Finally a bit of a break in the stiffling heat; enough to get some much-needed writing done and post a brief website update. Not much of an update, really, but rather a short mention of a bit of strangeness (not to mention some delicious ego-stroking) that came up recently.

Over the past week I’ve had four different people tell me that I look like Christian Bale in Batman Begins. As much as I would like to agree, I fail to see the resemblance – and believe me, folks, I really wish I could!

It’s strange because Bale is not exactly a new actor, and I’ve never heard that I looked like him before. But apparently there are at least a few people who think I look like him (in Batman Begins, anyway).

I decided to put it to the few visitors this site attracts and let you decide. I tried to get a pair of pics where there could be some resemblance – Bale and I are both six feet tall, have long faces, dark brown hair, are occasionally bearded …).

Christian Bale and some struggling writer who is clearly not Christian Bale

Not exactly writing related, I know, and kind of stupid if one thinks about it too much, but so strange to hear it from so many different people over such a short period of time.

On the other hand, I think there is much more of a resemblance between the young Bruce Wayne depicted in Batman Begins and me as a child. Maybe I don’t look like Bale but rather Bruce Wayne as played by Bale …?

Heir to Wayne Enterprises or future horror novelist?

Or maybe I just fantasize too much about being a billionaire playboy with a batcave and a snazzy utility belt.

The truth is I probably look more like Bale in The Machinist, a role for which he lost 63 pounds to play a man who hasn’t slept in a year. Holy insomnia, Batman! (That’s a Chris Nolan joke for all the movie-trivia buffs out there.)

Ian

Received two new rejections from two new markets the other day. "Charlotte’s Frequency" was rejected by Ideomaner, the first e-zine I’ve ever submitted to. They liked the protagonist but thought the pace of the story was too slow. Ontario Review stuck me with a form letter — more of a form-card, actually. Take a look and check it out. They get points for using the least amount of paper to say Boy, dude, your story sucks.

Both rejections aside, I think I’m doing okay these days. I’m up to 28 rejections now, 14 of which were from submissions sent out this year. That’s progress, baby. And if you look at the Stories section, you’ll see there’s been more activity in my writing career this year than in any other. Busy writers are happy writers.

Speaking of busy, the current heatwave in Toronto (and in lots of other places, too, I’m sure) is still doing a number on my writing output. And according to the long-term forecast, it’s going to be like this for the next two weeks! The summer has always been my least productive time of year, but this is getting ridiculous.

But, the way things are shaping up, this will be my last summer in the city, so I will just smile and take it. There are worse things in life. Like being tied to a fence and having lawn-darts thrown at your crotch.

One of the few websites I still allow myself to visit is one on publishing news. Visiting it this morning, I discovered that Amazon’s tenth anniversary is coming up, and as part of the festivities, Stephen King has allowed the website to post two pages from a hitherto unknown novel called The Pulse.

The book is about an incident — The Pulse, naturally — that causes people all over the world to go insane. Not all, just some, but the two-page excerpt doesn’t allow for much explanation.

It got me to thinking about all of the books and movies about the end of the world. I realized that no matter the cause — aliens, plagues, giant rabbits — the stories are usually told in one of two ways.

The first is from the view of the everyman. In these stories, the reason for why the world is ending is not usually explained (or at least not in very much detail); instead, the story is concerned with the emotional aspect of the event. Both of the book and film adaptation of War of the Worlds is a good example of this type of approach to the end-of-the-world story.

The second is told on a much grander scale. The government is almost always involved (and some scientists for good measure), and the question of why the world is ending usually lies at the crux of the story. If we can only figure out how the virus is spreading, then maybe we can come up with a vaccine! This type of storytelling rarely explores the emotional side of the characters; instead, it’s a race to beat the clock and save the world from the aliens/superflu/giant rabbits. The films Independence Day and Outbreak are examples of this type of story.

Having read only the first two pages of The Pulse, I can already tell that it is going to be a story about people dealing with a cataclysmic event rather than a three-hundred-page explanation of how The Pulse works. Most writers who explore the lofty subject of The End of the World tend to be more concerned with characterization than with the mechanics of which country is going to be wiped out first or the socio-economic reasons for why the aliens are invading earth. And it’s not a coincidence that the movies, a medium known more for its visual stimulation than its capacity for good storytelling, excel at delivering vivid special effects and huge body counts and frankly suck on characterization.

I can relate. The few end-of-the-world stories I’ve written ("Winter Hammock," "Last Summer") were more concerned with the effect on the characters than why it was happening in the first place. Of course, you have to tell the reader something . Too much mystery serves only to frustrate the reader, which was the problem I had with Dean Koontz’s alien invasion novel The Taking. It’s a very foreboding, atmospheric tale of aliens flooding the world with a strange silver rain that causes strange mutations, but it doesn’t go anywhere. The ending of the book is so abrupt and unsatisfying that one gets the impression Koontz didn’t know how to end it and simply wrote at the point in the manuscript when his ideas petered out.

Like most kinds of storytelling, the key to writing a good end-of-the-world story lies in a balance of story, characterization, and theme. Too much explanation bogs the story down, while too much characterization pushes the story away. If The Taking had a bit more explanation, or an actual ending, I probably would have liked it a lot more. But when so many things are left by the side, one can almost picture the author shrugging his shoulders and saying, Sorry, I guess I done wrote myself into a corner.

Since The Pulse seems to be going along the same path as The Taking, I can only hope that King comes up with better results than

Koontz.

Ian

Btw, I just uploaded 225 photos from my recent vacation to Newfoundland. Some good whale shots in there; check ‘em out.

Coming back to Toronto I discovered things I had missed, like writing and my cats, and things I had not, such as the weather. I don’t write very much when the temperature plus humidex is hovering on the edge of 40 degrees Celsius. My office has an east-facing window which makes it feel as if I’m working in a greenhouse. I feel languid and uncreative. I’ve gotten a lot of reading done lately, but I really should have finished my two new stories by now. The weather shows no sign of letting up, but I’ve been able to stay on top of my submissions nonetheless, with four stories sent off just today (two to markets I’ve never submitted to before), bringing the current tally to five stories in consideration.

That should give me a good buffer of time in which to work on my new stories, assuming the heat-wave — or rather, the humid-wave — breaks sometime soon.

Ahh, to live in a house in the woods right about now.

Ian

Finally returned from Newfoundland last night. The trip back is a story in itself. We arrived at the St. John’s airport at 9:10 a.m. for a flight which was scheduled to depart at 10:45 a.m. The flight was delayed until 1:45 p.m. due to fog in Halifax, which is where CanJet’s fleet is located. I spoke to a couple of blokes from Global Television who were also stranded, and it turns out this had been going on since Tuesday. The fog wouldn’t be a problem, they said, but the Halifax airport was in the middle of upgrading the instruments on the runways that are used to help aircraft land and takeoff during foggy conditions. Bad weather and bad timing, in other words.

So we sat around waiting for our delayed flight, playing cards and swapping the sections of the Saturday newspaper. Then we found out our flight was being cancelled and we would have to rebook for another flight, which may also end up being cancelled if the conditions didn’t improve. So we get booked onto a flight for 4:00 p.m. Meanwhile, all of the other flights that are either coming out of or going into Halifax are being cancelled throughout the day. The airport begins to get progressively more crowded as people come for their scheduled flights only to find out that those flights no longer exist. And the fog held sway over all. (That’s an Edgar Allan Poe reference, btw. I haven’t touched a computer or written a thing in nine days, so you’ll forgive me while I get my brain back into gear.)

So as 4 p.m. draws ever closer, the announcer comes back on to say that our flight has been delayed until 5:00 p.m., then 6:00 p.m., and finally 7:00 p.m. We’re annoyed but not that upset; after all, our flight hasn’t been cancelled. Not yet, we all think but don’t say for fear that saying those two words aloud will cause it to happen. We eat dinner around 6:00 p.m. in the airport café. I have the hot turkey sandwich which I surprisingly finish. Most of the morning I spent nibbling toast and exploring the airport’s various bathrooms as I dealt with an unexpected (though not undeserved) Canada Day hangover. Anyway, our flight finally boarded around 7:45 p.m., and after a stopover in Moncton, a very nice looking city from what I could see from the tarmac in the dark, we flew back to Toronto.

Eleven hours in an airport, man. And here’s another tip: don’t fly on a plane if you’re hungover. The cabin pressure does strange and horrible things to your sinuses. If you’d like more details, check out David Cronenberg’s Scanners and you might have an idea of how I felt on the three-and-a-half hour flight.

But what about the vacation itself, you ask? Well, it was probably the best one I’ve ever taken in my life. Incredible weather, great company, and incredible sights — all of which were captured on almost 20 rolls of film, about 440 photographs all told, which will be posted on the website next weekend probably. We drove all over the island, starting in St. John’s, the oldest city in North America, north across the Avalon Peninsula, to the town of Twilingate on the northeast coast. Went for a boat ride, didn’t see any whales, but saw our first lighthouse. Spent the night, enjoyed a nice fish-and-chips dinner and my first (but not the last, oh no) bottle of Quidi Vidi Honey Brown beer, a brew available only on the island. The following day took us across the island west-to-east, through Gander, to the Gros Morne National Park, where we stayed in yet another small village, Rocky Harbour. Saw another lighthouse, took the Western Brook Pond boat tour (three hours between two huge cliffs with waterfalls and a very grumpy-looking American family), and several moose sightings (I believe the final count was 10 moose, 1 caribou). The day after that was our longest in the car as we drove all the way back across the island to Bonavista, the largest town we’d been to that point (excluding St. John’s) and the original landing point of John Cabot way

back when (we saw a life-sized replica of his boat, the Matthew). We stayed at an ocean-side cabin, ate the greasiest food I’ve ever had in my life, and skipped rocks on the shore. I got a major soaker after taunting the ocean (i.e. shaking my ass at the waves and saying something to the effect of “Try and get me from here, ocean!”). The day before we left Bonavista we drove down to Trinity East and went on the best hike of my life (as the pictures will prove). Again, we frolicked on the shore, and again I got a soaker, a much bigger one this time, soaking both shoes and my pants up to about mid-calf. Good times. Leaving Bonavista, we drove back down to the Avalon Peninsula for the final three days of our trip, which we spent in St. John’s. We visited Signal Hill, site of the first trans-Atlantic wireless message, and the lighthouse at Cape Spear, the eastern most tip of North America. We visited the latter at sunrise (4:30 a.m.!) and I captured what I suspect are some pretty excellent pictures. The remainder of our time was spent eating Newfoundland pizza, drinking Quidi Vidi (we also visited the brewery), and three whale-watching excursions (we saw whales every time, and the last time they were close enough to touch), during which we also saw puffins (which some tourists call “poof-ins,” very odd) and dolphins, the latter we were told is an extremely rare sight. No icebergs, but who cares? We saw all the wonderful wildlife Newfoundland has to offer, went on incredible hikes and boat tours, and capped the whole trip off by spending Canada Day on Newfoundland’s George Street, where we stumbled upon a hitherto unknown Northern Pikes concert. They were incredible, playing songs off their new album as well as the favorites (“Teenland,” “Girl with a Problem,” “She Ain’t Pretty”). The perfect ending to a perfect trip. Minus the aforementioned airport adventure.

But now it’s back to work. I read a lot of Alistair MacLeod while on vacation, and I’m committed to finishing “Leaves Brown,” my first Cape Breton supernatural tale, and “The House on Ashley Avenue,” my haunted Rosedale house novella. Both are already close to finished; they just need that final push. It was great to be in Newfoundland, but it’s also good to be back … and writing.

Happy belated Canada Day!

Came home from vacation to two new rejections which are now available for your viewing and mocking pleasure. They mark my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth rejections to professional and semi-professional publications since I began submitting short fiction. The rejections section was getting so big that I decided to move all those from 2004 and beyond to another page. Not sure if that’s a good thing or not yet. That one acceptance looks pretty lonely over there.

I’m still not sure if I’m in the place where I’m suppose to be at this time; a position made even more difficult to track since every writer’s career is different. I can only hope that my continued efforts are working toward a better understanding of the craft and of the publishing world itself. It feels that way, of course, but being the only passenger on this boat makes me wonder from time to time if it’s headed in the right direction.

Anyway, go check out those rejections, they’re from a couple of big ‘uns and neither one suggests I might be more successful in the salmon-gutting industry. Always a good thing.

Ian

New links: Lawrence Block, Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver, and Donald Westlake.