Category Archives: Uncategorized

I know what you’re thinking: The Sex Life of the Amoeba is obviously a favourite of most pre-juvenile detention boys and girls and current Super Max facility residents, but is it the Great Canadian Novel? Let’s read the blurb on the back cover, shall we?

A novel about passions — a passion for sex, a passion for America, and a passion for movie-making. Sarah Fielding wants to turn the great Canadian novel into a ‘quality’ movie, but the sex-mad producer, the deluded Hollywood star, and the ‘authentic’ young actor have their own thoughts about how it should unfold. Will Sarah triumph? Not likely.

Riveting? Very much so. Salaciously scandalous? Is the bear Catholic? Does the Pope poop in the woods? ‘Nough said.

A couple of months ago, CBC published a list of 12 books it thought should be taught in high schools (but presumably were not being taught at many/most high schools). The list included some big names and heavyweight titles such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (otherwise known as Someone Knows My Name, as it was published in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand…what’s wrong with you, Yanks, Wallabies and Kiwis!), Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, and Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian.

Taking this one step further, I asked my book club colleagues and fellow curlers not long ago if they could think of The Great Canadian Novel. While we came up with some of the usual suspects (Alias Grace, In the Skin of a Lion, Barney’s Version, Fifth Business, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Lives of Girls and Women), there was no unanimous agreement as to The Great Canadian Novel.

So, in the spirit of the literary awards season now upon us, I want to open this up to visitors to my site. What in your esteemed opinion is The Great Canadian Novel? Cast your vote by emailing me at harrisrh@gmail.com. I’ll announce the winner on November 1.

For Jays fans, the picture pretty much says it all.

Last night, Dorothy did not make it out of Kansas alive. She got swept away in a technicolour tornado and will not have the opportunity to look back until next spring in Dunedin, Florida.

Fair-weather fans will, I’m sure, lament our lot in life as Torontonians, the hardship of having to live in the same city as the Maple Leafs, etc., but I’m  proud of our Boys in Blue and want to thank them for making the last few months more exciting for sports fans here in the Dot than I can remember in almost a generation. You played hard, you gave it your all, you kicked some serious ass along the way, and in the end you took it on the chin with dignity. In that way, perhaps I just misspoke. It’s not just Toronto you made proud; from Victoria to St. John’s, I’ve seen and heard friends calling, texting, emailing and Facebooking each other about the Jays, especially during their playoff drive. So, without dragging this out any further and turning it into a waterworks celebration, thank you members of the Toronto Blue Jays and its organization for being wicked awesome. You did good, boys.

Now, for those who not only enjoy America’s pastime the sport “not a lot of Canadians grew up playing [so] they’re not used to catching balls in the stands” but its accompanying literature as well, I thought I would suggest a couple of options if you’d like to keep the baseball season going, if only cerebrally. For me, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel is by far and away the greatest piece of baseball-oriented fiction out there (and will make you pee your pants it’s so funny). In more recent years, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding has got a lot of good press, much of it exaggerated in my humble opinion. Other enjoyable works include Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (with a totally different ending than the Robert Redford/Wonder Boy movie of the same name) and W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (a much more multi-layered novel than the adapted screenplay, Field of Dreams). A couple of other notable books are Michael Chabon’s Summerland and Jennifer E. Smith’s The Comeback Season.

As for the other part of the title to this post, there seemed to be no more controversial buzzword in this series between Toronto and KC than “conspiracy.” From questionable calls behind the plate to Fox News “mistakenly” saying the World Series would start next Tuesday between KC and the Mets when the KC/Jays games was still in the 7th inning of game 6 to an Amish punk (seriously, he looked like one of those guys from the TLC show, right?) who went on national television and described how he caught a ball off the bat of Mike Moustakas “above the wall” when video evidence clearly shows he dipped his glove below the line, committed fan interference, and turned what should have been a ground rule double into a 2-0 lead for the Royals.

No comment from here on those calls, but I will offer a list of some top-notch conspiracy theory fiction. It obviously goes without saying that author, philanthropist, and Nobel nominee R.H. Harris’s Conspiracy is a classic in the genre. However, there are also some inferior works which are quite good, including Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (and one of the most challenging books I’ve ever sunk my literary teeth into), Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Some also put David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana up there. And while Dan Brown has now become the mostest bestsellingest author of all-time when it comes to conspiracy theories, I can’t say I’m a big fan of his, though I have to admit that I was pretty impressed with the research he carried out (i.e. the backbreaking work his minions did) for his latest novel, Inferno.

Anyway, this post started with baseball and will end on the same note. We as Torontonians often walk that fine line between self-deprecation and self-loathing, but thanks to the Jays this autumn, we can all hold our heads high and be proud that at least one of our myriad sports organizations got it right.  You won’t soon be forgotten, boys…

    +       +      =   ?

If you like playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon n’ Eggs, I tempt you to connect the dots of this post’s title before reading on any further.

In an article released online by The Intercept, a site “dedicated to producing fearless, adversial journalism,” federal prison inmate Barrett Brown penned an article titled “Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels.”

Mr. Brown is an imprisoned American journalist and founder of Project PM, “a crowd-sourced investigation into the cyber-industrial complex.” In 2012 he was sentenced to 63 months in prison after the FBI raided his house and indicted him on 12 federal charges.

In the October 6 piece mentioned above, Mr. Brown does a convincing job of demystifying what in recent years has become the cult of Jonathan Franzen, author of notable works such as The Corrections and Freedom. His latest novel is called Purity.

As you might glean from the title of his review, Barrett Brown is not a card-carrying member of the J. Franzen Party. He actually starts his review of Purity by quoting Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin, who describes Franzen as follows:

By now, Franzen is often regarded less as writer than as cultural signifier, emblem of white male hegemony. That this has little if anything to do with the substance of his novels is (perhaps) the point and the tragedy; when it comes to Franzen, the writing is where we go last.

When Mr. Brown gets to the subject at hand himself, this is what he had to say in a nutshell:

Purity isn’t a terrible book or even a very bad one. There is some clever use of language once in a while, yet Franzen resists the temptation to dip into the self-conscious attempts at “literary” phrasing that mark so much of his competition…Characters will sometimes think clever thoughts or even say them out loud, but not so often that this becomes unseemly. Now and again we are even presented with snippets of real insight. One can see how Franzen could have written a much better book 15 years ago.

Mr. Brown then goes on to Franzen’s interpretation of the state of fiction today through the author’s 1996 Harper’s essay, “Perchance to Dream,” and summarily tears down that Berlin Wall of triteness when he says that people would be better served to read a piece from an old friend of mine from my Korea days, B.R. Myers, who penned a scandalous (well, as scandalous as the publishing world gets when it’s not centred around such cerebral topics as how many hues of grey exist and can a million little pieces really be one big piece of hyped-up poppycock?) article that appeared in the July/August 2001 issue of The Atlantic called “A Reader’s Manifesto: An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose” (and would be published a year later as a book).

Barrett Brown winds down his own piece on Franzen and Purity with this rather, er, direct commentary:

Let me put it this way. I was interested enough in WikiLeaks, state transparency, and emergent opposition networks to do five years in prison over such things, but I wasn’t interested enough that I would have voluntarily plowed through 500 pages of badly plotted failed-marriage razzmatazz by an author who’s long past his expiration date simply in order to learn what the Great King of the Honkies thinks about all this.

And who said all federal inmates are boors and ignoramuses who have nothing to contribute to society! If you missed the recent debate between a group of young Harvard go-getters who had their asses handed to them by a bunch of prisoners in a hotly contested debate that was moderated inside a federal correctional institution, then perhaps someone like Barrett Brown will set you straight.

As Mr. Brown concludes at the end of his piece, very poignantly, I might add:

We live in a sort of silly cultural hell where the columns are composed by Thomas Friedman, the novels are written by Jonathan Franzen, the debate is framed by CNN, and the fact-checking is done by no one. Franzen’s nightmare — a new regime of technology and information activists that will challenge the senile culture of which he is so perfectly representative — is exactly what is needed.

Welcome to the world of Kim Sun-young, a self-dubbed “sexy mild genius girl.” This satirical novella will most certainly be unlike any kind of fiction you’ve read before. As opposed to the typical literary satire, which more often than not tends to be political and/or social in nature, “The Uncorrected Proof of Sexy Mild Genius Girl” is a linguistic satire that is also a work of metafiction (think of anything from Don Quixote to Cloud Atlas to The New York Trilogy). At the same time, it is a fresh look at Korean culture, essentially a show-don’t-tell approach that past and present residents of the peninsula will immediately identify with, and something that may very well leave those who have no connection to the 5,000-year-old nation scratching their heads (but hopefully have a few laughs along the way).

After living in Korea for a decade and studying the language for years, I wanted to capture a unique element to the country’s language and the challenges/pitfalls that we as native English speakers face when learning Korean. More specifically, I wanted to point out the hurdles that Koreans must clear to learn English. The way I see it, one of the biggest problems Koreans face when learning English is that they are forced to use archaic, out-of-touch, poorly organized dictionaries, some of which date back (I kid you not) to the time of the Jesuits, especially their heyday between the 16th and 18th centuries, when they had a linguistic juggernaut on much of Asia.

The WTF/unique approach I took to writing Sexy Mild was to conceive of the story in Korean and then translate it back into English using only a Korean-English dictionary (from the popular portal Naver). I call this a reverse translation because it’s essentially an outbound-cum-inbound translation.

So, on that note I invite you to enter the world of Sexy Mild Genius Girl and share her journey as she does battle with the English language and engages in a passionate monologue with her “editor.” Click here to download the story.

The 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction has been announced, and Jamaica now has its first Booker Prize winner in Marlon James. Congratulations to Mr. James on the epic achievement. For those not familiar with the Booker (as it used to be called), it’s kind of like the Nobel Prize for Fiction rolled into an Academy Award.

As per the Man Booker website, here’s a description of a book that looks very intriguing:

On 3 December 1976, just weeks before the general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica concert to ease political tensions, seven men from West Kingston stormed his house with machine guns. Marley survived and went on to perform at the free concert. But the next day he left the country and didn’t return for two years.

Inspired by this near-mythic event, A Brief History of Seven Killings takes the form of an imagined oral biography, told by ghosts, witnesses, killers, members of parliament, drug dealers, conmen, beauty queens, FBI and CIA agents, reporters, journalists, and even Keith Richards’ drug dealer. The story traverses strange landscapes and shady characters, as motivations are examined – and questions asked.

If you’re curious about past winners and which of these former Booker winners you’ve read, click here.

In my last post, I included a quote from Amy Poehler’s book Yes Please about the writing process. In her preface, Ms. Poehler brought out that universal broom for the ages, the everyone broom that seems to sweep the entire population of mankind into a single category. We all do it from time to time in conversation, though mostly as innocuous hyperbole: “Everyone knows who President Obama is.” Actually, not true. “Everyone loves chocolate.” Definitely not true. “Everyone loves Raymond!” Okay, now you’re just being balmy, slightly dippy, and most definitely inane.

For this post, I would like to scratch the whole “everyone” thing and instead offer my thoughts based on my own experience as a writer over the last 15 years, tempered with the sage wisdom of writers far more deft at the craft than myself and who have had some thought-provoking quotes on the subject over the years.

Ms. Poehler wrote in her preface that “[writers] perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea.” While that is true for some people, I would like to counter with what Ernest Hemingway once said, something I believe in far more:

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Forgive the disturbing metaphor, but meaningful writing is a spiritual enema. It is a holistic process to those who practice the craft out of necessity and love – the emotional oxygen by which the soul blooms – and not for reasons concerning money, fame, anger or boredom.

Ms. Poehler then wrote, “[Writing this book] has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.” I can most certainly relate to this sentiment. There have been moments in my own experience, especially in the editing process, when you seem to go over the same page or the same sentence over and over until you want to tear your face off and self-immolate before jumping off a building into a field of broken glass. Okay, maybe not that bad, but it can suck the bag big time.

That being said, I will once again turn the floor over to someone who said it much better than I could. As Sylvia Plath wrote in her Unabridged Journals:

Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

So true. How often do we complain as writers before we even attempt the challenge of getting down a story or reworking a chapter or listening prudently to constructive advice? Sadly, I, for one, am guilty of this. But as funny as Ms. Poehler’s simile is, the situation has to be approached not with a screwdriver but with several kilograms of that wonderful fairy dust called patience if you’re to make the story come out in Dolby. That may sound flighty and exactly what Ms. Poehler was referring to when she said writers romanticize the process or make it into something “mighty and macho,” but it’s a simple truth. You need time to examine, re-examine, and then re-examine what has just been looked over 20 times. You need to discover beauty for beauty’s sake, or as Oscar Wilde once mused:

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

You need to keep things simple. You need to avoid adverbs whenever possible. You need to use the active verb tense over the passive and you need to show, not tell, your readers what you’re trying to get across. Or, as Chekhov once famously wrote:

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

And for those who write novels, you have to realize what Stephen King has long known:

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

But most of all, beyond any metaphor or simile you can come up with, if you’re going to write well you have to write because you love it, because your soul hemorrhages when you don’t have the craft as an outlet, and because you miss the other half of your soul which Plato said was separated at birth and which you only find when you sit down to produce the written word.

Ms. Poehler stated that writing “…is a small, slow crawl to the finish line.” Indeed it is. However, there is nothing or no one to say that is a bad thing in and of itself. Reading a great book is also a small, slow crawl to the finish line, but I, for one, love that.

I’m currently reading Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and I’ve been reading it for what feels like the length of a war. Some nights I read only two pages. And that’s okay because it’s not a race. The writing is exquisite and the story is captivating. I imagine it took Mr. Doerr quite a long time to research and write and edit the book, but every word he has chosen, every chapter he was penned, sings off the page with a harmony that makes the “small, slow crawl” so worth it, most definitely as a reader, and – I hope – for the writer himself.

The following excerpt from Amy Poehler, in the preface to her book Yes Please, has been making the rounds in online forums and Facebook posts recently. At the very least, I think it worthy of discussion, but will post my own thoughts tomorrow.

Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea. They talk about their ‘morning ritual’ and how they ‘dress for writing’ and the cabin in Big Sur where they go to ‘be alone’–blah blah blah. No one tells the truth about writing a book. Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about writing. I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.

Most authors liken the struggle of writing to something mighty and macho, like wrestling a bear. Writing a book is nothing like that. It is a small, slow crawl to the finish line.

By now, most people will have heard of a film called The Martian. They will also know that Matt Damon is the star. They may even know that Ridley Scott directed it. But ask these same people who Andy Weir is, and just as many might scratch their space helmet in confusion.

As it turns out, Andy Weir is the author of the novel The Martian, the basis for the blockbuster that made more money in its opening day than Andy Weir will ever see in his lifetime.

That’s not the interesting part, though. This past weekend I saw an interview with Andy Weir on TV and aside from being a really down-to-earth guy, his story is one that writers like me (and millions of other writers like me) dream of happening one day.

Andy Weir was a computer programmer by day. By night, he’d sit in front of his keyboard and pound away at the keys in a field he was passionate about: science fiction. He started The Martian in 2009. Two years later he was trying to sell his manuscript to literary agents. Weir did not succeed. He was turned down across the board.

However, this didn’t stop him from pursuing his goal. Although he continued going to work to earn an honest day’s paycheque, he didn’t relent with his dream to publish his sacred baby, and decided to publish it for free online, one chapter at a time. Readers became excited. He grew a fan base. In fact, his fans demanded he publish the whole story as an ebook on Kindle when all was said and done. And Weir did exactly that, selling it for 99 cents.

He immediately shot up to No. 1 on Amazon’s science fiction bestseller list.

Only then did publishers start to take note of the same novel which had been turned down by literary agents just two years ago, and in 2013 Weir signed a publishing contract worth a cool $100,000. According to Weir, the movie rights would be optioned four days later.

Then, a year later, on March 2, 2014, the hardcover version of The Martian came out in print form and debuted on the New York Times Best Seller List in the hardcover fiction category at No. 12.

From zero to sci-fi hero in four short years. Not bad.

So for every writer out there slogging away in the trenches of obscurity and a full-time job, let Andy Weir’s story be the inspiration, the rocket fuel, if you will, to keep going until you reach the next plateau.

In A Father’s Son, the hero’s father, Rick Maloney, says:

There is nothing in this world as breathtakingly miraculous and poignant as a father’s pride in and of his son. Despite my shortcomings as a parent, Justin, not a day goes by that I don’t acknowledge my good fortune, and feel eternally grateful for being the luckiest father in the world.

Well, it is with great pride that I announce the launch of my newest page on this site, Screenplays, where you can actually download a PDF version of  the screenplay. Producers, executives and investors, feel free to contact me if you’d like to see a full version of the screenplay and make movie magic together.

I’ve just finished my first screenplay (cue the applause, please). After penning numerous books, articles, and novels, I can say that this was unequivocally the most taxing job in terms of the technical aspect, as may be gleaned by the picture above. Unlike non-fiction, which requires hours of research, or journalistic writing, which requires hours of transcription, putting together a screenplay is most definitely a pain in the ass when it comes to how you stylize the thing. Does content matter? Obviously. But it goes far past that when actually writing the thing.

I will now be submitting A Father’s Son to the Daryl Duke Foundation for its annual Daryl Duke Prize for first-time screenplay writers.

Although you’re supposed to purchase Final Draft software to write a screenplay (roughly $100), you can get around it like me if you do all the technical work yourself in Word and then convert it to PDF format.

There are a lot of websites out there which offer advice on how to write a screenplay, but you can also download screenplays from  established writers. Study them, learn from them, and then go for the gold.