a python is born

It's been some time since I've posted to this blog, but I've not been idle. For the past few months I've been working to publish another novel of mine, and I'm happy to announce that now it's done.

My literary thriller, Truth of the Python, is now for sale at Smashwords and on Amazon. In it, a hypnotherapist and his young client discover that they have unfinished business with each other--from twenty-five centuries ago.

Right now it's priced at $0.99. I warmly invite you to check it out. Download a sample, or be bold and spring for the whole price right up front, read it, and write a review. Tell me and the world what you think of it.

I've also got a new website with a new blog. Come on over.

Back to work...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 2

In yesterday's post I started talking about the origins of the TV series The Odyssey. Today I'll continue.

In December 1985 the Vancouver film producer Michael Chechik called me up to express interest in producing Flash Dispatch, the half-hour pilot script that Warren Easton and I had written about bicycle couriers. I recall driving through snow to meet Michael at La Bodega in the West End, not wanting to postpone the meeting merely because of the weather. I'd met Michael before of course, but things were different when the issue of a project of my own creation was on the table: I was moving to the inside of the industry, I felt.

Michael's enthusiasm was genuine, and this is a huge boost for any writer, who toils mostly in obscurity and self-doubt, and very often in failure. In the world of filmmaking, the highest compliment any producer can give a writer is to form a sincere desire to produce his work. Verbal expressions of praise are only icing on the cake. So, on that cold dark night, in the dim and rather deserted atmosphere of the tapas bar, I basked in the feeling of becoming "real" (sort of like that excellent children's story The Velveteen Rabbit, if you've ever read that: in the story, becoming "real" is the dream and goal of every plush-toy).

Michael, with his electric-blue eyes, neatly trimmed beard, and rather high-pitched, fast-talking voice, expressed his eagerness to make the pilot--but of course there was the matter of getting a broadcaster interested, and funding the production. Indeed, he didn't have the resources even to buy an option on the script, a normal step in the big time when a producer wants to lock down the rights to a particular project so he can see about raising funding to produce it.

That was OK with me. I knew that Michael so far had not produced any drama; he and his two partners at Omni-Films were documentary producers, and in fact had won a Genie Award for their documentary Greenpeace: Voyages to Save the Whales. (Michael's involvement in the movie Walls was more that of a silent partner, as I understood it, rather than as a primary producer of it.) Producing a drama from scratch would be something new for them--as it would be for me and Warren. Michael's newness was one thing that made him open to looking at our work, so I was more than willing for us all to be newbies together.

Michael set the wheels in motion, and had us write (I think) another draft or two of the script, along with supporting material discussing and selling the concept for the TV series. Warren and I were invited in to meet the people at Omni-Films, a small cadre of 20- and 30-somethings operating out of a suite of offices near the top of the Dominion Building, a picturesque 1910 office tower at Hastings and Cambie that was briefly the tallest building in the British Empire (13 stories). We used the Omni word-processor to prepare final drafts of the material.

Now that we were in show business, Warren and I of course had to quit whatever pesky jobs we had and set up as full-time TV and movie writers. I quit my job at ICBC, and Warren and I took to meeting every day, first of all in a spare room at my mother's house, but then soon at our own office in the Dominion Building--a place where, it turned out, you could rent a one-room office with its own sink for $80 a month. We took an 8th-floor terrazzo-floored office facing west over roof parking-lots and looking into the walls of downtown high-rises, furnished it with a friend's old desk and a couple of mismatched chairs, chose the whimsical business name The Megavolt Script Factory, which the landlady put on the building directory down in the marble-floored lobby, and got to work.

Yes: work. What to write? We came up with and submitted show ideas for Canadian series running at that time, like Night Heat (our favorite) and Danger Bay. We started working on a screenplay, The Panda Gap, a Cold War comedy that featured the abduction of politically sensitive panda-bears. And, because we had a telephone and therefore a Yellow Pages listing, we fielded inquiries from young would-be scriptwriters who wanted to join our company. Our gross earnings for the first half of 1986: $0.

Meanwhile, Michael kept pressing to finance Flash Dispatch. There were some exciting moments. I recall him showing us a letter of intent from Jan Rofekamp, at that time a Montreal film distributor, expressing enthusiasm for the script and assuring us that if we could deliver the show, he could certainly find buyers for it internationally. We were feeling more and more "real".

An office in the Omni suite became available, and, in exchange for a continuing "option" on Flash Dispatch, Michael let us have it gratis. The Megavolt Script Factory moved up to the 11th floor, now looking east over the more picturesque Downtown East Side. It was a smaller room, and I think the sink didn't work here, but we were closer to the heart of the action. The people at Omni said that they heard us laughing all day long from the office down the hall. I don't think that that was much of an exaggeration.

As 1986 started drawing to a close, Warren and I were forced to ask ourselves whether we could afford to be professional film and TV writers. Although we did actually earn some scriptwriting income that year--we split $1,000 paid to us by a director who liked our work, and who wanted us to write a sitcom pilot for him about an old-folks' home--the writing contracts were not flooding in as we'd hoped. There was the odd producer or director who wanted us to write something for free--sorry: on "spec"--but these projects were always terrible, and we felt that if we were going to write for free, we might as well do our own material, or at least something we liked.

In short, I was going broke. I also wanted to devote more time to writing a novel I'd started, Truth of the Python, about a Vancouver hypnotherapist who accidentally regresses a client to a past life as the philosopher Pythagoras. Feeling chastened after a year as a "real" TV and movie writer, I returned to my job at ICBC in December 1986, a month before my 28th birthday. Warren stayed on for a time as the lone representative of The Megavolt Script Factory, but eventually he too had to give up the office and find gainful employment.

As for Michael, he hadn't given up on Flash Dispatch. It's just that these things take time...

And as 1987 came in, I had returned to corporate life, and the dream of scriptwriting was apparently a bust, at least for the time being.

To be continued...

bones, muscles, skin: the anatomy of story

Yesterday I was talking about the idea of using the technique of writing a "story treatment"--a document once routinely used in screenwriting--for novels. I mused about perhaps drafting a sample section of story treatment for an existing novel, and I haven't forgotten that; I'd like to try it.

I'm thinking now of the preceding stage: the "step-outline", in which you develop the bare bones of the story, perhaps on index-cards. I had already used index-cards as a way of helping myself plot stories for many years by 1990, when I first came upon a set of notes of one of Robert McKee's storytelling workshops. (A workshop student, typing furiously on a laptop, had taken excellent notes, a copy of which had been obtained by a CBC executive who had also attended the workshop. I was a struggling writer with two mortgages and couldn't afford the workshop. She took pity on me and let me have a copy of the bootlegged notes--I was after all trying to write a series for them. And Robert, if you're reading this, don't worry: I have since bought a hardcover copy of your book, and was delighted to do so!) They were a revelation. How eagerly I read through the photocopied pages of typed notes.

McKee's method changed my approach to using index-cards, and I immediately put his ideas to work in drafting a novel I had been working on called Truth of the Python, about a Vancouver hypnotherapist who inadvertently regresses a bed-wetting client to a past life--as the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. Mckee's methodology made this a much more purposeful exercise: I isolated my main plot and subplots, and gave each an act structure.

I still have those index-cards (or most of them)--I just pulled them from a file in my cabinet. I see I developed three separate stacks. One is a "master stack" of 4 x 6" cards that contain only the act turning-points of the plot and each subplot, of which I had five. The plots are labeled A through F, and each act has a number--so A1, A2, B1, B2, etc.

Then there is a stack of 3 x 5" index cards containing the individual scenes (this stack appears to be incomplete, alas), filling in the steps between the major turning-points on the 4 x 6 cards.

Finally, I have another, separate stack of 3 x 5 cards devoted to "thematic" developments in the story. These cards represent the idea-content or the significance of the story developments to my protagonist, Philip Dozier. I can't quite tell now exactly how I used these "theme" cards. Each one contains some assertions written longhand in pencil, along with a page-reference at the bottom-left corner (I think these are references to my binder of notes), and a sequential number in red pencil in the bottom-right corner. There are 37 of these cards.

For example, card 5 contains the story question for the book as a whole--the A-line question, which I phrased as "Will Philip find meaning in his life?" The card goes on to discuss the implications of the "inciting incident", or the scene that kicks off the story. (In this scene, Philip regresses his client, Greg Brodie, to a distant past life as Pythagoras, but also discovers that he, Philip, apparently had a role in that remote time as well, and the whole session is crowned with the appearance, through Greg, of an apparently all-knowing "discarnate" entity that calls itself Khepra.) Card 6 makes the comment, "Phil thinks he wants 'meaning', but in truth he seeks life: the sustenance of the heart."

Weird? Perhaps. My aim was to take my ethereal, spiritual idea, and turn it into a dramatic story, with a proper act-structure and cliff-hanging turning-points. It pretty much worked, and indeed I was able to get representation for this book at A P Watt, a prestigious London agency. The "index-card" approach had stood me in good stead.

I developed the method further with my next effort: a novel called Observer that I started writing in 1994. This was a space-age murder mystery, also set in Vancouver, that had my protagonist, a financially independent loner named Connell Smith, investigating the killing of a local software entrepreneur. In this work I prepared the drafting by writing the whole story on index-cards first, winding up with a stack of 90 4 x 6 cards, which I have in front of me now.

I recall crafting and recrafting this stack, moving between it and my notes binder. As I developed the story, I would draft cards, changing them, throwing them out, inserting new ones as I went. As the stack developed, I would periodically sit down with it and go through the stack sequentially, visualizing the story unfolding. As I turned each card, I would feel a sense of "yes!" and move on to the next card. As soon as I hit a problem, a feeling that what I was reading did not really flow, or push the action to a new level, I would get to work on identifying the problem and solving it. Rejig some cards, add one or two, and start again.

While plotting this story, because it was a mystery, I also developed another set of cards, yellow 3 x 5 ones, on which I recorded the protagonist's evolving theory of the murder. This way I, the author, who knew who did it and why, could keep track of the working theory in the mind of the protagonist and of the reader. Each new story event would cause that evolving theory to change.

Card 1 (theory 1), for example, is "sabotage/revenge by a disgruntled employee". (The victim, Rick Matthews, was found shot to death in his office in Richmond, B.C.) Card 2 is "sabotage by competitors". Card 3 is "sabotage by vencaps/investors in order to grab more of Mattrix (Rick's company) cheaply". And so on, until the climax of the story, when the full truth comes out. I found this method very helpful, for I could always, when working on any given part of the book, check to see what the current theory of the killing was. (Plus, of course, I had to come up with all these different theories of the murder--whew!)

I divided the story into chapters, and gave each chapter its own header-card, with the chapter number, as well as a word signifying its key event, and a phrase expressing the significance of the event. For example, the header-card for chapter 1 has the word "murder", and the phrase, "the trauma of loss"--the significance of the event for my hero, who was heavily invested in the victim's company. Chapter 2 is labeled "conspiracy" and "Connell decides to sleuth the crime for himself".

My story, as always, was weird--but it did flow. I do believe in and recommend the method.

Sometime over the past day, maybe in the dead of night again (although I did not spend much time awake last night), I thought of the story-development documents in terms of the parts of the body. The step-outline is the skeleton. The treatment is the organs and muscles. The actual draft is the skin and hair.

Note that in order to live, we need all of those things. And just because the skin and hair is all you see as an end-user, it doesn't mean that you can do without the other, structural elements. The skin and hair, of course, lie over them.

So, yes, maybe a story treatment for my next novel.

thinking during domestic hibernation

I enjoy the period between Christmas and New Year. In a novel I wrote back in the late 80s and early 90s, called Truth of the Python (about a hypnotherapist who accidentally regresses a client to a past life as the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras), I used the phrase "domestic hibernation" to describe this week of the year--and it is still apt. For me there is a feeling of true vacation, of hiatus between the old year just past and the new one not yet begun. I feel a lightening of shoulds in my life and a sense of permission to do what I please.

This year, that has meant delving into the question of identity and what it means. My philosophical self has emerged with full force. I have been spending the early mornings keying notes from the books Acquiring Genomes, Identity: Youth and Crisis, and In the Name of Identity. Yesterday I created a new Word document in a folder labeled Thinking, where I file notes of my thoughts on various topics; the new document is entitled Identity.

Why am I so thirstily in quest of identity? I have long realized that the issue is a central one in my novel. As I was structuring my story I came to recognize how much it was making its presence felt, and as I have drafted the prose it has pressed forward more and more as an issue. Finally a kind of ignition temperature has been reached: the question has caught fire and become urgent to me. I recognized that I don't know very much about identity. What is it, exactly? Where does it come from?

When I typed the phrase "caught fire" and "become urgent", I see the connection with a dream I had last night. I have already written the dream down. Here it is:

I'm with Dad, heading up through the Edgemont area toward a fire alarm, seemingly at Handsworth High School. I may have been talking about the necessity of having drills, at least weekly, in order to have orderly responses to fire alarms. People need to practice in order to be proficient in an emergency. Now the alarm is going--but is it a drill, or the real thing?

Somehow the talk of fire drills and volunteer firemen makes me think of Carisbrooke Park and also Deep Cove: as though these are places where there are local firehalls, and where therefore people need to practice. I'm thinking that three hours a week would be enough, maybe on Saturday mornings.

Traffic is jammed in the reaction to the emergency. As though from on high, I can see the main street (Lonsdale? Edgemont?) become jammed with cars, and on-ramps get backed up. I see cars accumulate in a herringbone pattern on one ramp, the last few are taxis who try to surge ahead and there is a rear-end collision by the last one. "It figures," I think, disgusted.

We get out of our bus, figuring we can make better time on foot. It looks like 1st Street between St. Georges and Lonsdale, but is maybe supposed to be higher up, like at Balmoral in upper Lonsdale. I run, jumping up over obstacles like boulders and concrete debris on the old, broken road. Dad keeps pace with me, and Kimmie is also with us, trying to keep up. I can't wait--this is a civic emergency, and I have a role to play.

Dad and I are in cheerful, friendly spirits. We're talking about meteorites hitting the earth. Meteorites rain down all the time, but small ones get burnt up in the atmosphere. We're joking about being hit by one. I say something like, "Even one the size of a rice-grain would feel like you’re being shot by a BB gun." Dad flinches comically at the thought of this, and I picture being hit by a small meteorite--what would it feel like? Would I survive?

I make my way through the traffic snarl-up in Edgemont Village (or a place like it), perhaps leaving Dad behind too because of the emergency. I might be a journalist, working on a feature that relates to the emergency, and so may get special attention or access. I get to the high school, which is full of normal-looking kids (no sense of emergency here), and run up the stairs, knowing that the emergency room, bell room, is on the second floor.

I'm on a landing of the stairs, wondering which way to go. I ask a student, a teenage girl, where to find it. She may direct me, or she may try to get me to go to another room, where another event is happening that she supports. I am impressed with her calm, mature, intelligent demeanor.

I might finally make it to the room where the alarm is controlled; but I forget what happens...

The issue of identity has deep roots. Here are some thoughts from Amin Maalouf, author of In the Name of Identity (slightly compressed):

My identity is what prevents me from being identical to anybody else.

Each individual's identity is made up of a number of elements. These factors include allegiance to a religious tradition; to a nationality--sometimes two; to a profession, an institution, or a particular social milieu. But the list is much longer than that. A person may feel a more or less strong attachment to a province, a village, a neighborhood, a clan, a professional team, a union, a company, a parish, a community of people with the same passions.

None is entirely insignificant. All are components of personality--we might almost call them "genes of the soul."

While each of these elements may be found separately in many individuals, the same combination of them is never encountered in different people, and it's this that makes each human being unique and irreplaceable.

From this point of view, one's identity is the intersection of all the sets to which one belongs, in my case male, white, North Vancouverite, (sometime) Buddhist, and so on. This intersection is unique for each person.

As I thought about this yesterday, I arrived at the idea that these sets do not all have the same value in identity-formation. Maalouf says as much in passing, before turning to a few that are of special importance for his main topic. But in my thinking I figured that the important sets will be of those qualities that are inseparable from oneself (such as one's sex or place of birth), and those that are deliberately chosen (such as a faith one has converted to, or a country one has emigrated to).

But sets are conceptual constructs that do not exactly coincide with reality. I'm a Canadian--but what after all is a Canadian? The conceptual category seems clear, but on the ground it is not. I was born in Canada and am a Canadian citizen, so my Canadianness seems solid. But what about Quebeckers and aboriginals and landed immigrants? What about children born to Canadian parents abroad, and who are therefore citizens of that other country? Or at sea? What about children of one Canadian parent? What about someone granted Canadian citizenship by mistake or through fraud? What about someone born in a place where Canadian sovereignty is challenged by other countries? In at least some of these cases the boundary conditions of "Canadianness" are being tested; such individuals may feel a diluted or conflicted or incomplete sense of being Canadian.

My point: while the category "Canadian" seems clear, its application is not. Concepts do not and cannot match reality exactly. Therefore an identity that is forged purely of concepts is inherently mismatched with reality.

This got me thinking about another angle on identity: ego as understood in Buddhism. I spent time in my office yesterday going through my notes and books from three years ago, while I was studying at Gampo Abbey and Nitartha Institute. I couldn't find what I was looking for (a stack of vocabulary index-cards with definitions on them), and felt a vague sense of loss and chagrin. But I certainly remembered that the whole project of Buddhism, at least for the beginning practitioner, is discovering the emptiness of ego: that the thing we call I has no absolute existence. Does this mean identity is a non-issue?

There is, as always, much more to say. Another time...