Voicing a 22-year-old

I read Hunter S. Thompson's THE RUM DIARY this past weekend, fulfilling a wish from last summer when Johnny Depp's protrayal briefly splashed across the newspaper entertainment section. My teenage son and I have been dying to pick up the DVD and I refused until I'd read the book. Teenagers having less patience, he gave it to me as a Christmas gift.

THE RUM DIARY traces the evaporation of hope experienced by thirty-year-old journalist Paul Kemp, as voiced by Hunter writing in his early twenties. It's easy to see why it wasn't published until Hunter had earned his audience with his underbelly oeuvre. It's hard to find a page where a cigarette isn't lit or an ice cube rattled. Apart from a handful of scenes, there's not so much dramatic tension as a crescendo of despair. A foggy sense of impending doom that regularly dissipates like one more grease-fed hangover.

But it's the voice that captured me from page one.

Hunter drafted it as a young man for whom thirty represents the "hump" after which bleakness reigns. It's as if the salesmen from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross were dumped into a 50s era San Juan newspaper. Life is done, cynicism is a religion, and the only way out is down.

What Hunter did was project middle-aged angst onto thirty-year-old men because from the perspective of a twenty-two-year-old, that made sense. Here he is musing about Yeamon, a character five or six years younger, who still dreams of success:

"This is what I told myself on those hot afternoons in San Juan when I was thirty years old and my shirt stuck damply to my back and I felt myself on that big and lonely hump, with my hardnose years behind me and all the rest downhill. They were eerie days, and my fatalistic view of Yeamon was not so much conviction as necessity, because if I granted him even the slightest optimism I would have to admit a lot of unhappy things about myself."

For me, more often than not voicing twenty-two-year-old characters through a rear view mirror, it was interesting to see Hunter hit some notes perfectly and then play others sharp, missing a beat. It's like when I forget that the language of a young adult in the 80s needs a lift to ring true today.

It will be even more interesting to see how my teenage son, whose name is the Germanic form of Hunter, reads a couple hundred pages of debauchery. And whether THE RUM DIARY's existentialist musings connect to a boy for whom adulthood is just coming into focus.

Where do real whackos come from?

I get asked where my characters come from. My poor deranged head is the only real answer. Problem is, the next logical question is, "How the hell did they get there?"

Answer: In bits and strips.

Things people say. Stories in the news. Imagined outcomes when the real ending hasn't happened yet.

Now, I don't doubt whacko folk can be found pretty much anywhere. And I don't believe for a minute that you've got to go off the grid to find them. What's more, I'm pretty darn sure every last one of us has been certifiable at least once in our lifetimes, some of us (taking a bow, here) more often than we care to remember.

I like situating my extreme characters in a place I love: rural Ontario. It lends itself to living outside society's "accepted norms". Not because country life is unhinged. It's just separate. Writing about the backwoods keeps my scenery simple, but it's more than that. You see, things can happen off-road that might get noticed—and interfered with—if they happened smack downtown.

Like ice fishing.

I'm not saying it takes a whacko to sit on a lawnchair in the middle of winter waiting for fish to bite. But when I came across this video posted by fellow Ontarians . . . well, let's just say there's another bit and strip in there somewhere.

Breakin' my a-political rule

I said I wouldn't get political on this blog—mostly because my politics are such a mess I would be extremely hard-pressed to avoid offending just about everyone on the right, left, or upside-down part of the spectrum.

But if you live in Toronto today, you just gotta give your head a shake.

Our country has a prime minister who refuses to acknowedge parliamentarians were sent to Ottawa to do more than warm their seats. He pushes omnibus bills through once in a while, packed to the rafters with everything he wants done. It's not horribly different from the way the Chinese National Assembly operates.

Our province is currently led by a premier who shut down the legislature when he was handed a minority third term in office. It was kind of inconvenient having to work with that pesky opposition, it would appear.

Our mayor seems to spend more time in court fighting this that and the other (I've lost count) than in council. If he's too busy to show up for work, who the hell else is going to berate the earnest garage-sale-inspecting, brothel-promoting councillors who pretend to run Canada's largest city?

Now, our director of education confesses to plagiarism and DOESN'T understand that this would be a good day to resign. Instead, the good doctor says he'll sign up for a course in ethics.

Think about it. If a bank CEO kited a few cheques, an archbishop got caught practicing witchcraft, or a judge took a couple bribes, we'd kinda expect them to quit. Wouldn't we?

For the record, in my lifetime, I have voted Liberal, Conservative, Green (mostly), and probably for a couple of wingnuts along the way. I have held more ignorant beliefs than I care to admit, and stood corrected only when my gi-nor-mous ego got out of the way. I'm an observer. Not claiming innocence.

But, really, how the hell are we supposed to expect better of the next generation when ours—as represented by the leaders we elect and appoint—steadfastly refuses to take accountability, behave with integrity, or even bother to show up for work?

If I were to write the above prime minister, premier, mayor, and director of education into a novel, any sane editor would tell me my characters are too far-fetched. To dial it back a little and make it believable.

Rant closed.

Blog update

Said director of education did resign, reportedly after a five-hour discussion with his and his employers' lawyers. Oh, and the journalistic discovery that other articles he had "written" appeared to be heavily, erm, supported by unattributed lifts from other writers. Guess there's a lesson for the kids in there somewhere.

Do word counts matter to you?

Writers are forever talking about word count. It's a measure of productivity. It's a dividing line between novel and novella. Between flash fiction and short story. It defines NaNoWriMo and provides a measure of heft in a 3-day Novel.

Agents and publishers will tell you a given genre can't exceed 75,000 or 85,000 or 100,000 words (I've heard all three, spoken with the same degree of certitude, and all from people whose opinion I respect).

Writers gush about their daily count, their biggest count, their fastest count, as though writing were an athletic pursuit.

Others groan that it takes them hours to craft a decent a paragraph, yet they produce bookloads of paragraphs, each laid next to another, in a stream that flows effortlessly from page one to page last. Are they superhuman? Do they even sweat?

And since writing is rewriting, how do you count that? If you slash 10,000 words from your opus, have you now written 95,000 and not 105,000? Or, even discounting the edits, have you in fact written 125,000? Is rewriting additive?

If it is, I must have written about three hundred thousand words on my first novel by now. Do I get a badge?

I'm wondering is all.

If you write, do word counts matter to you? Or just words.

THUGLIT Issue #3

Todd Robinson relaunched THUGLIT last fall and Issue #3 came out this week. It's hard-boiled as hell and has been a launch-pad for a whack of great talent since Todd first got it going nearly a decade ago. (Read how that happened in this no-holds-barred interview by Jen Conley at Shotgun Honey.)

You gotta know I'm jazzed Todd put me in this issue along with J.D. Hibbetts, Terrence McCauley, Paul Heatley, Hector Acosta, Ed Kurtz, John Hodgkins, and Nathan Pettigrew.

If you want a taste of "Lucky for Me", I've put an excerpt up here. But seriously, pour yourself a stiff one and stick THUGLIT on your Kindle. Just make sure the lights are out.