Month: October 2014

Cerebral Commotion

Posted on by Head Wombat

Charles Pierce has an addition to the literature on athletes and concussions with an article on one of my favorite active players, Patrice Bergeron.

Fight Night at the Garden
Fight Night at the Garden

I always enjoyed Pierce’s columns for the Boston Herald and his work for the Globe and would seek him out — he’s a fellow Worcesterite*, Saint John’s Pioneer.

After all Patrice has done (we’re buddies, I can call him Patrice), you almost forget, or I did, anyway, that he had that horrific concussion so early on in his career. The guy is nearly synonymous with pain, his legend growing after that heart breaking Stanley Cup Final against the Blackhawks. “Patrice was playing with a punctured lung!” “Patrice’s heart had technically stopped in the middle of the third period.” “Bergeron played half the game with only his liver and stomach in reasonable working condition.”

But I remember when he had to take time off for that Randy Jones hit. I was in the middle of writing Butterfly, a novel, and the protagonist was already a hockey player, a far less accomplished player than Patrice Bergeron, even at that stage of his career. It was an awful, awful thing to watch a player out on the ice, just laid out and unmoving, for as long as he was. And his press conference. It’s rare to see the vulnerable side of a hockey player, but there it was, on full view for all to see. I was already interested in the effect that retiring had on these elite athletes, yes, even the ones who never quite make it to The Show, whatever their given show is. But I think that moment, watching Bergeron out cold next to those boards, before Marc Savard’s injury at the shoulder of Matt Cooke, before Derek Boogaard’s death, I think that helped get me thinking even more about what it was these guys were leaving on the ice. For us, for themselves.

I have a huge amount of respect for Patrice Bergeron and how he plays the game, and it’s nice to see Charles Pierce take a moment, too. It’s a short and sweet little piece, not asking for action, just honoring a player, his work ethic, and showing you the “behind the scenes” costs that player may have paid already.

 

 

 

 

* I have an urge to scream “Woos-taaaah!” and shake my fists, possibly in defiance? At the sky. Don’t mind me.

The Music of Butterfly, a novel

Posted on by Head Wombat

Butterfly, a novel is a book. It comes with words for reading and very few pictures, if any.

When one of my first readers gave me feedback one of their comments was “I can easily see this being a movie, and I know exactly the soundtrack!”

Well, the book is hardly a book, yet, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves, but she picked some excellent songs that captured the mood of Butterfly, a novel.

One you might have guessed, particularly if you’ve watched the trailer, is One eskimO’s excellent “Givin’ Up.” The soundtrack for our super low budget, indie made book trailer was a toss up between “Givin’ Up” and Imagine Dragons “Nothing Left to Say.” It’s meant to capture a man on the run, who may have just seen his wife and daughter die, to borrow a plot trope from afternoon, a story, by one of my personal favorites, Michael Joyce.

As I’ve been writing (and editing, and editing, and editing) Butterfly, a novel I’ve also had a soundtrack. Usually I write to classical music, without any words to give me a Barnes & Noble-esque atmosphere in my little writing hovel. But as I sat down to finish out the fourth draft/heavy editing, I ran ear-first into Tanya Donelly’s Swan Song Series. It was the fourth volume, the one that includes “Salt” and “Cape Ann.” I’ve been a fan of Tanya Donelly from her Throwing Muses, Belly, Breeders days and I just love the mood she evokes. It’s a little bit wistful, joyful, so so good. So I went back through her back catalog of Swan Song Series and collected them all.

Tanya Donelly's Swan Song Series is a big repeat listen
Tanya Donelly’s Swan Song Series is a big repeat listen

I kept all 5 volumes (the fifth came out in the middle of slogging through yet another edit, a welcome addition) on constant play during my early morning editing and writing sessions. It’s a story about a man losing his family, possibly irrevocably, and their attempts to get back together again, so there’s that little bit of hope and remembering the good times that I get from Ms. Donelly. In fact, should it be turned into a movie (whoa, chief, let’s not get ahead of ourselves or our hunt for an agent yet), I would beg plead and grovel to get her to write the soundtrack.

Mix in the odd song that sounds like it would belong in a hockey arena and you have the recipe for writing Butterfly, a novel. The latter songs in the iTunes playlist, in particular, got heavy rotation when I would spend half an hour to an hour at the rink, thinking through various plot points, scenes, that sort of thing. William Murphy was a professional hockey player, in his former life — a goon who dispensed and received great punishment on the ice. So some of those raucous anthems got me going through fight scenes (much easier than picking somebody at the rink to tussle with).

So there you have it. I have no idea if this is interesting or not (I suspect it’s not terribly), but the music behind the novel.

Now back to waiting for agents to get back to me. And working on the next book.

The Story of Bobby Robins

Posted on by Head Wombat

Yet Another Update: The nearly always excellent Chad Finn has a write up of the Bobby Robins NHL experience last night.

Update: I should have included a link to one of the first profiles on Bobby Robins to come out since he’s made the big club, by Dan Cagen in the MetroWest Daily News – “A dream come true as Bobby Robins makes the NHL“. So between that article and the BDC article/video, you should go have a read.

So a player named Bobby Robins, a hard-working 32 year old, as they will repeatedly tell you, hockey player has, at long last, made the big club — he’s on the roster for Opening Night for the Boston Bruins against the Philadelphia Flyers.

Lace 'em up
Lace ’em up

I started following Bobby Robins last year, maybe the year before, when he hit Providence. He looked just like William Murphy, the protagonist in Butterfly, a novel. He seemed like an earnest guy, working hard at his hockey career, his life as a family man, and his life as a public figure. I was doing a little bit of research on those guys who get stuck in the trenches of goon-dom, who languish in the minor leagues, looking up at the feet of the NHL — my own hockey career is far less successful than theirs, so while I thought I’d done a good job of capturing William Murphy as a lifelong minor league hockey player with flashes of the big leagues, I wanted extra color, some inspiration for applying that third or fourth coat of realistic paint to the novel. At any rate, amongst the George Laraques, the P.J. Stock highlight reels, Thorty, Skillsy Hal Gill’s observations on Twitter, I found Bobby. After watching the couple videos he has up on his site, which counts as research, to the abject horror of my wife, I couldn’t help but root for the young man.

I can be curmudgeonly and incoherent with the best of them.

Now, I’m not writing as a hockey pundit, though I can be curmudgeonly and incoherent with the best of them and am available for hire, so I don’t know how having Bobby Robins on the Bruins’s fourth line is going to work out, but on a personal level I’m rooting for the guy and I hope it works out for him and the Boston Bruins.

A Subliminal Signal Detector from the Kids at Supertart.com

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As I’ve said before, these guys are on fire. The Supertart kids have launched a brand new social network, my own personal author scoreboard, and now they’ve shipped a little project we worked on together back in the Spring a few years ago.

It’s called the Subliminal Signal Detector and it’s based on a passage from Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny sublimal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth.”

It was conceived during one of those terrible news stories events, and Douglas’s sentiment just kind of rang true. You never feel so disconnected from the place of your birth as you do in times of great stress.

A long way from home.
A long way from home.

So we figured we’d throw together a little web app to help other people figure out what their own subliminal signal might be at any given location. And then they waited… and waited… and waited. And now, for some reason they’ve decided to make it public, at long last.

It should look good on your iPad, your iPhone, your standard web browser. Heck, give it to a friend, an enemy, somebody having a bad day, figure out maybe why they’re having a bad day.

Go check it out.

My Own Personal Author Scoreboard

Posted on by Head Wombat

Those damn cute kids at Supertart.com have done it again. They’ve launched a social network, and now they’re dipping into the Author Scoreboard market, I suppose.

The Scoreboard at the Moment
The Scoreboard at the Moment

These are, yes it’s true, my current stats, with regards to queries sent out, responses I’ve received, and responses I haven’t received. I’m not quite sure how it works that I’m the one at bat but the Empty, Soul-Sucking Void of No Response is scoring all the runs, but this isn’t baseball, and there is crying in pitching to agents and publishers, so there you go.

All I’m aiming for is one run. Just one little run.