Goodbye 2011

Well, Christmas has come and gone and from all accounts here in the Beynon household it was a good one.  There was one absence that was deeply felt and throughout the day I found myself looking to the empty chair where my mother has sat in Christmases past.   It was an odd feeling setting only four places at the dinner table this year.

After Christmas, we loaded into the car and drove seven hours north to spend some time with my wife's side of the family.  The kids and the dog are such good travelers.  The weather co-operated and we found ourselves in the far north just in time for a brutal flash freeze.  Our drive back was favoured with fine weather, too.  We arrived home last night to a few inches of snow and the obligatory persons of snow soon took shape in our front yard.

And here we are, hours before the New Year.  Tonight it looks as if the kids and I will be heading out to celebrate the turn of the calendar without my wife.  She's resting upstairs in the hopes that she'll be well enough to accompany us this evening.

No resolutions.  I make mine later in January on my birthday. It has been a strange year.  There have been triumphs and tragedy.  That is, I suppose, as it should be.

I wish you all the best in the new year and I hope that something interesting and wonderful is waiting for all of us on the other side.  Be nice to each other and I'll be back in 2012.

Santa Comes Early to the Fergus Library

Despite the lack of snow, Christmas is alive and well in my little slice of the world.  The streets are decorated, the houses are covered in lights and our local library is full of festive activities.









As I've stated elsewhere in this blog, there are very few things to which it is almost impossible to say no.  Being asked to help St Nick out during the holidays is one of them.  Santa is a very busy guy, especially around this time of year, so when the Fergus Library asked me if I could stand in for Santa this year, I didn't even have to think about it.

The answer to that particular question must always be "YES".









I would like to pass along my personal note of thanks to the staff at the Fergus Library for inviting me in to help out Santa.  If you have never had the opportunity, I suggest you try it.  There are worse ways to spend an hour than seeing the wonder and magic in the eyes of little children.

"Don't embarrass me, dad!"

A short while ago during parent / teacher interviews my daughter's teacher told me that his class was doing a project on creative writing and would I be willing to come in and give a professional point of view.

"I don't know how professional it will be, but yes," I said, "I'd be honoured to come in and share the little bit I know."

Well, yesterday was the big day and it was a blast.  I only hope the kids had half as much fun as I did.

I started off talking about how lucky I was to have had a full year of creative writing in high school (Grade 11, I think).  As an added bonus, one of my daughter's classmates is the grandson of the teacher who taught me that course.  I told them that the one exercise that stood out in my mind was the day she showed up to class with this battered, mud-crusted hightop sneaker.  She dropped it onto the table at the front of the class and. amid a cloud of dust and mud, asked us to write a page about the sneaker.  "What's the sneaker's story?" she said.  We ended up with 22 different stories.

After that we spoke about different writers' advice.  Heinlein's rules for pros, Neil Gaimen's idea that writing is like building a structure - placing one word after another like bricks in a wall until you end up with something that wasn't there before.  From Ray Bradbury, I shared his idea that anyone can write a bad story but he challenged anyone to write 52 bad stories in a row (assuming a Bradbury-like output of a story a week).  Vonnegut's advice of giving the reader a character they can root for and being sadistic enough to put that character through hell to show the reader what he or she is made of.  And every writer's greatest bit of advice - READ!  Read a lot on all different sorts of subjects.

We did a creative exercise involving a Killer Platybot who yearns for freedom from the evil scientist who created him.  We could have gone on for hours with that but I decided when the scientist's cave was full of hot coffee would be a good time to stop.  I encouraged them to finish the story themselves and told them they'd probably have twenty different endings.

We talked about Symbiosis.  They seemed interested by a vampire story but seemed a little disappointed when I told them it wasn't really about vampires.  We talked about The Platinum Ticket and the Pratchett Prize.  We talked about editing, being edited and how many drafts are enough.  I also pointed out the dangers of editing too much so that you find yourself moving commas around.  We spoke about the value of reading your work aloud to get a feel for flow.  I told them if they find themselves stumbling over a word as they read their writing aloud to take a long, hard look at that word.  It probably doesn't work in the sentence and your vocal stumble is telling you to do something about it.

It was a wonderfully rewarding experience for me and I hope the kids took something of value away with them.  The best bit of writing advice I gave them came from The Pratchett Prize award party.

"Kids," I said, "if you ever find yourself in a situation where someone who has sold 75 million copies of his books comes over to you across a crowded room and asks if he can give you some advice on your book, always, always, always say YES!"