More Random Whatnottery

I have some public service announcements:

• I had a Sausage McMuffin on Sunday, the first one since I discovered the Tim Hortons bacon sandwiches. Holy, Moly and Frijoly, the Sausage McMuffin is a foul, evil food. Once you go Tim’s, you can’t go back.
• Green and Black’s chocolate is on sale at London Drugs right now for $2.99 a bar instead of $3.69. GO! Wait, no, finish reading this, then say something pithy in the comments and THEN go. Unless you don’t have a London Drugs in your town, in which case, well, I’m very sorry and remind me to mail you some chocolate.
• Michael Ondaatje was interviewed on Writers and Company on Sunday afternoon. He has one of the best voices of any writer anywhere and I would happily listen to him say “sausage mcmuffin” over and over again but I discovered, as I listened, that I feel strongly that people who go to the trouble of (for example) 25 drafts per novel should be left alone once that novel is published.

I often joke that someday I would like to be interviewed on the CBC about the novel I wrote that wins the Super XYZ Prize! but actually, I don’t think I would. I would like people to read it, enjoy it or not, write me letters saying so and then form book clubs or whatever. But don’t ask me to explain it to you. If you didn’t get it? Either you are an idiot or I have failed as a writer. Either way, I don’t think I want to talk about it on a national radio show.

Ah, with an attitude like that I am BOUND for glory, non?

Speaking of random French and writing, here is a small story.

A few months ago I decided that it would be in everyone’s best interests (in our house) to have a bedtime routine. A ritual. A nice, calming thing the baby could count on and then he would be all, “Hey, let me in that crib so I can go to BED, yo!” Saint Aardvark agreed. It’s just safer. So we started to “do” bedtime as many people do: a couple of board books, a bath, some aloud-reading from a proper storybook, some cuddling and feeding and putting down for the night.

The aloud-reading takes place up in our bedroom. We read Winnie the Pooh, Mary Poppins, Paddington Bear, Curious George, then we started Coraline by Neil Gaiman. Over the months, Trombone has gone from squirming and wailing the whole time to playing nicely while we read a few pages every night. It’s more to get him used to the ritual and the sound of words than for him to take anything from the actual content of what we’re reading. So when we got back from vacation and I couldn’t find Coraline, we picked up a novel that had been in our headboard bookshelf for months. A novel I swore I would never read. A novel Saint Aardvark finished in one day and almost burned.

The Da Vinci Code. All 102 chapters of it.

Wow, does it suck. But because we’re reading it aloud, we get to use our throat-clearingly rotten French accents and mock the writing mercilessly:

SA: Give us more detail on the parquet floors of the Louvre, Dan Brown. We need more chapters and we’re never gonna crack 100 unless you PAD THE HELL out of this puppy.
Me: Say “nowadays” again, Dan Brown. How about you take up a paragraph explaining some boring detail and then take up ANOTHER paragraph rewriting it as dialogue! Did you get paid by the word or what?

which serves the wonderful purpose of helping us relax and laugh a lot.

It also gives me hope. I may publish a novel yet. As long as nobody makes me talk about it.