There’s a big stack of signed copies of The Vanishing Track, The End of the Line, and The Darkening Archipelago at Cafe Books. I’m told The Cardinal Divide is on order. Click here to read a summary of each of these titles.

Reading from The Vanishing Track in Canmore, Alberta.

I’m off to Vancouver and Victoria next. Check here for event details. Follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault for updates.

It’s always humbling to walk into any book store, let alone five Chapters stores in a row. The first Chapters I visited was in the Chinook Centre and I had to navigate my way around a massive circular table adorned with the biggest stack of books I’ve ever seen. It must have been piled as tall as a person could reach, and all by one writer: Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games trilogy.

She also got her own section. Similar piles of that same book greeted me in the other Chapters.

More than just that display of marketing power, the thing that really humbles me when I walk into a Chapters is the sheer volume of titles vying for the consumer’s eye. There are tens of thousands of books on their shelves. And that’s just a drop in the bucket of what is being published each year. Ten times that number are being published as e-books. It’s good to keep perspective.

I dutifully sought out copies of The Vanishing Track and the End of the Line, my two most recent books, on the store’s shelves and signed them and introduced myself to store staff and asked for “signed by the author” stickers. I don’t really know if this helps book sales. I don’t think it hurts, and I suppose if a reader has to choose between two books, a scrawled personalization might tip the scale in my favour.

I did have two really positive experiences. The first was visiting Owl’s Nest Books, one of my two favourite book sellers in Calgary, the other being Pages on Kensington (who I visited last week). They had lots of my books on their shelves, including copies of The Darkening Archipelago, a previous Cole Blackwater title. Owl’s Nest, like other independent stores, is not so easily influenced by mass hysteria around books like The Hunger Games. I’m sure they had copies in the store, but nothing that threatened to bury a customer if they inadvertently knocked the display table.

The End of the Line, Darkening Archipelago and The Vanishing Track at Owl's Nest Books. You can just see Stieg Larsson being crowded to the side by my titles.

The other really positive experience was in the Dalhousie Chapters. They were short on staff, so I just grabbed copies of my books off the shelves and took them to the checkout counter where I signed them and handed them to the clerk for stickers and re-shelving. The people in line behind me had a small armload of mystery titles and they asked me about my books and then happily added copies of The End of the Line and the Vanishing Track to their purchases. Connecting with readers is one of the best parts about being a writer.

In the end, I don’t know if driving all over Calgary and signing books will help sell a few more. But it was good to meet more book sellers and a few readers. And my message is that, as a writer, I’m willing to go the extra mile to make a success of my books.

“Actually, I’m an overnight success. But it took twenty years.” — Monty Hall

I started my day today by checking my email and finding a Google Alert for my name. The alert told me there was something in The Calgary Herald so I clicked on the link and found out that The Vanishing Track, which was released a month ago by TouchWood Editions, was the #1 bestseller there last week.

I was gob-smacked. My first instinct was to tell someone, but because I start my day at 5am there wasn’t anybody around to confide in. The kids are at their other household and Jenn is on the coast where it was only 4am. Its not part of a healthy marriage to wake your wife up so early, even if it is with good news.

I don’t even have a pet I could tell so I made another cup of tea and paced around the house for a while, and then sat down and felt a wave of happiness and something else –relief? — rush over me

I’ve been writing since 1988 and seriously trying to publish since 1994. My first book was released in 2006 and since then I’ve had four more published. This is the first time I have been on a bestseller list. Just like Monty Hall said, this overnight success has been some time in coming. No, it’s not The New York Times or The Globe and Mail, but this means something to me.

It means that my hard work is paying off. It means that the choices I’ve been making are sound. And it means that I have a lot to be thankful for.

That’s what is most important about this for me: gratitude. I am grateful that every morning I can wake up and sit down at the computer and without fail write something. I’ve never had a single day of writers block. Yes, I’ve encountered plot challenges, but that’s different. Writing comes completely naturally, if you call dogged determination and waking up hungry to create and succeed every single morning natural.

I’m also grateful to have an impressive team behind me, starting with my wife Jenn, who is the first person to read everything I write to keep me from seriously embarrassing myself. Ruth and Frances at TouchWood form the backstop of my editorial team and Lenore has been doing her best with my rotten syntax and terrible spelling for the last couple of novels. Without them I’d be nowhere. The rest of the gang at TouchWood – Peter, Emily, and a whole gaggle of other folks who I adore but whose names I can’t remember or find in my email – make me look far better than I deserve.

I can’t forget my children: a couple of hours ago my 6-year-old Silas called me up to congratulate me. Either his mom and step-dad told him about this or he’s creeping me on Facebook. Kids these days.

There are a lot of people selling my books. To get to #1 on a local bestsellers list (without passing through numbers 10 through 2 I should ad) means that two book stores in Calgary – The Owl’s Nest and Pages on Kensington – had to sell a stack of books. That’s how it works: bestsellers lists, including the Globe and Mail‘s, are compiled from sales from independent booksellers. There aren’t as many of them around anymore, and digital book sales are having an impact too, so this is a heroic effort. In additional to these fine Calgary book sellers, Victoria’s Munro’s, Bolen and Russell Books, and of course, my favourite Chronicles of Crime, are what keep writers like me motivated. In Canmore Café Books pretty much treats me like family.

But most importantly, readers are who I have to be grateful to. People like you who buy these books for their Kindles or Kobos, who pick them up at their favourite independent book seller or at one of the big stores, who take them out of the library or buy them used or, as one woman recently wrote to tell me, found The Darkening Archipelago in a lending library in her hotel in Thailand. It turns out that Alison and I worked at Royal Roads University at the same time (and the book was one of the only English language books on the shelf) so she picked it up and now it’s continuing its globe-trotting.

Readers are what make my job so much fun. We connect across the universe; we are, as someone once said, holding hands under the table (or maybe it was the covers….). So thanks for buying my books; you make it possible for me to keep doing what I love, hopefully in every increasing amounts. I am grateful to you.

If you’d like to keep in touch follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault.

I penned about 8,000 words this morning. I had planned to work on this manuscript over the long weekend, being at home sans wife and children, and now that it’s done all have to do for the next few days is sit back and gloat. And go skiing.

In case you’re just dying to know, here’s what a day in the life looks like as I race through the conclusion of a first draft.

10:30 pm. A good morning’s writing starts with an early bed time. Healthy, wealthy and all that, minus the wealthy.

4:14 am. Wake up, already thinking about the final chapters of the book. I just fall back asleep when…

4:50 am. The alarm goes off. I lay in bed for a couple of minutes and then go down to the kitchen, make tea.

5:00 am. Back in bed I listen to the news. I usually do this in my office, but Jenn is away so I won’t wake anybody.

5:03 am. The news is the abbreviated version reserved for holiday’s when there is little newsworthy going on, or nobody left at the CBC to report it. Thanks Stevo. Feel cheated. Listen to the first 6 minutes of some BBC show on science.

5:09 am. Still savouring my first cup of tea, I commute the 7 steps to my office and read the Globe and Mail, Politico, and Pearls before Swine, online.

5:11 am. Open The Glacier Gallows and start reading the last few paragraphs I wrote yesterday.

5:12 am. Read Calvin and Hobbs. That’s right. On Go Comics you can read the whole strip, right from the start, with a new instalment daily. The internet is swell.

5:13 am. Back to The Glacier Gallows: start writing. I’m still not fully awake so it’s slow going at first.

5:20 am. Make second cup of tea. First breakfast: Honey-nut cheerio’s with almond breeze.

5:30 am. I work my way through some minor changes that I was thinking about at 4:14 and then start into a new chapter. The writing comes very quickly at this point and by 6:20 I’ve written 1,200 words.

6:21am. Third cup of tea. I switch to decaf (And don’t sneer. Taylor’s of Harrogate makes the best bagged tea in the world and they started making a decaffeinated tea and it’s awesome.)

6:30 am. Check Tweet Deck. Send a few tweets. Check Facebook. Check weather forecast and look at Ski Louise web site. Fantasise about skiing.

6:40 am. Back at it. (Sound of whip cracking.) I bore into the next chapter, and write another 1,100 words before…

7:30. Fourth cup of tea. Back to caffeine. High octane stuff. I use a fork to speed the steeping process.

7:33 Get distracted (again, always) by sunrise out my office window. Take pictures. Upload. Edit. Post.

The view from my office window of Mount Peter Lougheed (right), Wind Ridge (forested, foreground) Mount Allen (centre) and Mount Collembola (left)

7:42. For the next couple of hours I work on one of the climatic scenes in the book. It’s the much anticipated (by me) chase scene. Good fun.

9:45. Fifth cup of tea. Back to decaf. Switch things up. Keep the adrenal glands guessing. Second breakfast: toast with jam. I’ve come to a plot challenge that I have to work through, so I pace around the empty house, talking to myself. “Well, what would Cole do? He would do this…No, no, no he would do this….”

10:04 am. Take a shower. Next to going for a run, this is the easiest way for me to solve a plot problem.

10:09 am. Warm up fifth cup of tea.

10:10 am. Back at it. The plot challenge overcome, I burn through the a very long, exciting chapter that involves a car chase, a gun fight, a fist fight, an car accident and livestock being startled by masked assailants.

11:45 am. I want more tea, but it’s a bad idea, so I drink a glass of water and feel slightly righteous.

11:47 am. All I have left is a short epilogue. Not much room for creativity there….But wait, the excitement isn’t over! I decide to set up the fifth Cole Blackwater book right there in the epilogue. Legault you clever fellow. That’s where all the smug gloating comes from.

12:30 pm. I punch the last period of the last sentence of the last paragraph….you get the idea…of the first draft of The Glacier Gallows.

12:31 pm. Tweet about it.

12:32 pm. Wonder what I’m going to work on next.

If you would like to know what comes next, follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault.

To read all of my posts on Deconstructing Draft One for both The Glacier Gallows and The Third Riel Conspiracy, click here.

Everybody seemed so concerned. I did an interview with Russell Bowers, the host of CBC’s Daybreak Alberta last Thursday and he started the interview noting that I was in a bit of a jam. He had read this blog. It’s no big deal, I assured him: Cole got the pickup truck moving again and he’s no longer loitering on the streets of Cheyenne Wyoming.

He did get himself in a heap of trouble, mind you.

Things don’t always go as planned when I’m working on a first draft. That’s certainly been the case with The Glacier Gallows. Given that this story has been in my head for more than five years, and the meticulous planning that I do when I’m preparing to pen a first draft, you’d think that this would have been all but feta-complete. It doesn’t work that way. I step into first draft mode with a solid idea as to where I’m going, and a good idea as to how to get there, but there are a lot of miles between word one and word ninety-five thousand.

Characters change; the story takes on a life of its own. It goes in directions that I couldn’t’ have foreseen. It’s a living thing: born of the grey matter between my ears in part, but more a mixture of the creative soup of the cosmos than anything else. I’m just the dude at the keyboard.

The one thing that has happened in penning The Glacier Gallows that has never happened before is about two-thirds of the way through I changed who the killer is. I didn’t see that coming. But there I was working my way through that jam in the plot line when it occurred to me that the killer had been revealed too soon, and maybe I had better rethink this whole mess.

I did, and things changed. I’ll have to go back in draft two and expand on some stuff in the early chapters, but I’m pretty happy with the way the story is shaping up.

As always, there’s going to be a lot of work to do to get this book to print in the next eighteen months. And I’ve still got three or four chapters, and another six or eight thousand words to write tomorrow morning, but I’m in the home stretch. I think.

Wanna read more about first drafts and plot changes? Follow along @stephenlegault.

I hit a wall this morning. It’s not an insurmountable wall. From experience I know that I’ll overcome this obstacle, but it stopped me never the less.

I’m about 75,000 words into the book; this is the time when the story’s pace is supposed to be peaking; when all the red hearings are supposed to be evaporating, and our hero – Cole Blackwater – is supposed to be figuring out what exactly the mystery in the novel actually is.

But he’s not. I left him parked in a pickup truck in Cheyenne Wyoming this morning. He’s about to brace one of the bad guys in the story; a character who the reader hasn’t met, but who we have heard a lot about.

The problem is, I’m just not certain what happens next.

I have my outline, but so far into the novel a few things have changed, and the outline only says that Cole discovers that…. It’s not much help, frankly. When I was writing the outline I knew this would be a problem, but trusted I’d have a solution by the time I got to this point in the novel. I don’t. Not yet.

I know what I’m supposed to do: Just keep writing. And I will. Tomorrow morning I’ll sit back down and write my way through the obstacle. I’ve learned to trust the first draft process. This is my 9^th first draft, and after facing this challenge before, in particular in The Third Riel Conspiracy, I know that if I just keep my fingers moving, I’ll get enough material down in the first draft that I can clean up the plot in subsequent versions of the book.

Trust is a critical component of the creative process. These stories emerge from somewhere I can only vaguely describe as my imagination. And what is that? Imagination is a part of the subconscious self that is connected with the vast store of ideas, energy, information and inspiration that makes up the universe around us. We’re all connected to that storehouse of creativity; for some the pipe is just a little fatter, allowing the ideas to flow faster, and with greater regularity. Practice and millage is what makes the pipe bigger.

We have to trust the creative process. It’s never failed me before, and it won’t fail me now. Part of that trust is knowing this can’t be forced. I can’t force myself to solve this plot problem. I can work at it, but in this case working to solve the problem means taking a step back and letting my subconscious take over. I’ll meditate and later today I’ll go for a long run in the hills. As Lao Tzu says, emptiness is the source of all things.

The way to overcome these challenges is to relax and not worry too much about it. There isn’t a shadow of a doubt that I’ll write my way through this predicament and the novel will take shape. It might not be very good, but I’ve got lots of time for second, third and fourth drafts.

One technique I’ve used to tap into this creative store-house in the past is to sleep on the vexing challenge. Before going to bed I meditate on the problem (which means, I clear my mind of the challenge and then ask myself a simple, clear question) planting the seed in my subconscious and believing that when I wake up, I’ll have the solution. Sometimes it takes several days, but this almost always works.

So I’ve left Cole sitting in his truck, watching, and waiting for me, his author, to know what to do next. I’m as excited as the next guy to find out what that will be.

If you want to find out what happens next when I do, follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault.

Click here to read more notes about Deconstructing Draft One.

But on Sunday morning I breezed past the 225 page mark, wrapping up what I consider to be a distinct part of this novel. In the first half of the book the story is told by several people, in different places, and at different times. At the end of Part 1 the various timelines and character-perspectives collapse into one. Cole Blackwater, the novel’s protagonist, is part of each chapter but sometimes only peripherally. At the end of Part 1 the focus shifts squarely onto Cole and will remain there throughout Part 2.

Without giving too much away, Part 1 is where Cole Blackwater gets into something of a pickle. Cole is working on a climate change project with Brian Marriott, his once arch-enemy who used to work for the Petroleum Industry.  Brian is murdered while they are leading a hike though Montana’s Glacier National Park, thus the glacier part of the title. Cole isn’t above suspicion, hence the gallows.

On Sunday I wrapped up Part 1 and then I just kept on going. Right into the middle of nowhere.

The next morning I started back again with Part 2 and realized that I was boring myself to tears; never a good sign. After a rather dramatic culmination of the action at the end of Part 1, I had to keep the energy up in the middle of the book. I backed up and took a run at it again. The reader, I guessed, will likely expect the same sort of walloping suspense that the book starts with (or at least that I think it starts with, delusional pen-jockey that I am). I think my second attempt was better; at least I was able to stay awake.

The middle of the novel is always a challenge for me. By breaking this book into two distinct parts, I’m trying to inject some freshness into the middle nowhere; make it the middle of everywhere!

To keep the middle of everywhere from becoming the middle of a bowl of mushy oatmeal, I’ve been developing a few first draft techniques:

1. Avoid exposition

I try to keep the plot crisp and resist the urge to melt into narcissistic explosion, expounding on how much my characters (ie: I) know about the world by having them droll on in their heads about subject matter only peripherally related to the novel’s plot. I know from that which I speak: I’ve done this many times, and thankfully my story editor has had the good sense and courage to remind me that I’m writing a mystery novel and not a polemic on some environmental issue or a lesson on Canadian history.

2. Keep everybody talking

With The Glacier Gallows I’m writing as much of the book as possible as pure dialog. I learned from reading one of Chuck Wending’s expletive-filled but insightful blog posts on the craft of writing to eliminate as much exposition as possible. If I have to, I’ll fill in some additional scenery and details in subsequent drafts.

The reader, I am told, is less likely to skip over dialog than narrative description or exposition. That means they will continue to read through the mushy middle if you just keep everybody talking.

3. Now is a good time for that plot twist you’ve been saving

I like to introduce a plot twist somewhere in the middle of the story. In the Cardinal Divide the twist was the discovery that the murder hadn’t actually happened where the cops and even the protagonist thought it had. In the Darkening Archipelago the twist was the revelation that Archie Ravenwing, heretofore believed to have died in an accident at sea, had actually been murdered. Do something to keep the reader on their toes. Give them a jolt to get the blood circulating. Step away from the cattle prod; yes you.

4. Cut to the Chase

If you’re slogging along wondering when the hell your novel will finally come to an end, there’s a good chance it will, and sooner than you want it to. Scrap pile of broken dreams time. Sometimes when I’m writing the middle of a book I catch myself wishing I didn’t have to scribble all this crap and could just get to the good stuff. So I do. As I said above, if what you’re writing seems tedious and tired, there’s a very good chance readers will find it tedious and tired as well. Get to the point! Skip a chapter, even two: write the next chase, cut to the sex scene, or revel in the big reveal. There’s a fair chance that whatever you are labouring through is unnecessary anyway. Even if it isn’t entirely, you can likely cut 75% of it and still have a stand up novel.

5. Beware False Summits.

I hate false summits. When in the mountains, sometimes I’ll look up and think, wow: I’m almost there! Then I crest the rise and realize I still have a thousand feet of elevation gain and I’m out of Snickers bars.

In writing, however, false summits can be useful. I started dabbling with them when I wrote early drafts of The Vanishing Track, and continued with the publication of The End of the Line. The reader gets the impression that the mystery has been solved and there’s nothing left but the Sherlockian summation of the crime when whapo! More action, another twist, more fisticuffs! This sort of thing helps me write the mushy middle because I never hesitate to throw one of these false summits somewhere into the middle of the book.

6. Head down, chin up

Sometimes the middle of the book is just plain hard work to write. The excitement of starting a new project is long in the rear-view mirror. At the 45 or 50,000 word mark I’m still 45 or 50,000 words from the end. This is the time when I heed some of the best advice I’ve read. It’s from Henry Millar: “When you can’t create you can work.” It’s not all glamour; it’s not all car chases and fist fights and nail biting tension. Sometimes it’s weaving a complex story that slowly, deliberately builds towards a crescendo.

Sometimes I just put my head down and write through whatever ennui I’m feeling towards my project. Sometimes I’ll just force myself to write another thousand or fifteen hundred words, even if I know I’m going to burn them in a garbage can during the next draft. It gets the creative juices flowing. If nothing else, I can write my way to the next car chase or fist fight.

I’m trying to learn the difference between this need to just work through a difficult chapter and plain old boring writing. It’s the difference between being in the middle of nowhere and the middle of everywhere.

Fifty thousand words to go.

To read more  blog posts on Deconstructing First Draft, click here.

For updates, follow me on Twitter: @stephenlegault.

The read part 2 click here.

It was early July and Jeffrey sat next to the creek, the woods alive with the hum of cicadas. The boy alternated between painting a small canvas and reading a book he had borrowed from the library the week before. It was Aldo Leopold’s A Sand Country Almanac. He had picked it up on a whim, it having been recommended by his biology teacher of all people. In the chapter called The Round River he read:

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

The artist needed to harden his shell too, Jeffery thought, for he also could see the marks of death, though with a very different eye. While those who called themselves experts might be capable of naming the thing that brought death to the woods, Jeffrey believed that maybe the artist could feel it. In doing so the artist’s shell could very well crack and the suffering of the worlds wounded beseech him.

Contemplating these wounds, Jeffery looked up from the book and his gaze was met by the cool stare of another: only 30 feet away, on the far side of the creek, a coyote watched him, its eyes locked on Jeffrey’s. The boy felt studied in a way that unnerved him.

Jeffery slowly put down his book, not wishing to startle the creature. With a quick glance back at the boy the coyote began to trot downstream, gliding along the forest floor. The animal cocked its head as if to say, “Are you just going to sit there?” Then it was off again, a beige blur passing between the trees.

Jeffrey stumbled after, his legs feeling like iron after sitting so long. Each time the coyote moved just beyond Jeffrey’s sight, it stopped and waited, looking back. In a minute it occurred to Jeffrey that they must be approaching the edge of the woods and that soon the animal would have to run from the cover of the forest and onto the four-lane road. And where would it go from there? Jeffrey wondered if he should stop pursuing the animal, and slowed his pace. Was he chasing it from the shelter of the woods into civilization where it would be hit by a car, attacked by dogs or caught by an animal control officer? He stopped running, his heart beating fast, his breath ragged.

The coyote stopped too. It turned and took two steps toward him. When Jeffrey finally took a step forward it began to run again, like a dog playing chase. The creek at his side was now nearly level with the forest floor, and Jeffrey didn’t recognize this place in the woods. Somehow, despite having combed this forest nearly every day of the last year, this locale had eluded him. He might never have come here without the coyote’s taunting.

Jeffrey saw bright sunlight through the heavy canopy of the forest in the distance. Was this the road? The coyote ran on, entering the bright sunlight. It came to a steep bank and paused, inviting Jeffrey to close the gap between them. Then it disappeared.

Jeffrey ran to the place where he had last seen the coyote, and skidded to a stop on a mat of leaves. He was on the edge of a precipitous escarpment of broken and exposed limestone that dropped twenty feet. The creek plunged over the limestone terrace in a series of cascades, white spray dancing in the hot afternoon sun. Below him, next to a pool at the base of the falls, stood the coyote, its head lowered, its tongue lapping from a tiny pond.

How could he have missed this escarpment, this waterfall, and this pool? He looked around him to get his bearings. He recognized nothing. There was a faint trail that snaked its way from one ledge to the other below him and he followed it down the escarpment. Birdsong enveloped him.  As he stepped onto level ground near the pool the coyote looked up, water dripping from its snout, and broke into a trot downstream again. Jeffery regarded the clear pool, the fine mist spraying from the cascade, and momentarily contemplated abandoning his quarry in favour of a swim.

How long had it been? More than two years now. The last time he and his father had been fishing together at Opishing Lake was the last time he had swum without chlorine in his eyes.

I can swim on my way back, Jeffery reasoned, and returned to his pursuit. The animal was running now and Jeffrey had to hurry to keep up. He tripped several times, the first time stopping himself before he fell, but the second time his foot caught on a root hidden among the leaf litter and he came down hard on his left hand and elbow. He scrambled to his feet in time to see the coyote bound through a thicket of hemlock. He had cuts on his palm and his elbow. His shirt was ripped and some blood already soaked the sleeve.

Fucking ridiculous, he thought to himself, getting to his feet and starting to run again. Chasing some damn dog through the woods, believing it’s a coyote. There are no coyotes here anymore. They’re all gone.

The animal turned and jumped through a tangle of cedars. Jeffrey figured the chase was on again and ran forward, holding his bleeding left arm close to him. The shrubs were strangely thick in the comparatively open woods, and he crashed through them. He came face-to-face with two children playing in a sandbox.  They looked up, fearful, as Jeffrey nearly tripped over them.

Jeffrey looked around himself. The cedars were there, but also a chain link fence. He must have jumped it, though he could not recall doing so. He searched for the coyote. It was nowhere to be seen. He looked at the children. One was seven or eight, the other much younger. The younger one looked as if he were about to cry.

“Hi, um, ah…”

“Who are you?” demanded the older child.

“Uh, I’m Jeff. Did you just see a coy— a dog run through here?”

“No.”

“I was chasing a, I mean my dog got away and I was trying to follow it. It didn’t just run through your yard?”

“No. I’m going to get my mom.”

“It’s okay. I’m going to go now . . . sorry.”

Confused, Jeffrey turned and put his hands on the fence, his left hand still bleeding, his elbow now sore and bruised. He pushed himself up, into the shrubs and over the fence. He expected to land back in the dark woods, but instead found himself in another backyard. Two girls about his age were lying on deck chairs in bikinis. He thought he recognized them from his school. He stood before them, bloody, his hair messed and his shirt ripped. His jeans were dirty from where he had fallen.

One of the girls looked up and he said, “Did either of you see my dog?”

One of the girls giggled and said, “Nope.”

It took him twenty minutes to figure out where he was. It took him another hour to make his way home. He wove his way through the sweltering heat until he came to Upper End Road and finally Cavanaugh Street. He followed it for six or seven blocks to his townhouse complex. When he got home his mother was standing in the kitchen preparing dinner. He walked past her and started up the stairs.

“Hold it,” she said and he stopped. “Turn around,” she said. He did. “What in God’s name happened to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you get in a fight?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“I fell in the woods.”

She shook her head and dried her hands on a dishtowel. She walked to him. “Let me have a look at your arm.” He held it up. “Go get some peroxide from the bathroom so I can clean this.”            Jeffrey did as he was told and came back down the stairs. He met her in the kitchen. He opened the fridge and took out a can of Coke and drank deeply. “Take off your shirt, hon, so I can clean this up,”

“I can do it,” he said, taking off the shirt.

“Yes, but you won’t. You’ll forget and you’ll pay for it.”

She dabbed at the cut on his elbow and then his hand. She was smiling and shaking her head. “You’re just like your father, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She put several butterfly bandages on his elbow and one on his palm. “It looks worse than it is. You’ll be okay. You spend a lot of time in those woods, don’t you?”

“Yeah, it reminds me of home. Of up north, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. You miss it, don’t you?”

Jeffrey was silent. He sipped his Coke. After a minute he said, “Yeah, I miss it a lot.”

“You know we had to move here. I couldn’t stay up north, not after what happened. I needed to start over. There were too many memories for me up there, Jeff.”

“I understand, Mom.”

“After your father….well, I just couldn’t look out the window every day at nothing but pine trees. I needed a fresh start. I hope you and Bill understand that. I did this for you too. I want to be a good mom, and not be mourning your father forever. Do you understand?”

Jeffrey was looking at his Coke. “Of course I understand, Mom.”

She came over to him and knelt beside him. “You be careful out there. The forest is a dangerous place sometimes.”

“Ah, Mom, it’s not like I’m using a chainsaw…” He immediately regretted saying it. “I’m painting, that’s all.” And chasing coyotes, he thought.

“Just be careful, okay?”  She kissed him on the forehead and went back to the stove.

After dinner Jeffrey walked in the fading light into the forest to retrieve his things. The woods were familiar again, every tree, every log, every stump was known to him. He found his pack and his paints where he had left them and tidied them up. The book lay open at the chapter he had been reading and he slipped it into the bag. He glanced up and down stream, and was relieved to see no coyote watching him. He could hear the faint hum of the road beyond, filling the woods.

* * *

The next day he returned to the same place and tried to retrace his steps. Within five minutes he came to where the creek slipped from the woods into a concrete channel. There it flowed into a giant steel culvert and passed under Upper End Line. He crossed the road between speeding cars and watched the creek emerge on the other side. It flowed in the concrete gutter between rows of houses with high fences. Jeffrey picked a side street and walked down it. Where the road rolled down a short steep hill he turned right to see if he could find any sign of the waterfall or the pool. Instead he found that the creek had disappeared altogether, flowing underground in one of the city’s storm runoff pipes. He rubbed the bruise on his elbow and felt the stiffness there. Still cradling the tender arm he turned and walked back up the hill.

Twenty minutes after Jeffrey had crossed the road and walked home through the forest, a City truck pulled up along Upper End Line. Two men got out of the cab and took tools from the back of the truck. They erected posts and a plywood sign that read:

Attention: Zoning Change Requested

Shady Woods Developments has requested a change in the zoning of this parcel (SD-121) from Community Reserve to High Density Residential. Shady Woods Developments has applied to build 124 condominium style townhouses on this property. All Inquiries must be made by August 1.

Jeffrey, who never walked along Upper End Line, never saw the sign.

* * *

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1. Think Ahead

I started working on the idea for The Vanishing Track in 2003: 9-years ago. Okay, now I’m a little depressed. I need a moment.

I’m back. Books take time. They take time to write and time to edit (some, like mine, much more time than others) and they take time to publish. Think ahead. The narrative arc for The Vanishing Track was essentially set back in 2003 while I sat on a flight from Costa Rica to Calgary, dreaming up the story line for the first books in this series.

Had I not been thinking ahead, I wouldn’t have been able to weave key elements into the first two books of the series that are important in the third. I also might have settled into a complacency with the protagonist, rather than pushing his development in the first two books.

2. Get Help

I needed a lot of it. First off, and because The Vanishing Track is a reverse mystery there’s no need for a spoiler alert, the antagonist in this novel is a psychopath. I didn’t know anything about psychopaths when I started writing this book; just what I saw in the movies, which is enough to be dangerous. The first person I turned to for help was my best friend and running buddy Josh, who is a clinical psychologist. We spent hours talking about Sean Livingstone as we ran up and over Victoria’s Mount Doug again and again. He helped me create some real complexity in the character.

Next I turned to Judy Graves, the Vancouver City Advocate for the Homeless, and other activists. Judy and I worked on a book together for a short while, and while it never came to fruition (first and hopefully only time I sent an advance cheque back to a publisher). During the planning phase for that book I learned a great deal from Judy about the real cause of homelessness and what we can do to solve it. Other’s like Pivot Legal Society founder John Richardson, and his colleague David Eby, were inspirations.

But the people who helped me the most were those I met on the street: Sharon who I used to talk with outside of Wellburn’s market near my home in Fernwood; Chris who I chatted with in Victoria’s Chinatown; and Sam, in Gastown in Vancouver. There were many, many more. Too many. The Epilogue of The Vanishing Track, which I particularly like, was inspired by an encounter in the Downtown Eastside when I was doing a ride along with the Vancouver Police Department. The gentleman in question was very drunk early in the morning and told me about his wife and children he hadn’t seen in years. It helped me realize that behind every single person we see on the street, and often pass by and sometimes stop to talk to, is the story of a life lived in a way that could never have been foretold.

3. Do your research

I did a lot of research for the Vanishing Track. Probably too much, which is part of the reason why I had to cut 35,000 words from the manuscript. That and I like exposition way too much; another very bad habit as a writer.

I spent a lot of time walking around the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver while writing this book. I was collecting stories, personalities and settings. I was creating a mental map of the neighbourhood to populate with my characters. Once, when Jenn and I were in Vancouver for a weekend getaway, I took her on a walking tour of the DTES and pointed to places saying, that’s the ally where Cole nearly gets killed by some thugs!…Such a romantic.

The best thing I did by way of research was to spend a day with VPD police constable Jodyne Keller. She and I drove and walked around the Downtown Eastside, visited Single Room Occupancy hotels and talked with their residents and from her I learned a great deal about how the VPD handles missing person’s cases in the region. It was a really great way to test some of my assumptions while writing the book. Though I did way too much research, I would have gladly spent more time with Constable Keller.

4. Have Patience

See Think-Ahead, above. It took much longer to get this book to press than I had wanted. I had hoped that this book would have been released in 2009, or 2010 at the latest. My plan was to have it come out before the Vancouver Olympics and the first few drafts I wrote used the 2010 games as a central theme in the mystery. That didn’t happen, so:

5. Be Flexible

When the timeline for the first two books in the series developed very slowly, I rewrote the book, or at least the part of it that used the Olympics as a focus point for the theme of SRO redevelopment across the City of Vancouver. The plot still worked.

6. Work Really Hard

The main thing I learned while writing this book was that I had to work really hard. Writing is hard work. Okay, that’s just what writers want you to think. Sometimes its hard work. First drafts are often pretty hard. Writing takes time and patience and effort and a lot of practice, and for some of us, that can be hard. Mostly it takes time. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers talks about the rule of 10,000 hours; you have to do something for about that long to get good at it. If you write every single day for three hours, it will take about 10 years to reach that magic number. It takes dogged determination to do that. That’s what I mean by working really hard.

7. Trust your Editor

I’ve gone on at some considerable length on this subject. I feel blessed to have an amazing story editor, Frances Thorsen, and an equally fantastic copy editor Lenore Hietkamp. They know my writing and they know my myriad mistakes. They resist as best they can what must be an almost unassailable urge to chide me for my habitual follies. When you find an editor you can work worth, trust them. Push back when you can, but listen to them always.

8. Believe in yourself

This is the bit where I remind you never to give up. Never. I was talking with a friend this week who has been helping me edit The Third Riel Conspiracy and we got onto the topic of PFO (Please *&^% off) letters. AKA: Rejections. Every writer gets them. William Faulkner, one of the greatest American novelists of all time said he could paper the walls of his house with rejection letters. Louise Penny, who is a phenomenal success in the mystery genre, said she received 80 rejections before she entered a writing contest in England, came in second, landed an agent and book deals in Europe and the United States.

The Vanishing Track wasn’t rejected by any publishers. Its predecessor The Cardinal Divide was and had it not seen the light of day, the Vanishing Track certainly would not have either. It took several years and half a dozen attempts to land a book deal for The Cardinal Divide. By deal I mean, I got about $500 for several years worth of blood sweat and tears. But it was a start! And I am grateful to NeWest Press – and in a nice twist of fate, my current publisher Ruth Linka, who was GM at NeWest – for, in a moment of delusional weakness, saying yes to Cole Blackwater.

When I started working with Ruth at TouchWood Editions on the Durrant Wallace series and The End of the Line it made sense to bring Cole Blackwater into the tent. Now, with the Silas Pearson – Red Rock Canyon Mysteries due to launch in September, that tent is getting crowded and probably smells like old socks and horses. But I’m very happy there.

Moral: believe in yourself and your work. Keep trying. There are thousands of publishers, and if they ALL say no, self publish. Post the whole damn thing on a blog. Give it away on the street corner. Be proud of what you’ve done. You’ve written a BOOK after all. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

9. Become Attached

For those of you who read my blog posts on Buddhism and Taoism and all manner of touchy-feely topics, you’ve likely heard me counsel non-attachment. Well, that’s fine when it comes to life’s big mysteries: There’s nothing solid to hold onto and everything is illusion, blaa-blaa-blaa. But books and writing; that’s another thing all together.

I don’t mean become attached to the words themselves. That would be bad as I’ve noted on my posts about editing. Become attached to the words is a sure-fire way to find yourself very sad. What I’m talking about is subject matter. Become attached to what you are writing about. In the case of the third Cole Blackwater novel what I became attached to was the idea that homelessness could be solved.

Homelessness is a human constructed problem. In fact, the problem is that we haven’t constructed enough proper human habitation. There is a dire need for community supported housing in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Calgary and all across Canada and the United States. These housing units should be built and maintained by the government and could allow people who have lived rough, or in shelters, to slowly gain their independence by living in units where they get help when they need it.

Studies show that over the life of these units, they are much less expensive than paying the astronomical costs – some studies suggest as much as $40K/year/person – associated with homelessness. Policing, social services, health care and other expenses associated with people being left to fend for themselves when they are suffering from addictions, mental illness or have simply fallen on hard times are a tremendous burden on our budgets. Our failure as a society to support the least fortunate among us is an unacceptable burden on our moral conscious.

Homelessness is entirely caused by human actions. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and they get left behind. Poverty, and its sister homelessness, are born from affluence. I am entirely in favour of the compassionate society that helps people left out in the cold to live dignified, safe and meaningful lives.

That’s what I’ve learned. And a lot about sentence structure, plot, narrative, character development and dialog, but this has gone on long enough as it is.

To get updates on The Vanishing Track keep in touch by following me on Twitter @stephenlegault.

On Wednesday Jeffrey cut class after lunch and walked toward home. He felt he deserved it. He had, after all, gone to every class on Monday and Tuesday. He had even attended his biology class.

During morning announcements on Monday he was summoned to his counsellor’s office. When he arrived Dr. Lemon, whom he had come to know well over the past year, greeted him. She asked him to join her in her office. He found Ms. Wilson, his biology teacher, sitting in one of the plastic chairs at Dr. Lemon’s conference table.

“What’s this, group therapy?” Jeffery said.

“Grab a seat, Jeff,” said Lemon, sternly. “Ms. Wilson asked me to arrange this meeting.”

Dr. Lemon turned to the biology teacher and indicated that they should start. Wilson looked down slightly and then back at Jeffrey. She said, “I’d like you to come back to class today.”

Jeffrey’s heart sank. He had already begun to look forward to finishing school each day at 2:00. He had planned his excursions into the woods to sketch. Jeffrey regarded Ms. Wilson coolly as she said, “Why didn’t you tell me that it was Shawn that was talking?”

“What would have been the point?”

“You wouldn’t have had to leave.”

A long moment passed, “I don’t rat on my friends.”

“Shawn told me after class Friday that he was talking. He said he was sorry. You can come back to class this afternoon. Okay?”

Jeffrey was implacable. “Jeffrey will see you then,” said Dr. Lemon looking at Wilson without seeking confirmation from the boy.

Jeffrey watched Wilson leave.  “You should take it easy on Ms. Wilson,” said the counsellor.

“She didn’t take it easy on me. Now I’ve got to go back into that stupid class.”

“Will you attend the classes?”

Jeffrey smiled and looked out the window at the morning. The birch trees shimmered in the breeze. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“The weather.”

And so on this sunny afternoon in late April he was walking toward the woods near his home. It was hot. The traffic on Upper End Line droned with the constancy of a bee hive. Once in the woods Jeffery strolled through clearings that were carpeted with trilliums. Absorbed with the brilliance of the flowers, he soon found himself on the banks of the tiny creek.

More water seemed to course between the margins of the brook than normal. He imagined that freeing the waters from the strangulating obstruction of newspapers on Friday had helped. But more water pushed between these banks than seemed explainable by his efforts. Jeffrey was about to dig his sketchpad from his pack when his eye was attracted upstream to a flash in the water. His hand still buried in the green canvas bag, he looked to where he had seen the movement and there was  a blaze of motion again. A burst of silver-white, like lightning moving through the water; it was gone in an instant, but like a quick glance at the sun, it had been burned into Jeffery’s memory. He saw the flash again and in a moment of dawning recognition, identified the arching back of a rainbow trout slipping upstream from its hiding place behind a broad stone. He watched it glide around a bend in the creek and disappear. Through the shimmer of light on the creek’s surface he became aware that more fish rested on the bottom, noses upstream, mouths agape, waiting for mayflies or stone fly larvae to drift by. Jeffrey watched as another trout moved from the eddy where it rested, out into the current and rolled over onto its side, mouth breaking the water, to swallow an insect drifting on the lazy current. Then, like quicksilver, the fish slipped back behind the rock.

Jeffrey sat for an hour and watched, making several sketches as fish moved up the creek from downstream and disappeared upstream out of sight. There shouldn’t be fish here, he thought. There were no fish here on the weekend when he came to collect the newspapers. There were no fish here last autumn. For all he knew, there had been no fish here since the 1970′s when this creek had been channelled and diverted through culverts to make way for Upper End Line and the housing developments that now surrounded this tiny woodlot.

He followed the brook upstream, pressing as he did through a small thicket of willows, and stopped abruptly. There was movement in the shallows. A great blue heron silently lifted up from where it had been hunting in the creek. The bird flapped once, twice, and disappeared through the trees, up the creek and out of sight. The flash of its prehistoric looking wings, its long trailing legs, bent neck, and stiletto-like beak were unmistakable.

Jeffery sat down on the bank, his gaze fixed on where the heron had been and shook his head. It shouldn’t be here either. It can’t be here. He looked down at the pool where the bird had been hunting. Trout swam by. On a stone, wet with the splash of water, was a rainbow trout, its side ripped open, as if it had been impaled on the tip of a spear.

***

In the first week of June the temperature reached 30 degrees Celsius every day. In his morning math class Jeffrey sat next to the open window watching waves of heat rise off the pavement of the parking lot. He dreamed of being in the woods with a pencil and paper, in the cool shade of beech and maple trees. His teacher, Mr. Reid, was explaining something at the blackboard.

“Mr. Patterson.”

Jeffrey did not turn his head from the window.

“Mr. Patterson?”

Jeffrey was miles away, walking along the pathway in the woods, following the tracks of deer that he had seen only a few days before. He had not seen a deer since moving from the north. But he had seen the tracks on Saturday while he was exploring a section of the woods he rarely visited. Their cloven hooves had pressed little heart-shaped tracks into the soft earth of the pathway and he had followed them to the chain-link fence that bordered his housing complex.

“Jeffrey Patterson. Earth to Jeffrey Patterson.”

Jeffrey turned to see Mr. Reid standing next to his desk, an amused look on his face. “Care to rejoin the class, Jeffrey?”

Several of his classmates snickered at this and Jeffrey looked around the room and scowled. Mr. Reid seemed to be awaiting an answer to what Jeffrey thought was a rhetorical question.

“Not really,” said Jeffrey, hoping to end his school day early.

Mr. Reid smiled. “You’re not getting off the hook that easy, sport.”

***

On the last day of school, Jeffrey skipped all but his third period class. After spending the morning in the woods he walked straight to Paul Winters’ class. He went to where canvases in various stages of completion were sitting upright next to the window. A six-foot-long, four-foot-high painting that he had been working on earlier this semester was among them. It was a kaleidoscope of light and colour. Even to its creator – its harshest critic –  the painting imbued the observer with the impression that they were running through the woods. The myriad hues of green affected a gentle blur, and the light that poured through the canopy danced in warm yellows and pale blues. Jeffrey had finished the painting almost a month ago and had not looked at it since.

He looked at it now. Later in the day his mother was coming with the truck and they would take the painting home. He was going to give it to her for her birthday. As he prepared to drape a heavy canvas over the painting to ready it for transport, his eye detected something out of place in the lower right-hand corner. He bent down to investigate. He felt his heartbeat rise as he studied the painting: he thought that someone had defaced it. There was a flash of red among the greens and yellows that he had not painted himself. But the red was not graffiti. It was carefully tinted. It was a red fox poised, waiting at the margins of the dense foliage.

Stay tuned next week when I post Part 3 of Among the Wounded. This is the title story in a collection of short stories that I’ve been working on for an embarrassingly long time. To receive updates when I post new pieces follow me on Twitter @stephenlegault. Feedback is welcome. Post your comments below.