Coming This Weekend!

To be released from captivity:

Chapter Five

Let Us Not Forget 
You 
Are a Prisoner

Thoughts: Call All Your Pulitzer, Booker, Governor General and Nobel Friends!

Feeling giddy...

This afternoon, Tuesday, March 27, 2012, the last pages of How To Lose Your Voice Without Screaming (the greatest novel of ALL TIME!) came into being. It's a truly amazing feeling to complete your novel, and it feels unreal: your novel is the kind of thing you're only supposed to be working on. But, miraculously, I'm done. Now, it is something I can hold up in the air and announce to anyone who will listen, "I MADE THIS!! IT IS MINE!!" This is something I have practiced quite a bit with my human children. And they seem to like it a lot. I sincerely hope my book is not indifferent to conspicuous public displays complete astonishment? If so, suck it up, book. You'll simply have to adapt.

Really important background information: I started the novel in the summer of 2009 while sub-letting an apartment in Jamestown, Toronto. I chipped away at it on weekends in the UAE, and while on vacation in Japan, at a friend's office in Koriyama. (Thanks Wild Bill.)

And now, How To Lose Your Voice Without Screaming (the greatest novel of ALL TIME!) is done! Which is freaky. 

And, wonderful! 

I can't wait until you read the whole thing!

Alistair

P.S. call all your Pulitzer and Nobel friends... They read too, right?

Thoughts: Top Five Books To Take When Stuck On Desert Island

Thinking of my favourite books. If I was trapped on a desert island and could only have five books to read or - if things got really rough - eat, they would be...

1) War and Peace
2) In Search of Lost Time
3) East of Eden
4) Spring Snow
5) The Catcher in the Rye

Bonus books I would secretly hide in my pants...

1) In Cold Blood
2) A Prayer for Owen Meany
3) Barney's Version
4) Fifth Business
5) William Shakespeare's Collected Plays

The one book I would happily set on fire to cook the others I will probably have to eat:

Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) by Philip Roth (...What was he thinking? I wince for you, Philip Roth.)

Thoughts: anticipating The End

If you're a Facebook friend you know I've recently been taking care of a whole team of sick ladies of various sizes and shapes. On the weekend, I found myself making french toast - with a sneezing eleven month old on one arm and a hacking five year-old standing by in close proximity providing endless commentary and non-sequiturs to confuse me - and feeling just a little too much like Dustin Hoffman as he endeavoured to make breakfast in the 1979 classic Kramer vs Kramer...

And now, this weekend, I am off to the Dubai Festival Authors...

I am very excited about the latter but, unfortunately, this means it may be yet ANOTHER week before I can announce that "I have completed How To Lose Your Voice Without Screaming!".

Let it be said, however, that all the characters (Kingsley, Martha, Louis, Doktor Flees and Zeak the Sheik) are presently standing-by in the wings, very professional, stretching and getting more deeply into character in preparation for the unbelievable climax that will end the story and free them to move on to other forms in other stories.

Please do stand by!