My wife Lynda is at work, seven months pregnant and enjoying if not every minute of it, at least every second or third minute of it.  I’m at home, painting the nursery.  I’m painting the nursery because our twins are due in just two months, and we’re afraid they might be early – you know, like two weeks early – because they’re twins.

So there I am, painting away, and the phone rings. Too late, I missed it.  Then it’s ringing again, but my hands are full of brushes and rollers and it’s just too much trouble to go into the next room and answer the phone, except that…

…the darn thing rings again.

This time I know it’s important, if not an emergency, so I high-tail it to the phone and pick it up just in the nick of time.  It’s Lynda.  She sounds… well, panicked, her voice all quavery, on the verge of tears.  “I think my water broke,” she says, and provides details that are watery, messy, and a little scary.

I’m thinking, nah, not possible, we’re two months early here.  Clearly she’s misread the signs.

“What are you doing?” she asks me.

“Painting the nursery.”

“Paint faster,” she says.

I’m off like a blue streak to the pharmacy where Lynda works, ready to bundle her into the car, prepared to make the hospital at something resembling four times the speed of light.  When I get there Lynda says, “Hang on.  Gotta finish up a couple of prescriptions first.”

Excuse me?

It’s obvious to everyone in the store that something is not quite right.  “Nothing serious,” I explain to one woman.  “She’s about to give birth, is all.”

Twenty minutes later she’s ready to go.  We’re in the car.  I start the car and we are outta there…

…or so I think.

“Wait!” says Lynda.

“What?  What is it?  What’s wrong?”

“I forgot my boots.”

I stop the car, run back into the pharmacy and get Lynda’s boots.

She’s weeping a little on the way to Markham-Stouffville Hospital.  “I’m scared, Joe.  I’m two months early.”

I’m scared too, but I need to reassure her.  I don’t know what to say.  Lamely, I say, “Everything’ll be okay,” and take hold of her hand.  She accepts the hand — for a bit, then gently places it back on the steering wheel.  “Two hands,” she says.  “Wouldn’t want to get in an accident now.”

I agree, and make it to the hospital accident free.  There, we take the wrong hallway, then figure it out and pass a woman facing the wall, a man gently rubbing her back.  A glimpse of the future?

Soon we’re in the birthing room, a cheery nurse catering to Lynda’s every need.  We’re in good hands, I think, but soon it becomes clear that Markham-Stowville can’t handle little babies that want to arrive two months early.  The closest hospital that can is McMaster, in Hamilton.  Two young, hip paramedics arrive and transfer a stoic Lynda onto a rolling stretcher, and take her away.  I drive to Hamilton, alone in the dark, in the rain.  Knowing that I’ve got the easy part.

Lynda’s just over thirty-one weeks – not a big deal, we’re told.  Lynda is given medicine to speed the babys’ lung development up.  She’s given other medicine to delay the birth as long as possible.  Our spirits are good.  We’re lucky Lynda’s thirty-one weeks and not less, like many others that come through this ward.  Some babies, we’re told, come as early as twenty weeks.  It’s heartbreaking — their chances for survival are not good.  At thirty-one weeks, the success rate is close to one hundred percent.

Two days later.  It’s Valentine’s Day, and our babies have decided they want out now. Decisions are made.  Lynda is moved from a cosy little room with pleasant music to a sterile place of white walls and shiny metal beds. I count eighteen people in the room.  The anesthetist has a funny little dog on his stethoscope.  Lynda is pumped so full of drugs she can’t talk properly.  I worry about her.

Our doctor’s name is Lightheart.  Did I mention it was Valentine’s Day?  Doctor Lightheart explains the use of forceps to her intern, then promptly demonstrates, deftly delivering Keira.  Keira lets out a healthy wail and is whisked away to the level 3 neo-natal intensive care unit where I hope they don’t mix her up with another baby.

Suddenly Erin’s heartbeat drops to half the normal rate.  The atmosphere in the room changes instantly.  Doctor Lightheart reaches inside Lynda farther than I would have imagined possible.  Her hand is poking at Lynda’s belly from inside, like a scene right out of Alien.  I didn’t know you could DO that!

Finally, the forceps bring Erin out.  She doesn’t cry like Keira did – just a brief, muffled chirp.  This is because she’s been fitted with a respirator, but she’s fine.  She, too, is whisked away to the intensive care unit.

The room empties.

It’s Valentine’s Day.

And I am the proud father of two.

Just, all my writing time lately has been spent on the novel.  I was on page 320, now I’m on page 315.  How the heck did that happen?  Well, I’m sorting out the conclusion.  And in the process of sorting out the conclusion I realized that about five pages worth of material back in the two hundreds were messing things up.  So I got rid of them.  Now I’m back to sorting out the conclusion.

We’re getting there.  Slowly. 

Just for fun, here is a list of the chapter names:

A Time and a Place

Part One: Beautiful Stranger

Chapter One: Demon in the Den

Chapter Two: Casa Terra

Chapter Three: A Quite Exceptional Nose

Chapter Four: Friends Like These

Chapter Five:  Ignominious Procedures

Chapter Six: Plan B

Chapter Seven: Fuzzy

Part Two: Through the Looking Glass

Chapter Eight:  A Short Trek

Chapter Nine: Inside

Chapter Ten: Cat

Chapter Eleven:  Vegetation Abounded

Part Three: What’s Past is Prologue

Chapter Twelve:  She That Dwells

Chapter Thirteen: Monkey Business

Part Four: No Time Like the Present

Chapter Fourteen: Wings

Chapter Fifteen: Ansalar

Chapter Sixteen:  Scary Monsters

Chapter Seventeen: Interview With a Monster

Chapter Eighteen:  No Place Like Home Part One

Chapter Nineteen: No Place Like Home Part Two

Chapter Twenty: Still picking out a name for this one

Epilogue

I’m working on Chapter Nineteen through to the Epilogue right now. 

All I can say is I understand what George R. R. Martin must be going through right now…

I always remembered that 8 Track (yes!  An 8 Track!) and when I growed up (sic) into the strapping man I was briefly in my twenties I would think of it fondly.  Later,  in my couch potato thirties, I thought of it some more, but did nothing about it.

(I might be confused.  It might be Simon and Garfunkle that was on 8 Track, and Live at Carnegie Hall on vinyl.  Damn this aging memory.  No matter.)

But it wasn’t until my forties that I got around to purchasing Live at Carnegie Hall on CD.  I thought it was just a nostalgia purchase, a way to recapture a hint of my youth.  Once purchased, though,  I found myself listening to it all the time.  It is a beautiful performance, full of lively music, funny music, touching music.

That album wasn’t all I knew of them.  My father had other albums too.  I used to take them to CJRW Radio with me back when I was a DJ.  I did a six hour country show on Friday Nights called the Ranch Party, and I would often slip in some Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers.  I remember I used to play this one song I really liked called Isn’t it Grand, Boys.  I don’t remember much of it now, except that one line went: “Isn’t it grand boys, to be bloody well dead.”

One night after playing that song a regular listener called up to say that I should never play that song again.  It wasn’t that they didn’t like the song, it was that they couldn’t handle the sentiment.  They were of an age where perhaps they had seen too much of death, or perhaps they felt their’s was imminent, and they had yet to come to terms with it (who has?).  Out of respect for this regular listener’s feelings it was with some regret that I never did play that song again.

The last of Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers passed away the other day, Liam Clancy.  He may think it’s grand, but I don’t.  Thankfully his music and that of his colleagues live on because we live in an age where though artists may pass on, their work doesn’t (necessarily).  Just today I listened to Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers version of The Parting Glass from their performance Live at Carnegie Hall.

Good night, Mr. Clancy and friends, and joy be with you all.

The section starts at page one hundred and sixty-three of the novel, at the beginning of Chapter Eleven, a chapter entitled Vegetation Abounded:

It was awful – the light too bright and the sounds too loud.  I cried out and curled up into a ball to protect myself.

“Wildebear!  Can you hear me?  What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s not used to it.”

“Will he be all right?”

“He should.”

“Should?”

“He might not.”

“Will he or won’t he?”

“That’s what you’re here for, doctor.  To see that he’s okay.”

“Hmph.  What happened to him?”

“Not much.  Plenty.”

“That’s an infuriating thing to say.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry – just don’t say anything like that ever again.”

“I can’t promise that I’ll –”

“Okay okay, just — where was he, anyway?”

“Where he needed to be.”

“Oh for crying out – Wildebear!  Wildebear, it’s me, Humphrey.”

I peeked out from between my arms to see who was talking.  Humphrey – the name sounded familiar.  He had a lot of meat on him, this Humphrey.  He’d make a sumptuous meal.  And I just happened to be starving.  Although a part of me knew that there was something very wrong with the idea, I unfurled myself in anticipation of a feast.  Catching a glimpse of one of my front paws, I was shocked to discover that it was almost completely hairless.  My God!  Was I ill?  I emitted a most un-T’Klee like whimper and curled back up.

“Physiologically he’s all over the map,” a voice said.  “His pulse is racing and his serotonin levels are dangerously low.”

It had come from my front foreleg.  Something shiny and silver was attached to me.  I tried to lick it off.

The creature Humphrey leaned down to touch me.  Instantly I whirled on it, but something was the matter with my reflexes.  Before I could deliver the coup de grace the Humphrey creature grabbed hold of me and held fast.  I found myself in the embarrassing position of having been captured by my own prey.  It was like having been bested by a bandaloot.  I hoped that none of my brothers were around to see.

Except that… I had no brothers.  It was Cat’s brothers I was thinking of.

And I was not Cat.

Was I?

“Damn it Wildebear, what were you trying to do?  Slit my throat?”

Humphrey.  Humphrey!  It was my old friend Doctor Peter Humphrey – and I had been about to eat him!  What had I been thinking?  Awfully confused, flitting back and forth between two identities, one human, the other a cat, I could not have said with any degree of certainty who or what I was just then.

“You should think about cutting your nails once in a while,” Humphrey muttered.

A thin red line had emerged on the side of Humphrey’s neck.  My attempt to dispatch him had come altogether too close for comfort. I started to apologize, but couldn’t seem to get the words out — talking involved using whiskers I no longer possessed.

Humphrey let go and stepped back.  I desperately tried to pull myself together.  I had no fur, no whiskers; I was, therefore, not a cat.  I was a human.  And humans spoke with their –

“Humphrey!  I – I’m so sorry.  It’s – it’s good to see you alive!”

He touched a finger to his neck.  The tip came away red.  “Little thanks to you.”

I rose to my feet and took in my surroundings.  We were in a small room blanketed in luxurious sheets and pillows.  Frills, tassels, reds and purples abounded.  The furnishings would not have been out of place in a Sultan’s tent… or that of a T’Klee.  Humphrey and I were not the only ones in the room, I saw.  Iugurtha was there as well.

I began backing away slowly.

“You’re scaring him,” Humphrey told her.

“It’s not me he should be afraid of,” she said.

And with that everything fell into place.  Suddenly I knew precisely who I was, where I was, and what I had just been through.  It seemed incredible, but I had just spent several days, possibly weeks, living inside the mind of an alien cat.  I had witnessed the subjugation of a people I had come to love by a race of horrible monsters.  After an experience like that it was a wonder I was anything resembling sane.

“Wildebear.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“You’re licking the backs of your hands.”

“Ah.”  I stopped and considered.  “So I am.”  Then, because there really was no better way to relieve stress, I resumed licking in earnest.  “Please don’t ever throw me through the gate again,” I told Iugurtha in between licks.

“Once should suffice,” she said.  “What is your opinion, Doctor?  Is he in good health?”

“Nothing a little bed rest and years of psychotherapy won’t fix,” Humphrey replied.

Mention of rest made me realize how exhausted I was.  I excused myself, curled atop several of the fluffiest pillows I could find, and purred myself to sleep in a matter of seconds.

My father called me last night and told me you passed away.

What the hell? You were only forty-eight years old. Forty-eight is way too young to die. And how is it you were forty-eight anyway? My God, we were teenagers just yesterday.

I haven’t seen much of you these last few years and I’m sorry about that. There was a time when we were good friends. We went to High School together, played in the Jazz Band together, and got our first start in professional radio together on the same 250 watt daytimer. And then I moved away and it got hard to stay in touch and now I realize too late what a shame that was.

Lots of memories, though. Like the time you hit me in the head with your trombone when we were playing a concert. You probably don’t remember but I kind of lost my temper because it was the second or third time you hit me in the head. I’m sorry I lost my temper; it’s pretty funny looking back at it now.

And then the time you asked me to work for you after I’d spend the entire day in the hot blazing sun sanding the hull of some rich guy’s sailboat. I really wasn’t up to it but you talked me into it. I was so muddle-headed that night I accidentally swore on air and got suspended for two weeks. Also pretty funny thinking back on it. Thanks a lot for that one.

Another night I was finishing my show and I accidentally identified myself on air as you. “You’re listening to CJRW radio, I’m John Burk,” I said. I have absolutely no idea why I did that, but again, it was pretty darned funny.

You were the disc jockey at my wedding. Thank you for that, sir. And a long standing DJ on CJRW. Probably one of the last men standing on CJRW, long after the first building burned down and the owners were so scarred by the experience that they turned the station country and made it almost fully automated. I remember visiting you in that sad excuse for radio thinking that you were just like Venus Flytrap on that episode of WKRP. But you survived.

You were a good guy, Mr. Burk. I don’t remember you uttering one single word of malice toward anyone, ever. My mother told me how well you looked after your mother when she was ill, visiting her every single day for hours at a time. I sure hope someone did the same for you this last little while ’cause you deserved the same consideration you showed your mother.

If there’s a heaven or the rough equivalent of one I know that you’re in it, John.

Where ever you are, even though it’s gotta be a long ways away, I can still hear your voice as clear as day.

However, it does afford an excellent opportunity to teach my kids how to handle that nefarious aspect of the writing life. They already know a bit about rejection; E had a piece published in the local rag, so K wanted something published. So she wrote something up, submitted it, and shades of Schmidt! It was rejected. She was deeply offended and spent several days afterward ripping up every newspaper she could find (not bothering to distinguish between them).

So now they have an excellent opportunity to see how the old man handles rejection. After the tears, profanity and inevitable bender (the kind where you wake up afterward on a different continent with a full beard) you can bet the old man will be just fine. Like the professional I am (or aspire to be) I will just keep the story on the market until some day some fool somewhere publishes the damned thing.

In the meantime, in the words of writer Matt Hughes, I will never surrender.

And I will do my damndest to hide the worst of the bender from the kids…

Sorry!

I remember we had quite a pleasant chat, and I came away thinking what a nice fellow. I figured his book would come out, quietly disappear, and I’d never hear about him again (I did not think this mean-spiritedly; just, with so many books published each year, what were the odds of success?) Since then, of course, Scalzi has become quite the science fiction phenomenon (and I couldn’t be happier for him, especially considering he appears to be every bit the same well-grounded, pleasant fellow I met in ‘03).

I remember thinking exactly the same thing about a fellow by the name of Rob Sawyer about twenty years ago when we worked on a CBC Ideas radio show together (on SF, of course), and he told me he had a book coming out… so much for my powers of prognostication.

The common denominator appears to be having met me shortly before publication of their first novels — clearly I am some sort of good luck charm.

Either that or they’re just talented workhorses… nah…

The interview runs nine minutes, twenty-six seconds.

An interesting footnote to this interview… John talks a little about how he came to publish his first novel Old Man’s War. In the last Worldcon in Montreal, I attended a panel on publishing that included writer Mike Resnick. The subject of how Scalzi had published his first novel came up, and Resnick remarked that Scalzi had done emerging writers a great disservice by setting such an example. My response to Resnick would be perhaps, but ultimately we are all responsible for our own actions, and in any case it certainly worked out well for Scalzi.

Yes, it’s time I collected some new tape. Actually, I still have tons I haven’t edited or posted. I’ll see if I can’t get to that shortly after the kids are grown.

In the meantime, plenty of old tape to repost…

Anyway, back on today, hopefully for good.

The timing was unfortunate; Canada Reads had just done a short profile on me that I had been looking forward to mentioning in the blog.  Oddly, the Canada Reads blog appears to be suffering a few problems too.   Hope it’s not me!

We couldn’t get in at the Provincial campground, so I booked us a spot at a nearby campground called Bon Echo Family campground.  It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from the Provincial park, so that’s worked out well… every second day we get a day pass and spend it at the provincial park canoing, swimming, hiking, exploring.  And there’s canoing available where we’re staying, along with a beach that’s even better than at the provincial park, so we have the best of both worlds in many respects.

And the weather has been fantastic, especially considering it looked quite dodgy the day we got here, cold and rainy.  But every day since then has been better and better.

And that’s all the time I will spend blogging today, as this is not supposed to be an electronic vacation.  In fact, I just hooked up to the campground wireless to see if Mr. Schmidt had read my submission to Analog yet… but no such luck.

No news is good news, I guess.

And tomorrow it’s back to Whitby, and the following Monday back to real life.

Not thinking about that, though.  This afternoon is all about swimming, canoing, and ice cream.