Tuesday 24 February 2015

Awning Sighting!

Great friend of the program Taryn Gunter writes: "The Cambie Cafe has been closed for over a year. There's a frozen yogurt place and Running Room next door, but no more all-day bacon and eggs at Cambie and 7th."

This blog's response: "What the shit?"


Contributions of All-Day Breakfast photos always welcome! Most easily posted at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Adam-Lewis-Schroeder-author/19806273500,
they will find their way here every time.

(Cambie St. & W. 7th Avenue, Vancouver BC.)

Friday 20 February 2015

Follow the Fellow Who Follows the Sea


Online journal Forget has been awfully good to me over the years, and after a seven-year hiatus they're celebrating their 14th anniversary with a freshly-made raft of material. I was happy to supply a short piece that I feel is lovely. And wet. It's lovely if you like things wet.

http://forgetmagazine.com/150214b.htm

(Brentwood College, Mill Bay BC.)

Thursday 19 February 2015

Wednesday 18 February 2015

Can't Lit Podcast Ep 11


A wonderful & rollicking interview on the Can't Lit podcast, recorded down in Vancouver less than 24 hours before the Seahawks barfed up their last play. Hence my expression; I just knew.
http://cantlit.ca/post/111339429513/011-cant-lit-adam-lewis-Schroeder

Listeners of, say, This American Life may find the episode's pace more conversational than they're used to, so grab a cocktail and relax for once. When was the last time you did?

(Pictured: Daniel & Dina with me in the middle.)

Spring 2015 BC Tour Schedule


In a nutshell: Vancouver Island & the Okanagan in a single week in March, Vancouver in May.

Vernon. Monday, March 16Vertigo Voices
Doors open at 7, Reading at 7:30 pm
Gallery Vertigo
Suite 1, 3001 – 31 St., Vernon

Penticton. Tuesday, March 17 Hooked on Books
7:30 pm
225 Main St., Penticton
For more information contact Hooked on Books: 778-476-5621

Kelowna. Wednesday, March 18 The Bohemian Café
7:30 pm
524 Bernard Ave., Kelowna
For more information contact Mosaic Books: 250-763-4418

Victoria. Saturday, March 21
Russell Books
2:00 pm
734 Fort St., Victoria
For more information contact Russell Books: 250-361-4447

Duncan. Sunday, March 22 
The Old Firehouse Wine & Cocktail Bar
2:00 pm
40 Ingram St., Duncan
For more information contact Volume One Bookstore: 250-748-1533

Vancouver. Wednesday, May 6
InCite: An Exploration of Books & Ideas
Doors open at 7, Reading at 7:30 pm
Central Library, Alice MacKay Room, 350 West Georgia, Vancouver
For more information and to register: http://writersfest.bc.ca/events/incite_may6

Friday 13 February 2015

All-Day Breakfast book trailer is new, beautiful

The first entry on this blog posted a link to a now-2.5-year-old book trailer for All-Day Breakfast, and I think I've finally located its raw footage so I can chop that one up so it's shorter and shows the correct publication date.

IN THE MEANTIME I've made an entirely new one, with the help of a shiny new Blue Yeti microphone, an eerie sun over Surrey BC, and an actual Union Pacific rail car in New Westminster! I totally made BC look like the bleak Midwest! Is the bleak Midwest sometimes not in focus?

The clip's backbone is the middle minute of Rick Maddocks' song "Nobody Nowhere," from The Beige's album 01. He is a nice guy to let me use it. I'm remiss not to have included his plain-beautiful singing, heard on almost of every song of The Beige's 01 and El Angel Exterminador, The Lost Gospel Ensemble's The Meal and Sun Belt's Cabalcor.



The ninja footage is entirely relevant to the novel.

Friday 6 February 2015

All-Day Breakfast Q&A, Including True-Life Gross Coincidences

    
 
 
 

How did All-Day Breakfast get started?
I’d written half of a historical novel set here in Penticton, and it was going well until I accidentally steered myself onto another path.  I’ve always read a lot of comic books so I took one of the Walking Dead collections out of the library, a while before the show came out. My wife was talking about a fictional character she loved, a massive American ex-MP named Jack Reacher, and all of his traits like wearing clothes for three days then throwing them away, only ever eating the same meal which involved a haystack of bacon, and how he wandered the country kicking ass in the name of homegrown justice. So thanks to the Walking Dead in my hands we spit-balled how Reacher might get along as a zombie—cross-country missions, kicking ass even while his limbs dropped off, craving bacon instead of brains.  We have many wonky conversations like that but this particular hodgepodge had momentum. Plus I’d have to eat heaps of bacon as, you know, research, so in the name of non-stop good times All-Day Breakfast jumped the line in front of the historical piece.

Do you feel this novel’s good times right from the start?
I guess not. It takes a turn about page 20, but initially it’s sad. For such a possibly-cartoonish concept to feel halfways genuine I had to populate it from own experience, so right off the bat Peter wasn’t an unencumbered ex-MP, but a teacher and father of two who was unfortunately really grieving. I’d just lost my dad, grandpa and father-in-law and was about to lose my stepdad, and I really loved them all, so I guess it was a combination of what I wanted to write with what I needed to write—Peter just arrived in that state, there’d been no plan for it. At least he gets to be sarcastic from the first page.        

As you worked were you heartened to see the rising popularity of zombies—The Walking Dead TV series, World War Z, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?
I assumed that tide would subside long before I finished, but happily it still seems to going strong. While I wrote I steered clear of reading or watching any new zombie stuff so that my guys could strictly be my zombies, without anyone else’s ideas inadvertently shuffling through. So I only learned yesterday, three years after the fact, that there’s a 2012 first-person zombie novel written by another Canadian author, Corey Redekop, though outside of that one conceit it doesn’t sound like there’s overlap. But his name made me jump, because Gary Redekop is my neurosurgeon!

You consulted a neurosurgeon for the novel?
Not deliberately. During substantive edits, after the years of writing were finished, my legs swelled and I had dizzy spells, and in March 2014, right before starting copy edits, I was diagnosed with Cushing’s Syndrome, which meant I had a benign tumour on my pituitary gland, right in the bottom of the brain.  A small tumour can be pulled out your nose but mine was nearly the size of a Rubik’s Cube, a “massive macroadenoma,” so it had to come out the side of my head at VGH in Vancouver—Dr. Gary Redekop did an amazing job. And I’d written a similar, far less-precise brain procedure near the end of All-Day Breakfast, so that made two creepy parallels.

Are there any more?
Near the middle of the book there’s a lengthy misadventure involving Peter’s poor jaw, and when I first went into hospital they found I’d somehow broken mine—I have no idea how, though I realized I’d been eating only soup for the previous three days. I got to have true-life experiences based on a novel, rather than the other way around.

Do you still eat heaps of bacon?
Not nearly as much, though if All-Day Breakfast has one message it’s to eat as much as you possibly can while you have the chance. 
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See posts below for links to purchase.

Tuesday 3 February 2015

West is the Beast


Just home from a great Vancouver weekend, getting to spend oceans of time with my sister Katy, head honcho at Vancouver Performing Stars, then laying down the usual beats and rhymes on Can't Lit podcast (online February 23, will link when it's ready), then Cards Against Humanity and Super Bowl (no heartache there since I roll with the Steelers) with friends, cousins and more friends (including Al Hoffman of Acme Café), ending Sunday at the PuSH Festival for the Sun Belt show, Cabaldor. Monday with a UBC Creative Writing kinda-reunion lunch, then an interview with Peter Darbyshire from The Province. How come? Because All-Day Breakfast IS COMING.

When I head out of Penticton it's big-time. Then I stay home six months.

Also news: happy inclusion in CBC Books' Top 5 February Picks. (Which might be early for my book.) All the same, to pre-order please track down my All-Day Breakfast winged baboon at your favourite online vendor.

(Photo from my VGH Neurosurgery window, April 2014. Pretty sweet.)