Wouldn’t It Be Cool If…

Kids often ask me what inspired Perpetuum – the magical island in my new novel where time stands still.

It happened like this.

I was eleven. A boy scout. On a 3-day canoe trip somewhere in Haliburton county.

It was the middle of July, and beautifully warm. My scout troop had paddled 15 kilometers that morning, passing through three lakes, and portaging over two dams. We pitched our tents on a beautiful campsite carpeted with soft pine needles.

After we cooked lunch, we were given free time. We swam, hunted for crayfish, made friends with a bunch of ducks.

At some point I lay down on my sleeping bag inside my tent, and stared out through the tent flaps at the blue sky and the waving tree branches.

The air smelled of cedar and pine and wet rocks. The wind was silky, and deliciously warm.

I lay there in the tent, feeling happy. I didn’t have a care in the world. I was well-fed, my arm muscles were glowing from the paddling, and I was halfway between being awake and asleep.

That’s when I thought it for the very first time: I wish this moment would never end.

This moment. RIGHT NOW. With the warm wind, and the blue sky, and me lying on my sleeping bag. I don’t want it to end. Not EVER.

It ended, of course. You probably guessed that, eh? The sun went behind a cloud and I fell asleep.

A couple of hours later a terrible storm blew up, and one of our canoes was blown onto the rocks. One of my friends broke his ankle, and the next morning we had to pack our waterlogged tents and paddle home through the freezing rain.

A few weeks after that, I was back in school. That beautiful moment was gone. Forever.

30 years have passed since then. Some sad things have happened, but they’ve been outnumbered by the happy things. I travelled across Canada, I met my wife, I published novels, and I met lots of amazing kids.

But time kept going. It never stops.

Still, every now and again, I remember that day on the canoe trip, and I wish I was back there, lying in that tent, in that picture-perfect moment.

writing floating island story

One day a few years ago, after my first novel was published, I had another crazy idea. I thought: Wouldn’t it be cool if there really WAS a place where time stood still? …

If you ever find yourself muttering those words – Wouldn’t It Be Cool If – pay attention! Grab a pen and take notes. Some of our best ideas begin with those very words.

Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought to myself, if there really WAS a place where time stood still?

I kept thinking about that feeling I had, lying in that tent. Also: the view I had of a little island, out in the middle of the lake. It was tiny, and it seemed to float.

I wondered: what if time never passed on that island? It’d be great, right? You could beach your canoe, and then you’d go through some sort of time portal, and then you’d have all the time in the world. You’d never get old, and you’d live forever, and best of all, you’d never have to do any homework.

On the other hand, you might get bored on that island, since nothing would ever change.

I thought a lot about this stuff. And then, after a while, I started writing down my thoughts. Some time later, I wrote my novel “Sight Unseen.” And that’s how the magical land of Perpetuum was born.

(photos by my genius brother Andy)

Want To Be A Writer?

Of course you do!

Dave re-writing Sight Unseen

It’s totally easy! Just follow these 3 simple steps…

Write every day. Doesn’t matter what. Stupid stuff, funny stuff, poems that don’t rhyme. Don’t worry if it’s crap. I write crap all the time! Just keep writing. It keeps your creative gears from getting rusty.
Always! Be! Reading! It doesn’t matter which books. Smart ones, goofy ones, comic books, magazines. Read off your phone or in the library or in a hammock. Fiction, non-fiction, whatevs. Just keep turning those pages!
The third step, and by far the most important is this: make as many interesting friends as you can! Hang out with people who are totally different than you. People from different countries, who speak different languages, who listen to the weirdest, wildest music you’ve ever heard! Make friends with older people, and people who are younger. Seek out storytellers. Laughers. People who cry at movies.

The more friends you have, the more stuff you’ll be exposed to, and the more you’ll have to write about. I never would’ve written either of my novels if not for some amazing friends who inspired the stories.

Westmount Team Ultra

Warning: If possible, avoid making friends with gun smugglers and bank robbers. They’re interesting, but also dangerous. We writers need to draw the line somewhere.

agatha's note

Would You Eat This Cake Sight Unseen?

A grade 8 student – the amazingly talented Abby – baked this cake based on my new book! That’s the magical land of Perpetuum on the right. She put the purple hills in there, and a little BMX bike, and Finn’s bike ramp, all made of sugar candy, and chocolate trees.

I love the attention to detail – especially the red bookmark that hangs down between the 2 pages. I bet that took HOURS.

I just about wept when I saw it. Who wants a book award when you can have a CAKE!

Abby couldn’t bear to slice into the cake when the other kids arrived for the “author mingle party,” and I couldn’t blame her, what with it being a work of art that deserves to be in the Louvre and all. Still, everyone was glaring at us with their paper plates and plastic forks scrunched up in their fists, so I turned to Abby and she nodded and then I took the knife and sliced into the cake. “Everything is impermanent,” I said.

The cake was delicious. Better even. It was a beacon of deliciousness.

Publication At Last

My new novel, Sight Unseen, just hit the bookstores.

A bit of a miracle really. Two years ago, after ‘Ultra’ was published, I didn’t have a single idea for a follow-up book.

But then I got a phone call. From this woman, Rhonda-Marie Avery:

Rhonda-Marie had read Ultra and liked it. But that wasn’t why she was calling. She’d looked up my bio and discovered that I run ultra-marathons. And she was hoping I could help her out…

Have you heard of the Bruce Trail? It’s a 900-kilometer footpath from Tobermory to Niagara Falls. It runs along the lip of the Niagara Escarpment, which is essentially a 450-million year old coral reef. It’s incredibly rugged. Home to rattlesnakes, bears, wolves and 100-metre cliffs.

Perfect place for a blind woman, right?

Rhonda-Marie was born with a rare genetic eye disorder called Achromatopsia, which means she has no cones in her retina.

She has only 8% vision. And she decided to run the length of the Bruce Trail – all 900 kilometers of it – to show the world what blind athletes are capable of.

To help her out, she found 50 volunteers from the ultra-running community to ‘guide’ her. I was one of those 50. And it was a fascinating experience. For twelve straight hours, I ran 5 feet in front of Rhonda-Marie, and ‘narrated’ the trail for her. The guide runners had developed this whole language – to help Rhonda-Marie ‘see’ the trail in her mind.

This is what we sounded like:

“Rock right. Root left. Rock salad. Toe grabber right. Ankle-grabber. Okay, take three steps up! We’re running through some scalloped potatoes now, Watch out for the cheese grater to the right. Thread the needle! Dinosaur steps!”

The most important phrase of all was “death to the left!”

We were travelling north to south on the trail, so the life-ending cliffs were always to our left.

Anyway, after 20 days of straight running, and 30,000 feet of elevation gain (basically the equivalent of Mount Everest), Rhonda-Marie reached the end of the trail.

The final 500 metres

She ran 900 kilometers on one of the world’s gnarliest trails – with only 8% vision!

I was so inspired by this!

But here’s the thing… I shouldn’t have been.

For the past 21 years I’ve been close friends…best friends… with this guy. His name is Kai Black. He’s an executive producer at CBC Radio. He and I created three national radio shows together.

Back when Kai was 15, he was diagnosed with a rare eye condition called Stargardt disease. By the time he turned 18, he’d lost virtually all of his central vision.

A healthy eyeball

A Stargardt eyeball

Kai is one of the most heroic and inspiring guys I’ve ever known. If you met him on the street, you wouldn’t notice anything unusual about him. Stargardt disease affects the central vision, but it leaves the peripheral vision intact. That means Kai has full mobility, doesn’t use a cane, gets around with little trouble, and sometimes even rides a bike. My brother and I have gone downhill skiing with Kai – zigzagging down black diamond runs at Whistler. My brother simply wore a brightly-coloured ski jacket, which was easy for Kai to see against the snow.

Kai and I have run races together too. This picture was taken moments after we crossed the finish line at the Boston marathon a few years back.

Anyway, I don’t know when it clicked. When I suddenly realized that I had a great idea for a second novel staring me in the face!

Finally I blurted out what I’d been thinking. I told Kai that I had an idea for a new book… And that it was inspired by…uh…him.

“It’s about a kid who gets diagnosed with Stargardt disease,” I told him. “And he’s worried about the future, and he keeps riding his bike even though it’s dangerous, because his bike is his life, and he can’t bear to give it up, because that bike represents his independence.”

Kai thought about it for a minute, and then he nodded and said, “Okay… But it sounds kinda boring. You’ll need some other plot devices to ratchet up the tension.”

So I went looking for a second bit of inspiration.

Do you remember this book? ‘Oranges and UFO’s’ by Muriel Leeson? I bought it out of the Scholastic catalogue in 1975. It’s about a group of kids who get abducted by aliens, and go off to Mars where they have crazy adventures. But here’s the thing: when the kids are on Mars, time stands still! They stay there for months, and when they finally come home, their parents don’t even know they’ve been away.

I loved that! So I merged that idea with my earlier idea – about the kid with the visual impairment. Now I had a main character who was losing his eyesight – only, I had him discover a magical place where time stands still.

I was so excited about this idea. I mentioned it to my editor, Sandy Bogart Johnston. Sandy got quiet for a moment. And then she said, “Are you absolutely sure you want to write magic?”

Early diagram of ‘Perpetuum’ – my land where time stands still.

It turns out writing magic isn’t easy. It’s like building a condo tower. You need architectural drawings, a solid foundation, lots of rebar that nobody ever sees but that holds everything together… Once you’ve got all that in place, then you can wave your magic wand and start having fun… But not before.

Lesson learned. We eventually got the time travel stuff figured out. And by we, I really mean my editor, Sandy.

And there’s the book! It’s in bookstores – and available online – now.

Of course, I never could’ve done it without my guides. Many thanks to Kai Black, Rhonda-Marie Avery, and especially my editor, Sandy Bogart Johnston.

Running Through Opposite Land

This year’s Haliburton 50-miler shouldn’t have gone well. The previous two weeks had been insane, what with the launch of my new radio show, and the impending publication of my novel. I got 8 hours of sleep in the three days before the race. Also, I was being force-fed a bunch of life’s predictable crap sandwiches.

You know how it is: hidden icebergs of grief, bullet-holes in the drywall, gale-force winds.

Long story short: my head wasn’t in the game. Which is why, in the rush to catch my train, I forgot to pack my watch, salt pills and favourite shoes.

Doomed, I thought. I’m totally doomed.

Oh well. Might as well run the dang thing anyway.

Happily, Saturday morning, the conditions were perfect. Firm trails, and air so brisk you could see your breath. I went out waaaay too fast, but for some reason my body never crashed. Maybe because I ate a TON of food. Potatoes, bananas, gels, and uhhh Clif bars.

Now, I have a love-hate relationship with Clif bars. I hate it when I eat them, and I love puking them up.

Seriously – Clif bars are tougher to gag down than soggy woolen mittens. Sure, they have calories, but it’s like swallowing a Christmas sweater.

Luckily, at aid station 5, after trying to coax a third oatmeal-mohair bar down my throat, a fellow runner gifted me a packet of tangerine Gu chomps. Have you tried these chomps? OMG. It was like the Book of Genesis unfolding on my tongue.

The sugar flooded into my bloodstream and I started sproinging up the hills. Sproing! Sproing! Sproing! Sproing!

I bounded up hills I’d only walked before. I was a gazelle, a dik-dik, a Kangaroo Rat. The only hills I didn’t run were the diabolical three ‘sisters’ between Ben’s Trail and The Pass, and that 300-foot monster at the start of the King and James trail.

I had no right to be running this well. But sometimes runners get lucky, and wind up in Opposite Land. If you’ve been running for any length of time, you’ve probably been to Opposite Land. You train and plan meticulously for months, and yet, when race day comes, everything falls apart. Other times, even if you’ve been eating nothing but Pocky and crying your eyes out every night, you can still – for some inexplicable reason – exceed expectations.

Opposite land. That’s where I was. So I kept running hard. No part of my body complained.

I ran into old friends at aid stations and stopped for hugs. Those friends gave me more energy than a dozen boiled, salted potatoes.

“I miss you like whoa!”

“I miss you like whoa too!”

“I’d love to stay and chat, but-”

“Keep going! It’s a race!”

Shawna asked me what I thought about during this run. I told her I didn’t think about anything at all. Maybe my mind was too blasted from the radio show or the book or the drive-by shootings in my mind. Yes, it felt like the whole world was crashing down, but out here on this trail, I was in complete control. For nine hours, my whole existence was a dusty brown ribbon, two feet wide. It was that simple. Just keep running. Everything else will unfold as it should.

As usual, the trails were storybook pretty. Tree trunks as thick as elephant legs, and leaves that rattled in the breeze like twenty dollar bills. When I got to aid station 4, ten miles from the finish, I asked a volunteer for the time. I was delighted by her answer. I had a shot at breaking 9 hours. I ran on, and started to fantasize about the finish line. What would I do when I got there? Turn my usual pirouette? Do a couple of cartwheels? Or should I moonwalk? Hmmm.

In the end, I just leaned forward, and ran it in. My time was 9:02.

I know – pretty boring.

My parents were there, cheering wildly. And the moment I crossed the line, I realized my mistake.

Instead of racing straight across the fline, here’s what I should have done:

Abruptly stopped running – ten metres shy of the finish.
Walked over to the side of the road and hugged my parents.
Grabbed them by the hand.
Pulled them across the finish line beside me; all six of our hands raised high.

That’s what I should’ve done. Because all of my victories – deserved or not – are entirely thanks to them.

That’s what I learned from Opposite Land. Calories only push you so far. Heart pushes you further.

The Grind

As usual, I hated every minute of it.

I ran the North Face Endurance Challenge the other day. A fifty mile race, up and down Blue Mountain, in 40 degree humidity.

It was a punishing course, on a punishingly hot day. 100 or so runners struggled up 800 feet of elevation gain in the very first kilometer. Stupidly, I forgot to take my salt pills, and by 2 p.m., after 9 hours of running, my mind had turned to oatmeal.

“May I please have a double ocean liner freeway paste?” I asked a volunteer at the aid station.

“I’m sorry?” he replied.

“I said, I want an ecclesiastical marzipan hope merchant on a tugboat—“

Inside my head, my little speech made sense. But for some reason, when it left my mouth, it came out mangled.

Suddenly I yanked in my breath. Someone was chopping away at my back with a pickaxe.

Wait a second – no. It was just cold water. The volunteer had poured a glass of ice-water down my shirt.

“That better?” he said, snapping his finger in front of my eyes.

My eyeballs narrowed into laser beams. Suddenly I was all-powerful and alert. I was the Millenium Falcon! I was a Kendrick Lamar song!

“Thank you very much,” I told the volunteer. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to run.”

I ran 11 more miles after that. The temperature spiked and the sun was unrelenting. Runners dropped all around me, from heat exhaustion, quad muscles torn to shreds, sneakers melted into gluey white puddles.

The entire time I kept asking myself, WHY? WHY do I do this stupid sport? Am I really so fond of the nausea and the knee pain and the medicinal taste you get in your mouth after sucking down 20-odd vanilla-flavoured gels and the sight of yet another 150 metre ski hill you must force your complaining kneecaps to ascend? For what possible purpose do I do this? Vanity? A trim belly? An uppity post on facebook?

Of course, my attitude changed when I got to the finish line. Shawna was there. She told me that she’d finished reading my new novel, and that it had made her cry, and that she loved it, just loved it.

Suddenly the race was forgotten. All the pain, all the nausea, all the self-loathing – GONE.

“Seriously,” she said. “It’s really good.”

It’s a weird feeling, when, after three long years, your book has finally been finished, and goes off to China to be printed. Your editor stops texting you hourly, and your agent moves on to the next in a long line of impatient writers, and you suddenly feel adrift. You can barely remember the anguish you felt, slugging through each of the book’s 240 pages. At times, it felt like the agony would never end.

Writing is a lot like running that way. It’s intensely painful while you’re out there, but once you cross the finish line, you just feel lost.

Sight Unseen comes out October 1st. You can pre-order your copy here.

(North Face Time-Exposure Photo credit: the awesome Kent Keeler.)

A Blur of Inspiration

My new novel, Sight Unseen, isn’t about running.

Instead, it’s about mountain biking. White-knuckle trail rides down vertical walls of rock. Stomach-twisting gap jumps and body-crushing endos.

Terrifying stuff. And guess who’s sitting in the saddle?

A kid named Finn. A kid who’s going blind.

Sound impossible? It’s actually not.

I know this because I have a friend who’s legally blind, and for many years he rode a bicycle through downtown Toronto’s busiest streets – even after he’d lost 90% of his vision.

Yes. A blind guy rode his bike through downtown Toronto. Not just once. He rode that bike for years.

I have another friend who ran the entire Bruce Trail – all 890 gnarly kilometers of it – in spite of having just 8% vision.

People with visual impairments have written hit records and climbed Mount Everest. One of them even served as President of the United States.

A healthy eyeball

I spared my protagonist a life in politics. instead, I made him passionate about mountain biking. And why not? I loved cycling when I was a kid. Of course, as I got older, I gave the sport up. I got more and more uh, what’s the word? Oh yeah – chicken.

The most common injuries among mountain bikers are (1) broken wrists, (2) broken collarbones and (3) broken ribs. For that reason, I have’t ridden a bike in years. I love running too much. Don’t want to risk getting injured.

Still, I love watching videos and reading about mountain biking. I’ll be keeping an eye on the goings-on at Crankworx next week. Speaking of which, here’s one of my all-time favourite videos. It centres around Brendan Semenuk; one of the best dirt jumpers in the world. As I was writing Sight Unseen, I watched this video over and over. My main character, Finn, dreams of landing some of the jumps Brandon does here. Finn is especially determined to do a ‘Superman No-Hander.’

Another Real Life Superhero

Bailey Matthews from Doncaster, U.K., has completed his first ever triathlon – despite having cerebral Palsy. The eight year old was cheered as he crossed the line unaided at the event at Castle Howard this weekend.

Nothing is impossible.

My New Novel – In Bookstores October 2015

Thirteen-year-old Finn loves bike riding — the more dangerous the trail, the better. But he had a spectacular crash a few months ago, and he’s just received a diagnosis that will change his life. He is slowly going blind. In a few years his vision will be gone.

Desperate to salvage something of his “last” summer, Finn invites a friend to the cottage and is drawn to a strange island that seems to glimmer — but no one else can see it. When he gets close, he’s sucked into something he could never have anticipated. Can Finn’s friend Cheese help him come to terms with “lights out” . . . or will it take something much more extraordinary?

Raves & reviews:

Have Faith, Writers!

Have you ever cooked an amazing meal for a friend? I mean, a truly amazing meal? Maybe your famous thai shrimp curry with cornmeal flatbread and that amazing spinach and strawberry salad you do…

And you set that meal down for your friend and watched him or her eat it — bite by bite… Course by course… Appetizer, salad, main course, dessert. And all that time you were WAITING for their verdict. But they kept eating, and you kept waiting, and the compliment never came?

What the heck???

That’s kinda what happened to the great Russian composer, Pete Tchaikovsky. After ole Petey finished composing his very first piano concerto he played it for his buddy, Nikolai Rubinstein. Rubinstein was this hugely famous pianist and Tchaikovsky was hoping he might agree to perform this new concerto. But the longer Tchaikovsky played, the more silent Rubinstein became.

Here’s Tchaikovsly’s version of what happened:

“I played him my first movement. He gave no comment. Not a single word, not a single remark! Oh, for one word, for friendly attack, for God’s sake one word of sympathy, even if not of praise. I fortified myself with patience and played through to the end. Still silence. I stood up and asked, “Well?”

Well, the news wasn’t good. Rubinstein HATED the concerto. According to him it was worthless and unplayable. Passages were so fragmented, so clumsy, so badly written they were beyond rescue. The work itself was bad, vulgar. Two or three pages were worth preserving; The rest needed to be thrown away!

Tchaikovsky’s seriously no-fun, dream-killing friend, Rubinstein

All in all, it was a miserable night for Tchaikovsky. But don’t worry – things turned out alright in the end. Here’s the “worthless and unplayable” work Rubinstein was referring to:

https://dailymotion.com/video/xdbjwk

Never lose faith in yourself, or your dreams. Persevere! Create that masterpiece!

And don’t let the haters get you down – even if they are “experts.”