July 2005 Archives

Surprise! I'm finished my first draft. Oh yes, it's ugly and short by about 5 pages, but all the ideas that I wanted to explore are in the play. My wife read the draft and was quite taken by the character's voice. For me, 80 per cent of the work is in finding a character. This play was a case of one of those lucky chances when I found the character first and built the story around him. It doesn't happen often when the stars align, and I'm certainly grateful when it happens, especially when I'm facing revisions to Forbidden Phoenix, Count of Monte Cristo, and The Mystery of the Graffiti Ghoul... and I just agreed to help develop a potential TV series. Yikes! Anyway, I'm going to do some revisions to Nearly Normal over the weekend, then let it sit for a few days before I do a polish. I'm sure with the passage of time, I'll find all sorts of flaws that need to be addressed. Still, as a first crack goes, I'm pretty pleased. Yay!

I've been on a reading binge for the last two weeks, probably inspired by Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I loved J.K. Rowling's penultimate instalment of the series, and I can't wait to see how she wraps everything up. I've also started the Spiderwick Chronicles, which are pretty cool and short reads. Thanks to a recommendation from Glen Huser (Stitches), I discovered Joey Pigza Swallows the Key and Joey Pigza Loses Control, by Jack Gantos. Wow, those two books were amazingly funny and touching. I read the first instalment of the Five Ancestors (Tiger) by Jeff Stone. It's a martial arts action y/a book. Not bad. Not great. I read Shelley Hrdlitschka's Sun Signs and was totally impressed with her depiction of a girl's on-line relationships with cyber-friends. I also breezed through Roddy Doyle's kids books - Giggler Treatment and Meanwhile Adventures. They were pretty fun.

I know these are all y/a titles, but that's where my head is at these days. I'm thinking about starting Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke but I'm going to have to do some wrist exercises so I can hold that tome up long enough to read it.

If my mind is like my body, I have to feed it the right things and keep it active. The good thing is as long as the writing is good, it doesn't matter what genre I read. I'm learning something new from each novel. Lately, I've been paying particular attention to dialogue in books, which is much different than dialogue in theatre. While dialogue in plays are for the ear, dialogue in books are for the eye. It's an important difference, and I have to remember that what is a strength in theatre is not necessarily an advantage in prose. On that note, I'm heading back to work on my TYA play, Nearly Normal.

I'm pleased with the progress of the first draft. I'm deviating from the outline because of a cool discovery. Norman starts his day talking about how he's seeing bad luck omens (like the number 13). Originally, I had planned for him to reveal the superstitions during the climactic encounter with the bully at school, but now I realise that the information needs to come before it. So I'm juggling and folding two scenes into one. Already, I'm at 15 pages and with a one person show, the text is dense, so I'm probably looking at 40 - 45 pages for a good 50 minute show, which is just the right length for TYA.

Whew! The hardest part of any writing project is the first page, and I pushed through it yesterday. I wrote 5 pages of the new play. The work was tough as I tried to create the world and the main character. Thankfully, I had an outline to work from and already had found Norman's voice. He's the king of run-on sentences and has a vivid imagination. I'm having a lot of fun with this character. I just have to remember to show other dimensions or he may wear out his welcome.

Today, I start work on Nearly Normal, a Theatre for Young Audience (TYA) play. I received some funding from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts to develop the script, and the Citadel Theatre is interested in seeing a first draft for possible production down the line. The story line is about a Norman, a kid who is one letter away from being normal. He has a hyper imagination which gets him into all sorts of trouble at school and has turned him into a social outcast. His confidante is a mannequin, and Norman pours his heart out to this immobile thing, expressing all his fears, doubts, joys, and secrets. All he wants is the mannequin to move, come to life, become normal so that Norman can feel normal as well. In the end, we discover the mannequin is Norman's dad, who has suffered a stroke, and he does move for just a moment, but we're not sure if it is Norman's imagination.

The whole play is a one-man show with elements of story telling and some stage magic. I'm hoping to get a first draft done by the end of the week. It's a one-act play (maybe 45 pages), so I should be able to meet my target, unless I get distracted. Off to work!

Taste of Edmonton is a culninary delight. Thirty-eight restaurants set up in Churchill Square to offer 2 samplers from their menus. The price ranges from 75 cents to $3.75 per item, but don't worry about walking about with a pocketful of quarters, because there is a ticket system to purchase food.

Last night, I hit the event with my wife, my brother and his friends. I wasn't impressed with the layout, because all the booths were lined up on the east end of the square and made for very congested traffic flow. Lots of bumping into people and some spilled food. However, the food was terrific. We started with my favourite from That's Aroma - Chicken Satay... very garlicky. I was a big fan of the Bison Burger on Sage Bannock from the Crowne Plaza booth, but it just made me want to find bison so I could cook my own burgers. Huang Long offered up Lemongrass Beef Skewers, which were my favourite last year, but I think my memory of them was better than the experience. The surprise of the night were Patatas Aioli from La Tapa. Who would have thought potatoes in garlic mayonaisse would have tasted so good. (Everyone had garlic at some point so we all had bad breath).

My wife tried the Garlic Chicken Tart from Cafe Delight, Buffalo Kabobs from Normands, Wasabi Beef on a Bun from Hawkeyes, and Pad Thai from Krua Wilai... I wasn't a big fan of those dishes.

My brother and his friends made the experience pretty fun, because with so many people we got to see and try a lot more than we normally would have. His girlfriend loved the Balsamic Strawberries with Marscapone Mousse from Four Rooms as well as the Coconut Shrimp from Outback Steakhouse. Her friend tried to convince herself that the Smoked Meat Sandwich from Botanica was the best sandwich she ever had (I think we made too much fun of her choice). My brother noticed that Organic Roots Foods was trying to push a Cabbage Salad for $3.75. No one seemed interested in the salad. I wonder why.

Of course no trip to Taste of Edmonton is complete without Seafood Paella from the Nisku Inn's Lakeside Grill. The consensus among the group was that the best dish belonged to Character's Restaurant - Bacon Wrapped Scallops, and the funnest dessert was a Beaver Tail from Husdon's Canadian Tap House. Many a joke was made that night about the cinnamon-covered treat.

First the good: I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Great book. I'm itching to get my hands on the final book, and I hope J.K. Rowling doesn't take as long as Stephen King to finish her series. The characters have grown up a lot in this book, and the story is really gaining some momentum.

Now the bad: I might have screwed up my knee. It's been stiff and painful for two days. If the pain gets worse I'm going to see a doctor this week.

And finally, the ugly... very ugly. My wife and I saw The Island last night. Pee-yew! The story was lame and the action sequences weren't cool enough to keep us distracted from the gaping plot holes. Stay away from this bomb!

Yay! I've finished the polish on the revised manuscript and sent it off to my editor. I made plenty of changes to the climax and I started to find Trina's character (ie. she's more than a gossip now). I could round her out a little more, but I think I'm going in the right direction. My only fear is that the latter parts of the book aren't as funny as the first few chapters. I'll have to look at it again after my editor sends me notes on this draft. Now on to the TYA play, Nearly Normal, and the Peking Opera, Forbidden Phoenix. Oh boy am I glad I didn't do a Fringe show this year.

At last, the event I look forward to every summer has arrived. Some 40 restaurants set up booths around Churchill Square to serve samplers from their menus at relatively cheap prices. Every year I look forward to paella from the Lakeside Grill. I'm such a big fan that I've been known to cart Tupperware to the booth so that I can have paella to go. Forget the diet for a day... or two... or maybe three... I'm off to the Taste of Edmonton.

As I cycle through the manuscript I'm trying to trim about 3,000 words out. I'm feeling the book is long and I need to cut the fat. I've chopped 1,500 words out so far and it hasn't really impacted the story. The best test to know if something was meant to stay or go is to read the chapter with the cuts. If it's smooth, the edits worked. If there are any jolts or bumps, then I've taken out too much. Back to it. I should have a draft to send out by Friday, if not sooner.

I've finished most of the major revisions to the manuscript. The only thing left is to fold chapter six into chapter seven, then cycle through the whole thing and clean up the mistakes. I hope to send the revised draft to my editor by the end of the week. I have to get this off my plate, because I have to finish Nearly Normal (the TYA play), polish the Forbidden Phoenix, and start the third book. Oh, and I also will be developing a TV series for CBC over the next three months, so sleep has just slipped down my list of priorities. Oh well, at least I'm not working on a Fringe show this summer. Whew!

I picked up my copy of the new J.K. Rowling book. I'm torn though. Do I read it in one sitting or do I savour the experience. It's the chocolate bar dilemma. Maybe I'll take my time. Oh, who am I kidding? The only place I'm going today is Hogwarts.

I'm just back from a week of teaching junior high kids at YouthWrite, a camp for aspiring young writers. The kids were great. If these students are a sampling of the future, I have great hope for the next generation of playwrights. The ideas were wonderful, sometimes surreal, but always entertaining.

My highlights (good and bad) in random order are:

- Having the privilege of working with the student who won an award at the end of the week for his contributions to camp life.

- Watching a student comedy sketch where one boy taught his friend to walk like General Grievous from Revenge of the Sith (the sketch inadvertently turned into a tribute to Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks).

- Heading out of camp Wednesday night and discovering Infusion, a restaurant in Bragg Creek, which served four-star meals.

- Running away from vicious mosquitoes (I hated that part of camp).

- Trying to put out a candle fire with a bottle of water and touching off a mini fireball, earning me the nickname "Firecrack."

- Watching fellow instructor Barry Thorson (an actor as well as a writer) do a cold read from my book The Mystery of the Frozen Brains with an Irish accent. I laughed so much my face hurt.

- On a sad note, three students couldn't perform their scenes because we ran out of time. I'm still kicking myself for managing my time poorly on the last day, and I'm so sorry to the three students who missed out.

- I went to Cochrane with two instructors (Duane Stewart and Glen Huser) to pick up party supplies like ice and chips. We were to meet at an ice cream parlour at 4:30 pm, but Duane and I realized we needed cash and drove off to find an ATM. Meanwhile, Glen didn't know where we were and sat politely on a bench with his bags of melting ice wondering if we had ditched him in Cochrane.

- Listening to a beautiful poem by Dawn Carter about growing up in a small town. Remember Swamp Water Slurpees?

- Seeing the bright faces of over 50 kids having a great time at a writers' camp. To have that many children who love writing together was just amazing. I hope that their love for the arts grows with them, and I hope that their memories of YouthWrite will be positive ones.

I've just finished addressing all of my editor's notes on Mystery of the Graffiti Ghoul, and boy do I feel great. As I'm writing this blog my printer is shooting off 172 hot pages. I'm going to take a couple of days off to get some perspective, then I'll read the manuscript to see if there are any more changes I want to make. Most likely, I'll do a polish to clean up the clunky sentences and make sure that everyone's voices are consistent, but for the most part I'm happy with the shape of the story. The big change I had to make was to the climax. My editor said the problem was the book had no denouement. I thought the problem was even bigger than that; the climax was too easy. In this pass I took Remi and Trina out of the climax so that Marty was alone against the Graffiti Ghouls. It's always a good thing to chase your protagonist up a tree and see how he climbs down. I have no doubt that I'll be tweaking the climax over the next week to make sure it is moving briskly and cleanly. I hope to send the revised pages to my editor in a couple of weeks. There's still a lot of work to do, but for now I'm very happy to have finished this round of notes.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through my editor's notes. The revisions are going well, but one note is troubling me. I have to work out a denouement, a resolution to the story. The climax ends abruptly, and wraps up in like two sentences. I understand that I have to give some closure to the book, but I'm trying to avoid the kind of ending that you would have seen on old TV detective shows. I have to find a balance to give a denouement that doesn't wear out its welcome. This is going to take some thinking time.

I know that it was a traumatic experience, and I understand his need to work through the near-death experience, but did Stephen King have to use the Dark Tower series to exorcise the demons of the accident?

I'm about 300 pages away from finishing the last book in the series, after waiting several years to see how the Gunslinger's quest would end, and now all I'm doing is wading through a bunch of meta-literature/post-trauma therapy. I sure would have loved to read the Dark Tower that he had originally intended to write, because there is no way he could have planned out this weird path, which is essentially an excuse and apology for why it took him so long to finish the series.

I'm cycling through my editor's notes on the manuscript, and they're very helpful. The major change that I have to wrestle with is cutting the action in the middle so that I can get to the graveyard faster. I think I found a way to cut to the chase but not lose the fun stuff. Already, I've chopped 4 pages out of the manuscript with my proposed revision, so I think my editor will be happy. The big discovery is that the mystery that the two boys have to solve is who is the person drawing graffiti. That made me realise that the tile shouldn't be plural, but singular, so the official title is going to be "Mystery of the Graffiti Ghoul."

With about 9 more chapters to revise, I hope to have the editor's notes addressed by the end of this week. Then I'm going to take a week to carefully read over the manuscript and fix up any inconsistencies and clean up the characters. Hopefully, this will make for less work in the next round of revisions.

Once the general shape of the manuscript is there, I'm going to need a good proofreader to catch all the typos and missing words (I'm terrible at copy editing). A friend has offered his kind services (he caught about 15 typos in The Mystery of the Frozen Brains after it had been published). I'm getting very excited about this book, but I'm also itching to get to work on the third book in the series... and I'm starting to think about putting together a new kids' book series with a fantasy/comedy angle. More on that later.

Good news. I've finally finished the revisions to the play. This week, I'm going to take some time to polish the dialogue to make sure all the characters are consistent, and if I feel really ambitious I'm going to try to write the lyrics to the songs in the first act. I just have to make sure that the content is right and that the voices are consistent in this next pass, and I'd like to do it before I get together with my composer so that all he has to do is worry about the music.

Today, I tuned into CTV's coverage of the Live 8 concert to end poverty in Africa, and I was struck by the passionate pleas by musicians and celebrities to pressure world leaders to do the right thing. For a second, just a second, I thought wow, idealism still exists in the world. Then, CTV cut to commercial to advertise a new GM Pontiac car, cell phones by Rogers, and TD Bank's late night hours. I'm wondering how much money GM, Rogers, and TD are donating to fight the poverty in Africa. Or am I going to be really jaded and say that the Live 8 concert has noble intentions, but the only people who will reap financial benefits are the companies who advertised between the impassioned pleas. I would have liked to see more commercials outlining the problems in Africa and what Canadians could do to help; instead, I was hit with ads to buy cars. I suspect the lobbyists for car companies have more clout than all the musicians in the world (just take a look at how slowly the governments have moved to reduce carbon emissions...)

Also, today, I read an article about Nasa's Deep Impact mission, an attempt to crash a satellite into the Tempel 1 comet to see the effects. Apparently, the collision will do nothing to affect the trajectory of the comet, but will create a fireworks show for scientists and skywatchers. I can't help but see the parallels between this mission and the recent controversy over same-sex legislation. Isn't marriage an institution like Tempel 1, hurtling through space and virtually unstoppable? And same-sex legislation is like the satellite crashing into the comet, setting off a brief spectacle, but ultimately doing no damage to the institution of marriage. So why are people so outraged by the government's adoption of same-sex legislation? Would it be fare to say that 40 years ago, these might have been the same people who were against civil rights for blacks?

So those are my random thoughts on a Saturday afternoon. Not sure why they popped into this blog, and I may throw in other random thoughts as time goes on. As I grow older and find less energy to produce plays and discover the agonizing years that it takes to get something published, I realise that the blog may soon be the only way I can communicate my ideas. Hmm, that means I'm just one step away from writing letters to the editor. When that day comes, consider me officially out of the writing business.