Andrew Pyper

I am a Writers Convention virgin, at least when it comes to the US.  No Bouchercon (yet), no Bram Stoker Weekend (definitely curious).  But I’m about to lose it (as it were) in New York this year for Thriller Fest.  There’s an amazing line-up of top-rate writers, and the panels sound actually interesting (hard to make a panel topic sound intriguing, but they’ve managed it).  Though I will be meeting with some of my editors there, and a hardy clutch of Canadians will be in attendance, I’m feeling some first-day-of-school nerves about it all.  Excited, in other words.

If you’re planning on being at Thriller Fest this year, or are in New York July 8th and 9th and are inclined to head over to the Grand Hyatt, love to meet you.  Otherwise, I’ll let you know how it went once I’m home…

Me, talking about The Guardians.  (Watch out for the clown.  No, not me – a real clown!)

The Guardians – Bookends

The Guardians is now available in audio book format, with really great readings, gotta say.  It’s available through Audible, the Amazon audio publisher, at:

The Guardians audio book

Judging from the number of questions asked of authors at post-reading Q&As, people are interested in writers’ offices.  What’s your desk like?  How’s the view?  Is there a bar?  As for me, I’m of the Discomfort-Is-Good-For-Work school.  You don’t want your space to be too fancy.  And you definitely don’t want a sofa and/or TV.

But I do have my lucky charms.  This piece at cbc.ca runs through some famous writers and their totems.  And on the less famous side, there’s me.

Writers and Their Lucky Charms

Mad Men.  The Walking Dead.  Breaking Bad.  True Blood.  The Wire…

The best of cable TV over the past few years has re-invigorated the medium.  People talk about television drama now in a way they haven’t for a long time, that is, with irony-free interest and brainy passions.  The dinner party intelligentsia can analyze Don Draper at length without shame, without worrying about the conversation being dumbed down or a fellow guest wondering if she has shown up at the wrong address.  You hear fewer educated sorts bragging about not owning a television and more of them buying whole seasons of favourite shows and viewing them, in a ravenous swallow, over the course of a few evenings.  So how did TV manage this turnaround (or at least partial turnaround) from dismissably vapid to meaty substance?  Simple.  TV became novels.

People still read, of course.  They will always read.  But I have this theory:  as much of so-called serious fiction has turned its back on story in favour of message or affirmation or obvious theme – as it specializes in handy book club discussion points over raw narrative – TV drama has stepped in to fill the gap.  The best of cable (and some broadcast) storytelling does what novels do, or used to do:  it draws flesh-and-blood characters and inserts them into high stakes situations and then surprises us with how they respond, what they do, the mistakes they make.  The best examples of this (Breaking Bad, in my opinion) don’t show essentially good people doing essentially good things (the Oprah model) but nakedly real people doing nakedly real things.  These shows trouble us as they entertain us, leaving aside the pre-chewed moral lessons of so much so-called literary fiction.  They trade instead in ambiguity, understandable villainy, the grey zones that make up our actual lived lives (as opposed to life as we might wish it to be).

This is not to say, by the way, that TV has trumped the novel.  Not yet.  But there are now a growing number of dramas on our screens so good – so literary, in the true sense of the term – that they offer a pointed reminder of not only what television can be, but books too.

I am currently re-reading a thicket of short stories of mine, plowing through basically every non-novelized bit of fiction I’ve written since Kiss Me, my first and only story collection.  Some of the pieces go back a decade or more (the oldest being “Haunted Hayride,” published in The Ottawa Citizen in 1998!)  It’s like riding a time machine:  I remember so vividly the physical places and, even more vividly, the mood and emotional circumstances of their writing that I’m often surprised at the different people I’ve been.  No, not different people, exactly, but the different themes I’ve returned to in my life.  I can see myself in the preoccupations of these stories more clearly than if I stared at myself in the mirror for a whole afternoon.

It makes me think that what we call personality – the way we know others, know ourselves – is really a walking bundle of themes.  For some, it’s Lost Love and Missed Opportunity.  For others, Second Chances and The Cost of Lies.  Whatever the big concerns might be, they aren’t usually too numerous, as each of them are more then enough to buoy (or plague) a life to the end.  So not only are we understandable as themes, but we typically are comprised of only one or two.  Three if you’re an especially complicated soul.  And there’s not much you can do about changing them either.  Just try jettisoning one of your themes for longer than a week or two.  They always come back.