There was a time, before today’s cross-border troubles, when a trip to the United States was a common thing for me. Enhanced driver’s license in hand, I would timidly cross over to New York, the Carolinas and Florida two or three times a year. During this time in the aughts of the first decade of the millennium, I was also growing into a new phase of my writing. After noticing a great many of my stories had been written with little to no commitment to the setting the stories were inhabiting, I wanted to challenge myself to aim my writerly camera at the new locales I’d been visiting. Those trips south of the border soon had me writing reams of notes about the differences in culture and attitude between Canada and the U.S., with an eye out for the eccentricities they would present. It turned out to be a deep trove from which I would choose numerous scenarios.
First off, it gave me the flash fiction ‘Geosmin’, an attempt at automatic writing, a genre that worked well the idiosyncrasies of American culture. In that open train of thought, I came about depicting a weary traveller from Newfoundland on a layover in Orlando en route to the Galapagos Encantados. My own experiences with Orlando with its hyperbolic news media and the multi-layered environment of a Disneyfied International Drive, I was able to give an absurdist take on a quintessential American city. The story found a place in Blank Spaces magazine months later, as well as a part in the Just Words anthology in 2020.
That accomplished, my remaining notes still had more to say. Somewhere in those pages, a road trip story was demanding to be made. “Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you,” Gustav Holst once said, so from this came the story of ‘Individe’.
At the time, I was in the middle of extricating myself from a failed marriage and my headspace was looking to do some healing. I began to craft a cathartic component to the story to help me along my own journey towards finding myself again. Starting with the concept of individuality, meaning the indivisiveness of the singular self, I drew up themes of personal autonomy, identity and the preservation of the self. ‘Individe’. The unbreakable self, the sum of its parts. Along the same lines of ‘indivisiveness’, I looked at the unbreakable ties of fraternal unity, speaking also of the geographical divide of the continental east and west, north and south.
Furthermore, I’d always loved the dynamics of brotherhood. I relished forming the construct of two siblings who are close, but have grown apart due to circumstances in their lives. I love the banter between male friends, how it can oscillate from lighthearted chirping to heated arguments and then resolve itself with harmless juvenile ridiculousness. I started to work on characters loosely fashioned after the dynamics between my own brother and myself, giving them both proportionate baggage to carry and let their banter dictate how the journey would unfold. With all this, I started to piece together a narrative of two fraternal twin brothers, estranged through the trajectory of their own separate lives who arrange an escape from the Canadian winter to watch the Toronto Blue Jays spring training in Florida. On the way, illness and emotional freight complicates the trek as they consider their own familial divide, trying to reconcile them.
As the story approached fruition, I was seeing that it was going to have a word count in the nine thousands, which pushed it into the category of novella- something I didn’t expect. Considering this, I turned inward to see if there were any elements I could expand upon to truly flesh it out in the novella context. This brought me more developed characters with stronger motivations and a story that could breathe and resonate more.
So with this rather long story, too long for the submission guidelines of most magazines, too short to be viewed as marketable by the traditional publishing industry, I began to look at opportunities to publish it myself. In the end, I turned to Kindle Publishing and found it an easy platform to develop an e-book and later a printed piece. I now have twenty little book-babies in a neat cardboard box in my office, ready to go out, looking nifty with their glossy, professional-looking (but self-designed) covers. There’s a certain dopamine rush involved when you finally hold a printed copy of something you’ve made yourself. It's a reward in itself. It’s partly why I create art. Each creation feels like a gift to myself, each finished product always filling me with pride.
So I send my little book-babies out into the world, hoping readers catch my drift and enjoy my twists of phrase and relate to the characters I’ve devised. Yes, there’s a little bit of brave narcissism involved in promoting it, but each step of the way I’m humbled in its creation and the craft of ensuring its artistic and technical strength. It’s a balanced thing, full of checks and balances to maintain but when it’s done, it brings the greatest affirmation. You release your little baby into the wild, and you hope for the best, giving it the greatest send-off you can.
So, reader. It’s up to you now…
