This shit just got real.

Okay, for starters this is a dumb movie, but it is also a very very smart movie. I took in Hot Fuzz this weekend with my son and wife. My wife gets the mom of the year award for sitting through a tremendously male movie. Secretly, I think she might have liked it, but needed to preserve her sophisticated mom exterior. My son thought it was the best thing since...well... EVER!

It is clever satire, Hollywood action films get screened through a British sardonic filter. There are also some definite nods to John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat in Hardboiled. I actually liked a lot of the quieter moments rather than the over the top parody. For a movie guy like me it was fun to pickup all the references and homages (one of the reasons I love movies like Pulp Fiction). But I have to admit it was bit embarrassing to admit I knew dialogue from Bad Boys 2 (the title of this post for example) and knew exactly the moment they were talking about in Point Break when Keanu Reeves fires his gun in the air in rage.

Now, pardon me, I need to go watch some Bergman films as a penance.
Then I'll see if can rent the entire Dirty Harry series - now that shit is real.

Fall in One Day

I've been working on a new piece for my class. A long one.
Here is an excerpt from "Fall in One Day".

The first week of September is just an extension of summer. School starts and there is an excitement to that, even those who dread the day have to admit it. When the last bell rings, I jump on my bike and the seat burns my ass, which reminds me that last week it was August. Peeling across the soccer field, past the wire cage that surrounds the school, and riding past the pool, it's almost like I could fool myself into thinking that it's still summer, except the pool has been drained and a couple of poplar leaves are stuck on the yellowed bottom.

The wind that pushes me home has the smallest hint of cold, barely there – I sort of think I am imagining it because the calendar tells me its coming. Fall. When we are lucky it last a few weeks, but some years it's a day. It's an amazing windy day where every leaf is torn off every tree and launched into this aerial parade – like soft fireworks echoing the fair that started the summer. I remember watching them with Brian on the bank of the river. How good it felt to lay back on the grass, our shirts dusty and sweaty from a day of riding the Zipper, knocking over bottles with baseballs and breaking our teeth on candied apples. Just like the breeze tells me that fall is coming, and as much as I loved watching those Roman Candles, the fireworks told me that the summer would be over before I knew it.

Radio CBZY Plays all the insecurities all the time.

Another update from class-land. It does feel a bit like being away from other things, in a foreign country even. I have been looking both closely at my work and from a distance, trying to get that objective distance, which can be difficult when you go deeper into your work.

Reading and still loving Bird by Bird, which it turns out is a good compliment to the things I am learning in the fiction class. Lamott nails the writer's mind so well, or mine at least. She writes about the radio station that blares away in your head, filling you full of self-doubt and insecurity (this blasts away in the left speaker) and self-aggrandizement blasts out the right, the recitation of one's specialness. The goal is to shut that station off and become quiet so you can listen your characters speak in a still small voice.

Her station she calls KFKD, or K-Fucked. This is an example of the great cranky stream of humour that runs throughout the book. For me the insecurity channel blares a bit louder than the other, though I am sure it is there. I am thinking of a name for my own channel, and all the anxieties and mental demands of life that encroach when I sit down to write. Probably CBZY - C because it's a Canadian station and the rest because I can have a hard time settling my busy mind. There's always things to think about, taxes to do, phone calls to make and meetings to arrange. But I am working at flipping the switch on that station, or putting it on time-delay. I can always listen to it later.

All work and no play.

Just to let you faithful readers of woofreakinhoo know, I have not dropped the verbal ball here. I have been heavy duty into my fiction class, unable to come up for air and post.

So this is my message in a bottle note that more is coming, so stay tuned and please do come back.

Now back to class - k-raccckk goes the teacher's whip (or maybe my own).

Class in session

It has begun... cue the music. Dun-dun-dunnnnnnn. I had my first conversation with my instructor in the master fiction class. I hate to be always saying that word master, because I am anything but. Although, it is the name of the class and as I thought (and hoped) it will mean going deep into my fiction - including what I write and why I write.

I really respect the instructor in this course, and I was not disappointed. She read four of my stories and basically nailed it - I agreed with everything she said and there was more than a few light bulb moments.

So day one, I am already totally re-thinking the way I write. Yikes. It's like I want to gather up every story I have out there and shout, "Don't look at these! I need to fix them all!" Surprisingly, this is not daunting but rather, very exciting.

I won't be sharing a lot of the particulars of the process that I go through in re-working these pieces, well not for a while anyway. I think I am going to be very busy, but in the best sort of way.

"Snatch the pebble from my hand young student or tell me why you have such issues with conflict in your fiction."

Hmmmm, I think I'll go for the pebble.