With much of the globe seemingly lurching from one crisis to the next, it’s not for the first time that I feel blessed that life in my small corner of the world is, for the most part, a little bit dull. Now that winter is upon us, the most difficult decision I’ve found myself making is whether or not my desire to have warm toes in the morning is worth turning the fan heater on for. Yes equals toasty tootsies, but a bigger power bill at the end of the month. No equals… a pair of woolly socks. It’s hardly life-changing stuff.
Woolly socks and a coffee? What more could a person want?
My children have gone back to school, and despite the not infrequent pleas of “I hate school! It’s so boring!” and “Turn the heater on! My toes are cold!” they’ve settled back into the swing of things remarkably well. Life got a bit too loose during the lockdown and they’ve all benefited from the return to a more structured daily routine.
I’ve also returned to my school, and there’s something else to be thankful for. It’s wonderful to see all the smiling faces, teenagers and teachers alike, but the most interesting thing that’s happened since my return is that the textbooks I ordered from the Ministry of Education to be sent out to my students during lockdown finally arrived… on Friday… in my classroom… two months after I ordered them and almost a month after lockdown ended.
I shouldn’t complain. A free textbook is a free textbook, and for the Ministry of Education to be a mere two months late in their delivery of a promised service is practically unheard of. But it would be hyperbole to describe the outcome as an exciting one.
However, when I compare that to the excitement of joining the unemployment queue, or sleeping in my car, or fearing for my life because of the colour of my skin, it helps put things in perspective. Yes, at this point in time I’m certainly thankful that my life is as mundane as it is. There’s a certain beauty in boring. For the moment, at least, I wouldn’t want it any other way.
What are you feeling thankful for at this point in time? Let me know in the comments.
My Writing Progress
In other news, I’ve finished the first draft of the sequel to Taking the Plunge. Hemingway said the first draft of anything is shit and my manuscript is no exception to that rule, but I’m pretty sure there’s a decent story buried in there somewhere. I’ve been through it chapter by chapter and made a looooooong list of things that need improvement. Now it’s on with the hard graft of writing the second draft.
FREE BOOK!
A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
As I write this, we’re into our seventh week of lockdown here in NZ and the days really are turning into one big amorphous blob. We went from Alert Level 4 to Alert Level 3 a couple of weeks ago, which meant some restrictions came off and more people went back to work, but it made minimal difference to myself and my family, aside from the fact that we were able to order takeaways again — potato wedges with sour cream and sweet chilli sauce have never tasted so good.
Speaking of food, despite more ambitious intentions, my main task during the lockdown has been the provision of snacks. In the last six weeks, I’ve served at least 600 pieces of square crusts-off bread spread with butter and Marmite (in both toasted and sandwich form), 150 bowls of cereal (to a single child) and 100 chocolate muffins (to a different but also singular child). This is as nothing compared to the number of times I’ve heard the word, ‘no’. The following is a transcript of a typical lockdown discussion with my children:
“Do you wanna do some maths?”
“No.”
“How about some writing?”
No.”
“Then I’ll tell you what. Let’s all sit down at the table and do some drawing? You love drawing.”
“No.”
“Well then, go get a book out of your room and read it to me.”
“No.”
“Okay, then why don’t we all go outside and kick the soccer ball? It’s a beautiful morning.”
“No.”
“Cricket?”
“No.”
“How about a bike ride?”
“No.”
“Then help me fold the washing/do the vacuuming/wash the dishes?”
“No! That’s your job.”
*Sighs* “Well, what do you want to do?”
“Playstation! And can I please have four square crusts-off Marmite sandwiches?”
*More sighing, tempered by the fact that the request has come with the word ‘please’ and an adorable smile.* “Have you washed your hands?”
“No.”
Who says the art of conversation is dead?
Thankfully, not all of my proposals have been dismissed so summarily. Earlier last week, my suggestion that we go outside and make flower art designs from the camellia petals that had fallen to the ground was met with a surprisingly enthusiastic response from two thirds of my cohort of offspring, resulting in these.
Can’t you tell? It’s a chicken!You’re a star!
Anyway, it’s been announced that we’re moving to Alert Level 2 tomorrow, which means that everything can open again, with some social distancing measures in place.
Next Monday, with a sigh of relief (and yes, there has been an inordinate amount of sighing in our house over the last six weeks), my children will be returning to their school (and I’ll be returning to mine). I already had a healthy amount of respect for the work their teachers do and that’s only increased now.
It’s been a strange and fascinating time indeed, and despite the challenges and frustrations I have, for the most part, enjoyed the extra-time with my kids. And although I’m sure they would have preferred to be stuck at home with their mother while I went to work instead, I hope they would say the same.
FREE BOOK!
A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
As I write this it is Sunday 12th April 2020, and here in NZ we are about to enter week three-and-a-bit of a nationwide lockdown in a bid to beat Covid-19. The days are beginning to blend into each other now, and the only thing to distinguish today from any other is the collection of easter eggs sitting on the TV cabinet waiting for the kids to wake up.
Luckily, the Easter Bunny was considered an essential service.
These are extraordinary times indeed.
I feel blessed to say that in our very small corner of the world, the trauma and tragedy has been far less then elsewhere. We are lucky to live rurally with a rather sizeable back yard, so the restrictions on movement have not been particularly onerous. Prior to the lockdown, if I wanted some exercise, I could take a few laps around the garden. This hasn’t changed.
Both my wife and I are also lucky enough to have public service jobs. She’s a nurse, and leading up to and during the first week or so of the lockdown, what with the massive upheaval the virus has caused at the hospital where she works, she was seriously concerned about where things might go. Now, a couple of weeks later, with the national statistics on Covid-19 cases trending downward on a daily basis, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic. The shit hasn’t hit the fan, so to speak, and it looks as though with careful management, it might not.
I’m a high-school teacher, and the biggest challenge for me has been finding ways to keep my children busy, now that we’re all stuck at home together. My respect goes out to all the home-school parents out there. Despite the many and varied challenges, I think that teaching other people’s children is a damn sight more simple than teaching one’s own.
I’ve tried. We’ve painted pictures, baked muffins, written stories, solved maths equations and hit nails into bits of wood. PE has featured heavily, mostly because the weather continues to be sunny and hot. There’s been backyard cricket, soccer, hide-n-seek, tag and frequent bike rides to the local shop for ice-cream and chocolate. Oh, and we’ve made a bit of Lego, which is fine with me, because I REALLY LIKE making Lego.
Did I mention that I like making Lego?
But I must confess I bought a PlayStation the day before we went into lockdown and the kids have spent more time than I’m comfortable admitting playing Sonic Team Racing and Lego Marvel Superheroes. The fact that Lego Marvel Superheroes is remarkably educational (sure there’s a lot of supervillain face-punching, but there’s also a lot of teamwork and problem solving required to progress through the levels), has done little to assuage my feelings of guilt.
Still, all this PlayStation time has freed me up to get other stuff done. I’ve read some books, done some writing (I’m now 77,000 words through the first draft of novel No. 2 — on the home stretch) and marked some assessments. I’ve mowed the lawns and cut firewood. And yes, I’ve surfed the internet for updates on the virus and to see what other people round the world have done to entertain themselves in lockdown. This was one of my favourites.
So far, the best thing I have discovered in my search for lockdown activities for the family and my absolute favourite thing to do with the kids during lockdown has been GoNoodle dancing in front of the TV. It’s at least as educational as Lego Marvel Superheroes, plus it’s guaranteed to get your heart rate going and make you smile. If it’s good enough for their real teachers to use in class then it’s good enough for me. If you don’t know what GoNoodle is, here’s a taste.
If you and your family been stuck in lockdown during the fight against Coronavirus, what have you been doing for entertainment? Let me know in the comments.
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A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
It’s been an especially hot, dry summer here in our wee corner of Northland, with no real rain since late in 2019. The vegetable garden, aside from a few lonely, overripe tomatoes drooping from a couple of withered stems, is essentially dead, and the leaves on the azaleas have turned a mottled shade of brown that I’ve never seen in the seven years we’ve lived here.
There’s brown in them thar hills.
We live in the country, so the only domestic water supply we have available is the stuff that’s fallen out of the sky onto our roof. As a result, my favourite pastime over the past few weeks has been climbing on top of the water tank to inspect the water level inside.
It costs approximately $450 to get half a tank load of water delivered from town on the back of a truck, and my wife and I see it as a matter of personal pride that we not allow this to happen. So, we’ve implemented rigorous water conservation measures. These include, in no particular order: washing our clothes and our children at the in-laws house in town; a strict if it’s yellow let it mellow policy with the toilet (and then when it becomes necessary to flush the brown down, bucketing water from the small tank that is fed from the garage roof to fill the cistern); and ceasing to clean our cars (this was easy for me since I never washed mine in the first place).
I’ve even taken to showering at work, which is no small sacrifice, as the men’s bathroom there is a strange and disconcerting place. Although it received a new paint job a couple of years ago (a particularly unsettling shade of baby blue), the ledge above the shower stall is a graveyard of empty bottles of shampoo and conditioner which have potentially been there for decades.
Headstones in a shampoo cemetery.
The door to the stall is hinged in such a way that you have to contort your body just to get inside it (or maybe I’m just fat), and there’s only one single hook for hanging your clothes and towel on. Leaving them on a pile on the floor isn’t an option, because the doorway into the shower is screened by a mouldy plastic curtain which doesn’t quite do what it’s supposed to, so by the end of your shower there’s an inch of water pooling on the floor outside the cubicle.
Things don’t get any better once you’re in the cubicle itself. I’m six-foot-four (or at least that’s what I tell people), and the ancient shower rose is conveniently located at a height just north of my navel. Even so, there’s always at least one half-blocked jet that shoots upwards at just the right angle to hit me in the eye. Furthermore, for some reason there’s rarely any hot water, and even when there is, it has a nasty habit of disappearing at the most inconvenient times (I’ll spare you the details).
To be fair, there has been a smidgeon of the wet stuff falling from the heavens in the last week or two, but while our friends who live five kilometres down the road have been plastering pictures of the downpours at their house all over Facebook, all we’ve had at ours is the occasional short-lived, misty kiss, as though we’ve strayed too close to someone with the habit of ‘spraying it’ rather than ‘saying it’. So far, no amount of naked shamanic rain dancing has convinced the sky to perform otherwise, and it remains touch and go as to whether we’ll have to forfeit that 450 bucks for a tanker delivery.
Hopefully, the heavens will open up soon and we can go back to washing ourselves, our children and our clothes in the comfort of our own home. I suppose the one good thing about waiting for the rain is that we learn not to take such a precious resource for granted.
Do you have any handy tips on saving water? Let me know in the comments.
FREE BOOK!
A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
Indigo and Violet were upset when they discovered they weren’t invited to the party.
It’s the school holidays here in NZ and keeping the kids entertained through the slow, sweaty, summer days can be a real challenge. So as a special treat, this last weekend we took them to Rainbow’s End, a theme park in South Auckland.
They had a great time, and two out of the three of them proved to be real adrenaline junkies. For myself, overall, it was a fun day, although when broken into smaller chunks, it was more like pockets of fun interspersed with long stretches of tedium (the inescapable queues), dotted with two or three paralysing moments of sheer terror.
One of these awful moments occurred while hanging upside down at the apex of the loop on the roller coaster, where I was struck by the sudden thought that if the engineering failed and our cart came tumbling out of the sky, the inevitable result would be a battered and bloody death for everyone involved.
At the end of the ride, my daughter, smiling from ear to ear, asked me if I’d like to go again. I wiped a dribble of vomit from my lips and suggested that she spread the joy by asking her mother instead.
After completing two more circuits, my wife and daughter then recommended I finish the day with this little number, the Fearfall.
Lucky I bought a spare pair of undies.
Despite still feeling slightly nauseous following my turn on the rollercoaster, I was up for it. I’ve been bungy jumping and skydiving before and I thought it couldn’t be any worse than that. The Fearfall rises 18 stories into the South-Auckland sky. I don’t know why they don’t provide a useful metric measurement for its height, but in the final few seconds of our ascent all I could think was, S#*tthis is high. This was immediately followed by Oh, God, this is going to be bad.
And it was. Pants-wettingly terrifying, to be frank. In some ways, the worst part was the few seconds stopped at the top, prior to the drop, where you realise you’re well past the point of no return and have the time to contemplate how absurdly horrible the coming moment is going to be, without ever knowing exactly when that moment is going to begin.
It was just the same when I went tandem skydiving in Queenstown many years ago. The same feeling of utter helplessness that comes with being strapped to some stranger’s front, blasted by the wind screaming through the open doorway of a plane 10,000 feet in the air, with no control over what’s going to happen next.
The abject terror of the fall was the same too. Time slowed down and, too scared to scream, my stomach rose up into my throat and I thought I was going to die. Then, only a moment later… it was all over and I was on the ground again.
Despite the awful, incapacitating horror of it all I actually giggled at the operator and thanked him upon exiting. The words came out before my brain could stop them. I suppose I was happy not to be dead after all but still, it seemed so incongruous. It’s a fine line between fun and fear.
Trudging back to the car with three exhausted but exhilarated children, I felt the day was another reminder (along with grey hair and varicose veins), that I’m not as young as I used to be. These days, when it comes to being entertained, I’d rather read a book.
When was the last time you paid good money to get scared out of your skin? I’d love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments below.
FREE BOOK!
A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
It’s that time of year again and our elf, Ralph, has been busy with his Christmas shenanigans. In the weekend he caught a dinosaur.
And a couple of nights before that he borrowed my wife’s brassiere and used it as a hammock.
He’s not all mischief though. Sometimes he can be quite helpful. Yesterday we woke up to find that he’d cooked the kids breakfast.
However, his helpfulness was short-lived.
This is only the second year Ralph has been visiting us (prior to that I’d never even heard of elves on shelves) and I have to say that the notes he writes each morning have been reasonably successful in modifying our children’s behaviour in the lead-up to the Christmas school holidays (well, all except for last night, when one of the twins decided to do a ‘Mike Tyson’ on his brother’s ear!) But despite that hiccup and being hot and bothered by some extreme early summer weather, they’ve all tried hard to be a little bit nicer to each other since he arrived on the scene.
Do you have an elf on the shelf? If you do, I’d love to know what your elf has been up to. Let me know in the comments.
FREE BOOK!
A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
My new novel, Taking the Plunge, is set mostly in the small town of Cromwell, in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. The main reason I chose to set it in Cromwell is because I lived there for a couple of years in the early 2000’s, commuting to work in Queenstown, and the impression it left on me has been a lasting one.
Cromwell is fairly typical of small towns in New Zealand. Sleepy and serene (some might say dull), it’s surrounded by mountains and perches on the edge of a man-made lake that was the result of damming the Clutha River for a hydro-electric power station in the 80’s. Historically, it was a gold mining town (parts of which now lie beneath the waters of the lake), but these days it’s better known for its vineyards, apricot and cherry orchards, and for being the place you pass by on the way between the popular alpine resort towns of Queenstown and Wanaka.
As if real fruit weren’t enough, Cromwell also has the notable attraction of the fake variety, on a giant scale. Just beside the highway turnoff, imploring visitors to stop and take in all the town has to offer, is this:
“That lady should really put some pants on.”
Cromwell isn’t the only small town in NZ to have a giant sculpture as a local landmark. Gore, for instance, has a giant fish;
These sculptures play their part in helping put these towns on the map, and if nothing else, they make for great photo-ops.
Along with its giant fruit sculpture, Cromwell, like most small towns, also has some interesting street names. When I was living there one in particular always stood out to me—Neplusultra. Off Barry Ave, and running parallel to Clare, Wicklow, and Kirtle, Neplusultra’s Latin heritage stands out. I had to consult a dictionary to discover that it means no more beyond, which I guess makes sense because running down one side of the street is a golf course, so there are no more houses beyond that side of the street.
Anyway, if you’re wondering where I’m going with this, here it is. Neplusultra Street and the giant fruit sculpture were the inspiration for a limerick I composed whilst living in Cromwell:
There was a young man from Cromwell, Whose landlord was giving him hell. He moved from Neplusultra To the giant fruit sculpture, And there he did happily dwell.
If you know of any other small towns in New Zealand or elsewhere with giant sculptures or interesting street names, I’d love to hear about them. And if you have a favourite limerick or two then I’d love to hear them too. Let me know in the comments.
FREE BOOK!
A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
As I write this, early on a wintry Saturday, it’s the first morning of the mid-year school holidays here in Aotearoa. I’ve been counting down the days for the last week — not because teaching is such an onerous job that the idea of having a student-free break is the one thing that makes life liveable — but because the holidays do provide a small opportunity to get things done without the constant interruptions that are an everyday part of school life.
By the last week of term, everyone is in survival mode. By the last day of term, the brains of students and teachers alike have turned to mush and in an atmosphere of barely suppressed chaos a successful lesson is one where nobody gets stabbed with scissors and the floor is cleared of paper aeroplanes before students stampede out the door when the bell goes.
All pretence of anyone learning anything disappears. On Friday, my lesson plans consisted of handing students a laptop each and telling them not to swap the letters on the keyboard around. By last period, four students turned up to my lesson out of a class of twenty-three. God only knows where the rest of them were — I was in no hurry to find out — and the lesson consisted of putting the chairs on the desks so the cleaner would have better access to the floor and comparing Justin Bieber’s early catalogue with his more recent material.
But even in the midst of such chaos, great things can happen. In the corner of the main whiteboard in my classroom, sometime in the distant past, some helpful boy has used a sharp object to inscribe the outline of a penis (I guess I can’t know for sure it was a boy, but in my experience, girls, while being perfectly happy to vandalise school furniture, don’t do it by drawing images of male genitalia). One of my delightful students took it upon himself to use the penis as the central feature of an idyllic landscape scene, turning it into a lighthouse on a rock, surrounded by a gentle ocean, fluffy clouds and a passing sailboat. I’m not quite sure why the light was shining in the middle of the day but I wasn’t complaining — it was a wonderful picture and I was loath to rub it off when it came time to clean the whiteboard.
“Boy, this is boring — I wish I was back in English class.”
I have a depressingly extensive list of schoolwork to complete by the end of the school holidays. There’s also an extensive list of chores to do around the house — all the things that build up because there’s never enough time to do them in the weekends.
If I didn’t have children of my own the chances of getting all these things done would be reasonable. However, I have three young children, who due to the vagaries of our schooling system have their school holidays at the exact same time as mine! Which means they’ll spend the next two weeks stealing each other’s toys and then complaining to me to arbitrate their disputes. This dynamic is going to be further complicated by the arrival of their older half-brother, who’s coming from Australia to stay with us for the holidays. It’s going to be fun times I tell you, but I can’t help thinking that by the end of it I’m going to need a holiday from the holidays.
FREE BOOK!
A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
Here in Northland, it’s been an excellent season for growing things. A wetter-than-usual winter has been followed by a wetter-than-usual spring, and by the time Movember came and went, the plants in the garden had well and truly sprung.
My lawn, or perhaps more accurately, the weeds in my lawn, have grown exceptionally well, aided by the fact that my ride-on lawn mower had broken down (I took it into the shop for a service and it hasn’t worked properly since). In particular, it’s been a great season for carrotweed. Carrotweed, as the name suggests, is a weed that resembles wild carrot. It grows abundantly during the hot and humid Northland summers. I went for an early-morning walk a few days ago and noted my neighbours have grown entire fields of it, as you can see from the pictures below. I’m not quite sure why, as it’s a noxious, invasive species and once it reaches the flowering stage almost nothing eats it, except for maybe goats, and I’m pretty sure my neighbours don’t have any goats (we live in dairy country, surrounded by cows, with goats being few and far between).
Fields of carrotweed.
The other thing that has grown well of late is my moustache. Yes, I know you thought that my spelling of Movember in the first paragraph was a typo, but it wasn’t. I grew a moustache in support of men’s health, along with many of my work colleagues. I always enjoy Movember in New Zealand—it’s a chance to get creative with the facial hair. In the past, I’ve grown goatees and ‘muttonchops’ but this year I went for a simple ‘slug’. As usual, my wife hated it, but I was pleased with the result, despite the constant upper-lip itching.
Lost in the jungle.
Now, it’s mid-December and Christmas is approaching fast. I’ve managed to fix the ride-on lawnmower (with the help of my brother, who is good with that sort of thing). The garden is still growing well but I’ve cut the carrotweed and mowed the mo. Yesterday was my last day of work for the year and I’m looking forward to a well-deserved break and a chance to spend time with my kids, go swimming, camping, and catch up on all the chores around the house that have been neglected over the year (such as weeding the garden).
An Escargatoire of Snails
Aside from carrotweed, the other thing I noticed on my early-morning walk of last week were the gardensnails, or perhaps more accurately, since I found them on the side of the road, roadside snails. I’m not sure if the dawn parade of snails is a typical occurrence on our road at this time of year or whether it was just the particular moist and misty conditions that had them gathering in such abundance, but they were everywhere, a veritable plague of mollusca. (Curiously, the collective noun for a group of snails is an escargatoire — an escargatoire of snails — now there’s a piece of trivia that’ll make you popular at your next pub quiz).
Welcome to our escargatoire.
There were so many, in fact, that I accidentally stepped on a few of them. I was particularly taken with this little guy (or gal – I’m no expert on determining the sex of snails) below, and when I lay down at the side of the road to take the photo, I felt like his journey could be a metaphor for my writing progress.
Crossing the finish line.
I’ve just hit forty-three-thousand words on my novel. I’ve been tracking my progress and it’s taken me fifty-three hours of writing at an average of eight-hundred-and-twenty-four words-per-hour to reach that goal. I’ve been reading a book on increasing my writing speed and will work on that over time, but it’s not so much my writing speed that slows me down so much as my thinking speed. When you know exactly what you want to write, writing fast is easy. When you have to think about what you want to write before you write it, the process is slowed considerably. This is where the use of a comprehensive outline is helpful.
I have an outline for my novel. It contains a basic description of what happens in each scene, and which characters feature in these scenes. All of these descriptions have, at the very least, a beginning and an end, and many are more detailed than that—broken down into five stages, as follows: inciting incident, complication, crisis, climax, and resolution. This is extremely useful, but there is still an awful lot of empty space in between these points. I know my start points and I know my destinations, and for some scenes, I know the big landmarks I want to hit on the way, but the journey I will take to reach them is unknown prior to my departure.
This is an exciting, fascinating, and as far as I can see, necessary element of the writing process, but it does slow things down. However, I take heart from the little guy above. I figure if the local garden snails can make it all the way across a road to pass the finish-line, then so can I. It’s all a matter of persistence.
FREE BOOK!
A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
I’m really excited about this month’s interview with proud Canadian and horror and comic fantasy author, C.D. Gallant-King.
C.D. wrote his first story when he was five years old. He had to make his baby-sitter look up how to spell “extra-terrestrial” in the dictionary. He now writes stories about un-heroic people doing generally hilarious things in horrifying worlds.
He’s a loving husband and proud father of two wonderful little kids. He was born and raised in Newfoundland and currently resides in Ottawa, Ontario. There was also a ten-year period in between where he tried to make a go of a career in Theatre in Toronto, but that didn’t work out so well.
C.D. has written eight novels you haven’t read, because they’re still locked in The Closet. The Closet is both a figurative and literal location – it is the space in his head where the stories are kept, but it’s also an actual closet under the stairs in his basement where the stories are also kept. It’s very meta.
He has published two novels you can read, Ten Thousand Days in 2015 and Hell Comes to Hogtown in 2016. He has an ongoing series of dark comic fantasy stories called Werebear vs. Landopus, which is available on Kindle Unlimited. His work will also appear in Mystery and Horror’s upcoming humour/speculative fiction anthology, Strangely Funny IV.
Welcome, C.D. Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for me and my readers this month.
No problem.
Let’s leap right in, then. I read Hell Comes to Hogtown earlier this year, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve been meaning to write a proper review for it and post it to my blog, but haven’t got there yet. It’s a strange, genre-bending mixture of action and horror and fantasy and comedy, but it works, and it’s a lot of fun. What are you currently working on? Is it in a similar vein?
I just released a new (rather long) short story on Amazon called Revenge of the Lycanterrancephalopod, which is the next part in my “Werebear Landopus” series. While it shares a similar dark, crude humour to Hogtown, this one is set firmly in a medieval fantasy setting.
My current work in progress is another comic fantasy, but this one is pretty firmly “PG-rated.” It uses a lot of the tropes of the genre but it also touches on some modern contemporary issues. It’s sort of like His Dark Materials meets Discworld, with a touch of Garfield or Get Fuzzy (the comic strips) thrown in. Yes, there are talking pets in it. It’s very different to find comedy and jokes without resorting to profanity, bodily functions and other obscenities. Not impossible, just different. It’s as if you’re painting with a new palette of colours.
That sounds really interesting. I love the name for your short story.
You’ve chosen to self-publish the works you’ve written so far. What motivated you to become an indie author?
Impatience and self-respect. I don’t want to spend a year querying authors and agents for what will probably amount to nothing. I tried it in my youth when I had time to mess around with it and it’s frustrating and demoralizing. Now, with a full-time job and a wife and kids and a million other responsibilities, I don’t have time to grovel and beg trying to get someone’s approval as a writer. I’m not looking for their validation. If I feel that I’m improving at writing, and people enjoy my book, that’s all I’m looking for right now. Getting an agent or a publishing contract is no guarantee of fame or money anyway (today more than ever). I can publish a book myself and get the same non-guarantee.
Yeah, I totally agree, and I really enjoy the freedom and control that comes with indie-publishing. But it’s certainly not all milk and honey. What was the hardest thing about writing Hell Comes to Hogtown?
I just couldn’t get the ending right. I knew the main characters had to confront the bad guy and I knew roughly what position they were in when it was over, but that was it. I didn’t know who lived or died, what the ending beat should be and how it actually tied together. I wrote it several times and it just didn’t feel right.
Finally, my Alpha Reader (my wife) read it and said “You’re being stupid. X should happen.” Suddenly, bam! Everything fell into place. It wasn’t what I expected, but I had accidentally planted the seeds through the whole book. The hook was already there, the final beat finally made sense, and everything came together almost as if I had planned it.
Did I mention my wife is a lot smarter than me?
For such a genre-bending novel, coming up with a cover must have been hard. I like the cover you’ve got for Hogtown—I think it works well. Do you think that the cover plays an important part in the buying process?
Personally, I don’t particularly care what a cover looks like. I’ve spent more time studying copyright pages than I have studying covers. It’s not to be dismissive – I recognize that there is great art out there and that some people really do enjoy them, but I really am of the opinion that you can’t (and shouldn’t) judge a book by its cover.
When I look for a book it’s always because I’m looking for something specific—I’ve heard about it or I like the author or I’m looking for a particular topic. I have never, ever scanned a bookshelf (digital or real-world) just hoping something pops out at me. It’s just not the way my brain works. This creates some dissonance with me though, because apparently, some people do shop like this, so you have to be aware that your cover is aesthetically pleasing (or at least not downright ugly). This is especially difficult because, like any art, there are a wide variety of opinions on what makes a good cover. Sure, certain things like having clear, readable fonts and scalability to thumbnail-size are fairly universal, but beyond that, you will get lots of different opinions on what makes a good cover. The trick is just finding something that’s right for you and your book.
To make sure I had an original, eye-popping cover for Hell Comes to Hogtown, I got an original image from Jason Salvatori Photography. He does some great work you can check out at facebook.com/SalvatoriPhotography
That’s interesting. I don’t shop by covers either, although I may have borrowed the odd book from the library based on an eye-catching cover. Having said that, I’ve seen a few books on Amazon that I WOULDN’T buy purely because of how UGLY the covers are. It’s important to have a good one.
Next question—do you read much and if so, who are your favourite authors?
I don’t read as much as I would like simply because my free time has to be split between reading and writing, but I do as much as I can. I recognize that a writer needs to be as well versed in as many styles as possible to help develop their craft.
Kurt Vonnegut is probably overall my favourite writer. Mother Night is my favourite book: it was a perfect blend of comedy and blackness, hitting all the right notes for me at the age I read it. The lost love, the denouncement of war, the questions of morality, all undercut by Vonnegut’s infamous dark sense of humour. I read it again recently and it still blows me away with how effortlessly Vonnegut stirs up so much emotion. Not to mention how terrifying it is in light of what’s going on in the world today. It’s not hilarious, laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s got a certain satirical levity that is totally incongruous with the dark and painful subject matter, and it works perfectly. I wish I could write a book like this.
Terry Pratchett is a close second. I wish I could turn a phrase like he could. In some ways he’s a lot like Vonnegut, tackling important topics with humour, though his stories lean so hard on the fantastic and silly that sometimes it’s easy to miss the lesson. That doesn’t make it any less important, though. Plus, with his perfect British sense of humour, his books are always guaranteed to bring a smile and a chuckle.
Some other favourites include Cormac McCarthy—no one does dark and bleak better than McCarthy; Douglas Adams—if you don’t like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy we can’t be friends; Christopher Moore—Lamb is one of the single greatest books ever written. If I could go back in time and write one book, it would be this one. I hate Moore for getting to it first. How can you not love a book where Jesus Christ travels to China, invents martial arts and calls it “Ju-do: The Way of the Jew?”
That’s really interesting—we both have similar tastes as far as our reading preferences go. I love both Vonnegut and Pratchett. Vonnegut is the short story master, and I always try to follow his advice when writing short stories. Pratchett is the king of comic fantasy. I’ve read a number of the City Watch series this year and they’re brilliant. Fiercely intelligent but so funny that you almost don’t realise you’re getting such a sharp insight into the world and how it works. I’ve got an idea for a fantasy crime novel that I want to write in the next year or two, and it owes a debt to Terry Pratchett.
Now, back to the questions, and sticking to favourites—what’s your favourite movie and why?
Depends on the day of the week you ask, but I’ll take the safe route and say Star Wars. The original one, aka A New Hope. The Empire Strikes Back is probably a better movie overall, but nothing can match the sincere earnestness, joy and fun of the original. It’s a wonderful mix of fantasy and sci-fi, a classic hero’s journey that completely revolutionized filmmaking. Even if you take away all the sequels and world-building and games and toys (which are also all great), the movie itself is still such an entertaining journey that I can watch again and again. And now that I’m discovering it again with my kids, it makes it all the more special to see it again for the first time through their eyes.
A second, more intellectual choice would be Seven Samurai, but it’s for many of the same reasons as I love Star Wars (not to mention that George Lucas borrowed a lot of his themes and ideas from Kurosawa’s movies).
Ha! I love both those films too! Well, thanks again for your time, C.D. It’s been great to chat with you. All the best with your future writing.
A gritty and engaging story of human faults, fears, and frailty, What Friends Are For is the prequel short story to my tragicomic novel, Taking the Plunge. Introduce yourself to the characters from the novel and find out where it all begins for Kate, Tracy, Evan and Lawrence.
