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For Earth Day, the Toronto Star asked 15 science fiction writers, including me, how we’d tackle climate change. To save some space, my answer was edited down.

Here’s my full reply:

The environment is something I watch on TV. Narrated by Sir David Attenborough, it’s a pristine world free of human interference. But it’s also the concrete, the highrise and the little blue screen. Where animals are pests. The destruction wrought on the so-called natural world results from the false division between humans and it. Humans need to fuse with nature. Using biotech, houses should be grown not built. Towns designed with no clear line, aesthetic or technological, between human and environment. Euclidean geometry must be overthrown. Only by reaching such a state of obvious symbiosis can we end this conflict with the world we inhabit. The alternative is an increasingly alienating spectacle that will end in the circus of our own destruction.

You can read everyone’s answers here.

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I’ll be at Ad Astra this weekend. It’s a science fiction convention.

Ad Astra’s 31st Con will be held on April 13, 14 & 15, 2012

Ad Astra is a literary fan-run convention, promoting local talent within the genres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Paranormal, for all media of the written word. Our weekend includes panels on a variety of topics including writing, publishing, media, creative works, comics, costuming and steampunk, as well as many events including Masquerade, writer workshops, and book launches.  Complementing our programming, Ad Astra also has a dealer area, featuring many vendors, writers, exhibitors, artists and artisans and an Art Show and auction.

I’ll be doing some panels. I’m not sure what. Like, I know and everything but I’m too lazy to go through the schedule right now and find them.

I think I’m doing one on criticism in the 21st century, fascist undertones of SF, Dystopian Aesthetics, and I can’t remember what else.

But I’ll be there.

Continue reading »]]> This is an interview that occurred in late January and will be hitting 12 television stations and 80 radio markets in about a week via TVCOGECO. It’s for Brent Holland’s Night Fright Show.

Ryan Oakley – Technicolor Ultra-Mall via Skype from Toronto Canada. What if in the future Toronto had been turned into a huge indoor mall? But the class hierarchy is dominated by roaming gangs intent on enforcing their own version of what makes up a society. Free of authority, free of military, free of…order? Ryan draws upon the current “Occupy Movement” and a certain amount of libertarian doctrine as his prose. Would a society be better off under these circumstances, worse off because of roaming gang mentality or just same old same old? And that is the challenge of his book and our show together. We challenge each other’s conventions throughout this show and expose many shocking government policies that may already be in place and not in the future. Profound.

This is the first interview I’ve ever done of this type. (Radio, television, sound and image.) So yeah, I was a bit nervous. It should come as no surprise that I’m most comfortable in print.

But Mr. Holland was quite friendly and I think it all went off pretty well.

And cool shit about the internet, if you want to ask any follow up questions or anything like that, there’s always the comment section here.

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Official Meeting of The Adventure Time Nap Gang

If you’re interested in my sleep patterns and I have no idea why you would be, I was recently interviewed by Denise Balkissoon for an article in the Globe and Mail: Is Bi-Modal Sleep as Good as Eight Straight Hours? I don’t know. Guess you’ll have to read it to find out.

Bi, straight, bedtime, eight . . . Sounds sexy.

I never thought people were interested in this sort of thing. Like, how I sleep is how I sleep. No big deal. But, if major newspapers are running this, maybe I should do a post on it sometime soon.

I’d certainly like to expand on my answers in the article.

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The people at Open Book Toronto recently subjected me to the Proust Questionnaire.

The Proust Questionnaire was not invented by Marcel Proust, but it was a much loved game by the French author and many of his contemporaries. The idea behind the questionnaire is that the answers are supposed to reveal the respondent’s “true” nature.

You can find my answers here.

And, curiously enough, I recently blogged about this questionnaire. It was given to chatbots. I fear my answers were more sensible and thus less interesting than theirs.

Continue reading »]]> With summer at an end, and inspired by the nude face of Zoetica Ebb during her No Make-Up Week at Biorequiem, I’m showing off my legs.

That’s my house robe with shorts by Al Sharif of Syria.  The slippers are Prince Alberts, the hat is something Father acquired while in Turkey,  the couch is a new La-Z-Boy, the coffee is freshly ground Jamacian Blue Mountain, the pipe is a Butz Choquin packed with ‘Rise and Shine’ – a Brigham knock off of Dunhill’s now unavailable in Canada ‘Early Morning Pipe’ and the dog is a damn fine companion.

Life, at the moment, is fine.

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Like any community of malcontents and weirdos, writers have certain quirks in common.  One of these is the trunk. While it might look like someone just sits down and writes a novel, the process is much sloppier than that. Stories are started and abandoned. Some are finished but remain awful. There are pages of notes, half-thoughts, outlines of things that never went anywhere, letters to people one has not seen in twenty years, sometimes letters back from them, decent stories that still need work, things that could not sell, snippets of poetry and prose, rants, ramblings and drugged, up, delusional twitter feeds from some subconscious hellscape.  Every completed novel, the good, bad and the ugly, stands atop a mountain of corpse-words and that mountain is put in the trunk.

It’s probably not a coincidence that a trunk looks like a coffin.

Then again, coffins sometimes look like fish.

My trunk is not actually a trunk at all.  It’s a big old clothes drier that was in my apartment when I got here.  Now it’s packed tight with paper.

While every writer has their trunk, every writer relates differently to it.  Stephen King took parts of his and made it into the Bachman Books.  Naked Lunch was edited together from parts of Burroughs’s trunk.  I seem to recall some poet throwing theirs overboard while at sea.  I never even look in mine.  I have a seperate space for things I can look at.  Those things don’t require anything as large as a trunk.

My trunk terrifies me.

Just sitting here, thinking about it, shrinks my lungs. There’s a lot of very bad writing in that drier.  A lot of very bad writing that I, knowing nothing, once thought was very good writing.  The bad prose is, perhaps, forgivable. The confidence with which I wrote it, not so much. When I was a child I was told that looking directly at the sun would cause blindness. Like Santa Claus, God and dentistry, that turned out to be bullshit. But I know that looking in that trunk would cause a fit of self doubt leading directly to block. That’s how bright my humiliation is.

I never had any natural talent but I can’t even begin to fathom what I was doing with some of that crap.  Thinking most of it was bad enough.  Actually going to the trouble of writing it down and thinking it was good enough to ever be read by anyone? The stark ratio of shit to quality that I produce?  That’s enough to turn one off the whole enterprise.

And I would quit if I could – Santa-God-Dentist knows, I have tried.

But our virtue and our vice often comes from the same thing.  Once I make up my mind about something, I’m willing to see it right through to the bitter end.  When smarter men would give up and stay down, I keep getting up.  Though this is often portrayed as virtue, it’s a dangerous one.  It’s sent me on benders, got me kicked in the face and kept me in relationships much longer than was good for anyone.  I play to extinction.  I know this about myself. It’s not as romantic as it may sound.  I’ve spent the last few years trying to learn failure.

Giving up can be very good for you.

I was a child when I decided to be a fiction writer.  I had no idea what that meant.  I knew it meant writing stories so I dedicated myself to that.  As far as the sort of life writers led, what they did on their spare time or how they made a living, I was completely clueless.  I wasn’t raised around professors, scientists or authors.  Quite a few writers were.  Insofar as I’ve ever been jealous of another person’s upbringing, I’m jealous of that. It might have saved me a great deal of trouble. But I also know this – It would’ve ruined me.

Because, when I started reviewing books and saw what most writers actually do, I knew that wasn’t for me.

Not knowing any of that or having the sense to figure it out and quit while I was ahead, I taught myself how to write. I cannot ever recall getting any advice or anything remotely approximating an education from my school teachers. I was never even taught the formal rules of grammar and punctuation. To this day, I have no idea what they are and navigate by feel. What I did get from these people was encouragement. This was the last thing I needed.

I didn’t even know what books I should be reading. I’d find an author I liked, find out what authors they liked (if I could – this was pre-internet) read those authors and try to find out who they liked and read that.  This was a path that took me from 80s horror to science fiction, to the beats, to the lost generation, back into Victorian novels and French Romanticism, then, eventually, to Homer. I stole everything I could from these folks. Usually breaking it on my way out the back door.

At about age 18 or 19 –I’d already quit school and moved to Toronto- I came into a copy of William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well.”  Although this is a guide to writing non-fiction, it was the first book I’d ever read that imparted sensible advice on building a sentence. It emphasized clarity. From there, it was on to “The Elements of Style.”  This remains my most treasured reference book.  I prefer it to the dictionary and I really like the dictionary. Those two books taught me how to write. They gave me new eyes.

It made me look at my previous work how my first bespoke suit made me look at my previous clothes.

Having learned as much as I could on my own, I decided it was time to try attended Humber school for Writers where I had the privilege of being taught for a week by Robert J. Sawyer.  It was the first time that I’d learned anything about writing from another human being and I learned quite a bit.  I learned the names of some things that I had figured out for myself and gained a much better understanding of the rules governing them.  It made quite a bit clear.  He did say, however, that I was “a writer of enormous talent” and I thought of all those late nights and long hours  trying to figure out how a sentence worked and shuddered.  In spite of this, if you -for some damn reason- aspire to be a writer, I’d recommend him highly.  The Humber School for writers, not so much.

My trunk is full of stuff I wrote before knowing any rules and the stuff I wrote while trying to apply them.  While I understood and agreed with the principles, there’s a pretty big gulf between knowing something and being able to do it.  I know how to throw a curve-ball but I sure can’t throw a curve-ball.  Shit, I know how to throw a knuckleball and I probably couldn’t even get one of those out of my hand let alone reach the plate with it.  And most of my trunk is written with the sort of arrogance that one only ever finds in the truly ignorant.

It came easy.  Shit usually does.

Looking at my trunk makes me feel like a pitcher watching a highlight reel of his very worst moments from little league on.  You might be able to say in some cold objective voice: “Look how far you’ve come! You can actually throw a strike now!” You might even be right.  But it’s not a cold objective thing and, holy shit, it is not the sort of thing anyone needs to be thinking about right before they take the mound.  If you look at a pitcher, when things start to go real bad, you can see that movie playing in their eyes.

The greats can battle through that.  They can ignore it.  Everyone else carries it with them and reenacts it.

As far as I go, I find it hard enough to face every blank page and the failure, fuck-ups and embarrassments it represents, without waking up every single day with a drier full of them at the head of my bed.  I’m gonna throw all that old writing out.  If I ever need to mine stories or ideas out of my trunk, I’ve made a  bigger mistake than could ever be found within it.  Because, even worse than the prose is the man who wrote it.  And I’m always going to have to face him.  When things go bad, when I’m stuck and whenever I’m gripped by doubt, I’ll see that man.  i’ll be goddamned if I ever depend on him for anything and I sure don’t need an altar to the bastard.

The mirror is a tombstone that always looks backwards and the mirror is enough.

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Just found my baby book while cleaning.  Here’s some of Mother’s notes:

“Ryan was an extremely good-natured little fellow – crying only when he was hungry.  He enjoyed travel; new places and faces and lots of attention.  Ryan had a winning smile for everyone and was a true little “charmer.” By six weeks, he was sleeping soundly thru’ the night and often he would awake with a smile to wish me good morning! Ryan was a BIG baby and at the age of 3 months was wearing some of his new outfits sized to fit 12-18 month old babies!!”

I have no idea what happened either.

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I’ve been feeling strangely restless of late and last night, at about 2 am, I asked the wife if she intended to be awake until dawn.  Like me, she’s a night owl and usually goes to bed shortly before the sun comes out.  ”What time is dawn?” she asked.   I checked the weather network and found that the sun rose at 6:28.  Having informed her of this, I was pleased to learn that she would be awake.

“Let’s go to the park,” I said.  ”And look at birds.”

She found this idea agreeable and grabbed her camera.  We both wore pink, which garnered immediate compliments from cyclists.  For both of us!  This is quite odd as it’s usually my plumage that attracts notice while I tend to reduce the people beside me to invisibility.  ”Try to upstage me again,” I said to my dear wife, “and I will cut you.”

Taking my comment as a challenge rather than a warning, she pulled her switchblade and lunged towards my throat. Using the akido I learned in previous relationships, I disarmed her.  Our struggle brought us close together and our fight quickly escalated into passionate lovemaking on the sidewalk outside of the mini-mall.  This garnered no compliments from anyone.  It did attract the notice of the police.  Decoying them with the box of Timbits we keep for such purposes, we escaped into the park.

It was a shockingly beautiful morning.  So beautiful, that I had threaten to cut it too.

Pictures with captions after the jump.  None have been manipulated in any way.

Wife and I.

Sometimes I glow in photos. It's a nasty habit that Nan has warned me about.

They always tell you to stop and sniff the flowers. They never warn you about the bees.

One of my favorite pics of the wife. You can't tell but we were surrounded by chickadees. She's looking up at one of the cute little fellows.

Keeping an eye out for danger. I'd heard rumors of joggers.

Happily strolling along.

I don't often pose for photos. This is why. Though truthfully, even without the camera there, I would have been acting like an ass.

Imagine how happy the wife was to see me pick a flower.

Now imagine her disappointment when I gave it to myself.

And now imagine me hearing ye olde list of Ryan's personality flaws.

For the life of me, i don't understand why certain people don't just pick their own flowers. I did eventually give it to her. She did one of those 'he loves me, he loves me not' things. Turns out I love her. Big mouthed flower.

On a bridge, being quiet so that we won't wake the troll beneath it.

It woke up anyway but, luckily for us, wanted a pre-breakfast swim.

I just realized these photos are chronologically backwards. Not bothering to change that now.

Why don't I go to the park every morning? It's wonderful.

Waiting for the wife who was busy with her camera.

Still waiting. No wait, these are backwards. So not waiting so much yet.

It's almost like you know what's about to happen!

Leading my wife up the garden path.

I plain like this photo. Nice and simple.