The Skeleton in my Closet

Did I mention that I work for Canada’s public broadcaster?

It’s awesome. Not only am I surrounded by brilliant and spunky people, but I get to climb around in Casey and Finnegan’s tree-house every single morning.

But things are always changing at the CBC, and recently, due to budgetary challenges, it was announced that our (formerly commercial-free) national music service will soon begin airing 4 minutes of commercials per broadcast hour.

It’s a siesmic shift. Nobody wants commercials cluttering up the airwaves, but the possible alternatives (show cancellations? endless re-runs of dusty radio dramas? dismantling the transmitters and selling the iron for scrap?) would likely drive even more listeners away. So commercials it is.

I’m just hoping nobody learns about my past.

Back in my early-twenties, I wrote commercials for a small-town radio station. I could churn out anywhere between 20 and 25 thirty-second spots per day. I wrote radio ads for funeral homes, steak houses, furriers, gentlemen’s clubs, used car lots, you name it. I was shameless, and I had a special knack for writing slogans.

One day, however, my copywriting superpowers deserted me. The results were disastrous. Check out this slogan I wrote for a flooring company – a company with the unusual name of Feel Fooring:

“For floors with feeling, feel free to phone Feel Flooring.”

Yes, I actually wrote that sentence. Forgive me. It was the end of a long day, and I’d written 30 spots already. I was, as they say, out of juice.

Back in those days, once you’d written a commercial, you had to call up the client to get them to approve your copy. It could be a humiliating experience; reading your well-crafted commercial over the phone, and then having it ripped to shreds by some dude who sold, I don’t know, chain saws for a living.

As I read that goofy Feel Flooring spot over the phone, I kept thinking NO WAY is Mr. Feel Flooring going to go for this.

“For floors with feeling feel free to phone Feel Flooring.”

I gave it my very best delivery. And to my shock and horror, the copy was approved! The commercial began running the very next day.

If you lived in the greater Espanola area during the early nineties, and spent any time listening to the radio, then I sincerely apologise.

On the bright side, that commercial won me the employee-of-the-month award. 50 bucks!

Real Life Superheroes, Part 7

You’ve probably heard of exteme sports like base-jumping, free-running, and wake-boarding…

But have you heard of the greatest adrenaline rush of all?

Let me introduce you to…extreme ironing.

Let’s face it. Everyone’s gotta iron. And ironing’s pretty boring. So why not make ironing time more fun?

Welp!

I’m a bit OCD, so this sport really speaks to me. You can do extreme ironing anywhere. Atop a mountain, on board a roller coaster, even at the bottom of the ocean. All it has to be is…extreme.

Uh…dude…there’s a shark above your head.

If you love challenging outdoor activities and the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt, then extreme ironing is for you!

And guess what… One of the stars of the sport is a 17 year-old kid.

Most teenagers aren’t too fond of housework, but Kevin Krupitzer is an exception. He’s particularly interested in removing creases from his clothes on top of weird rock formations near his home in Arizona.

My hero, the young Kevin Krupitzer

That doesn’t look too extreme, does it? Wait a second…let me show you a wide shot:

No matter how peculiar your passions may be, the world is waiting to see you succeed.

The Man Who Forgot He Wrote a Book

Crazy story – about my talented friend Tim. A warning, though: Tim is successful at, like, everything. He’s an award-winning journalist. Plays violin like Nigel Kennedy. Bakes the most mouth-catering cakes.

These days, Tim spends most of his time writing children’s books. But it’s a career that almost never happened.

Here’s how it came about. A few years ago, Tim’s niece came up for a visit from Colorado. During her stay, she reminded Tim of a poem that he’d written many years before.

“What poem?” said Tim.

She reminded her Uncle of the poem he’d written for her as a gift, back when she was a little girl. A poem about a frog who is appalled to learn that that not all animals share his love of spiders and bugs.

Tim’s niece took the poem to school. Her elementary teacher loved it and read it aloud for the class.

The class, predictably, LOVED the poem. And so, for years, that teacher went on performing it. An entire generation of Colorado kids grew up on Tim’s poem about the frog – and Tim didn’t even know!

Not long after the niece went back home to Colorado, Tim was telling a group of us about this story. We were at a friend’s book launch, and a literary editor happened to be standing nearby. It’s a good thing Tim has a loud speaking voice because the editor overheard the story, and asked to see the poem. And presto! That poem got turned into a book.

The book sold a lot of copies. So Tim was asked to write a sequel. That one sold well too, so a third book was requested. It’s coming out in November, with a fourth book already in production.

And it all began from a poem that Tim forgot that he’d written!

What writer doesn’t have dreams like this? That at some point in our scribbly past, we wrote a brilliant poem, or short story, or novel, and forgot all about it? Lord knows we’ve got enough journals and floppy discs and thumb drives full of forgotten writing lying around… Surely, somewhere among all those literary droppings there’s gotta be something worth publishing, right?

Quite possibly.

As this wonderful story also attests.

Writing is my AEIOU and Sometimes Y

Note to self: kids are really smart.

Case in point. The other day I got interviewed by a grade 10 student. He needed to dissect a living writer for a class project, and somehow, poor guy, he got saddled with me. We went for a coffee, and then I dragged him into a radio studio (the same studio, I should add, where the fabled literary broadcaster, Eleanor Wachtel, conducts all of her interviews). The student pulled out his iPhone, pressed record, and placed it on the desk between us. He asked me some very good questions – about writing, working in the field of journalism, how much education is needed to get a job in broadcasting, and how to build a career as a fiction writer.

He gave me a real grilling. And then, near the end of our discussion, he asked me this: “Knowing what you know now, if you had to go back and do it all over again, would you still set out to be a fiction writer?”

OMG. He had me. I froze.

As a seasoned interviewer, I usually love moments like this. The moment when a question hits the bulls-eye, and you can see your guest squirming, because he or she has secretly been asking him or herself the exact same question – possibly for years.

If I had to go back and do it again, would I still set out to become a fiction writer? I had to hand it to the student – his random drilling had hit a geyser.

“Do you want me to be completely honest?” I asked.

The student grinned from ear to ear. “Of course,” he said.

No way, I thought to myself, I’d avoid writing like the plague. It’s nothing but an endless road of pain!

Want proof? I wrote my first novella more than 2 decades ago. It never got published. Neither did the two novels I wrote after that. And of the 100+ short stories I composed after that, only a handful made it to print.

NO, DAVE. BE HONEST. 3 GOT PUBLISHED. ONLY 3. And the money I earned from them didn’t even cover the cost of the printer ink and stamps!

If someone had sat me down back in 1990 and done the calculus; if they’d explained how hard I’d have to work, how many hours of sleep I’d lose, how much my arteries would harden, how awkward I’d feel each time a friend asked how my book was coming along… If someone had told me all that two decades ago, would I still have gone into writing? No, probably not. You’d have to be crazy to embrace a career like that.

It’s one of the great mercies of the universe that I didn’t know the odds I was facing when I started out. This isn’t limited to writing. If any of us truly knew how much heartache was in store for us, we’d never do anything. If we knew how hard it would be to maintain relationships, we’d never allow ourselves to fall in love. If my parents had warned me about the skinned knees I’d get while learning to ride a bike, I never would’ve let them take my training wheels off.

I still hadn’t answered the student’s question. Sensing my difficulty, he shifted gears. “How about this,” he said at last, “what has writing given you?”

The question was a relief, and I was flooded with good memories. I started rhyming off the list: writing gave me a purpose in life, it gave me the career I now enjoy, it helps pay my mortgage, it stills my mind during stressful times.

Writing is my sun and my moon. It is my breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is my AEIOU and sometimes Y.

And in spite of all those rejections I mentioned earlier, writing eventually did make my dream come true.

Why Writing is Harder than Running

~~Writing a novel~~ is a form of madness.

No. Trying to get a novel published is a form of madness.

I won’t bore you with the manifold heartbreaks that befell me in the months before I finally got the call from my agent-to-be. But I will share one example of the profound self-doubt I experienced as I rewrote my novel for the umpteenth time.

It was the spring of 2011. I’d spent two years writing and re-writing my pretty-skimpy looking 40,000 word book, and then three months pitching it to prospective agents.

I sent out 50 queries, and got 49 rejections. Then, one day – THANK YOU LORD!!! – I got a phone call from the 212 area code.

New York, I thought. This is it – the call.

And it was the call. But the literary agent was quite clear with me: he wanted a few changes before he could offer me representation.

His suggestions were excellent, and I had no doubt that every single one of them would improve the book. The only problem was, I actually had to write those changes in. Which meant yet another rewrite – under a strict two-month deadline.

It was, to say the least, a difficult 8 weeks. Here’s what I wrote in my journal on the 21st of May, 2011:

This novel is stupid, awful, I hate it, I can’t write, I’m a terrible writer. I hate myself. I’m the most boring person on the face of the planet! Every day I get up at 5 a.m., write until 8, run to work, run back home, then write from 7 p.m until midnight. Weekends I do nothing but write. This has been going on for six weeks now.

Am I close to being finished? I HAVE NO FREAKING CLUE! Is the thing any good? I HAVE NO FREAKING IDEA!

Am I happy? NO I’M NOT HAPPY! I’m pretty freaking UNHAPPY! I hate this. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The opportunities for rejection seem endless. And yet I toil on, annoying everyone who loves me (and that ain’t many!)

“This is your 100 mile race, Dave,” Shawna told me. “This is the tornado that Quinn faces at the end of your book. Everything is telling him to quit, but he doesn’t.”

That’s right, I thought – Quinn doesn’t quit. He beats the odds and crosses the finish line.

But here’s the difference between a fictional character running an ultra-marathon and an all-too-real human being writing a novel: in a running race, all you need to do is cross the finish line. Do that, and you’re a success. You get a cheer and a finisher’s medal.

Write a novel, on the other hand, and you still have many races left to run. You still have to find an agent. You still have to get published. And then you have to pray that you’ll actually sell some books.

If you fail to do any one of those things, then YOU FAIL! There are no finishers’ medals for novelists. Maybe there should be.

A few weeks after I wrote those piteous words, I finished the rewrite of the book, and sent it back to the literary agent. A couple of weeks dragged by, and I didn’t hear anything back. Then, on June 17th, I wrote this:

The agent acknowledged receipt of my manuscript today. He wrote: “We have it. Thanks David.”

I read and re-read that e-mail over, trying to glean some information from it. “We have it. Thanks David.” Hmmm. What did that mean?

First I thought – he hasn’t read the manuscript yet. Or if he has, he hasn’t yet gathered the opinions of his trusted advisers. Or, maybe something worse is going on, I thought. Maybe his marriage is failing and he’s folding his agency and he doesn’t have the heart to tell me how distraught he is.

Or more likely, I thought, he’s read my manuscript and he hates it, and now he wants to punish me for wasting his valuable time with my lame writing.

“We have it. Thanks David.”

What does that mean?

Writing is suffering, just as running is suffering. But in both instances, the pain is quickly forgotten, and plans are soon hatched for the next enterprise.

Keep putting one foot in front of the other. The finish line is out there. Don’t give up.

Coming Soon – My New Novel About Running

The 100 mile race is a harsh and hostile immensity, and to take it on is to enter a war.

ULTRA is the story of Quinn’s war. A war against fatigue, despair, dehydration, wild animals, hallucinations, and a dangerous family secret.

It’ll be published by Scholastic in September.

Boredom is Good for You

It’s a dream come true, having a novel published. Ever since I was a kid, I knew that I wanted to write.

But listen: It never would have happened if I hadn’t spent years being bored.

For instance. When I was nine years old, I started cranking out a weekly newspaper. It had a circulation of 5: my mom, my dad, my two brothers and me. It looked like this:

Why did I write this weekly rag? Because I was bored! We didn’t have a computer or the internet back then, so I had to write the whole thing out by hand.

Not many news stories happened inside our house, so I had to make most of them up.

There was a big cloud of smoke and the robbers were gone!!!!!

In addition to being a budding journalist, I also wanted to work in radio. One Christmas, Santa Claus brought me a toy record player. I immediately constructed a make-believe radio station in our basement. I named the station C.H.O.W., and to my family’s immense pleasure I spun a lot of records by Supertramp, the Bee Gees, the Electric Light Orchestra, and yes, the Carpenters.

I set the radio station up beneath the hot air vent, so that the music would carry all through the house. I had to yell so everyone could hear me introducing the songs.

That changed when I got another present for my birthday:

Mr. Microphone turned me into a REAL broadcaster. The signal carried ten metres in all directions, so you could hear me as far away as Mom and Dad’s bedroom (if you tuned your radio to 90.1 FM)! I hosted a weekly chart show, and semi-regular newscasts in which I read the made-up news stories I’d written in the Weekend Household Paper.

Why am I telling you this? Because sometimes you may feel bored. I hope you do, because BOREDOM IS THE BEST THING EVER! If I hadn’t been bored as a kid, I never would have written that newspaper, or set up that radio station. And if I hadn’t done that, I might not be an author or a radio producer today.

So don’t be afraid of getting bored. Instead, use that boredom to figure out what it is you love to do. If you’re lucky, later on, you won’t have to chase after your dream career. Instead, maybe it’ll come chasing after you.

The Three Most Amazing Things I Ever Saw

Thirteen years ago, I saw an incredible thing. A chipmunk swimming across a river.

I thought that chipmunk was so amazing, I put her in my novel. You can do that sort of thing if you’re lucky enough to write books.

The second most amazing thing I ever saw was a silver rainbow. What is a silver rainbow? GLAD YOU ASKED!

As you know, normal rainbows occur when the sun shines during a rainstorm. Silver rainbows are the same, only they happen at night. A full moon comes out from between the clouds, and throws its ghostly light through the curtain of rain.

I thought it was so beautiful and strange, I put that silver rainbow into my novel too. You can read all about it when the book comes out in September.

The third most amazing thing I ever saw was a tornado. Actually, I didn’t see the tornado. Like the silver rainbow, it came at night, when it was too dark to see much of anything. But I heard it alright.

I was visiting my family’s cabin, which overlooks a long, narrow lake in central Ontario. The whole family was there, and we were wide awake and terrified. The tornado raced up the lake with a papery sound. As it came closer, it began to scream. Finally, like a bulldozer, it crashed into the forest beside the cabin. The trees thrashed, yanking at their roots. Branches smashed against the windows like ice cubes in a blender.

I put that tornado into my novel too. I even drew a picture of it.

I’m not a great artist, but you get the idea. That’s the main character in my book, trying to outrun the tornado.

Everything else in my novel is completely made up, but that chipmunk, that tornado, and the silver rainbow are totally real.

Trading Diamonds for Stones

A few years ago, when I was stuck in an office job I didn’t like, I found myself staring out the window. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and I felt like a panther inside a cage.

A colleague came up beside me. “Today is a diamond,” he said. “Workdays are stones. You and me, we’re trading diamonds for stones.”

It was a depressing thought, and I determined to get out of that job and change my life for the better. The trouble was, I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

A friend of mine came up with a good idea. He sat me down with a piece of paper and a pen, and told me to write down the best experiences of my life.

In no particular order, here’s what I wrote:

Sailing with my brother on Lake Kennisis in the summer of 1986, when a hurricane blew in and we nearly shipwrecked.
Tobogganing in Edmonton, with my nieces and nephews, IN MINUS 50 DEGREE WEATHER!
Running my first 100 mile race.
Sitting on the dock with my mom one summer night, while the Northern Lights tarted up the skies.
Skiing down Whistler Mountain with my visually-impaired friend.
Hiking through a forest with Shawna and running into that big-ass BEAR.
Canoe tripping with my dad, in lakes so clean you could drink straight out of them.
Getting the phone call from my agent that my novel had sold.

I handed the list to my friend. His face lit up instantly. “Good job,” he said. “Now what do all of those things share in common?”

It took me a while to figure it out. But eventually I saw the common thread. All of those events, with the exception of that last one, took place OUT OF DOORS. It sounds obvious, but it was an incredible revelation to me at the time. If I really wanted to be happy in the future, I needed to find a way of getting outside more often. And ideally, I’d do it with the people I love.

Years have passed since then, and while I still have a job that keeps me chained to a desk a lot of the time, it’s extremely creative, and I’m surrounded by zillions of smart, spunky people.

More importantly, I know what I need to do to keep myself sane. A week spent behind a computer screen can gut me like a fish, but an hour on the running trail puts me right.

So if you feel as though you’re trading diamonds for stones, don’t worry. Most of us have to spend some time in the mine-shaft before we achieve the career we want and deserve. The trick is to figure out how to get more sunlight into our lives in the meantime. Figure that out, and the bars of your cage may well evaporate.

I Love This Video and I Don’t Know Why!

What is going on in this video???

Where did all those dogs come from? Why is the little girl not afraid of them? Did she raise them from the time they were puppies? Is she some kind of dog whisperer?

Why is the girl so happy? Is she maybe a dog herself? Did she make a wish on a magic bone and transform into a human?

Why is she throwing those things in the air? What are those things? They look like blades of grass, but I actually think they’re cheese strings.

Why are the dogs all German Shepherds? Why are there twelve of them? Jesus had twelve disciples; is there some significance about the number?

Could the dogs actually be wizards from the future? Maybe they wanted to deliver a message to the little girl: “Don’t eat too many cheese strings, they’ll make you fat.”

If I had some spare time, I’d write a short story about this video. I’d call it “Cheese String Girl and the Dogs from the Future.” Millions of people would read it, and Disney would make a movie of it, and everyone’s questions about this weird video would be answered. And after the movie was made, you would be asked to keep the twelve German Shepherds. And you’d take good care of them and let them run free in a grassy meadow, and from time to time you’d frolic with them, and feed them cheese strings, and laugh endlessly.