Nobel
Prize winner Bob Dylan compared time to a jet plane — you know, it moves too
fast. Another Nobel winner, Albert Einstein, used trains, relatively speaking,
to explain time. With all due respect to Nobel Laureates, I see time as a
balloon. When you have little of it, time expands and you are incredibly
productive. When your time is boundless, it deflates to a limp rubbery
contrivance: never utilized, simply wasted.
I “returned” to writing in 2008. The reasons I
didn’t write for twenty years is a different story for a different essay. But
on Saturday morning of the 2008 Thanksgiving long weekend, around 6 a.m., I
went into the home office I share with my wife, closed the door, and began to
write the novel I’d been noodling for that entire twenty years. I worked for a
natural gas utility with the gold standard of retirement benefits for those who
lasted the duration — a Defined Benefit Pension — and nearly a decade stretched
before me before I could leave clutching the gold. As a morning person whose
energy level is highest when the sun rises, my writing time was restricted to
weekends and vacation days: evening and late night creative writing is
impossible for me. More than two years after that Thanksgiving Saturday, I finished
Son of Jack Nasty, a 140,000 word novel set in London, Ontario during the
60s & 70s, exploring, along with its fictional protagonist, the city and
its artists: Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe. A novel yet to be published.
While
learning about and executing the query process to literary agents and
publishers, I continued to write every Saturday and Sunday morning, Mondays on
long weekends, and some vacation days taken specifically for that purpose. The
golden date for exiting the corporate world was February 1, 2017, and between
finishing Son of Jack Nasty and that date, I wrote another novel, the
first draft of a third, four screenplays and a handful of short stories.
Along
the way, obtaining neither agent nor publisher for Son of Jack Nasty, I
decided to hold off the query process for the second novel, Fair — a
short literary work which follows a young man living within the largest
homeless community in North America, L.A.’s Skid Row. I knew that once I
completed my 30 year voluntary sentence at the gas company, I’d have all the
time in the world to turn my full attention to getting Fair published. I
also thought if I couldn’t crack traditional publishing, I could use all that
time to investigate self-publishing. Of course, as a seasoned reader, you’ve already
deduced this simple plot: time deflated to a limp rubbery contrivance, a tool
as useless to me as a sieve would be to bail water from a boat.
The
day my 30 corporate years ended my wife and I decamped to Santa Monica,
California for the winter. No longer a part-time writer: I was full-time. So,
let us inventory my accomplishments as full-time writer that year. Query letter
writing? Zero. New creative writing accomplishments, whether short story or
screenplay? Zero. Moving to the second draft of the third novel? Never mind
that, let me tell you about the best drinking hole on Venice Beach — though it’s
now been gentrified into another hipster hangout. Certainly I rose early each
morning, my lifetime habit, sat down with my laptop and…explored all the wonderful
corners of the universe guided by my new favourite uncle, Uncle Google. Oh, the
places Uncle Google took me: nostalgic, romantic, awesome, frightening,
breathtaking, educational, spiritual and pornographic (naughty, naughty Uncle
Google). All that intrepid travelling during my prime creative writing hours of
6 a.m. to noon, with Uncle Google turning that limp rubbery contrivance from
tool to weapon, elongating it so as to efficiently strangle both my drive and
my creativity. In the corporate world we had an axiom about how the
prioritization of work gets bastardized: the urgent overtakes the important.
But what happens when you lose all sense of urgency, when you are hypnotized by
Mick’s boast of time being on your side? For me, lacking urgency, the important
sank to the bottom of the ocean like a water-filled boat that a useless sieve
could not bail.
I
had all the time in the world, yet it took me eighteen months before I started
to write those query letters for Fair, a kickstart provided by a workshop
with a literary agent in the summer of 2018 — thank you for that Canadian
Author’s Association! After six months of agent rejections, I turned my
attention to publishers and in January, while on route to Santa Monica for the
third winter, I received an offer to publish from The Porcupine’s Quill. Fair
will come out next spring, 2020.
Are
my mornings now more productive? Well, I did finish the third draft of that
third novel, Of Murders and Merry Go Rounds. The end of May, my
wonderful editor, Chandra Wohleber (who freelances and I
highly recommend), sent me her marked-up copy of Fair. I’ve spent every
morning poring over the edits, both intrigued and awed by Chandra’s respect
for, and insight into, my writing. That said, from February 2017 to now I have
written one new short story and one new poem. Each and every morning I try
disciplining Uncle Google to guide me to areas where I can learn the rigours of
marketing my novel so I’m fully prepared when it is published, but that
tenacious bastard continues to assume I want to know much more about intimate
details of the Gilligan’s Island original cast members. I guess Uncle
Google remembers me fondly as a ten year old, glued to the television set every
week, desperate to see if the smartest man in the world, the Professor, would
finally figure out how to fix a small hole in the boat.
I
have reason — hoping reason is not a synonym for excuse — to wait until Fair
is published before driving forward with my third novel. Yet all the while, I
can’t help to think Robert Zimmerman is the most worthy of Nobel Prize winners:
time sure seems to be flying by me as fast as a jet plane.
Ed Seaward completed his first
novel in 2011. Since then, he has written short stories and screenplays,
including Mother Daughter Happiness, which was a finalist at the 2019
Pasadena International Film Festival. His second novel, Fair, will be
published by The Porcupine’s Quill in 2020. Ed is polishing his third novel, Of
Murder and Merry-Go-Rounds, a slice-of-life literary fiction exploring sex
and violence through the eyes of a Toronto homicide detective. After thirty
years in the corporate world with a natural gas company, Ed now spends his time
cashing pension cheques, writing, and serving on the executive of the Canadian
Authors Association - Toronto Branch. He lives in Georgetown, Ontario. @EdSeaward
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