This Much is True

Tomorrow night (June 16th) is the launch of a book I highly recommend, Trudy Morgan Cole’s By the Rivers of Brooklyn. I read this book when I was asked, by my publisher,  to consider doing an endorsement for it, a blurb, you might say. Now, I’ll be honest here and confess a couple of things. First, and I make no bones about this, Trudy is my friend. A very good friend. So, did that make it easy when asked to possibly provide an endorsement for her book? Nope. The truth is I probably wouldn’t have agreed if it wasn’t Trudy because, here’s my other confession: I don’t really like historical fiction. Not my cup of tea, but guess what By the Rivers of Brooklyn is? Yeah, you guessed it. But it was Trudy and I know Trudy has an amazing way with words and can grab my interest with anything she puts on paper (even a novel she wrote in less than 16 hours at an art event a couple of years ago had me quickly turning pages!). So I set about reading this book, knowing that I was interested in the idea of it: the story of a family of Newfoundlanders, some who who moved away to Brooklyn and some who stayed home, through three generations. The idea of it started me reading but it was the characters that hooked me.

A friend and I had a discussion some time ago saying that the books that stand out to us are not the ones with the big plotlines, but the ones with memorable characters, ones you think about from time to time, like old friends. By the Rivers of Brooklyn has rich, multi-layered, characters that I won’t soon forget. Trudy’s painted such a thorough picture that I can picture them, not just outside but inside, the poignancy of their often quiet desperation and the pleasure they garner from the simplest things. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s lots of plot in the book too. With a timespan from the 1920s to 2004 (I think it’s 2004) you know the story is going to have plenty of love, death, betrayal, and hope to keep you going. And it does. It’s a hard book to put down. Maybe I should read more historical fiction because, it turns out, it can be quite good. Maybe I was just reading the wrong books. Or maybe this was just the right one.

By now you must be wondering how to get this book and there’s a few ways. If you’re in and around St. John’s the official launch is tomorrow night at Bianca’s at 7:00 and Trudy will be there to sign books and to do a reading too (a treat in itself, I’ll tell you). But even if you’re not around, you can take part in the launch because she’s having a virtual, online book launch and there’s even prizes. By the Rivers of Brooklyn is also available at Chapters and Coles across Atlantic Canada and in online stores as well. So, maybe I’ll see you at the launch but if I don’t I hope you’ll pick up the book and I hope you’ll love it as much as I do.

Awwww, Stephen Eli Harris, over at the wonderful Newfoundland and Labrador BlogRoll must have known it’s my birthday today. This Much is True has been selected of Blog of the Week. Thanks, Stephen for that and for keeping up the NL BlogRoll.

And since I’m heaving out good news I’ll take this time to finally officially tell you that my next novel, A Few Kinds of Wrong, will be published by Breakwater in the fall. I’m very excited about it. Much more to come.

Never mind recycling. That involves breaking stuff down in order to reuse it. Upcycling is the new in thing. It’s when something old and used is used again for a new purpose but in its existing form. Frito-Lay is going all out with this with its Terracycle project.You send them your old chip bags (they’ll pay the postage) and they will turn them into backpacks, messenger bags, lunch boxes, etc. The old bags can be from Lay’s potato chips, Doritos and Tostitos tortilla chips and Cheetos cheese flavored snacks (excuse me, I have to wipe the drool off my keyboard). They’ll also donate $0.02 per bag collected to non-profit organizations of your choice (if you get picked to do this, there is a limit to the number of people who can participate). Frito-Lay says their goal is to “divert more than 5 million bags from landfills in 2009″.

And Terracycle has the same deal going with other companies like those who make Oreos or drink paks. These old cookie wrappers and empty juice paks are then remade into bags and even office products.  In the search for new ways to upcycle, Inhabitat recently held a design contest with some pretty interesting examples of upcycling (I love the Book Book Shelf).

Of course, if you have kids, you know they are the original upcyclers. Why, right now, just a cursory glance around the pig sty living room shows me it’s full of crap upcycled things. Like the box from my cellphone that is now a fort for bakugan. An empty tissue box now has two pairs of  3D glasses and some pipe cleaners attached to it so it can be a spaceship for bakugan. And the old shoebox, not the specially designed racks and clips I bought for the purpose, is now the home of all my son’s bakugan. Let’s hope that Terracycle or some smart person at Inhabitat is figuring out how to upcycle bakugan.

Oh, how I miss those stubbies.

More at stubby.ca.

Sometimes, I wish the world was a little more like facebook. I realize that makes me odd and, to tell the truth, I’m a bit embarrasssed to type that. But it’s true. Now, I don’t want the world to be totally like facebook. I don’t think it should be like this.

I guess the thing I most want to somehow transfer to the world, is a kind of new thing in facebook: the “Like” hyperlink. Under someone’s status updates and videos and pictures and even their sometimes annoying quiz results, is a little hyperlink that says “Like”. If you click on it, the person who posted the status update, picture, etc. can see that you like her posted item. It will simply say “Tina Chaulk likes this”. Or sometimes it will say “Tina Chaulk and four others like this”. And then, right there where “Like” once was is now another hyperlink that says “Unlike”. So, say you mistakenly pressed “Like” under the status update “So and so is back from the hospital minus one toe”, then you can quickly Unlike it before the world thinks you are some kind of anti-toe freak. Or if you accidentally Liked the picture your friend put up on facebook even though it is so blurry you are not sure if the creatures in the photo are human, then you can Unlike that before your friend thinks you are using your sarcasm on facebook again (moi?).

Anyway, so I find myself appreciating this feature and wishing I could sometimes use it in places other than facebook. Say, at a dinner party when you’re all making small talk and someone says something really mean about another person and you giggle before you realize no one else has and that you now appear as hideous as the person who just said it. I’d just like an Unlike button for that. Or when someone tells you that her pap smear went well and you don’t want to stare at her with horror because you really didn’t need to know that, and you don’t want to fill her waiting silence with some inane jabbering about vaginal tests, you could just click “Like” and move on to another conversation someone is having over in another part of the room.

So, if I’m out with you sometime and you say something kind of funny but it’s not THAT funny so I don’t laugh out loud at it, I may just point at you and say “Like” and you should totally understand what I have done. And maybe everyone else could start to do it as well. Deal?

Tina Chaulk likes this.

Ah, the Vic-20, with 5k of RAM (but only 3583 Bytes available to the user). All I did with this was play games. If only I had tapped into my inner geek back then, I could be a great programmer by now. Stupid Vic Avenger.

Wish I had a dollar for every time I listened to this song in the 80s.

You’ll notice a couple of new blogs over there on my sidebar under Interesting Blogs. There’s Signal, a great blog with lots of info about what’s going on in and around St. John’s. I finally remembered to put my own new blog, techreluctant.com there. And last but not least, an ode to one of my greatest pet peeves, the blog called Apostrophe Abuse.

Cartoon from chopping block from lee adam herold

Awwww, no, I don’t even think I liked this one, but I do remember it. Some characters, most in fact, should not get their own shows. America agreed and it only stayed on for one season.

Didn’t that line just make you hate her all the more? Yes, it’s Kelly LeBrock, she who married Steven Seagal and starred in such classics as Weird Science and Hard to Kill (links are to movie trailers so even more flashback).