Tag Archives: writer

Miss October 1981

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Posted: October 1, 2018 at 9:10 pm

As you may know, my first book, The Next Trapeze, is still looking for a home. In the meantime, I’m helping my friend  Kelly Tough, Playboy’s Miss October 1981, write her memoir. It’s entitled “Tough Enough,” for obvious reasons. Here’s a description I wrote for the back of Kelly’s book:

“Living in the Playboy Mansion was the least interesting chapter of Kelly Tough’s life.

Raised in a broken, dysfunctional family, Kelly suffered years of childhood sexual abuse. Homeless at 14, she survived on her looks, working in nightclubs until discovered by a Playboy photographer. She reached the pinnacle of sexual objectification as a Playmate of the Month, and thought this would satisfy her need for love and acceptance. Before she realized she would achieve neither, she slid into a decadent life of cocaine, B-list actors and group sex.

Once discarded by an industry searching for the next teenager to exploit, she had nothing to trade except her brief flirtation with fame. When her promotional opportunities dried up, Kelly supported her drug addiction for 25 years by manufacturing drugs for criminal organizations. During this time, Kelly lived inside a country and western song, looking for love in all the wrong places. Most men she dated beat her, cheated her, or gave her drugs. 

After an incident involving her near-death at the hands of a Hell’s Angel, Kelly went to rehab and withdrew from her gangster network. She relaunched her life on her own terms, without relying upon men to validate her worth, or drugs to dull her emotional pain.

Tough Enough is the intimate memoir of Kelly’s search for love and self-worth in a world of users, abusers, drugs and criminals. Other Playmates have written prurient exposés of life in the Playboy Mansion, step-by-step accounts of Hugh Hefner’s bedroom rituals. Tough Enough doesn’t shy away from Kelly’s carnal side; far from it. But the Mansion was merely one stop on Kelly’s journey from disposable sexual plaything to drug addict to crystal meth hustler, ending with her surprising redemption.

Part Playboy’s The Girls Next Door, part Breaking Bad, part A Million Little Pieces (but true!), Tough Enough is the ultimate story of survival.”

Rip Van Winkle

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Posted: September 20, 2018 at 10:01 pm

As the story goes, Rip Van Winkle fell asleep for 20 years and awoke to discover he missed the American Revolution. I felt like Rip last weekend when I visited my alma mater, Western University, in London Ontario, with my buddy Mark. SO much has changed while I slept through the last 40 years. Here are a few of the differences on campus from 1978 to 2018: 

In 1978, I ogled the lithe and nubile cheerleaders at the football games. They wore short, SHORT skirts, and I was glued to their every move, waiting for their skirts to flare up so I could see their underwear. In 2018, it’s almost the same, except they’ve saved me time and effort by just wearing the underwear, without the skirts.

About to enter the washroom at the campus Spoke ’n’ Rim bar (an action I completed about 9,000 times in the ’70s), I read a notice on the door: “Western respects everyone’s right to choose a washroom appropriate for them. Trust the person using this space belongs here.” We didn’t have that in 1978, but I think it’s a good thing.

It’s not polite to look at another dude at an adjacent urinal, but I spied a young man in the Spoke’s washroom, two-thumb texting while he peed (look Ma, no hands). There are a bunch of reasons why that never happened in 1978.

When I was at Western, there was a bar in the basement of the student centre called the Elbow Room. It was a chill oasis of calm where I drank beer in-between classes. Alas, the Elbow Room is no more, but there’s still a bar at the same location. Only it doesn’t sell alcohol and it’s called Wax Bar. Their corporate slogan is, “There’s a Brazilian number of reasons to get waxed.”

My old dorm, Saugeen, was a co-ed, 1200 student, hormone-bursting apartment block of debauchery. From its inception, it was deservedly called the “Zoo,” owing to its collection of uninhibited animals. The residence symbol was a monkey, which I designed as a student and which graced the cover of the Saugeen yearbook. At Saugeen last week, the residence proctor (kind of like the president of the residence) gave me a tour of my old haunt. She brought out the 1978 yearbook to jog my memories, but then balked. “Oh no,” she said. “Does that say ‘Zoo’ on the cover? We can’t say ‘Zoo’ anymore. In fact, we’ve forbidden anyone in this residence to ever say ‘Zoo.’” I assume they were in the middle of a failed attempt of rebranding, trying to convince parents their children’s residence wasn’t wild. The Zoo: “The Nickname That Shall Not Be Named.”

My dorm room in 1978 accommodated two guys, on a floor of 30 young men, bent on mayhem. Saugeen has long since integrated every floor with boys and girls, a calming influence on the drunken idiots. The proctor used her skeleton key to let me into my old room, now decorated with ruffled pillows and darling stuffed animals. The current inhabitants of Room 754 are two gals named Balpreet and Jordynne.  There was no one named Balpreet or Jordynne at Western in 1978, but there probably should have been.

I visited Saugeen’s cafeteria. It’s now a beautiful, distressed-wood-and-planters ashram with organic quinoa salads and an Asian stir fry bar. When I lived in Saugeen, the cafeteria was a cement-block hangar that held pub nights with drugged-out rock bands, always ending with a wet t-shirt contest. The food was boiled until it was grey, or fried until the batter calcified. A mainstay was what we called Mystery Meat.  We dubbed the Swiss Steak “Swiss Mistake.” Once a week they served fried chicken and fries in a little red plastic basket, lined with a red and white checkered paper, called Chicken-in-a-Basket. It was greasy and disgusting, renamed by the students as Chicken-in-a-Casket. Those were the three best entrées.

Near Saugeen’s cafeteria, there was a photocopier where our drunken selves photocopied our bare butts so we could give pictures to girls. Hilarity ensued. For some reason, probably linked to hygiene and the #MeToo movement, the photocopier has been removed.

One thing hasn’t changed since 1978. The Western football team, once again National Champions, won Saturday’s game 77-3.

Bluebeard

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Posted: August 2, 2018 at 11:09 pm

That evening, I sat in my favorite chair in la Pistache, the one beside the best reading light. I underlined incomprehensible phrases in La Provence in preparation for coffee with Cécile. The children watched The Adventures of Tintin on our tiny television.

“Daddy, can you help me with my homework?” asked Devon, five minutes before bedtime.

“Poor planning, Dev,” I said. “You’ve had all evening. Why are you doing it now?”

“I just remembered.” How could I be angry with him? I was a more skilled procrastinator in my youth. “I have some grammar and I have to review two pages of a story my teacher gave us.” I put down my newspaper.  

“Let’s sit at the dining room table,” I said. I interrupted my reading with pleasure; I liked doing homework with my children more than, well, anything. They both had a curiosity about learning I found satisfying. They were also petrified of being unprepared for class, and wanted the highest score in any academic pursuit. There was no disputing these traits were paternal in origin. 

“Dev, even though it’s late to start your homework, I love we have the time to do it together.”

“You always help me, daddy. Ever since I was a kid.”

“I appreciate that, Dev, but it’s not true. There were lots of times in Vancouver when I was working, or too cranky, and I couldn’t do this. In Aix I don’t have excuses. And you’re still a kid. You’re only in Grade Three.” 

We started with grammar, my weakest subject. Devon delighted in correcting me, with sly grins of superiority. He often forgot I was the reason he was bilingual. At lesson’s end, I used the incorrect French verb for “to know.” The word “savoir” means “to know,” in the context of knowing how to do something. “Connaître” also means “to know,” but it’s used when referencing a person or a place, as in, “I know Paris well.” It’s easy to mix them up.

Devon looked like he swallowed a canary. “Dad, you can’t use connaître like that. You have to use savoir.”

“You’re only eight,” I said. “How can you know that?”

With a straight face, he said, “I don’t know, dad. I just savoir it.”

“Okay, enough grammar. What’s the story about?”

“Get it, dad? I savoir it.”

“It doesn’t get funnier the more you say it,” I said. “Tell me about the story.”

“It’s called ‘Barbe-Bleu.’ That means Bluebeard in English.”

“Thanks for the translation.” I knew this story, a well-known French folktale. We read it together, and I wondered what sadists chose the curriculum for eight-year-olds. The story is summarized as follows:

A wealthy man lived in the country. As a consequence of his unattractive blue beard, none of the local ladies would date him. His neighbor had two daughters, and Bluebeard asked to marry one. The daughters refused, citing Bluebeard’s ugliness, and the small issue of the disappearance of several of Bluebeard’s former wives. Bluebeard had some swinging parties, allowing the ladies to see he was a fun guy, and one daughter finally married him.

After a month of marriage, Bluebeard told his young wife he was taking a business trip. He gave her keys to the house, the safe, and the cabinets holding jewels and gold. He also gave her one tiny key, and made her promise not to use it to open the small door at the end of the hall. Of course, as soon as Bluebeard left, the wife entered the restricted room. It was covered in blood, and Bluebeard’s former wives, throats slit, hung from hooks (did I mention Devon was only eight?).

In a panic, the wife left the macabre scene and locked the door. Unlucky, she smeared blood on the tiny key, and being magic, it was impossible to clean. When Bluebeard returned, he demanded to see the keys, and asked his wife why the tiny key was covered with blood. 

“I don’t know,” she said. 

“You may not know,” said Bluebeard, “but I know all too well. You have gone into the little room! And now you will re-enter the room, and take your place among the others.”  

The wife threw herself at Bluebeard’s feet, crying, and begged him…and begged him…and…

And that’s all we had of the story. Devon’s photocopy ended, mid-story, mid-sentence. He couldn’t read the ending, in which the wife was saved by her two brothers. They slew the serial-killer, rendering the widow both wealthy and Bluebeard-less. I worried about Devon going to bed with the image of Bluebeard’s many wives strung up on meathooks. As I tucked him into bed, he said, “Dad, you know what I was thinking about?”

Uh-oh, I thought. “Uhh, no. What?”

“You know what would be cool? In 1,000 years, people will look back and study us, like we’re prehistoric people. They’ll say, look, they actually reached down and used their hands to pick up a glass if they wanted a drink. Today, we have robot arms which bring the glass to our mouth.” 

How am I going to give up these precious moments? I couldn’t go back to Vancouver and resume my regular job. I couldn’t be like I was before, I couldn’t miss out on my children’s ephemeral years, those unrecoverable years, being an absent father. I pinkie-swore with myself I would structure my new Vancouver life to allow for maximum family interaction, maximum mental engagement, Provence-level. I immediately regretted binding myself to the unbreakability of a pinkie-swear, despairing I could not construct such a life and still make a living.

I returned to my favorite chair with my laptop and a glass of rosé. “Just savoir it?” I had to record that story before I forgot it. I laughed out loud while typing. Why can’t my real life be like this? Crafting stories from the quirks of everyday living for my own amusement. Unfortunately, blogging wasn’t a career; my vignette would be thrown into the blogosphere’s yawning maw, where it would be read by fifty friends and be lost in the beast’s intestinal tract along with millions of blogs written by unfulfilled millennials.

That thought threw me down another well of depression, too deep to escape. While I was down there, I came to a woeful conclusion.

(W)Inspiration

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Posted: May 15, 2018 at 7:44 pm

I was part of an awesome global conference on May 6th called WINSPIRATION DAY® (http://winspirationday.org). The Vancouver edition was just one of 20 simultaneous events worldwide. Winspiration connects people all over the world to empower collaborative thoughts and actions in creating a better future. Whew, that sounds heavy.

This is my artistic take on the Vancouver speakers (including me), and their main messages:

 

5 Ways NOT to Get Your Book Published

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Posted: March 13, 2018 at 4:04 pm

My completed memoir has been burning a hole in my laptop for about two years now. To say my publishing journey has been an exercise in frustration is an understatement of the magnitude of saying the Incredible Hulk has minor anger-management issues.

To briefly recap:

After months of trying, I finally secured an agent who loved my book and said my writing was “brilliant.” I didn’t trust his assessment, but it was encouraging to hear. Despite the “brilliance” of my book, said agent was unable to secure a  publisher. No other agents are clamouring for my attention. So, as I review my dumpster fire of a writing career, I have some perspective on the ways NOT to get your book published. Here are five things NOT to do:

Write a Memoir if You’re a Privileged White Male. For non-famous people, successful memoirs are written by reformed drug addicts, cancer survivors, victims of sexual abuse, or those with horrific stories of growing up. I find this especially annoying because I am positive my story will resonate with educated, disaffected office workers, afraid to face their mid-life crises. It’s a depressing fact that if you are an adult film star and call girl to a presidential nominee who, remarkably, became president, there’s probably a seven-figure book advance in your future.

Say “Yes” to the First Agent Who Offers a Contract. I should have waited for the right agent to come along – instead, I said yes to the first one because I was flattered and in a hurry. But having an unsuccessful agent and then firing him (before he fired me) was worse than not finding an agent. I think I’m less attractive to other agents now, somehow tainted because of past failures. And since a new agent is unable to contact publishers already approached by my first agent, a new agent may be reluctant to take on a writer with a smaller pool of potential publishers.

Suck at Social Media. My agent found an editor at a large American publisher who loved my book and its message. The editor agreed with my agent there’s a huge market of middle-aged office workers, stuck in their jobs and afraid to quit. Maybe he was one of them. In any event, he passed on my book because it was impossible to get internal approval for a memoir of a debut writer unless the writer had a HUGE social media following. In essence, the publisher wouldn’t back any writer who couldn’t produce a ready-made and engaged list of buyers – a writer who could sell 30,000 copies to his social media subscribers without the help of the publishing house. Which begs the question: if the writer can sell that many books on his own, why does he need a traditional publisher?

Refuse to Self-Publish. My plan has always been to secure a “traditional” publisher. This means a publishing house like Random House or Penguin. Once signed by one of them, a writer is assisted with editing, design, marketing, and distribution until the book ends up in Chapters or Barnes & Noble. The alternative is self-publishing, which can mean either ebooks or physical books. However, the writer is in charge of everything, and won’t have his books in a bricks and mortar bookshop (they’ll languish in his basement). If I had gone this route, my book would’ve been available, at least electronically, in 2015. There is nothing wrong with self-publishing, and I may do it  one day. But it has never been my dream, and I am stubbornly on a traditional path. You can see how far that’s gotten me.

Give up. Finding an agent and a traditional publisher for a new writer is a risky proposition at best. But as Wayne Gretzky famously said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” If I give up now, there is ZERO chance I will realize my dream. So I forge ahead, contacting potential agents (needed to approach large publishers), and smaller publishing houses who take inquiries from writers directly. I have a HUGE Excel spreadsheet of everyone who has said “no” to me. Every writer has a spreadsheet, or a wall of thumbtacked rejection letters (pre-email). It  goes with the territory, a badge of honour, and will make my victory taste all the sweeter. Maybe all it will take is one inspired, forward-looking agent or publisher to see my book’s potential. Or maybe another male will write a successful memoir, paving the way for mine. Maybe I’ll meet a guy playing hockey, and his wife’s sister’s ex-husband knows a guy who does the landscaping for an editor at Simon & Schuster. It may take a while, but it’ll happen. I won’t give up.