The story of The Ark has drifted briefly into the Pacific Ocean and a collection of islands known as Kiribati. 
The location is one of the poorest nations in the world and is best known by Westerners as the site of The Battle of Tarawa in World War II
and the most likely nation to vanish due to global warming. Book your tickets quick.
Tag Archives: writing process
Sloppy Rejection Letters
Having sent out a few query letters – with summary, sample pages and self-addressed envelope attached – regarding my bad side, I have received the occasional response, although all in the negative. All part of the process, McPhedran! Chin up! 
Nevertheless, notes such as the above leave something to be desired. While the font might be colorful and fine, the effort isn’t. The little strip of paper isn’t even cut in a straight line. “All the best?” Yeah, right.
Words as weapons: “Eichmann in Jerusalem”
Hannah Arendt offers a devastating portrait of humanity in Eichmann in Jerusalem, an assemblage of five successive articles written in 1963 for The New Yorker. 
It is in this work that Arendt coined the phrase, “the banality of evil”, positing that the mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis was not as much a thing of malevolence as it was of bureaucracy. She explains how words were used as weapons, to indoctrinate and then engineer the mass murders. Death camp architect Heinrich Himmler referred to the Holocaust as follows: “These are battles which future generations will not have to fight again.” Eichmann believed the “battles” to be geflugelte Worte (meaning “winged words” or words from classic literature), when in reality they were only the tools of propaganda.
Wagner’s “Ring Cycle”
In other words, not only does Eichmann not acknowledge the evil of his work, neither does he understand how the evil was disseminated. Arendt goes on to cite a story of a leader speaking to Bavarian peasants in 1944: “The Fuhrer in his goodness has prepared for the whole German people a mild death through gassing in case the war should have an unhappy end.”
Goebbels family – all of whom died of cyanide
Arendt’s text reveals how the people of Germany were indoctrinated as a cult, who were willing to go to the bitter end to satisfy their leader not out of malice but because “honor is loyalty”. Therefore it should not come as a surprise that Eichmann maintained his innocence in the extermination of millions; he and his Nazi brethren were gassed by their own words.
Funeral Procession
The funeral procession started at 4:00 in the morning. Buzz and Maude had been up since 3:00. There was a long shot up a cobbled street into a palace. All the channels were carrying it, commentators stumbling through the silence. A church bell tolled every minute. Mounted horses appeared and then, on a gun carriage, the coffin covered in white flowers. The pace of the cortege was squashed in the zoomed image, the tolling of the bell and the horses’ hooves clip-clopping, somehow all the more beautiful. A woman screamed, “Diana! Oh, Diana!” Flowers and bouquets were tossed at the coffin, toppling off and falling short. 
The streets were packed, many standing, others running alongside the barricades. There was only the bell and the hooves. Maude was asleep on his chest. He was transfixed by this slow play, simple, the glamorous reduced to such a quiet and regretful scene. The cortege approached Buckingham Palace. The royal family were waiting at the gates. The queen bowed purposefully. Five men followed the coffin: the king, the prince, Diana’s brother and two sons. “Oh, look at them,” Megan cried. “The poor boys.” The cortege came to Westminster. Six Royal Guardsmen struggled to bring their coffin to the shoulders and then carry it inside. It was a long service with hymns and readings. Buzz dozed. When he awoke, Elton John was singing a pop sing. And then there was a final hymn, and again the Guardsmen with the coffin and at the great front doors where they waited in silence. Megan sighed. Early morning light trickled into the living room. 
A peal of bells poured out of the church as the Guardsmen carried the coffin to the hearse. It eased into the crowded streets, flowers raining down, single roses and gargantuan bouquets. The windshield wipers swung back and forth to clear the windscreen. The crowds grew. Buzz dozed again and awoke to see the car, thick in flowers, slip through the gates of a country estate and vanish from sight. Megan was asleep.* Extract from Buzz (1999)
Subway Redux: Crystal on the “4”
Crystal reflects on the New York subways (Click on the images below for the video experience): You know when you’re on the subway, and there’s another one there, another train in the tunnel right beside you, another one full of people, the light of the car and all the people and the pillars in between, everyone watching. 
You know, at 33rd on the 4 or 5, and the 6 right there, everyone in that bright car, everyone going with you, going the same way, standing there in the light just like you are for them. Someone looks back. 
And you look the same way to her, and it’s like it will stay forever, those pillars, just standing there, staring back. That’s what New York can be. That’s what it’s supposed to be. (Excerpted from my bad side.)
Buzz at Grand Central Station, New York
I’ve made it. The doors open wide, begging, clean against the wall, red coat, and just like that, everything done, everything as it should, turning and my hand cool. 
She knows me. And that’s it, why for her, she forever, our silent descent, breathing, the glass reflecting us together, backward as forward, not words, but what they might, meaning nothing, tucked into our heads upside down, she out the hall, mine, everything mine, not that, but in me, here, me young, friendly, not wanting to stop, never. My eyes are inside my head. I’m going as I should, thinking as I do anything, on this sidewalk, fading, a door closing, in a room, music, and out.* (Click on the photo and links for video clips.) *Excerpt from Buzz (1999)
Deirdre’s voice for The Ark
I’m making slow headway on my novel, The Ark, and I’ve decided to stay with voice of my bad side, Deirdre Sinclair:
I liked how it was tedious, feeding a few pages at a time, watching them chewed, coiling up into strips of nothing, but I had to empty the bucket every ten minutes. It was supposed to eat staples, but it didn’t. They jammed and I had to pry them out. And then I had to wait until it wasn’t over-heated. The stacks bent into each other, investments and secrets, numbers, names, letters from my lawyer and Nani. 
The file on Crystal had been sent to me, but I had never looked. I was scared of seeing the bills, the intimacies of her lost life. She had spent so little. She had made money on everything, even the apartment, just by staying in it. She had paid for the rehab on her own and didn’t even know it. I thought I should cry, thinking of her, but there was nothing. I missed her. That was it. I needed a bigger shredder.
Truth in Fiction
While not everything is true in fiction – hence the word – writing is based on what I know. It’s a guessing game. The following is the first draft of a dialogue from The Ark:
“I ruined my knee when I was a kid, skiing in Vermont, torn acl, mcl, everything. I had arthritis after that. No cartilage, 15%, something like that. It was just bone on bone. I had to have a replacement.” 
He cut the seal meat into strips, twirled one length around his thumb and chewed. “I sat on the edge of the plastic mattress in that green paper dress and the surgeon drew a pair of red x’s on the side of my knee. There was a nurse with a clipboard of forms and the anesthesiologist with more. Everyone was wearing those plastic shower caps.” He pulled a bit off. It looked like fur. “And then I decided I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t going to surrender. I wouldn’t sign. The surgeon stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. He explained everything to me like I was a child. But I wouldn’t do it. And so he left. Everyone did. No one came for a while after that.”
“You didn’t have the surgery?”
“No.” He thrust his hands back and forth in front of him, miming. “I did the elliptical instead.”
“What’s that?”
“The machine. I worked out every day and took cartilage pills.” He ate the rest of the meat. “It’s fine now. Still. No running though. I can only dream about that.”
“You were afraid you’d die?”
“I don’t know about that. I don’t know. I remember the feeling as a kid, when I had the first surgery. I woke up cold. They had monitors attached to my chest. I wasn’t going to surrender just because they said I should.”
“I broke my hand. They put me out before I knew it.”
“You have to sign.”
“It was in Newfoundland.”
He tore off another strip. “It’s probably better like that.”
I did ruin my knee in my younger days and use the elliptical daily; however I’ve never backed out of a surgery, skied in Vermont nor eaten seal meat…as of yet.
Querying the Pitch
Literary agents can be very specific in how they think a query letter should be pitched. 
Send a query letter of no more than two pages, which includes your credentials, an explanation of what makes your book unique and special, and a synopsis.
Rather than leading with the plot, lay out the case for your book in a crisp, tidy four-paragraph format that begins: 1) Here is a (describe type of book), 2) It’s the story of (give only a three-sentence summation), 3) Here’s how the book came to be written and what people think of it, 4) Here are my credentials.
I prefer a short, clear letter rather than one that is overwritten or opaque. By which I mean, get to it: Know how to talk about your work succinctly.
Others aren’t as encouraging: No unsolicited queries accepted.
I will try to get my bad side query right.
Re-inventing the Business of Writing
My aspirations as a writer began in Grade Five, although I must admit that my series on the Secret Spitball Society didn’t impress Mr. Bacon, nor did my extra-terrestrial cat-being proclaiming See the USA in your Chevrolet! 
Mr. Bacon had us listen to John McIntyre’s clever, metaphoric prose instead, a story set in Niagara Falls, someone going over in a barrel. 
My words weren’t as adroit as John McIntyre’s, but I did have stories in my head; I just had to learn how to let them come out in a pure kind of form. I continued to write – more superficial stuff, including the closing pages to a confused epic (Vile Illuminations), and some awful poems in high school, and then angsty plays (Alleluia & Bare Cage) and awkward screenplays (Ferges in Newfoundland & Beyond the Sand of Virginia) in university – before starting my first novel in Paris.
I had a few moments of my hoped-for purity in The Sacred Whore, characters speaking for themselves, images flowing out, but it was more me just doing my five pages a day, gleaning along the way, until I had arrived at page 718. Something seemed to be working. I shared my progress with Ben, a fellow writer I met at a party in Toronto. He stared back. “I’m re-inventing the novel. It’s time to shed the artifice of the narrative and create something more pure.” Purity? Oh no. 
Was I as stupid and inane? I resolved to avoid writers from that moment on. I wrote in silence. I would think and read and write alone. That was all. I would send the work out and someone, somewhere would understand. And I did just that, stayed away from other writers, from everyone in the business, and wrote in London, Cordoba, Sardinia, Vancouver and New York. The isolation helped me find my sense and direction. 
And even if I didn’t re-invent the novel, I found a voice and only need the patience for it to be heard.