About a month ago, the good folks at CEO TV shot a segment about TBLP and my day job as a PR professional. They also sent a camera crew up to Orillia for the Leacock Award weekend to help round out the segment. Well, it aired nationally on Global a week or so ago and in case you need a laugh, you can watch it here…
I’ve just returned from the family cottage on Georgian Bay where I’ve just spend two weeks offline with my family. It was wonderful despite an unusually high mosquito count. I read several books, swam, slept, ate, and watched movies at night with my two sons. It was strange being completely discounted for two weeks (although my BlackBerry worked sporadically if I stood at the highest point on our property and stuck my BB in the air like the Statue of Liberty’s torch) but I managed. My in-laws arrived from Nova Scotia and we had a great visit. We saw some wildlife when we dropped off our recycling one day and my mother-in-law took this great shot.
We also took them on a day trip to Orillia to visit the Stephen Leacock Museum. Here are a couple of shots showing me sitting in Leacock’s library and the display in the Leacock Medal Room showcasing books and artifacts from the 61 year history of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
I’ll be back to Orillia on July 25th to do a public reading at the Summer Leacock Festival. I have to read for 30 minutes so I’ll need to decide which sections to present. My heart rate is slightly elevated already.
By the way, here’s the great Hamilton Spectator article by Mark Leslie Lefebvre that I mentioned in an earlier post. Thanks Mark!
Stay tuned for more information about all the events I’ll be doing in the fall to coincide with the release of the McClelland & Stewart edition of TBLP.
It’s nice to be back…
My wife, two sons and I have just returned from Orillia, Ontario where we’ve spent the weekend attending a number of events surrounding the Leacock Medal for Humour. It was a wonderful time spent with the incredibly warm and welcoming people who manage one of Canada’s oldest and most prestigious literary awards. I was presented with the Leacock Medal at an amazing dinner for about 250 people at the Geneva Park Conference Centre on shore of beautiful Lake Couchiching. As is tradition, I spoke for about half an hour trying to strike the right humourous-serious balance. I think it went well. Before and after the dinner my time was spent inscribing books. Don Ross, the owner of the great local bookstore, Manticore Books, took care of selling 65 copies of TBLP while I handled the signing.
The medal itself is amazing. The photo above doesn’t do it justice. It’s solid silver and shines like it’s emitting, and not just reflecting, light. It was quite simply one of the high points in my life so far.
To top it all off, the whole family sat in the Toronto Dominion Bank Comfort Zone, four leather arm chairs, at field level along the first base line for the Toronto Blue Jays - Baltimore Orioles game this afternoon. At one point we looked and found ourselves on the Jumbotron. My ever-resourceful son Calder took this photo.
On a whim last fall, I submitted TBLP to the Independent Publisher Book Awards in the U.S. in the regional category, Canada-East Fiction. Well many months later, the results were finally announced today. As if winning the Leacock Medal weren’t enough good news, TBLP just won the gold medal. Known as the “Ippy” awards, they recognize excellence in independent publishing, including self-publishing. Now that TBLP will be published by McClelland & Stewart in the fall, and I hope any subsequent books I may write, this may be the only independent Publisher Book Award I’ll ever win.
All of this seems too good to be true. I sure hope I’m not in for a run of bad luck…
I was browsing on Indigo today when I noticed an “Online Bestseller” banner across the top of TBLP. I have no idea exactly what it indicates, beyond I suppose that sales lately have been strong. I’m curious to know what it really means and have e-mailed Indigo in the hopes of finding out. In the interim, I’ve certainly no complaints about being tagged as an “online bestseller.” I guess the Leacock Medal honeymoon continues…
I’m certain I’ve now exhausted my lifetime allocation of good fortune. Yesterday my wonderful agent, Beverley Slopen, confirmed that McClelland & Stewart will publish TBLP as one its fall releases. M&S is the heavyweight Canadian publishing house with a long and rich history. What’s more, Douglas Gibson, yes the Douglas Gibson, will not only work with me on the manuscript, but the novel will actually be published under his prestigious imprint, Douglas Gibson Books. To me, this outcome is kind of like aiming to win the high school track meet, but instead ending up going to the Olympic Games and bringing home a gold medal. Doug is probably the most respected editor/publisher in the country having worked closely with some of Canada’s and the world’s leading literary lights including Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, and W.O. Mitchell to name but a few. I am over the moon.
As the Globe and Mail article below mentions, there is some irony in this most welcome outcome. Doug and I are actually friends, because our respective wives are close friends. I’ve so enjoyed the times the four of us have spent together. When you’re a passionate reader and weekend writer, nothing is more enjoyable than listening to Doug’s wonderful stories from his illustrious publishing career. It was a discussion with Doug three or four years ago about three-time Leacock Medal winner Donald Jack that ultimately got me off the couch and writing TBLP. Until last week, I’d never really spoken to Doug about my novel. I can only imagine how often he is accosted at parties or conferences by writers hoping that he’ll review their manuscripts. So I chose not to talk about my writing with Doug so as not to complicate the wonderful relationship we have. But after the Leacock Medal, Beverley Slopen did make an approach and the publishing deal was consummated yesterday. I could not be happier and I’m so looking forward to working with Doug.
The M&S edition of The Best Laid Plans, with new cover and interior design, will be launched this fall. I’m counting the days…
Back in February 2007, Steve Paikin, the outstanding host of The Agenda, TV Ontario’s great nightly public affairs program, was kind enough to interview me about the then unpublished TBLP. Here’s the blog post Steve wrote in the wake of the Leacock Medal announcement:
The Funniest Book In Canada
Back in February of 2007, I interviewed a political wise guy named Terry Fallis. Terry has been around the block in the political world. He now plies his trade at an eponymously named consulting firm.
But once upon a time, he was one of those back room boys who worked for politicians and tried to get them elected.
He’s a smart guy and figured there must be a funny book somewhere inside him, given all of what he’d seen in politics.
So he wrote a book, set on Parliament Hill, and followed the travails of a once naïve, now a bit too cynical back room boy who’s seen too much of politics’ seamy underbelly.
His book is called The Best Laid Plans and Terry rolled it out in unusual fashion.
Once a week, he downloaded a chapter of his work into podcast form on his website. He narrates the action himself. He did it this way because no Canadian publisher would print his work. Not a one.
So rather than wait for that, Fallis got the book into the readers’ hands with the newfangled technology so many of us are using these days. And what do you know: he ends up winning the Stephen Leacock prize for humour.
While the credit is all Terry’s, I take a certain amount of pride in saying we were the first program to interview the author, when, quite frankly, no one was beating his doors down to give him any attention.
So, to see and hear my conversation with Terry Fallis from last February, about his own political history, and his successful political novel, watch this web-exclusive video and enjoy.
Thanks Steve. You were there at the beginning and I’m grateful.
I am going to stop posting media coverage. It does seem kind of self-congratulatory but I love this headline so much. It’s pithy, to the point, and oh so accurate. This story appeared on the front page of the wonderful Orillia Packet & Times on Thursday, May 1st, the day after the Leacock luncheon.
The power of a little media coverage. On a lark, I checked iTunes this morning and was shocked (for the second time this week) to find the TBLP podcast sitting at the number one spot (Arts and Literature). Certainly a Leacock halo effect. I grabbed a screen shot as I don’t imagine it will stay at these lofty heights for long. Bizarre to be ahead of the New York Times Book Review podcast, which is one of my “must listen” podcasts. Just another surreal aspect to a surreal week.
The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, reviewed TBLP today in its wonderful Books section. My stomach has been in knots since I learned today would be the day. I can breathe again. It’s not bad:
More satire, please, we’re Canadian
D. GRANT BLACK
May 3, 2008
THE BEST LAID PLANS
By Terry Fallis
iUniverse, 257 pages, $21.95
A few years ago, CBC-TV foolishly cancelled Snakes and Ladders, a political dramedy set on Parliament Hill. The appetite for more Canadian political intrigue, especially with a satiric bent, is still there. But where do you find it in novel form?
First-time novelist Terry Fallis knew there was an audience. So he penned The Best Laid Plans and shopped it around to Canada’s publishers, but was not offered a book deal. So the tenacious Fallis self-published his 2007 book of fiction through iUniverse.
Fallis also submitted his own book to the judges of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. And this week, The Best Laid Plans won the $10,000 prize, beating out such A-list authors as Will Ferguson and Douglas Coupland.
This self-published wonder should be a cause for concern for the decision-makers at Canada’s faltering publishing houses about what should be jumping out of their slush piles, into print and on to national market.
The Best Laid Plans is not the best book of political satire I’ve read, but it’s amusing, enlightening - and Canadian. It deftly explores the Machiavellian machinations of Ottawa’s political culture, from the grassroots level in a fictitious federal riding during an election campaign, to the Wizards of Ottawa who operate the levers behind the curtain. This is a great platform to create satire that verges on parody.
Fallis, a former Ottawa backroom player who now runs the Toronto PR firm Thornley Fallis, is all too familiar with how the federal political game is played. The Best Laid Plans is written in first person through the eyes of the main protagonist, Daniel Addison, a 32-year-old former speechwriter to the leader of the Liberal opposition.
It’s immediately clear that Addison is a mouthpiece for Fallis’s own political views and the failings in Canada’s Parliament. This is how he starts his prologue: “I could take no more. With the backroom boys still driving Machiavelli’s motor coach, I was just a helpless, hapless passenger as they tossed the public interest under the wheels yet again. Just to be sure, we stopped, backed up, and rumbled over it once more. It was time to bail out. … On Parliament Hill, the pendulum of power swings between the cynical political operators (CPOs) and the idealist policy wonks (IPWs). It’s a naturally regulating model that inevitably transfers power from one group to another - and back again.”
After finishing his PhD on the side, Addison leaves his speechwriting job for a chance to become a tenured English professor at the University of Ottawa. But he owes one more favour to his Grit overlords: Find a Liberal candidate to run in the upcoming federal election against an entrenched Tory incumbent.
Addison’s lame-duck candidate is Angus McLintock, an indifferent 60-year-old Scots immigrant and professor of mechanical engineering. While the other characters are believably drawn, especially the Liberal leader’s obnoxious executive assistant, I struggled with McLintock, who seemed nothing more than a caricature when he was introduced.
McLintock is The Simpsons’ Groundskeeper Willie with a PhD. His pedantic tendency to correct people on proper English usage is odd since he speaks in a Scots dialect that sounds as if he just stepped out of an 18th-century Robbie Burns poem: “Aye, I cannae argue with you. Feel free to remind me what it feels like to face a rabble like that the next time me confidence clouds me judgment.”
Eventually, I came around, as the character developed into a chess-playing, hovercraft-building political rebel.
That Fallis’s political satire has won the Leacock could signal a sustained return of the go-for-the-jugular social and political satire missing in Canada these days.
D. Grant Black is a Saskatchewan journalist and editor who has considered self-publishing for his satire project.
Phew! I can certainly live with this…
Welcome to the podcast of The Best Laid Plans, a satirical novel of Canadian politics written by Terry Fallis.
Learn a bit about the author and podcast narrator, Terry Fallis »
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