OF COURSE YOU DID

A Breathless Update

Three false starts. One barebones and very raw first draft. Five rewrites to flesh out the story but not pad it. Constant editing and correcting. Cover art and internal layout. Two sets of proofs. Perfectly aware that I’m entirely capable of tinkering with the manuscript to the end of my days in search of perfection, I’m perfectly satisfied that I have done the best that I can do. Time to go to press.

Of Course You Did tells the tale of two brothers from a broken home. Tom, the narrator, is the younger. He is a frustrated, failed science fiction writer. Big brother Pete is the more practical and literal of the pair, a successful engineer, and because of their age difference, something of a father figure. They are close, but a plot requires conflict, death and humour.

The 22 chapters are divided into thirds. Each one begins with an excerpt from Tom’s pulp sci-fi epic Atomic Space Rangers, an unfinished masterpiece. Maybe. The middles are Tom’s memoirs, growing up. Each chapter’s finale is immediate, present day. This structure took me some time to figure out because each section not only had to relate to its chapter mates, but reach backward and forward into other chapters like folds in time itself. The inspiration came from a book I’ve never been able to classify, let alone known where to shelve in the Crooked 9’s library, Wolf Willow by American writer Wallace Stegner, who grew up in northern Montana and southern Saskatchewan when the boundary between Canada and the United States was pretty much a prairie abstraction, a dotted line on a surveyor’s map. Wolf Willow is a wonderful triptych of memoir, history and fiction.

Of Course You Did is a novella, an awkward in-between length. As such, it will be priced accordingly in three formats: hardback, softcover and as an ebook. My first three novels were minor commercial disasters. My publisher dropped me after my first two. Fair enough, that firm was small time and I was even smaller. The Garage Sailor, my third, was self-published; the most commercial thing I’d ever written (advertising copy notwithstanding) - there was even a fucking cat in it, for Christ’s sake. I expect no more than another modest nadir from this latest work of fiction. Still, here I go again, time to get back on press. 

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of creative complaint and angst since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is coming soon. Don’t miss out on the literary sensation of 2021. Bookmark this blog for more breathless updates.