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.

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:

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.”

8% No Limit

Back in August, I spent three days ‘guide running’ for Rhonda-Marie Avery; a legally blind runner who successfully ran Ontario’s 900 kilometer Bruce Trail, from end to end.

A documentary film crew followed Rhonda-Marie every step of the way – for twenty days. That documentary will be released later this year, but here’s a sneak peek of what happened on the trail. At this point in the story, Rhonda Marie has run 780 km.

You can see eleven other ‘previews’ of the film, capturing all sorts of hijinx and heartbreak and, yes, twisted ankles. Just go here.

The Zero Winter, Part 2

Back in the fall, my publisher mentioned they’d be “interested” in seeing my new novel – provided I finished writing it by the end of the year.

Unfortunately, by the end of November, I’d only written 30,000 words. I needed to write 20,000 more – FAST! So I booked a week off work, and ran away to this cabin to write.

I didn’t speak to anyone, didn’t play Super Mario Brothers, and didn’t watch a single cat video. All I did was write. And occasionally run. For nine straight days. It was…intense.

The view out the window

December 3: I’ve been here for three days, and I’m not sure how productive I’ve been. In terms of page totals, I have nothing to brag about. The first couple of days were consumed with organizational stuff – mapping out the chapters, going through old drafts, harvesting descriptive passages for re-use, blah blah blah. Boring, but necessary.

Kai called yesterday. He asked if my characters are surprising me with their words and actions. I think I disappointed him by saying no. My characters aren’t very clear to me yet. I’m not sure what motivates them. I don’t even know what kind of music they like. Hiphop or Christian metal? Shoegaze or bro-country? Until I nail that stuff down, they can’t possibly speak for themselves, never mind set out on an unexpected murder spree.

4 December. I’ve been at the cabin for 4 days. I’ve only squeezed out 14 pages so far, and by no means are they polished pages. On the bright side, 10 of those pages were written in the last 24 hours, and I expect to continue writing at that clip (10 pages / day) until I return to Toronto Sunday night. I’m still hopeful that I’ll break the 160-page barrier while I’m here.

On the running front. things are great. I knocked off an icy 28k tempo run today in 2 hours 20 minutes. Didn’t even raise a sweat. Saw a beaver in a swamp at the side of the road.

5 December: Ideas are flowing now; literally tumbling out of my mind, one after the other. One of my characters did something I totally wasn’t expecting! I need to call Kai and tell him. I love it when that happens!

At the end of the day I went for a three hour run. It was cold and icy and I ran straight into the sunset. Later, sitting cross-legged on a cushion for 45 minutes, I felt my mind go quiet, and I thought: I do not want this day to end. I want tomorrow to be just like today, I want to write another 6000 brilliant words.

It won’t happen, of course. Tomorrows are never like todays. I need to be okay with that.

6 December: Another solid day of writing. Churned out 14 pages, including a soulful chapter involving Finn, and Tab, and a guitar. Basically, I was writing about my old friend, Christopher Lailey, who invented Wikepedia (without knowing it) when I lived with him in Ottawa in 1989.

So now I’ve written 29 pages in 5 days and I expect I’ll tie off at least another 5 pages tomorrow. That’ll take me up to the climax of the story when the storm hits and Finn runs away to the floating island.

11 December: Back in Toronto. I’ve been feeling gloomy lately. I’m still working on this crazy novel, every spare moment I can find, and I’ve become the most boring, least fun person in the world. All I do is write. Every. Single. Moment. I’ve forgotten how to joke around or have fun. I am a fun vacuum. It seems like forever since I’ve laughed or even smiled. I keep ignoring invitations to Christmas parties. I don’t even know how to speak to people anymore. I just mutter-mutter-mutter-mutter-blah-blah novel.

I don’t like myself this way. I don’t want to be a fun vacuum. I want to be the opposite. I want to be a fun...forced air gas furnace? A fun…leaf blower? Yes, that’s it. I want to be a fun leaf blower. I want to blow joyful leaves all over the place.

18 December: Got an encouraging note from a young friend. I met Luka at a school visit this past fall, and he took a picture of me, and photo-shopped me into the Sahara desert. I’ve always wanted to run in Africa, so thanks Luka, for making another of my running dreams come true!

23 December: I need to start my Christmas shopping, but I’m having trouble taming three sections of the book: Pages 125-132, pages 156-163, and pages 180-188. The rest is fairly smooth sailing. But I need those time-travel sections to hold together. Without them, the novel will crumble to pieces like that dry vegan cheese that doesn’t taste very good. Okay, that’s a bad metaphor. But you know what I mean.

25 December: It’s Christmas morning, and yes, I’m still working on this book. Chapter 14 is a total wreck, and I need to start laying track for the final 3 chapters. Will I finish this thing in time? I have one week left.

1 January 2015: I finished the novel yesterday, so yay. It’s 212 pages / 58,500 words.

I have no idea if it’s any good or not. I cried while I wrote the ending, so I’m hoping that’s a good sign. It might just have been the exhaustion though.

The chapters that take place in the magical land of Perpetuum still need to be sanded down or amplified or…something. I’m not sure what. I need time away from it. Later on, things will be clearer, and I’ll start in on the rewrites with a fresh mind.

There, I just sent it off. Mission accomplished. I don’t care what happens to it now. I just don’t care.

I’m free!

Post script: Last night (New Year’s Eve), me and Shawna drove to Collingwood for a party. The weather was appalling: freezing rain, white-out conditions. Biblical stuff. As we passed over the Blue Mountains, slipping and sliding through the Siberian landscape, I thought to myself; what if we spin out, what if we get sandwiched by a truck or smash into a hydro pole? My novel will never be read by anyone! It’s locked on my laptop and nobody knows where it is. All that work will have been wasted!

I drove the rest of the way at 15 km/h. I swear. Writers are so vain.