Montreal means funny

Guest post by Stephanie Noel

Let me be honest. I don't like winter; I don't care if the Montreal Canadians make it to the series or not and maple syrup, although delicious, is not something I pour on everything (I will, however, defend ours as the best in the world. Take that, Vermont!) Yes, I am French Canadian, why do you ask?

When Scott asked me to come up a guest post about the influence of Montreal in my writing, I was delighted. Then, after telling everyone that cares (or doesn't, really I didn't give them much of a choice) that I was going to write a guest post — moi! — I started thinking about how I was going to tackle this topic. It would have been easy to write about the first few things that come to mind when thinking about Quebec (aside from the three listed above and poutine): the English/French rivalry the province's desire for independence and the fact that our students demonstrate with little red square pinned to their clothes while banging on pots and pans.

Those topics I discarded as overdone. I kept on brainstorming.

I could also have talked about the realities of a Francophone writing in English in a province that will die defending La loi 101. This too, I felt had been explored numerous times. So I went deeper (insert Inception joke of your choice here). What is it that living in Montreal brings to my writing? What is so typical of Montreal that it permeates almost all spheres of our lives? When I found it, I realized that it had been staring me in the face all along.

What really influences my writing as a Montrealer is humour.

Humour is so natural to me that I take it for granted. I'm not saying that Montreal (or Quebec) has the monopoly on humour in Canada (I enjoy the acts of many English-Canadian stand-up comics, such as Russell Peters), but it is definitely an important part of our lives. We have the biggest humour festival in the world (Just for Laughs), a stand-up comedy university (our ratio of stand-up comedian per capita must be unusually high), and many girls will turn down a good-looking guy because he doesn't make her laugh. I know I have.

Montreal's Just for Laughs is the world's biggest comedy festival.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons


Being funny is what allowed me to survive high school relatively unscarred and has allowed me to make friends easily despite my shyness. I always felt that making people laugh was half the battle. Lastly, I'm convinced that our dads make the worst puns in all of Canada (my dad has shamed me more than once at the supermarket.)

I can't speak for everyone, obviously, but for me, it translates into a quirky writing style, infused with humour and wisecracking. There is of course a big difference between trying to be funny on purpose and just ending up being amusing. I am deadpan and quick with repartee, but I can't write comedy. I have never really tried, but I know it would just end up being boring because I can't be funny on demand. I need context, someone to give me something to work with. That's what happens when I write. I do a lot of automatic humour when working on the first draft and as a result, my characters do things that make me smile, even sometimes laugh. I don't try; it just happens.

Maybe this constant desire to be funny is a manifestation of the traditional Quebec underdog mentality. For a very long time, the province had an inferiority complex (and sometimes still does); while Anglophones were, historically, white collars with two kids, a dog and a white picket fence, Francophones plowed fields, manned assembly lines and reproduced as fast as bunnies. It's possible that humour was a way for French Canadians to defend themselves by mocking the powers that be. Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, people can't antagonize you if you make them laugh. As Jimmy Carr (famously controversial British stand-up comedian says, "I write these jokes so that you'll love me."

Yes, Stephanie Noel is a Montrealer — which is why she's always
fashionable, even to wash the champagne glasses.

To sum it all, I could say that although I write in English and hardly identify with most of the French-Canadian culture, I think that Montreal has contributed to make me a writer with a sense of humour. A twisted and very dark one, mind you, but a sense of humour nonetheless.

Allow me to babble a little more to thank Scott for this great opportunity to reflect on the influences Montreal has had and still has on me.

Thank you, Stephanie!

Stephanie Noel is an avid reader, inspired writer and seasoned traveller based in, of course, Montreal, Canada. She graduated from Université de Montréal with a degree in East Asian Studies and Anthropology. She recently came back to Canada after five years spent teaching Japan. She’s currently working on different fiction and non-fiction projects. You can follow her on her blog, A Truth Universally Acknowledged, on her Facebook page, and on Twitter @atuaStephanieN. Also, leave a comment, below!



The Little Nani blog tour

Today, Written Words is happy to host a stop on the blog tour for the relaunch of The Funny Adventures of Little Nani by Cinta Garcia de la Rosa.
Yesterday’s stop on the tour was Helle Soe Gade’s photo and writing blog, where Cinta explained how and why she’s relaunching her collection of charming, hilarious and empowering stories for children. Here’s an abbreviated version of the blurb:

Little Nani is a little girl who likes helping people. However, when she helps people the results can be a bit unexpected. Why is that? Little Nani is a witch! Or at least she wants to be a witch. With her magic wand, she will try to cast different spells to help her friends, but she won’t be successful all the time.

Funny ostriches, horses that love reading, super-fast turtles, grumpy zombies… Little Nani has lots of friends!

Cinta provides places in the book for readers to draw their own illustrations of Little Nani’s misadventures. But now, Cinta herself will explain what led to The Funny Adventures of Little Nani.

What inspired you to write children's fiction?

That’s a good question. It’s so good that I don’t have a clue about how to answer it! Seriously though, I’m not sure. One day Little Nani popped into my head and I considered that maybe she would be more suitable for kids than for adults. But it seems that adults enjoy her adventures too, so that’s a bonus.

I have been a teacher for 16 years, and I love children. Writing for children was quite a challenge and at the same time something easy to do.

Where are most of your readers? North America? The UK? Europe?

Since I write in English, I don’t have many readers in Europe. So most of my readers are in North America and the UK.

Where did you get the name "Little Nani"?

In 2004 and 2005 I was living in London, working as an au pair. Au pairs live with a host family and help to take care of the children. So I was a nanny. I was living with a Jamaican family, where I had to take care of three girls. The three of them were very surprised to see that their nanny was such a tiny person (yes, I am very short), so they started to call me “Little Nanny.” Since Little Nani is a reflection of myself, I thought it proper to use the nickname my lovely girls from London gave me.

Are any of the characters in Little Nani or the second book based on real people that you know?

Yes, lots of them. I can’t avoid it. I have a funny conversation with a friend, or a friend does something funny, or I live a certain situation, and the character pops into my head immediately. I will talk more about this question in my blog stop tomorrow on My Books & I.

Have you ever had an adventure like one of Little Nani’s? Where you thought you could solve a problem, but where the attempt went wrong and the situation ended up being unpredictably worse?

Actually, yes. While I was in London, I had a Spanish friend there who was constantly in trouble, so the mother of the children I was living with didn’t really like her. I had to come back to Spain in a hurry when my family informed me that my mum was ill, so I thought that maybe if I made my friend help me with the preparations and made her look like a sensible girl, my “host mother” would like her better. I told my friend to come over to the house and offer herself to go with me to the airport and to take some of my bags to her house, which was closer to the bus station, so I didn’t need to walk with those heavy bags and all the luggage myself. She did that and my “host mother” was quite happy to see that my friend was trying to be helpful for a change.

I went to bed and the next morning, when collecting all my things, I discovered that my friend had taken the bag with my passport and money! I panicked, but then I thought that she would bring the bags, so there won’t be any problem. The problem was that she overslept, arrived at the airport too late and I missed my flight. So I tried to help her and it backfired on me.

If you could turn anyone in your life into an animal, who would it be and which animal would you choose?

It would be my sister. Taking into account that she is pretty lazy and her favourite hobby is just to lie down on the sofa, I would turn her into a cat, so she could spend her days doing nothing.

What do you consider your greatest writing challenge?

My biggest challenge is to write something longer than a short story. I am a pantser, so I don’t like planning. Indeed, I am unable to plan. I spent a whole day planning my choose-your-own-adventure Little Nani stories and that caused my worst writer’s block ever. My brain simply shuts down when it has to deal with planning. So my greatest writing challenge is to manage to write a novel or, at least, a novella.

Are there any other children's authors that inspired you or that you admire?

I don’t really read children’s books, so I don’t know many children’s authors. But if I have to name one author for children that I admire, it has to be Beatrix Potter. Her stories and illustrations are charming.

Who are the other writers that you admire and that may have influenced your writing?

My favourite author is Jane Austen, hands down. Some people say that my stories have a certain touch that reminds her style. Yeah, sure, I wish.... But sometimes I tend to write sentences in a way that sounds weird in the 21st century but sounded perfectly fine during the Regency period.

What is next for Cinta Garcia de la Rosa? Will you continue with children's literature, or turn to more work along the lines of A Foreigner in London? It seems to me that that could turn into a novel.

What’s next? Well, I have lots of plans for Little Nani, as I explained yesterday on Helle Soe Gade’s blog, but I don’t want to be just a children’s author. So there will be more stories along the lines of A Foreigner in London. In fact, I am planning several collections of short stories, based on different topics and emotions.

What do you hope to have accomplished as a writer in the next five years?

Well, in the next five years I hope to have many other books under my belt, and maybe I can even be moderately famous. I would love to travel the world signing books and attending to book fairs. That would be a dream come true.

Thank you, Cinta.

Thanks to you, Scott, for hosting me today.

GIVEAWAY!

Don’t forget to leave a comment, so you can enter the giveaway for the opportunity to win a signed copy of “The Funny Adventures of Little Nani”. If you leave comments in several blogs during the tour, you will get an entry for each comment. So don’t hesitate to comment!

Judge for yourself—check out Cinta's book:

The Funny Adventures of Little Nani (print) on Createspace: http://www.createspace.com/3914481

E-book: Amazon (US): http://www.amazon.com/Funny-Adventures-Little-Nani-ebook/dp/B009YMBXJW/ref=tag_dpp_lp_edpp_ttl_in

Amazon (UK): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Funny-Adventures-Little-Nani-ebook/dp/B009YMBXJW/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t

A Foriegner in London (e-book) at Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/298936

Visit Cinta's blogs:

Cinta's Corner http://cintascorner.wordpress.com/


I Can't Stop Reading http://icantstopreadingblog.com/

Indie Authors You Want to Read http://authorsyouwanttoread.wordpress.com/

Visit Cinta's Author page on Independent Authors International: http://independentauthorsinternational.org/iAi/Cinta_Garcia.html

And follow Cinta on Twitter: http://twitter.com/CintaGarciaRosa

Doing Max Vinyl: An independent book review

A fun thriller

Some books are just plain fun to read — like Frederick Lee Brooke’s Doing Max Vinyl.

This is a book that succeeds on several levels. First, it’s a perfectly crafted crime-thriller with a believable, sympathetic protagonist in Annie Ogden and a watertight plot. Second, all the characters are drawn from real life. Third, the writing is flawless, the style smooth and professional. And it’s full of observational humour. The laughs come from recognition — you know people like this, you’ve heard people say these things and you can easily picture them in the situations that Fred Brooke creates.

The plot

Max Vinyl is the owner of Tri-State Recylcing (TSR) in Chicago; on the day that he sells 20 percent of his company to Korean investors, his general manager fires the receptionist for spying on the company. The trouble is, the receptionist, Tris, is also Max’s girlfriend.

Tris, it turns out, is a “tree-hugger” according to the general manager, Manny Rodriguez. Manny had caught Tris snooping through some sensitive files and suspected she was going to blow the whistle on TSR’s less-than-environmentally friendly activities.

Those questionable practices? TSR recycles computers and other electronics. The law requires that companies dispose of their obsolete electronic equipment in such a way that harmful chemicals do not leak into soil, water or air. As a result, businesses pay recycling companies to dispose of their old computers, monitors, printers and other equipment properly. TSR charges to haul away the old equipment, then makes more money by reselling the best items. Any that it cannot sell, it disassembles, recycles, reuses or disposes of in an environmentally responsible manner.



Waste electronics represent two percent of the USA’s trash in landfills,
but 70 percent of overall toxic waste, according to e-waste workshop.
Image: Creative Commons.

 That’s what it tells the world on its website. What it really does, though, is pick the best, most sellable items from its incoming stream of used equipment — truckloads every day — and sell them through its website. TSR then dups eight to ten dumpsters into Lake Michigan every night.

Max has hired a number of ex-cons for the heavy work. Two in particular pilot the barge and dump the trash: Ike and Tranny. These two have the funniest antics in the book, especially the way that Tranny will say the opposite of what he means, then insist that’s not what he said.

“I get tired of always having to come up with the ideas, and you just say no to everything. How about you try saying no for a change and I get to have some ideas?”

“You mean I should come up with the ideas, and you can get to say no?”

“That’s what I said, stupid. Don’t try and turn things around that I say. I don’t go correcting you all the time.”

Every plot has to have a coincidence, or there’s no story. The skilled writer makes the coincidence seem unavoidable.

In Doing Max Vinyl, four very believable events occur on the same day:

• Max and the Korean investors agree to the $3 million sale

• Manny fires Max’s snoopy, tree-hugging ex-girlfriend

• a new laptop with very sensitive personal information accidentally enters TSR’s stream of trash

• and Ike and Tranny lose a global positioning system (GPS) device that shows them where to steer the barge and dump the garbage.

A waitress, Alison Ogden, find the GPS and takes it home because she thinks it’s a phone and her boyfriend collects old cell phones. When the boyfriend, Todd, tells her it’s not a phone, Alison gives it to her sister, Annie, who has just finished three combat tours in Iraq. Ike and Tranny track down Alison, break into her apartment and when they cannot find the GPS, take all of Todd’s 100-plus cell phones instead.

At this point, combat-trained Annie takes the fight to the bad guys to protect her sister. She infiltrates TSR and discovers its rotten foundation.

The characters

I could immediately picture Max Vinyl, the kind of sleazeball who convinces himself he’s a good guy while he’s cheating you, his wife, his employees, his business partners, the government and society at large. He overcharges his customers with rigged weigh-scales on his trucks, then dumps tonnes of garbage into the lake. He proudly proclaims he pays 25 percent above minimum wage. He’s chronically late on alimony payments and then pays his arrears with a cheque that bounces. Customers who have problems with items purchased off the website have to pay 90 cents a minute for telephone support. No wonder I laughed aloud when he falls face-first into a 10-dozen bouquet of roses after his ex-girlfriend pepper-sprays him.

Ike and Tranny kept me laughing, too, especially when Ike has to walk around with a table leg dangling from his forehead. The funniest part: he likes it!

Probably the most sensitively drawn character is Bob Olson, a square but straightforward good guy forced to bend his own moral code.

Brooke personifies the environment and Lake Michigan, too, in an original way that also evokes his humour. Bravo!

And Annie Ogden is precisely what I had hoped for in a female action hero. A former schoolteacher, she enlists in the Army and serves three tours in Iraq. She comes home with a new, confident attitude, a disdain for conventionality and a lot of fighting and survival skills. She’s small and fit, but not as young as she used to be. Brooke portrays her as very attractive, even beautiful in a diminutive way, but doesn’t take the beauty over the top like too many authors of female action heros. Conscious that she’s older than she used to be, she’s worried about the size of her butt — like every woman in the western world. When she takes on the bad guys, it’s absolutely believable.

The writing

Brooke is a pro. His skill with writing bears out his experience as an English teacher. The plot is airtight, the characters are likeable or hateable and recognizable. The style is spare and easy to read. I caught a few typos, but no more than I typically find in a commercially published book).

I found only two structural flaws:

• Two of the main characters, the catalysts of the action, Annie and Tris, never meet. While this makes sense in the context of this novel, I am sure that some putative expert will shake a figurative finger over this, calling it a major plot hole. It’s not.

• Somehow, the banner hanging over the work area at TSR that reads “MINIMUM WAGE PLUS 25% — TSR POLICY” gets replaced with the wording “Tris. TRS. Without.I.” Brooke never explains who did this (Tris, presumably), nor how. (Unless I missed it. If so, my apologies, Fred!)

The verdict

Doing Max Vinyl is a hoot, as well as a finely crafted thriller and a portrait of some real characters. I fully recommend this book!

5*

Visit Frederick Lee Brooke's website.

Check out Doing Max Vinyl on Amazon.