writing – Everydave Life

October 24, 2025

Where Fiction Crashes Into Fact

It’s been awhile since I took the bait and wrote about one of the writing prompts over at John’s weekly ones on his The Sound of One Hand Typing site. He typically has several such prompts every Tuesday which are well worth checking out, especially if you’re feeling a little writers block.

Which I haven’t had that. In fact, it just seems I have so many projects, I seldom make it back to this page. But this week one really made me think : “how do real world events affect your writing?” It was already a topic I was dealing with in my mind.

As I mentioned in passing here before, I’m writing some fiction …I’m not sure yet if it will be one novel, or more likely a collection of short stories, maybe even a series of audios, podcasts or something. But I’m about 50 short “chapters” in and am quite pleased with the results thus far.

In brief, it deals with a modern-day couple and their circle of friends and family with sections devoted to looking back to their past and telling about their hometown and all its unusual people and goings-on. Although the characters and the town (set in Canada) are fictitious, it’s meant to come across as real and relatable and there are in fact some references to real-life people, places, events. They often hang out and drink too much coffee at Tim Horton’s, talk of real hockey and baseball players and teams, listen to real music you and I listen to, watch some of the same TV shows and so forth.

Some of that inspiration I actually took from Stephen King’s writing. Although I’ve outgrown being a regular reader of the Maine horror master, I did that in the past and marveled at how realistic and believable his make-believe towns in Maine were. I felt like I could see them in my head and could navigate my way around them if dropped off there. That’s a sense of realism I want to create in my writing as well.

Which leads me to my dilemma. Do I bother to wade into the muck that is the present day? My main characters are reasonably intelligent, can be opinionated, read newspapers (when they were readily found and thus available to be read), and I’m sure would watch some TV news. One is at least loosely associated with a radio station, which has a “news guy”. Elections take place, at home and in the ever-present land to the South, wars rage in various parts of the world, atrocities are being committed, and the news brings dozens of downbeat, depressing stories with it daily for every happy one of a school giving a party for its devoted 86 year-old custodian or a rare bird returning to a place it hadn’t been seen in decades. Do I touch that?

On the one hand, it seems hard not to write about daily news when my characters live in the modern world, have smart phones and are themselves smart. It seems unlikely they’d not be talking about what some politician said over dinner or about some building being blown up overseas while chatting with co-workers. On the other hand, I hope my stories will have a fairly wide appeal and if anything, do a bit to unite rather than divide people. And I want them to be, on the balance, positive or upbeat as much as a few individual bits of them are sad. Nothing wrong with hitting that emotional button on my reader every once in awhile as well but I don’t want to make my readers morose.

So far, my guiding light has been… no, not the Guiding Light, but another long-running TV show, Friends. Friends as most of you know, is among my favorite shows and one of the few I actually don’t mind “binge watching” with my sweetie. It was at or near the top of the ratings for its decade-plus at the turn of the century.

When the world changed, back on 9/11, it as a show had a huge problem. It was set in mid-town New York City. The characters could as likely as not have seen the disaster take place in real time just by looking out their apartment windows. Their jobs, at cafes and bistros and museums near the World Trade Center would have been impacted and in all likelihood, they would have known people who if not killed, at least were close enough to know casualties from it. We were all shocked and horrified; the Friends six would have been devastated, one must think. But, the show was also a comedy. People connected with the characters and cared about them, but they also tuned in every Thursday to laugh with them, and at times at them. It was 30 minutes of weekly escape from the problems of real life for the tens of millions of fans.

There were apparently many tense meetings over it with the NBC people and writers. They considered doing a solemn “very special episode”, maybe with them reflecting on life’s meaning, crying a lot and going to funerals or something. It might be appropriate… but it wouldn’t be fun. It would pile on to the real-life troubles, not lift people out of them.

So they made the decision to carry on business as usual. They did put in a few subtle signs of respect for the victims, like Joey wearing an “NYFD” shirt in one, a “I {heart} NY” design on the famous whiteboard in Joey and Chandler’s apartment in another, but for the most part, they avoided the elephant in the room topic.

Time shows they made the right choice. Ratings went up after that. People still needed, maybe more than ever, a respite from the grim news and 30 minutes to be ready to laugh every week.

So for now, I try to run with that as my way of dealing with what’s going on around us in my fiction. Treat it as a respite. But with each passing headline, I ponder the question more.

What’s your take on the question?

July 25, 2025

Stormy Weather? And What I’ve Been Up To

Once again, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted here, so let’s touch base. And what’s a better way of doing so than with the Weekly Writing Prompts over at John’s The Sound of One Hand Typing site.

One of his suggestions this week is “do you like thunderstorms?” Great question and I find most people have fairly strong opinions about it. My answer is I love ’em… ** . With a couple of big asterisks.

In general, I do. I find them exciting, so much so I’ll usually stop what I’m doing if possible and go to watch out the window if there’s a humdinger of a storm outside – the belting rain, swaying trees, house-vibrating roars of thunder and the accompanying flashes of lightning. Fascinating, exhilarating. God’s fireworks, outdoing what man does, even on the 4^th of July.

I grew up in southern Canada, where our summers are comparatively brief, but we saw our share of good storms annually, quite often in spring and fall. It was one of the main reasons I think I got to be so fascinated with weather and forecasting as a kid. I guess I always was a bit curious as to what the so many different kinds of clouds were and found it interesting it could be really sweaty one day and chilly the very next. I wondered why. But it was those sudden, brief intense storms that occasionally blew in that made me take to the weather books. My family spent a few summer vacations in Florida and there, you could almost count on a big storm every day around dinnertime. It was exciting and cooled the place off after a sweltering day. I used to love seeing them out over the Gulf as they moved off in the evening, lightning illuminating the otherwise invisible towering thunderclouds.

I grew to understand weather maps and radars, and kept weather records for years. Tornadoes, although obviously terrible in what they could do, fascinated me most – so unpredictable, so powerful. Things like how can a house be flattened, yet the one beside it be intact, how could a stick get blown straight through a large tree, and so on amazed me and spurred me on to read more, watch more science shows. I’ve seen a few twisters in my day now – one a tiny little rain-wrapped one that spun by no more than a football field away from my apartment. Stood outside the back doors and watched the storm and noticed the weird tight spin in the rain; didn’t really know for sure it was one until afterwards when I walked around the neighborhood and saw the clear path it took, shingles ripped off roofs, large branches torn off, but only for that straight line maybe 20 yards wide. Fascinating.

I enjoyed the show Storm Chasers. It followed a trio of teams of guys (with the exception of one girlfriend who sometimes tagged along, it was all youngish males, adrenalin junkies basically) trying to guess where severe storms would break out on a given day and barrel along the highways and byways to find them. One team mostly wanted stock photos to sell and video clips for TV news; another was working on an I-max film and the third one were more scientific and tried to drop probes to collect data from storms going over them. Even though I figured much of the personality conflict between the dudes was staged for the camera, the storms they observed and ran into though made it a “must see” for me for a couple of years. That’s when I came to my first asterisk about storms – I love them… when I’m safely inside. I hate being caught outside when lightning starts flashing around me and also learned that they aren’t to be trifled with on the road.

Watching Storm Chasers, and having a weather channel on TV at home, some years ago, I felt inclined to try storm chasing myself. So, one hot day off, a severe storm was trucking in at a good clip towards my area and it became “tornado warned”. I looked out the window and could see ominous, dark-based clouds towering to the west; watched the radar on TV and could see how it was developing. I could tell approximately what it’s path would be and decided to load up some camera gear into my old, rather rickety car and try to see it up close. This was, I must add, before smart phones. The radar was on TV at home, not on a device I had with me in the car. I thus played it by ear… or eyes actually.

As it happened, I drove directly into the storm. As tornadoes typically develop near the trailing edge of large storms, the much, much smarter thing to do is skirt around the southern edge of the storm and come up behind it. But I found myself in the middle of this supercell on rural roads I wasn’t overly familiar with. Ones with big ditches! The rain got harder and harder, and eventually outdid my windshield wipers capacity to clear it, then, surprise, surprise, hail started pounding and making the road slippery and appear almost snowy. I had no choice but to try and pull over, without ditching it, stop, put on my four-way flashers and hope for the best.

I was lucky, nothing happened, and after maybe five minutes, the rain eased up and hail stopped and I carried on. Eventually, when it had passed by, I did indeed see two funnel clouds in the distance; whether they touched down or not I couldn’t tell because of hills between them and me. I got a couple of so-so photos which I ended up losing anyhow. And I got a good lesson, that storm-chasing was for professionals, with very sturdy vehicles and good radar capabilities!

So inside, yay, outside, nay. The other asterisk – I like ’em when I’m awake. The older I get the less I can sleep through thunder or even the flashes of lightning, which in the wee hours travel for miles further than the sound does. I like storms, but I like getting a good night’s sleep even better as I speed through my 50s!

By the way, the reason I’ve not been here so much lately is nothing bad. I’ve begun writing fiction again and am working on a series of short stories about an ordinary town that, like all ordinary places, isn’t quite so ordinary when you dig into it! Most of my spare “writing” hours, when not doing my music blog (A Sound Day) have been given over to that project… of which I’ll tell you more soon.

May 18, 2021

Movie Extra 10 – The Answer Man

As this cool exercise (the movie draft run by Hanspostcard) winds down, I find I have three categories left to deal with – Westerns and War, the all-encompassing Drama and the combo of Romance and Holidays. This time around I’m going with the latter…but with a twist. Bear with me.

Last time out, I wrote about a romcom, You’ve Got Mail. I love the movie. Many of you do too, but the comments made it clear that it was a standout in that genre, since a lot of romance and romcoms are well…not great. So while there are a number of romance ones I do like still that I could pick – Sleepless in Seattle, Bridget Jones’ Diary, etc – and there are many excellent holiday movies (Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas to me without seeing A Christmas Carol, and A Wonderful Life, which I think someone already covered) I’m going to risk “wasting” a slot by writing about a movie which, well, frankly wasn’t that good. I’m not especially recommending it. But it did make me stop and think, which I hope you’ll agree is worth shaking up the exercise just a little. So far cumulatively, we’ve read about 100 columns from some terrific writers and reviewers and undoubtedly found a few great gems we’d not heard of or seen before. Now let’s hear about one you might be OK missing…

The Answer Man. Never heard of it? Don’t feel bad. Nor had I. Nor many people. People who’d read a memoir from one of its stars might not have either – she didn’t mention one word about it in her book!

It popped up on one of our streaming services here recently, and it was a rainy afternoon so my love decided to press play. Looked like it might be at least half-decent. If not precisely a cast that was star-studded with A-list superstars, at least some decent talent, like Jeff Daniels, Lauren Graham (whose memoir was out in the living room… she passed right over this one without a mention of it!) Tony Hale and Nora Dunn among others. The 2009 film was billed as a romance-comedy, though as it turns out both the romance and comedy were in short supply in it.

Now I’ll get to why I chose this one, besides it being fresh in my mind right now, but first a short summary, full of spoilers for those who actually might watch it.

Daniels plays Arlen Faber, a world-renowned author of a series of spiritual guidebooks, started with one called “Me and God.” Alas, Arlen is a cranky, rude recluse, a seeming utterly irreligious sort in reality. He has a bad back, and after throwing it out, he crawls – literally – across the city to a chiropractor, Elizabeth, played by Graham. She’s an over-protective single mother with a 7 year old son who’s likable enough but not very memorable, and new to the city after some poorly outlined bad marriage. She fixes the writer/philosopher’s back and he falls instantly head-over-heels in love with her. Arlen however is not very suave. And he’s inexplicably odd. He gets furious if a piano player plays the wrong song. He has signs on the doors in his house labeling what each room is (one of the few quirks that does get explained). He collects toys but keeps them locked up. And he has a slew of books he’s curiously obsessed with getting rid of.

Why he is so anxious to rid himself of the books is a mystery, so too why in ’09 he wouldn’t turn to e-bay or Amazon to do so. But instead he fixates on having an indie book shop near him take them. Enter the bookshop’s owner, Kris, a sadsack young alcoholic who brings in an entirely different storyline. His shop is failing, so he won’t buy Arlen’s used books. This sets off some sort of weird reaction whereby the writer becomes obsessed with shedding his books at the store, even dressing up in disguise and trying to leave them on the shelves. After some equally improbable twists, Kris figures out who Arlen is and looks to him for advice on all the mysteries of life. Kris has issues with his father, and an assistant at the store who’s only role appears to be to let Kat Dennings have a role and look cute. Arlen begins dating Elizabeth but his erratic behaviour is a lot for her to take, however, he bonds well with her son. She’s conflicted.

He eventually breaks from his incognito existence by doing a book signing at Kris’ store, and then throws cold water over the crowd by telling them his books are a crock of you-know-what. A metaphoric bucket of cold water, although he throws a real one over some other fans at another point. His love is displeased, so he sets off to win her again, a new man.

Wow, right? That’s a lot to take in in less than two hours (which might seem far longer than two while watching.) It was written and directed by John Hindman, his first feature film. Surprisingly he has one more equally obscure one to his credit. If you’d never heard of The Answer Man, perhaps it’s because it seemed to last just one week at the box office and took in less than $50 000! The exact take of the money-loser is up for debate, IMDB has it at about $27K while Wikipedia quote $48k. We doubt the producers who bankrolled it care much either way! It is typical of the indifference to it though; one source says it was filmed in North Carolina while the other agrees with the movie credits and lists Philadelphia. It was just so insignificant as for the reviewers to simply not care apparently. Although review it they did. Roger Ebert for example thought the so-called funny bits looked like “outtakes from a manic Jim Carrey movie” and pondered why such a famous author with so many fans wrote a life-changing book yet “no one in the film – no one – repeats a single thing they’ve learned from it!” USA Today say The Answer Man poses questions like “why do the characters behave in ways that bear little resemblance to reality? Why is this dreary comedy so devoid of humor?”

So why I am writing about it? Well I’d actually like some answers from The Answer Man‘s creator. I truly wonder what he was thinking when he began the work. What he thought of the result. If I had a guess at it, Hindman actually was trying to do too much. He had too many ideas, too many storylines and too little time (arguably too little talent as well) to see them through to completion. That’s a bit of a shame, because if cropped, two or three themes might have been worthy and yielded an interesting or entertaining movie. What if a famous theologian is either a nasty person or perhaps a bit of an atheist? How tough is it for a free-spirited woman to become a worried single mom? What if a grumpy old man is made human by a little child’s presence? What if a celebrity has some personality traits – autism perhaps – that make it difficult for them to function in normal society? Can an “answer man” who doesn’t believe in himself actually give the needed answers to a lost young man? Any one or two of those plotlines might have been an interesting story. Put all of them and half a dozen more into one film and fail to answer most of those questions and you have a mess.

The Answer Man. I give it one and a half hardcover tomes out of five. A failure but an ambitious one. Think of it next time you’re watching a good movie you like and realize how lucky you are, and how rare it is for a writer with an interesting idea to be able to turn that into a film which truly entertains. It might give you a whole new respect for the hundred films that have come before in this event!

July 9, 2019July 9, 2019

Summer Reading About Some’s Writing

If I was going to pop open a bottle of the bubbly to celebrate, it would have to be a small one. Very small. Because it was hardly like Pete Alonso winning baseball’s home run derby yesterday or being awarded a platinum record. But it was something. For the first time in two years or more, one of my e-books sold today. I’d almost forgotten I had them available on a website, it had been so long.

Tiny as a victory it was, it made me feel good. Largely because I know something I wrote connected somehow to someone else, which is really the ultimate reason to be partaking in the usually solitary task of writing anyway. It also reminded me earlier this year, I’d mentioned I’d been trying to read a bit more, so I thought I’d give you an update on a couple of the books I finished recently. Both tie into that last thought directly.

One was The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates. She classifies it as a “memoir”, and describes within her book the difference (as she sees it) between a “memoir” and an autobiography. the former is more selective and focused, the bio more all-encompassing apparently.

I must admit, I had never read any of her work before. I knew of her, but had little idea what it was she wrote to become so popular. I grabbed the book when I saw it at a dollar store, it catching my attention because A) I knew she was a respected writer and I find it interesting to see the insight those types have and what drives them, and B) flipping through it, I noticed she grew up in western New York and mentioned a lot of names of towns I heard growing up just across the border in Canada. Turns out she even lived a decade on my side of the border, “ten years in exile in Ontario – a fruitful and altogether wonderful decade” as she describes it, but one in which she was still aware she was an outsider. Worse yet, one driven there mostly because her old home – at that point Detroit during the race riots – had become too perilous to stay in. It spoke to me as a Canadian who’s spent time on both sides of Niagara Falls.

She had some interesting reminiscences of the ’50s and ’60s and the changing landscape, which applied as much to southern Canada of the ’60s and ’70s, from the role boxing played in male culture in times of yore to the farmland being turned into strip malls and subdivisions. As well, her insight into how events in her life shaped ideas in her fiction resonated with me. So, all in all it was a useful and enjoyable read and one which just might make me pick up some more of hers. Even though it was on the discount rack and thereby didn’t make her a whole lot wealthier, hopefully she too has the appreciation of writing something that makes a connection with someone else.

The other similar book I just finished is On Writing by Stephen King. While known for his horror, King has a way with words and can write quite a range of things, including this non-fiction. Part auto-biography, part college-level writing course, King looks back at his life and his path into writing, his near-death experience being hit by a truck while out walking in 1999 but also devotes a good part of the book on his advice for aspiring writers and how they can write more effectively. An odd mix perhaps, but very readable and itneresting.

I went through a phase, when I was young-ish and working night shifts, where I read a lot of his novels. It, Salem’s Lot, Pet Semetary, The Body… you name it. I probably went through ten of his books in the two years I was up all night. I grew tired of the gore and began to find bits a little repetitive in terms of dialog and so on, but I always admired his way with words. He’s a talented writer who has great attention for detail and can spin a yarn that keeps you turning pages. So his advice carries weight as well.

Perhaps the things which spoke to me the most in his story was his willingness to keep believing and keep putting words to page even when times were tough and he was an unknown and to tell the story as it should be told. The biggest quagmire a writer can get bogged down in is worrying about what others might think. As he points out, there will always be someone who objects to something and if you try to self-edit to placate all of them, you’re never going to finish a page, let alone a book. Good advice and in my own experience, the biggest hurdle to jump on the road to putting out a good story.

So halfway through 2019, I’m also about halfway to my reading goal for the year. And, soon will have some news about adding something to the possilbe reading lists of lovers of romance and comedy…