Welcome, Tom!
There’s a man stranded on a desert island. He has a sheet of
plastic, a ball of twine, and a hatchet.
How will he get off the island?
This scenario is probably the reason that I first took an
interest in writing.
Way back when people were beginning to buy personal
computers (back when we still needed to include “personal” before “computer”),
my mom and dad bought one of those boxy, plastic contraptions, the ones where
people were impressed to see words appear on a screen. I say words because I
don’t think our first computer had enough memory for images. We didn’t care,
though. It was amazing enough to be able to type and see the white, pixelated
letters appear on the flickering blue screen.
One day, Pete, my oldest brother, was sitting in front of
the personal computer, and I asked him what he was doing. He said he was
writing a story about a man who was on a deserted island. The man had a sheet
of plastic, a ball of twine, and a hatchet, and the story was going to be about
how the man would use these items to get back to civilization.
I don’t know how old we were. We were pretty young, but I
can still remember how I felt. I was fascinated. There was something about how
Pete had created this imaginary world, how he had developed a problem, and most
importantly, how he was working on a solution.
I was obsessed with the idea of writing my own story.
One of the first things I wrote on that computer was a crime
story. It was about my Grandmother Fletcher and a serial killer in the small
town of Harvey Station, New Brunswick. The twist was that the serial killer was
actually a cereal killer. I mean this literally. The murderer was a giant
cheerio.
I can’t remember fully what happened in the story, but my
Grandmother defeated the cereal killer by some kind of karate chop or flying
kick.
Writing was always a lot of fun, and I was consistently
rewarded for being creative by my parents. I am still writing crime-fiction. My
novel Deli Meat also features a
serial killer and it does have a comedic bent, but it’s a little more serious
than my first story that I wrote for my Grandmother. To tell the truth, I don’t
know what my Grandmother would think if she read Deli Meat. It’s a violent dark comedy with all kinds of swearing.
The hero of Deli Meat,
a woman named Effie Pitts, travels to Plattsburgh, New York in search of her
husband who has gone missing on a bachelor party. She meets a cooky waiter,
Conrad Arms, who tries to help people, but invariably ends up doing more harm
than good. This is my first novel, and I’ve been working on it obsessively. I
really hope the effort shines through.
My wife and I have two small children, and the only
opportunities that I have to write are usually when everyone else is asleep. I
get up at six every morning, and that usually gives me an hour before the kids
wake up. Then when they go for their naps, I can usually write for another
hour.
Sometimes at night, my wife and I sit around the kitchen
table, and we both do a bit of work. The truth is that it’s very hard to find
time to read and write. But, since those days sitting in front of that
flickering blue screen, I’ve been a believer in the power of words. I keep my
nose down and continue to work whenever I can.
Sometimes when I’m writing, I feel like that man on the
island. I have a few tools, and I know how to use them, but there’s an ocean
between where I am and where I want to be. That’s a problem, and no matter how
hard it is to find time, there’s part of me that needs to figure out the solution.
