we employed spotlights and borrowed a black backdrop from the Community Players.

Laird came perilously close to stealing the show with his set—must make a mental note to pare down his time considerably or mess with his mike to throw him off.  If we ever decide to do this again.  A big nod of thanks to Wendy and the library for sponsoring the event and to my family, who did technical stuff and handled all the lifting and toting so the “artistes” could concentrate on their work.  They had it set up so that just after Laird finished his tunes, the lights came down and we debuted the book trailer for So Dark the Night.  Great reaction and a fabulous lead-in to my reading.

Clearly, I must do something about that blue shirt.  It’s a size too big and billows about me.  I look like freakin’ Meatloaf.  And I’m only 168 pounds, honest.  Surrounded, in the preceding shots, by the local glitterati, Mercedes and Lamborghinis purring outside, waiting to whisk them home…

Can’t remember enjoying a reading as much as this last one; not for a long time anyway.  Readings have become a chore to me, they don’t excite me like they used to.  But this time it was different.  I was showing off the best thing I’ve ever written, introducing friends and readers to the two most endearing and fully realized characters I’ve come up with in my 25 years as a professional scribbler.  I chose four short sections and scored a hit every time.  I fed off the crowd’s approval, getting stronger with each excerpt.

I could feel Sherron’s smile from the podium.  Knew that we’d carried it off.  The applause was nice but it was more what people said afterward.  Hugging their copy of So Dark the Night.  Thrilled at having it personally inscribed.  Book lovers, every last one of them.  Still not immune to possibility.  Daring to be amazed.

My kinda people.

“So Dark the Night” (Various)

Where to begin?

Let’s start with the fact that orders for So Dark the Night are rolling in.  The book continues to sell on Amazon and in a variety of formats.  Friends and people who’ve followed my work for a long time have been clamoring for their copies and I have done my best to oblige as quickly as possible.  On Friday, Sherron and I made a quick trip in to Saskatoon and hit some of the major bookstores.  Now readers in my favorite city will be able to buy So Dark from McNally-Robinson, Indigo Books, Turning the Tide and Stu Cousins’ fabo music emporium, “The Vinyl Diner” (on Broadway Avenue; tell him I said “hello”).  Even donated one copy of the Saskatoon Public Library.  Why not?

Jim, the manager at Indigo, provided me with my most gratifying reaction of the day.  I introduced myself and I could tell he was hesitant about taking on any new stock but as soon as he got a look at the cover, he grabbed the copies I’d brought in with me.  Thanks, Jim.

I’ve been plugging the book wherever possible but, of course, one walks a fine line when doing any promo; I don’t wanna come across as a “shill” but, at the same time, I’ve got a wonderful book that should make everybody’s summer reading list so I want to do what is necessary to spread the word.

I’m preparing for the reading and book launch we’re having here in town on Thursday, trying to decide which excerpts to read, rehearsing, etc.  I like to put on a good show…especially when I have my pal Laird Brittin “opening” for me, playing a couple of original tunes, including two we wrote together.  It’s going to be a fun evening so if you’re in the area, swing on by.

Last night Sherron and I searched out locations around town and shot footage for a book trailer we’ll be cutting together this week.  Plan on releasing it on YouTube and I’ll be sure to let you know when it’s up and running.

My thanks to the people who’ve already bought and read So Dark the Night, dropping me notes filled with kind words and praise.  Folks, you’re the reason I keep putting pen to paper.  It sure as hell ain’t the money or any desire for fame, I’ll tell you that.

To you, this author dedicates his work…and his life.

Reading and Book Launch