I'm Out of Clever Things to Say

And that's why I haven't made a post in a while. My apologies to anyone out there who looks forward to my diatribes on our world, our society and our nature. But now, I'm back.

Part of the reason for my silence is that I'm written out. I've got no goddamned idea how Timothy Findley (one of my favourite authors) managed to keep a diary/journal AND work tirelessly on a book or two day in, day out. Maybe that's why so many of the great authors are drunks or opiate freaks. You need something to distort your mind and the concept of time.

You see, three of the last four years, my good friend Adam Sikora & I have written a novel. Not your usual, patient, arduous process, mind you. We wrote a novel in 72 hours. Three times. (That's a total of 216 hours for you math geeks out there - I don't know how many minutes, but it's probably a lame choral lyric in Rent - btw, the movie of that musical is coming out and I couldn't be less excited - making it into a movie won't help. As my friend Suresh is fond of saying - about our less than sparkling production of Guys & Dolls, but also applicable to any variation of Rent - "You can't polish a turd." Too true, too true.)

Anyway, the contest is based out of BC. You have three days - from 0 hundred hours on Saturday am (or Friday midnight, as we call it) until 23:59 on Monday - of the labour day weekend to create your masterpiece. It's the honour system. So, there's certainly a degree of cheating involved. You can have the skeleton or structure of the story firmly in place. You can name your characters. You can stock the fridge with Pepsi (Adam & I consumed 16 during the course of this years novel). You just can't write one word of the novel until the appointed hour.

So how does the adjudication process work? Good question. A panel of 10 or 15 writers all read the novels. And if the majority of them agree that 'I couldn't have written this in a week, let alone 3 days', they toss it out of the competition. For example - some joker sent in a 2200 page manuscript last year. Unless he was writing stream of consciouness and had some really good crystal meth, i don't see how it's doable. So, they disqualified him.

Certainly it's flawed. But it's a load of fun. And it's nice to accomplish something. Because all of my friends (myself included) are world class procrastinators. We talk a great game and we're always 'working' on a screenplay or a novel or a film, but nothing ever materializes. In this competition, you're forced to have a product. It's usually flawed and rough, but you can always polish that later. And two out our three offerings are really quite good. Not Yeats or Joyce or Conrad, but thoroughly engaging literature. Our first attempt wasn't bad either, but it's funny how when you read it and you come to the 3/4 mark of the story, you see the desperation set in. It's not as well crafted as the other two. I think I may just post them up here soon and you can all read for yourselves if you have the time.

Anyway, that's my lame excuse for not posting recently. I just didn't have the words, words, words.