Book(s) News (July 2025 update)
All the Quiet Hours, Burning Redd, It's Clear to Me Fucking, To the Glum Alumni, Mumbai Jumbo, etc.
This is a long update. If you want the video version of what I got up to in the first half of 2025, here’s some stuff: https://youtube.com/shorts/73sPUz52mJc?si=X5ChBAQVdheiUICC
If you just watched the above video and think I’m suffering from some sort of unresolved anger issue, fear not! That particular guitar had been rendered unplayable. I recently grabbed a new one, which is the first guitar I’ve bought in over a decade. It plays beautifully and I can’t wait to record new music with it.
All the Quiet Hours is now available for order on Amazon. If you dislike ordering from Bezos because he's a strikebreaking hypercapitalist robber baron, you can order it directly from Vacant City Editions by clicking on this hyperlink. If you’ve ordered it, it’s en route and you should have it within the week. If you haven’t ordered it, you now can.
The delay occurred because I had to make yet another round of last minute edits. When I finished the manuscript it was quite long. The advance copy, which was the first time I saw the novel in completed book form, was 597 pages. Problem is, very few novels over 500 pages earn theit length, let alone first novels. I can think of just two debuts I like longer than 500 pages: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. Oddly enough, both debuts are campus novels and both are exactly 544 pages.
Originally All the Quiet Hours consisted of four separate but connected parts:
1. Fading Captain (250 pp.)
Miles and Jacob, childhood friends who have recently grown apart, are spending summer 2010 scouring a landfill in search of a comic book (Captain Beyond #1). They are also trying to track down the erstwhile leader of their childhood trio, Simon, who is missing.
2. Yawns Beyond (225 pp.)
Justine and Regan are sisters who use online dating websites to meet and rob affluent men. It's a bold M.O. but it works until they steal from a dangerous sociopath who doesn't take kindly to being played.
3. Of Facts & Friendship (100 pp.)
Simon, the one-time leader of a childhood trio consisting of himself, Miles, and Jacob returns to Toronto after two isolated years at CFS Alert, the most northern military base in the world. What follows is a spiral of drugs, booze, and bad decisions, including a risky job smuggling goods across the border.
4. Into the Empire (20 pp.)
A short chapter at the end covering a single chaotic evening where Miles, Jacob, and Simon finally collide again.
When I got my advance copy and read it, Parts 1 and 4 were much stronger than I remembered, while Part 3 was much weaker. Part 2 was good but I hadn't succeeded in connecting it to the main storyline (Miles, Jacob, and Simon). So I did the thing I said I wouldn't do, which was subject the novel to get another round of edits.
I cut Part 2 (Yawns Beyond) entirely. It works well as a standalone novel. I’ll try to get it out sometime in the next few years.
Part 3: Of Facts & Friendship, Simon’s solo storyline, was shelved entirely. It just wasn't good enough. A lot of it dealt with Simon's addiction and read like misery porn. Sometimes you have to kill your darlings. Or exile them to a hard drive.
I made the final edits and got another advance copy, which was 304 pages. And that’s AtQH in its final form.
Years ago Dave Eggers’ literary magazine McSweeney’s published an issue in which Michael Chabon published excerpts of his aborted sophomore novel, Fountain City. He talked about why the novel failed, what he was trying to do, and gave examples from the text. (He ended up writing the hilarious Wonder Boys in six months.)
I’m a huge fan of behind-the-scenes recording studio footage and I've always been fascinated with b-sides. So to be given a glimpse behind the magic curtain into the private process of a writer composing a novel was really exciting. I always thought that writers should somehow include material that didn't make the final cut, similar to how bands/artists release b-sides and alternate takes.
I’m not Michael Chabon but over the next year I'm going to be posting some of the stuff I cut from the book, just to show how it came together. It might be fun. If it seems pretentious, I'll delete it.
WHAT’S NEXT?
I have a ton of upcoming projects, so I'll list them here in order:
1. Yawns Beyond
The year is 2010. Justine and Regan Fixter have been using online dating sites to meet and rob affluent men for seven years. It's a bold modus operandi but it works. Until they rob a dangerous sociopath hellbent on getting revenge.
2. Burning Redd
Wilma Redd is the motorcycle riding, cigar smoking, whiskey swilling founder of the Redd Ranch in Gunbarrel, Colorado. A self-made frontier woman, she runs a wildly popular organic bakery with her wife Aikaa by day and dispenses vigilante justice by night. For the last three decades, Wilma and Aika have been kidnapping men who were once exonerated of awful crimes due to nepotism or money or influence. Wilma and Aika throw these men in cells in a secret underground jail on the ranch and throw away the key. But now their daughter Samone is asking invasive questions and the FBI is closing in. Wilma and Aika have to decide whether to flee and lose everything or stand their ground and fight.
I started working on Burning Redd in 2023 and wrote two 200+ page drafts from the POV of the FBI agent tasked with Wilma’s capture, Special Agent Daniel Davenport. But it works a LOT better narrated in third person and with Wilma and Aika as the protagonists and Redd Ranch as the setting. So that’s where I’m headed. I’m currently 84 pages into the third draft.
I’m a HUGE fan of mainstream thrillers by the likes of Steig Larsson, Sandra Brown, Michael Connelly, and Dean Koontz. Burning Redd is an attempt to write a fun, fast, pulpy crime thriller. If it works out, I already have a sequel planned and plotted: Running Redd.
I’ll be posting a rough draft of the opening chapter on here. It details Wilma’s miserable childhood in Ocean City, New Jersey and the events that bring her to Colorado. The novel is episodic, jumping from one stage of Wilma’s life to the next. It’s all about movement. Special Agent Davenport also has POV chapters but he’s no longer the protag.
3. It’s Clear to Me Fucking: An Oral History of Fruitopia
I'm a voracious reader of oral histories. Please Kill Me is fantastic but I actually prefer Lizzy Goodman’s Meet Me in the Bathroom, an oral history of the New York City garage rock renaissance of the early 2000s, as told by the people who were there. Interviews with the Strokes, Interpol, TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and LCD Soundsystem.
A few years ago I put together an oral history of a Brampton band whose career I had followed quite closely. I loved their music and I was friends with them but a lot of their songs went unrecorded, which is a shame. So I interviewed the 20+ both in the band and around it and put together a 94-page oral history of the group. I’m really proud of it but I wasn’t able to publish it or even release it online. The band members participation in the project was contingent upon my not putting it online because they don’t want their parents to stumble across it and read about all the mischief they got up to in their adolescence. So it will come out one day but for now, it just exists as a PDF on my hard drive, which kind of sucks. I had pictures from that era, the interviews were very funny. One of the band members texted me after reading it to tell me he laughed so hard he cried. It was one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.
Anyway, to satisfy my ongoing obsession with oral histories (recent ones I’ve read and enjoyed tremendously include Livin’ Thing: An Oral History of Boogie Nights and Wrong Way on a One-Way Track: The Oral History of Soul Asylum’s ‘Runaway Train’), I’ve been working on a fictionalized “account” of Coca-Cola’s development and release of Fruitopia. There was a long section that got cut from All the Quiet Hours based on a conversation I had with my friend Stefan where we talked about the sheer variety of drinks available in the ‘90s. As he put it, “twas an interesting time to be drinking sugar water.” And it was! The competition was stiff: SoBe, Jones Soda, Snapple, All Sport, Jolt Cola, Orbitz, and others.
I misremembered Fruitopia as being run by well-meaning hippies and then bought out by the big bad Cola-Cola Company. I don’t know if I conflated that episode of The Simpsons where Homer helps a pair of hippies make their vegetable drink or if it was just something I picked up along the way. We live in a time of profound certitude, but before the internet was in everybody’s pocket, you could carry around “alternative facts” for years. For example, in middle school someone told me that French Stewart (the guy who squinted a lot on Third Rock From the Sun) was Martha Stewart’s son. I repeated this “fact” confidently and loudly for years until about a decade ago when a friend of mine cocked her head, looked at me like I was crazy, and told me that French Stewart was in no way related to Martha.
Fruitopia blasted out of the gate with fruit juice names that would make any copywriter beam with pride. Strawberry Passion Awareness. The Grape Beyond. Tangerine Wavelength. And I distinctly remember one of my bottles having the tie-dyed LDS-hippie sentiment “happy unions of fruit in beverage form.” Gotta love that present tense.
It’s Clear to Me Fucking will be a 30-40 page fictionalized account of the development and release of Fruitopia. The title will make more sense when you read it. I’m about 45% through the second draft. I’ll be posting it on here soon.
4. To the Glum Alumi
This is gonna be the more “literary” follow-up to AtQH. I’ve been hacking away at it for 5 years now. It’s a campus novel about a disillusioned professor who claims to have “discovered” a manuscript by a French intellectual from the interwar years. His discovery launches him into academic stardom, but when a video surfaces of my professor acting inappropriately at Woodstock ‘99 (what can’t Fred Durst ruin? Woodstock ‘99, a professor’s career, the alternative rock genre as a whole), he is promptly canceled. It’s not a satire about “woke” politics or anything like that. I really love the campus novel as a genre, including the abovementioned The Secret History and The Art of Fielding, as well as Denis Johnson’s The Name of the World, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s The Rule of Four, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim and John Williams’ Stoner.
Like the Fruitopia oral history and All the Quiet Hours, this will be based on a false document. I freakin’ love false documents. The Navidson Record in House of Leaves is by far my favorite part of that book. Pale Fire is a masterpiece. All the Quiet Hours centers around a comic book called Captain Beyond written and inked by Togashi Ishiguro, brother of Kazuo (author of The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, among others). To the Glum Alumni is both the name of the “discovered” French manuscript and the name of an online newsletter circulated by recently fired academics, disgruntled professors and bitter teachers. There is precedent for academic fraud of this scope, both in real life and in fiction. In John Irving’s The Water-Method Man, narrator Fred “Bogus” Trumper is a PhD candidate working on his thesis. He is studying Akthelt and Gunnel, an epic poem in Old Low Norse. When he realizes that his PhD supervisors know next to nothing about his topic, he begins to insert his own fictitious couplets. Anything that supports his argument he inserts into the poem.
To the Glum Alumni has 300+ disorganized pages and will easily take me ten years to finish. My priority right now is Burning Redd, followed by the Fruitopia piece, followed by Yawns Beyond. I’m recording the audio version of All the Quiet Hours on August 2 and 3. It will hopefully be available by the fall.
5. I recently started playing music again with James, who I’ve been in bands with since 2002. Me, James, and Ryan played together in The Big City Nights, a band that formed on July 1 2005, making it over 20 years old now.
Me and James are also playing music with our friend Brent, who just recently had a son with his wife (and our mutual friend) Aurora. We’re so happy for them. With this new band I’ve been playing bass, which I haven’t done in years, and I love it. We’ve been playing a kind of downtuned, riff heavy rock in the vein of Dead Meadow and Goatsnake. We recorded three songs back in the winter and are currently mixing them. They’ll hopefully be done in a few weeks. I’m going to James’ place in Hamilton the weekend after next to finish them. We don’t have a name for our trio, though somebody floated Mumbai Jumbo, which I like. It reminds me of Reverse Mount Rushmore.
6. Back in 2009, myself and my friends’ band, The Flying Museum Band, rented a space at StorageMart way out by Kipling and the Queensway. I engineered the sessions for recorded an album’s worth of material there. It was titled Dufferin Succotash and released in January 2010. I’m super proud of the album. Check out standout track Kentucky Fog:
I went back to that storage space last weekend and rented out the exact same 10’ by 12’. I can’t wait to start recording some new music there with friends old and new. My buddies David Contin and Mike Lynch and Stefan Kupych (75% of the Flying Museum Band) are keen to collaborate. I just saw Contin’s band last week at The Painted Lady and they were awesome. David and I collaborated on an album back in 2016 called Use Your Confusion. Check it out below.
I’ve been going to the gym since January of this year. I’ve put on 10 lbs of lean muscle. I’m healthy and happy and firing on all cylinders. Huge thanks to my friends (especially James, Georgia, Rae, Courtney, Brent) for being so awesome.
I deleted a lot of the stuff on here because it reveals a bit TOO MUCH and it didn’t occur to me until quite recently that people google people now. I have a bunch of new stuff I’m going to post but I’m going to be stricter with quality control.
Currently: Looking forward to what the back half of 2025 will bring.
Currently Listening To: My Morning Jacket (The Tennessee Fire, At Dawn, It Still Moves, Z), Lowrider, Dua Lipa (Houdini, Hallucinate), Them Crooked Vultures, QOTSA, Ovlov, DIIV. Spotify sucks but it’s the best way to listen to ten hours of music a day. If you’re on there, add me @bramptoncomesalive
Currently Reading: Steve Erickson Shadowbahn, Fred Exeley A Fan’s Notes, Alex Ross The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century. Goodreads sucks but it’s the best way to keep track of what I’m reading, so if you’re on there, add me.
https://youtube.com/shorts/GKipJlg6On4?si=pZyldSBuf0JOyrok