What Does a Nice Review Mean to Me?

I tell myself that I have always written, but that’s a lie. Growing up, I don’t recall telling stories that anyone would pause to listen to. I drew a little – copying my favourite characters from comic books and Sunday funnies and inventing a few of my own – a dog and a hippie cowboy – that I drew and redrew with little variation. There were never any punch lines. They never flew outside the panels that I drew, nor could they.

Whatever faint praise I may have first got for my drawing when I was 12 had faded completely away by my mid-teens. I wanted badly to be special – to do something no one else could do. So, I kept drawing, I just started drawing things that were hideous. People will pay attention to that, I thought. And they did. There was a character called Rat Fink by an artist named Ed “Big Daddy” Roth – that was an attention-grabbing emblem in the emerging world of hot rod culture. I couldn’t have cared less about the hot rods. What fascinated me were the millions of people who found something beautiful and empowering in Rat Fink – the ugliest of uglies.

But still, I was only copying someone else’s creation.

In grade 10, I had a teacher who assigned us to write fiction. I managed to write a few poems that made it into my high school year book. They basically reworded the sentiments from a couple counter-culture rock songs including “The Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-to-Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish. It was high school protest – me being as counterculture as I could be at the time. It depicted the most wholesome elements of 60s pop culture (like toothpaste and breakfast cereal) with a sort of Roy Lichtenstein comic book sensibility and mixed it all with imagery of young men dying horribly in a senseless foreign war. I still didn’t have anything original to say. But I was finding original ways to say it – by incorporating other people’s ideas into a blend that seemed to be saying something worthwhile. I didn’t even sign it with my own name, called myself “Drogel,” trying and completely failing to capture that ugly/beautiful blend that I had used in the poems themselves.

My first fiction of any merit was at 15, when I penned a one page bit of science fiction/philosophy about universes within universes that ended with the profound revelation that our universe is merely an atom in a larger universe – and so on. The passage of time changes according to size, so that millennia pass in a micro-universe in the time it takes a person in a macro-universe to get out of bed and go to the bathroom. The story ends with the combing of the protagonist’s hair – turning him into the destroyer of worlds and civilizations. It was the first time I had ever risen to the challenge of organizing and expressing the strange M.C. Eschereque ideas in my head.

And it was my answer to those people who challenged me when I said I didn’t believe in God, demanding to know, “What do you believe in, then?”

“I believe in infinity,” I might have said. But I wasn’t sure that I did. My next story was longer – at least 1,000 words – and asked the question “what can you do if your guardian angel is a complete screw-up?” This demonstrated my understanding of workplace dynamics before I had my first job. Family dynamics too! So many of us are screw ups in so many aspects of our lives – and yet still we get by. Most of us anyway.

I think my teacher was more puzzled by my work than impressed, but I was hooked. I put away my Hardy Boy books forever and started to look for books that dealt with the sort of big ideas that I was coming up with on my own. I found Raymond F. Jones and Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison. I discovered Black Sabbath and Philip K. Dick at about the same time. In an attempt to make the universe around me seem more science fictional I started dropping acid. Not all my experiences with psychedelics were happy ones, and in fact, many were downright terrifying. That was when I began writing horror; although my horror contained no vampires and werewolves – instead, going to places where the foundations of reality perpetually come apart, where the centre could not hold and we were all “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.” I started losing friends to drugs and crime and plain old stupidity.

Several years later, I enrolled in creative writing classes at university and met a girl there who was willing to invest enough time in our relationship to get me through my insecurities. Problem was she believed that giving up one’s dreams was just part of the maturation process.

I never grew up enough to believe that. We broke up and I left my old life and beautiful children behind to pursue – what exactly??

Freedom, creation, frustration, and failure?

I kept trying to prove my value to those around me and kept falling short. I avoided my father’s alcoholism but developed a psychological dependence on marijuana.  While it fueled my imagination and idealism, it leached away my coherence and productivity. I entered my 40s, facing the realization that I didn’t have the self-discipline to make my dreams happen. I leaned too heavily on my second wife, and the relationship that had re-lit my creative ambitions sputtered and died.

Thus began my era of over-compensation. I had so much to prove! I gave up fiction writing and refocussed on more attainable goals. I started by launching a magazine, Canadian Newcomer, aimed at helping new immigrants adapt and integrate into Canadian society. I put my life savings and 12 hour days into trying to make it work, which it did for almost 10 years, despite my missteps and dithering nature. I employed five people, giving several of them footholds in Canada. I got several pats on the back from the provincial and federal governments and the magazine did a lot of good in the community. 

Shortly after launching the magazine I co-wrote a non-fiction book, How to Find a Job in Canada, that was published by Oxford University Press – once again proving to me that I am a good writer. It may have been what inspired me to think, “It was stupid of me to give up the one thing on earth I do well.”

So I went back to writing. I wrote the first draft of a short story that is reprinted in my new collection, Psychedelia Noir and rejoined my high profile writers group. But I couldn’t give the fiction writing much attention. What little focus or business acumen I had was demanded of me when I found myself going head-to-head with the Toronto Star who had launched a competing magazine. Not having the sense to give up after losing my federal funding, I kept shovelling more and more of my resources and the resources of friends and family into a black hole before my life-partner metaphorically slapped me around and told me I needed to let it go.

I drifted for a while, unemployed and incredulous that my credentials were incapable of getting me a decent job. I didn’t think I was over-the-hill at 58, but it seemed like the rest of the world did. I didn’t even recognize the depression that was pulling me down.

At my partner’s suggestion, I went to a psychiatrist who told me that I almost certainly had Attention Deficit Disorder. He expressed admiration for the coping mechanisms I had managed to develop over my lifetime and the goals I had managed to attain. He gave me answers, encouragement and even some good employment advice. “You’re good with people. Maybe you should look for a concierge job.”

As it turned out, I was stoic and competent enough to land and keep a security guard job – and as it morphed into a concierge position, I took advantage of the relatively low demands to self publish a collection of short stories and finish my novel.

Yay! Champagne time!! Wait a minute. Not quite.

The only peers I cared about outside of my family and extended family – were the people in my writers group – and they told me the novel I had been working on was not good, it felt like all the air had been sucked out of all the universes all at once.  

There are times in your life when the critiques of fellow work-shoppers will drive you to greater heights and times they will simply crush you. Same drill – completely different results. The workshop could no longer give me what I needed from it. So I quit.

With my ample spare time and my down time at work, I went back to a novel I had started in the late 90s and rewritten as a screenplay shortly before putting aside all my creative pursuits to go into the business world. The book, Avenging Glory, morphed as I was writing it and I realized that the set-up could and probably should sustain a novel all by itself. So I went ahead and expanded the first ten chapters into a novel called Avenging Glory.

It’s now called Remapping the Human Template and both this and the earlier version (just called The Human Template) received great comments from some very articulate people in reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. A few are from good friends, some from new friends and an encouraging number from people I have never met. Because of an anticipated perception of bias, my immediate family has refrained from putting up reviews.

So, although I have some great, honest, reader reviews online, it wasn’t enough to get the ball rolling – if you consider the ball as my reader base. Actually, it’s not the ball that is my reader base, but rather the whole bunch of tiny people underneath my idealistically giant ball giving it their Sisyphean best. Since I don’t want to scare any readers away, I encourage potential readers to think of the ball as a beach ball, and I promise to make sure nobody gets harmed in the execution of this metaphor.

Which brings me to this – three months after my initial book release, I got a brilliant review from R. Graeme Cameron at Amazing Stories that made my year.

And then he adds,

“this is basically a rip-roaring adventure with action a’plenty, albeit steeped in intellectual pondering as to what it all means. This is a very neat trick to pull off, but it works. Amazingly, it works. Kudos to Dale L. Sproule. A remarkable achievement. I like it a lot. Can’t wait to read the next volume.

My joy certainly wasn’t just a matter of needing or appreciating praise, although God knows, praise is the most wonderful of balms. It’s a celebration of hope – that my books will reach an audience that appreciate them – and that such an audience is more than just a figment of my wishful thinking.

Over the next few years I came to realize that the book wasn’t as good as I tried to make it, so I rewrote it – turning it into a book I am completely happy with. It hasn’t received the attention or praise that it did when the first version came out, but I have stopped being shy about promoting it. As my tale continues over the coming months I hope to win over a larger and larger audience. Remapping the Human Template is the book I want you to read. Book Two – In the Dominion of the Executrix will be out this winter. And the third book by the end of 2025.

I’m now projecting that the Gods of the New Wilderness series will be four books but it may stretch to five. Thanks in advance for coming along for the ride.