Monday February 9th

I’ve made sufficient progress on the sections of the book that I have to write that I don’t feel guilty stepping out for lunch with Mom, who has come to town for a school friend’s birthday. We go to Wvrst in Union Station, where she correctly points out that Wvrst’s Hofbrau Helles is much better tasting than Amadeus’s in Kingston. The nice bartender from Kildare points out that they go through several kegs a week, which probably has something to do with it. 

You must think yourself lucky if you’re knocking on the door of 80 and there are still friends from your school days involved in your life. It sort of suggests that you’ve chosen your friends well, which must be some kind of reflection on your character. This particular one had been under the weather around Christmas and I’d volunteered to run quiche and pastries to them. 

As I get older, I do wonder why I don’t see family more frequently. I find that we all sort of do better in relaxed circumstances. Things like Christmas and Birthdays all come with expectations and baggage and scheduling. Just visiting is a lot less stressful on everyone, I think, and sort of gives you a better sense of how people are doing. Because I had been working during the Christmas season and the Kingston end of the family had been sick after Christmas, we missed it this year. 

I am in receipt of the traditional Christmas gift from Mom, which is a navy blue sweater amongst other sundry items. In fact, there is an everyday navy blue sweater and a special occasion navy blue sweater. There are bean based soup kits from Cooke’s Fine Foods in Kingston, and enough coffee for the rest of the month. 

At various points in life, I have been a clotheshorse. For a while, I thought about it seriously. Fashion doesn’t really operate above a 46R and I am partially colourblind, so if everything is navy blue, at least it matches. I know better now than to complain about the colour. One year after complaining I got a bright orange fleece pullover with forest green piping and a tech weave matte grey zippable breast pocket. I looked like a traffic pylon.

Tuesday February 10th

Back to work on editorial tasks.

I’ve written or co-written a number of books at this point. If you wanted to skip the beer portion of it, I’ve basically written a how-to technical manual, two histories, two tourism guides, and an as-told-to autobiography. 

Alan McLeod, who is a lawyer and used to writing, was prolific, but insisted on using an iPad as his primary input device. We had a short amount of time to write an entire history of Ontario Beer, and while it was collaborative, the chapters were more or less split between us so tone matching was not absolutely important. I have forgiven him for accidentally deleting the index.

With Robin LeBlanc on the Ontario Craft Beer Guides, we actually managed to come up with what was more or less a house style. While we split visiting the entries based loosely on geography and opportunity, you could only vaguely tell who was responsible for what. We would basically write and then edit a la minute as we got down to the wire, because it was quite useful to make sure the praise or blame heaped on breweries was credible and fair. If you have a co-author to edit things the same day you’re writing them, the work goes very quickly. It had to. OCBG 2 is 640 pages long. 

With this book, I’m basically trying to make the parts that are Ron sound more like Ron. And then there are parts I’m writing that sound like me. The parts that I’m writing are dependent on Ron’s narrative, so a lot of the internal reference requires me to understand the sequence of events of someone else’s life and how that fits into a larger world. I am finding that this takes a lot of thinking time because the narrative needs to remain coherent not just internally but sequentially in order of material. You can’t really bill for thinking time so I worry that from the outside it looks like I’m not doing anything. 

Should this chapter go here? If it does, what needs to change in order for the flow of the text to be intuitive? This should be an easy read, after all. Can we make it sound more like he’s imparting wisdom? Would too much of that be overbearing? How do you accomplish consistency of tone?

I’ll give you an example. I’m a big fan of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels, so much so in fact that I once dragged colleagues to Jacob Wirth’s in Boston. Spenser is a Boston based private detective who is originally from Laramie, Wyoming and had been a boxer before briefly being a policeman. He periodically quotes poetry, is a pretty good cook, and a very good shot, so he’s familiar with three types of browning. Over time, they’ve had to change his backstory because the first book in the series, The Godwulf Manuscript, was published in 1973 and it made sense for him to have been in the Korean War.

Now, laterally, once the character is established, it doesn’t really matter whether he was in the Korean War. The series is still going, so if he had been at Inchon, he’d be 90. You can leave that detail behind and it doesn’t really matter. As long as you follow the character bible, you’ll be ok. He just has to be Spenser. 

Now, eventually, Robert B. Parker passes away and other authors take over the series. Ace Atkins did a pretty good job except for the fact that he lifted plots from other fictional works. There’s an entire Spenser novel that is just the Mel Gibson movie Ransom. He even lifted the dialogue of a crucial scene. It sucks, but the characters survive it because they act like themselves.

Mike Lupica took over recently and he’s made the mistake of changing the ancillary characters. Hawk (who’s played by Avery Brooks in the TV adaptation to give you some idea) is essentially an ex-boxer who became an enforcer and hitman, but with a code. He typically drives a jaguar with Italian shotguns in the trunk, drinks champagne, and dresses extremely well. Hawk’s dialogue code switches between academic literacy and urban slang depending on the situation because he’s versatile and importantly, playful. He’s amusing himself. In Mike Lupica’s version of the books, the dialogue sounds wrong because he’s trying to combine the two styles of speech and it takes you completely out of it. There’s 50 years of context to compare it with and the decision loses facets of a beloved character.

Tone is important. 

Wednesday February 11th

I have reverted to legal size printer paper left over from the 2021 census and a Lamy Fountain Pen that requires nib massage to function. The Japanese Sailor ink may be too old and clog it somewhat. Fixing it keeps me focused. At the beginning of the day, I set out a list of tasks. As they are accomplished, I rewrite the list on a new sheet, crumple the old sheet and throw it over my shoulder for the cat to shred. It sounds silly, but it’s vaguely meditative.

Part of the issue is transcription of interviews, which is one of the very few things that AI does well. There are details I need to recover about rowing skulls and theatre design and two dollar corpses, and those are in recordings. The trial software allows me three a day, so I’m managing transcription alongside editing and putting off the sections I need the transcriptions for so that they’ll be ready later when I need them. 

I’m aiming for one written section of 500 words a day and two edited sections, although those are of varied length. We’re now punching up text, so we’re looking at tone, flow, continuity of fact, and subtle MLA formatting tweaks. Sometimes, I am done by noon. Sometimes, I am done by mid afternoon. It isn’t digging a ditch. Sometimes you need to walk around the block and think about something else in order to put the importance of a choice in perspective. Being able to get outside has helped a lot. 

Thursday February 12th

John Prine says in Illegal Smile, “A bowl of oatmeal tried to stare me down and won. It was twelve o’clock before I realized I was having no fun.” 

If you’re up at 6:30 and into your oatmeal and a section deep before most people start work for the day, you’re entitled to be a little happy about it, but you can’t get out of pocket. I have to remind myself that I can be listening to music in the background. The Blue Note Break Beats set is a good one for gentle ambiance. Vocals aren’t going to help you much unless you are so familiar with them that you don’t think about them. You’re in the groove and you need to stay there. Certainty and emotional stability and solitude are your friends. Best to stay away from the news as well. Who knows when China might take away our Ice Hockey?

You can’t afford anything that is going to turn into an all day affair. I pop out to the Forest Hill Loblaws to do a protein shop. Normally, if I were headed towards St. Clair and Dufferin, I’d make an excuse to get out to True History, and a pint has a habit of becoming two, especially if there’s conversation to be had. What you need is coffee and ice water and a sensible lunch.  

There are lovely fifteen minute periods when one section is done and you surface just long enough to forget that there are still other sections. You can’t really afford to be pleased with yourself.

Friday February 13th

I wake up confused, my subconscious having invented an entire earlier decade of The Granite at a different location for me to dream my way through. Throughout the dream, the entirely black outfit I’m wearing is fraying apart in pieces at the elbows, knees, and gusset faster than I can patch it. For some reason, the country it’s located in keeps changing as does the hotel accommodation above the bar. By the time I’ve escaped and entered what seems to be an elliptically themed, futuristic version of the Toronto Reference Library, I’m completely sans pants.

In my experience, these dreams are totally normal for this point in a project of this kind.

I get through two pieces of editing and a section on Galactic Pale Ale and I consider taking Monday off. 

I have started sending completed pieces to Ron for his approval, and there are only minor changes necessary. 

At no point does it occur to me that it is Friday the 13th. 

Saturday February 14th

A section of editing deep, I pop down to Harvest Wagon for deeply discounted Sourdough from Brodflour and Blackbird and some fruit salad. I walk through the Summerhill LCBO and, although I know I need to prepare for a tasting of Tripels on the 28th, I don’t buy any beer. 

The day’s excitement, if you can call it that, is listening to the BBC Radio show The Unbelievable Truth, hosted by David Mitchell, and drinking quite a large pot of Genmaicha.

Sunday February 15th

It takes a little time, but I’m able to condense two chapters which culminate in the same place into a single narrative. I’m staring at a section of text that originally covered 2010-2019 and I’m working on splitting it into sections that are either narratively coherent on their own or suitable to be subsumed into some other chapter.

This is fortunate as the new chapter works as a framing device for the last section that I have to write about the brewery’s beer. It also means there are three or four textual orphans that I need to find a home for. 

The whiteboard, which I’m updating at the end of each day, seems to think at this pace there’s only ten days of this left, but I know there are a couple of longer tasks at the end. I decide to take the evening off. Tonight’s Late Great Movie is The Lion In Winter, in which absolutely everyone involved gnaws on the scenery. I’m not familiar with John Castle, but he’s terrifically greasy as Geoffrey. I had no idea Timothy Dalton started so early. He holds his own with O’Toole.