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.

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.

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.

So I’ve been doing the literary equivalent of rearranging the throw pillows in the house, organizing my sock drawer, wiping down the counters. Hunting for an agent is a little like fishing… at least the fishing I did when I was a kid. Most of the time I sat on the riverbank (the French River) and watched my fishing pole, and that was about it. It rarely involved any actual fish.

Well, one of my pillow arranging tasks was tarting up the Butterfly, a novel mini-site a bit more.

Based on some advice from an agent (not directed at me, necessarily, but useful, nonetheless), I decided to make the website/trailer website more presentable. I added a bio, the bio I’ve been sending to agents, a picture (good God help your eyes). I also added some more context about one of the main characters, William Murphy*. He’s an ex-hockey player who happened to be an enforcer — that brutal role where you stick up for your teammates and take and give a beating on nearly a nightly basis. When we were last in Ireland there were a number of articles, even there, about the concussion epidemic in rugby, a few players speaking out about the condition they were left in once their playing days were over (and usually much quicker than they’d have thought).

Over the last few years most of the attention has been on the National Hockey League and the National Football League, and the New York Times have an excellent documentary on Derek Boogaard, the Boogey Man who died a few years ago and whose brain has been studied to help diagnose the symptoms and severity of CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encencephalopathy) in athletes who often withstand blows to the head regularly.

The Hockey News had a link yesterday about a Swedish player who has been forced to retire at the age of 20. This is very similar to the type of stuff I was trying to dig up to highlight one possible theme to Butterfly, a novel. While he’s enjoyed a little more of a career than the kid who wrote this letter, and his playing days ended a few years ago, I think he’d identify with the sentiments in this letter.

At any rate, swing on by the new trailer site, let me know what you think, because I haven’t had interactions with any other human, and have vowed not to until I’ve got my claws into an agent.

* By the way, you may recognize William Murphy as my longtime partner and co-writer at Sane Magazine (though the content from that site is now here). For those of you (hi, mom!) who’ve been following along for a looooong time, indeed.

So it was one of those “hey, why don’t you?” kind of moments. My wife and dedicated First Reader said to me, after the first fifty pages, “Why don’t you make a book trailer?”

She explained the pieces she thought would make the cut and I agreed.

A few months later, she repeated the same thing. The book received more editing, more pages were laid down. She was speaking to me through a little food and mail slot in the heavy iron door, behind which I sat. I agreed.

Months more passed. Seasons changed. The book was finished. My beard was matted and home to a small family of squirrels. Again came the refrain through the food slot: “You should make a book trailer.” Again I agreed. “But,” I said, “first let me send it out to a publisher and an agent.”

The heavy iron door burst open. The bricks shook and chalk dust from my rudimentary calendar on the wall rained down on what I was embarrassed to find were chicken and possibly mice bones in the corner of my writing room. “You need to make a book trailer,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “You mean now.”

“And a book website.”

“Oh.”

And so I did. I present to you: Butterfly, a book trailer.