Psychedelia Gothique

While I was working on my novel, I came to a passage that reminded me of a breathtaking description of this very thing – in my story “Roots of the Soul,” which was the inspiration and the source of the ideas and characters in  Avenging Glory . I rooted around and found my contributors copy of  North of Infinity  – the 1998 anthology where the story first appeared. Re-reading it, 20 years later, I was dismayed that the passage I remembered so fondly, was really quite awful. In fact, the whole story was badly written - essentially a bunch of neat ideas, blocked out to give it a rudimentary dramatic arc. But the idea was great. In the 90s, I also turned it into a screenplay and pitched it as  Dark Woods , to a very nice and open-minded producer at BravoFact. She took the time to critique it – and gave me the opportunity to repitch it, a conversation that went very well, but ended with her telling me that she couldn’t see it going any further until I found a direc...

I have always voted, and at the age of 17, even campaigned for Liberal candidate Mel Hurtig in Edmonton. He lost by a landslide to a career politician whose major claim to fame was the two months he spent as the House of Commons speaker who refused to allow an emergency debate on the American deployment of Bomarc  missiles on Canadian soil - thus bringing the minority Conservative government crashing down.   I lost respect for politics and most politicians, at around the time that Hurtig made his unmemorable exit - an attitude that my eight month stint working for the government in BC in the nineties failed to change. I remember two different Social Credit ministers during my short time there, and neither of them impressed me as people who cared about anything beyond getting elected and appointed to cabinet in the first place. I guess they wanted to be perceived by the electorate as doing a good job, but not enough to, you know, actually do a good job. They were surprisingly...