At the Republik, A Special Education

There's a couple of places in A Special Education where the historian in me is forced to take a little nap. I talked earlier about the Wagbeard concert being a few years too early, something I'll probably change, but there are others that will remain. For example, I remember wandering around downtown Calgary during my first summer as a parking lot attendant and seeing gig posters for Nirvana at the Westward Inn (although its the Republik that Jack and Isabel visit). Nobody knew who they were at the time, and I think it was rumoured that twelve people showed up. I know two guys who claimed to have been there, and they say they only came to see Dave Grohl who they admired from his time in Scream.

I have a moment where Jack takes Isabel to go see a local band she's been dying to meet. They're opening for Nirvana and the place is empty. The teens are there to meet the local band during sound check and when they arrive, everyone is ignoring Nirvana.

I once read an interview with Bob Mould in which he said the first time he saw Nirvana was in Canada, as they "unleashed Endless Nameless on an unsuspecting audience", so in my mind, this is the song the band is warming up with as Jack and Isabel arrive.

The Party Scene, A Special Education

It's odd, I'll admit. I was never a big fan of the Smashing Pumpkins when they first came out. More neutral than anything else. However, one night back in 1997 I came home from a late night working in the parking lot and this video was on. I immediately sat down and wrote "Labellypock", my first short story in a long, long time. It wasn't meant to describe what happens in the video, it's just there was a lot of overlap between what I saw, and what I had experienced with my friends in junior high and high school. Set in pre-boom Calgary, with most of the city still mired in recession, "Labellypock" was about a kind of fin-de-siecle party featuring the "naked and the bored". It ended up winning me a small writing contest in university.

Fourteen years later, this video is still as evocative for me. The excerpt from A Special Education that I posted awhile back, which features it's own take on my early nineties party scene, once again leaned on the Smashing Pumpkins to help unlock those memories and experiences.

On the Lam, A Special Education

There's a moment in A Special Education where the kids have run away to go see a rock concert. The morning of the show Isabel and her friend are standing on the beach and she whispers a secret to him that was inspired by this song.

Isabel's Theme

The early 1990s saw a surprisingly large increase in violent crimes perpetrated by girls.This is part of Isabel's milieu.

Despite the numerous fights she gets into herself, the guitar part in this particular song always seemed to me to be the sound of Isabel laughing.



You can hear and buy more from Superchunk here.

Local songs, A Special Education

(I believe you can download all of this stuff from the Calgary Cassette Preservation Society in one form or another.)

With music playing such a pivotal role in my writing process, it should be no surprise that A Special Education is awash in it. In fact, one of the very first interviews has a character reference his fear of getting beaten up by punks on his way to and from school, a fear that many kids on my block had, largely because of the influence of bands like Beyond Possession.

I love this gritty video of them performing in the neighbourhood of Pembroke, not far from where I (and Isabel) grew up. It's also just north of where Jack and Isabel's classmate Chris was from, a place called Forest Lawn, the same community I saw my first concert in the park, featuring three of Calgary's pre-eminent bands of the early 1990s, Wagbeard, Field Day, and Primrods. It's a similar version of this concert (except at the more genteel location of Prince's Island Park) that Jack, Isabel, and Chris first meet each other, although they don't really know it. 

Here's an imaginary set list for that concert:

Piece of trivia: Isabel's math class on her first day of high school is drawn almost entirely from my own, with one little exception. Whereas the character of Chris arrives wearing a D.E.D. Souls t-shirt (from which Wagbeard emerged but not until a few years after A Special Education begins so that reference might change), I believe my friend on whom I based Chris in this scene (and who later went on to develop guidance systems for missiles, or so I'm told) wore an AC/DC "Raising Hell" t-shirt on the first day, and a D.O.A. shirt on the second. The D.E.D. Souls came third.

Bonus: A Special Education ends with a line stolen from a split Wagbeard/Primrods 10" from this era.

(Again, I believe you can download all of this stuff from the Calgary Cassette Preservation Society in one form or another.)

Jack Thomas, A Special Education

As much as Isabel felt that her old life was threatening to swallow her up at the end of junior high, I had always intended for Jack to feel the opposite. While Isabel feels compelled to use her potential to escape her friends, Jack is looking for ways to fit in with the kids around him without realizing that its the same gifts keeping him apart from everyone. When Jack and Isabel meet, part of what attracts them to each other is their background, and videos of late 1980s Fugazi always helped me keep this in mind. Jack wants to be a part of the aggressive crowd. He wants to be the one with his shirt off, body-surfing. Isabel is attractive to him because she's one of the few girls in the audience, and one of the only ones not standing in the back of the room.

"Waiting Room" was a good song for Jack because he also oscillates between these quiet brooding periods of sensitive reflection, and seemingly spontaneous explosions of emotions. Plus, early on, I imagined that it would be Jack who got the job in the parking lot as a means of "toughening" himself up, and this was also one of the songs that I listened to lot while working there myself. Luckily, my wife suggested switching that particular plot point around while the novel was still in the planning stages, yielding a far more interesting story.

Feist

I think it's no secret to anyone that I listen to a lot of music. I believe I've even shared that Stars' album "In Our Bedroom After The War" was a significant influence on the story of Jack and Isabel, my two main characters for A Special Education and its planned sequels. In fact, most of the ideas that came to me while listening to that particular album are actually for the last book and it took me a whole year to figure out how to begin the first one.

But begin I did and I thought over the holidays I would share some of the music that helped me along the way. Generally speaking, particular songs help to unlock specific scenes; the music creates mental sequences that I try to capture on paper. Letting my imagination drift away was one of the things I used to love about seeing live music.

However, the writing is usually after the fact. I hear the song and then write the scene. Usually with the song on repeat again and again. Today though, I wanted to share something that was a happy coincidence.  One of the themes of this particular set of novels is the relationship between my two main teen characters, Jack and Isabel. in A Special Education it looks, for all intents and purposes, like a love story. As things play out over the next two novels, we find that's not necessarily the case, and it surprised me to hear this new Feist song, as it appears to predict where I wanted to go with them.

Classic genre tropes

Brief thoughts this afternoon about some classic plot devices and what they meant at one time or another:

Individual v. vampires: fear of the unknown, death, or foreigners

v. werewolves and mutants: fear of one's self, typically brought on by adolescence

v. mummies: fear of past burdens

v. Frankenstein's monster: fear of science

v. computers, robots: fear of the future and our own inhumanity to each other

v. zombies: fear of each other, plague

June Progress Report

In his latest collection of The Believer columns, entitled Shakespeare Wrote For Money, Nick Hornby suggests that if you can write 500 words a day, you can write a novel within a year. Of course, he leaves it unsaid that you should probably dedicate those 500 words to a single project. Even if he had deliberately spelt it out like that, I probably wouldn't have listened since starting too many things at once has become my hallmark.

Here is June's Fiction Writing Progress Report:

Short Stories:

"Out of Time" - in revision*

"Of Light and Darkness" - in revision*

* these make up part of my Twilight of the Idle short stories "Labellypock" and "A Night on the Fronde"

"How My Uncle Faught The Spanish Civil War" - 1000 words

"Il Brute" - 700 words, a short story about living in Bridgeland

Novel Ideas (and working titles):

A Saturday Afternoon By The Slurpee Machine - 2000 words, growing up in NE Calgary, circa 1990

Games of Chance - 1000 words, quasi-related to the current economic downturn

The Last Days of the Daily Wenzel - 8150 words

Father Borsato di Sangi - notes only, about a priest in small town Alberta, circa 1910,

Mt. Pilatus Calls My Name - notes only, a corporate satire

Good Ideas At The Time (Whole draft novels):

joculatores domini - in revision, a novel about parking attendants and the Calgary Stampede

The Liminal Trip - in revision, backpacking through Europe,

June's Total Word Count: 12850

Theoretically, Hornby would suggest that by August 1, my word count should be approaching double what it is now, though I confess I'd be happy to finish off some of these "in revision" projects.