I’m on vacation right now. Paid vacation. And I will continue to be on vacation until the 12th of next month.

Let me explain.

I was contacted by my cool boss Prasad today, and he told me that since our voice actor Ryan has gone on vacation, I might as well do so as well.

That’s no big deal. It’s summer. Vacations happen. Or so I am told^[1]  .I would have understood it if that had meant no scripts and no money from Prasad until then.

The big deal is that Prasad is going to pay me anyway, exactly as if I was still doing a script per weekday for him.

Is he a cool guy, or what?

So I am officially en vacance. It’s a strange feeling. Kinda cool, but also a tad disorienting. I know that I will miss the world unless I find something else to do that demands as much effort and focus as those scripts.

And I’d been having so much fun writing them lately.

So whatever I do, it will have to be just as fun. That means writing comedy. Perhaps I will use this time to try and write the Great Canadian Comedy Novel.

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing in the style of such hilarious Brits as Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams. But I have never been able to get started.

Starting the writing is always the hardest part for me. Kinda of like how your car’s engine uses a lot of power just to get moving, or how when you are pushing something that has wheels on it, you have to push hard to get going.

Once I have a satisfactory starting point, the rest of the story tends to fall into place. It’s like that classic crystallization experiment from school science fairs. The one where the student supersaturates some water by heating the water up and melting a lot of sugar into it when it’s hot, then letting it cool.

The cold water is now in a supersaturated state. There’s way more sugar in it than could normally be dissolved into it. In a sense, the extra sugar “wants” to precipitate out of the liquid, but it can’t, because there’s nothing for the sugar to crystallize around. ^[2]

Enter the Small Length of Rough String… OF SCIENCE!

You dip the string into the supersaturated water, and sugar crystals immediately begin to form around it because the rough surface of the string has tons of places for the crystals to get their thing on.

Congratulations, you’ve official done some neato sciencing, and what’s more, you now know how to make rock candy.

Anyhow. Where was I? And how did I get here? Oh right, ideas crystallizing.

So if I had a good starting point for my comedic science fiction and/or fantasy novel, the rest would flow naturally from there. That’s how it works for me.

When I was at VFS, we were taught that in writing, events need to follow one another in a logical sequence that never leaves the audience wondering “How did we get here”? or worse, “WTF is happening and why should I care? “.

And I remember thinking, there’s another way of writing?

But I suppose there is, because I could easily imagine someone writing a lot of terrific scenes but skimping out on the connections between those great scenes, and that would destroy the narrative structure entirely.

For me, it has to make sense in a logical sequence because that’s how I write. One thing leading to another. That also happens to be how reality works too, which is why it’s so important to get it write.

But I would never claim that I have never broken the chain of causality in my writing. It’s just that when I do it, it’s because I don’t realize that what makes sense to me doesn’t always make sense to anyone else.

And that would be fine were I James Joyce. But I want to entertain people, and that means my inner audience must remain at least somewhat objective.

And even for a hardcore truth seeker like me, that can be painful.

Another challenge will be to keep the tone light. My most successful attempt to write something like Pratchett or Adams, my attempt at Pratchett type fantasy, started off with a very funny scene in exactly the right tone but rapidly devolved into stuff about death and ghosts and tortured romance and all kinds of dark shit.

What can I say, I got issue.

And it’s not like a funny novel can’t “go there”. Pratchett’s stuff proves that you can. People think of his novels as being light and fluffy and warm, and for the most part they are. But he’s also had scenes where a pregnant woman is beaten by her drunk abusive husband so bad that the baby dies.

So it’s not like I couldn’t get away with some dark shit in a funny novel. The best comedy, in fact, holds your hand as it takes you through dark and scary stuff, using the comedy as a kind of anesthetic, and thus makes the world a less scary place for people by confronting the scary parts of our lives and leaving them with the feeling that those things aren’t nearly as scary now.

Because they have been there.

The problem I had with the novel in question was that I realized almost halfway through that it had stopped being funny at all a long time ago.

It had become a serious novel, and that is not at all what I set out to write.

So if I decide to write this novel, I will be doing to while constantly reminding myself that it has to stay funny most of the time.

Then again, I might do something completely different.

Like look for better paying work on Upwork.

I have a career to think about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.