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rezendiThey say a prophet is without honour in his home town.
From the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, July 11, page A1 (yes, the front page, no less. Apparently I was folded at the chin.)
Me waving a copy of Kerouac's DHARMA BUMS at the photographer.
( (c) 2006 The Record (Waterloo Region). All rights reserved. )
My heels burned, my knees ached, my back itched, my pack felt like an anvil, but I had grown accustomed to my various agonies, and God knew I had a lot to think about.
Those words are fiction, taken from the pages of the thriller Dark Places by novelist Jon Evans.
And the words are also true, inspired by Evans' real-life struggle to endure altitude sickness during a trek through the Himalayas.
To Evans, truth isn't necessarily stranger than fiction. But it certainly does make for great fiction material.
The 33-year-old Waterloo native lives by the author's mantra: "Write what you know."
He wanted to set a book in the Balkans, so he went there, gathering material that fuelled his second novel, Blood Price.
Over the past couple of years he has dodged incoming mortars in Iraq and travelled through tumultuous central Africa on public transit. He has filled his mind with story ideas in Paris, London, Egypt, China and around South America.
"Every time I travel I see something that is defining, yet so deeply weird that I couldn't have imagined it on my own," he says between sips of coffee.
On this morning, Evans is relaxing in the comparatively unexciting confines of Java House on Toronto's Queen Street West.
It's a favourite haunt from his days as a computer programmer at a nearby firm.
He's decompressing, having handed in a manuscript for his next novel (tentatively titled Absolute Darkness) to his publisher just hours earlier.
By coincidence, it has been exactly one year since he handed in a draft of Invisible Armies, which was released just over a month ago to positive reviews in North America and overseas.
His novels are not highbrow literature -- nor does he intend them to be. They are the kind of fast-paced page-turners meant to be devoured in airports and on beaches.
Toronto, like most places on earth, is just a pit stop for Evans. He's en route from his Montreal home to his parents' cottage in Muskoka for a little R and R. Then it's off to Russia, where he'll board the Trans-Siberian Railway and chug eastward to China.
That adventure is "just for fun," he says. "But then again, I never know what is going to turn into a book."
Evans was eight years old when he vowed he would one day become a published author, preferably a best-selling one. He read voraciously, immersing himself in four or five sci-fi novels a week.
But writing his own masterpiece, he soon discovered, was much easier in theory than in practice.
"I wrote a very, very, very bad fantasy novel when I was 15," he admits, lowering his shaved-bald head in exaggerated shame.
"I hope no pages of it survive."
Evans didn't give up hope on his writing career but was also realistic enough to know that an education in something more practical might help pay the bill.
So he enrolled in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, which left him eminently employable after graduation in 1996.
Thus began the lifestyle that he has enjoyed since: work for eight months or so in a high-paying techie job in some big city, then quit, travel to some faraway land and write a book about it. Repeat. "I think it's fair to say I'm easily bored," he says with a chuckle.
His recurring protagonist, Paul Wood, is a self-effacing 30- something computer programmer who treks around the world between jobs -- semi-autobiographical is an understatement.
Book sales have been strong enough lately that Evans hasn't needed to supplement his income with high-tech jobs.
"I haven't had a day job in about three years," he says. "I strongly recommend it. It's very nice."
Sometimes it gets frustrating, though, when story ideas refuse to go from his brain onto the computer the way he'd like. For every book that gets published he has scrapped many more, and several are lingering in half-written limbo.
He's even toying with the idea of a children's book about a squirrel in New York City, though he imagines his editors would prefer he stick to international espionage.
For now, he's happy to relax. Well, relax as much as any author can while waiting to hear if the publishers like the new book or not.
He knows that, soon enough, he'll be in who-knows-where doing lord-knows-what, culling material for more fictional non-fiction.
"It's great," he says. "I have a very enjoyable life, getting paid for something I would do for fun anyway."
Meanwhile, in case you didn't hate me already, I'm having a lovely and sweltering time in Paris (and am way too busy doing so to read LJ.)
From the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, July 11, page A1 (yes, the front page, no less. Apparently I was folded at the chin.)
Me waving a copy of Kerouac's DHARMA BUMS at the photographer.
( (c) 2006 The Record (Waterloo Region). All rights reserved. )
My heels burned, my knees ached, my back itched, my pack felt like an anvil, but I had grown accustomed to my various agonies, and God knew I had a lot to think about.
Those words are fiction, taken from the pages of the thriller Dark Places by novelist Jon Evans.
And the words are also true, inspired by Evans' real-life struggle to endure altitude sickness during a trek through the Himalayas.
To Evans, truth isn't necessarily stranger than fiction. But it certainly does make for great fiction material.
The 33-year-old Waterloo native lives by the author's mantra: "Write what you know."
He wanted to set a book in the Balkans, so he went there, gathering material that fuelled his second novel, Blood Price.
Over the past couple of years he has dodged incoming mortars in Iraq and travelled through tumultuous central Africa on public transit. He has filled his mind with story ideas in Paris, London, Egypt, China and around South America.
"Every time I travel I see something that is defining, yet so deeply weird that I couldn't have imagined it on my own," he says between sips of coffee.
On this morning, Evans is relaxing in the comparatively unexciting confines of Java House on Toronto's Queen Street West.
It's a favourite haunt from his days as a computer programmer at a nearby firm.
He's decompressing, having handed in a manuscript for his next novel (tentatively titled Absolute Darkness) to his publisher just hours earlier.
By coincidence, it has been exactly one year since he handed in a draft of Invisible Armies, which was released just over a month ago to positive reviews in North America and overseas.
His novels are not highbrow literature -- nor does he intend them to be. They are the kind of fast-paced page-turners meant to be devoured in airports and on beaches.
Toronto, like most places on earth, is just a pit stop for Evans. He's en route from his Montreal home to his parents' cottage in Muskoka for a little R and R. Then it's off to Russia, where he'll board the Trans-Siberian Railway and chug eastward to China.
That adventure is "just for fun," he says. "But then again, I never know what is going to turn into a book."
Evans was eight years old when he vowed he would one day become a published author, preferably a best-selling one. He read voraciously, immersing himself in four or five sci-fi novels a week.
But writing his own masterpiece, he soon discovered, was much easier in theory than in practice.
"I wrote a very, very, very bad fantasy novel when I was 15," he admits, lowering his shaved-bald head in exaggerated shame.
"I hope no pages of it survive."
Evans didn't give up hope on his writing career but was also realistic enough to know that an education in something more practical might help pay the bill.
So he enrolled in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, which left him eminently employable after graduation in 1996.
Thus began the lifestyle that he has enjoyed since: work for eight months or so in a high-paying techie job in some big city, then quit, travel to some faraway land and write a book about it. Repeat. "I think it's fair to say I'm easily bored," he says with a chuckle.
His recurring protagonist, Paul Wood, is a self-effacing 30- something computer programmer who treks around the world between jobs -- semi-autobiographical is an understatement.
Book sales have been strong enough lately that Evans hasn't needed to supplement his income with high-tech jobs.
"I haven't had a day job in about three years," he says. "I strongly recommend it. It's very nice."
Sometimes it gets frustrating, though, when story ideas refuse to go from his brain onto the computer the way he'd like. For every book that gets published he has scrapped many more, and several are lingering in half-written limbo.
He's even toying with the idea of a children's book about a squirrel in New York City, though he imagines his editors would prefer he stick to international espionage.
For now, he's happy to relax. Well, relax as much as any author can while waiting to hear if the publishers like the new book or not.
He knows that, soon enough, he'll be in who-knows-where doing lord-knows-what, culling material for more fictional non-fiction.
"It's great," he says. "I have a very enjoyable life, getting paid for something I would do for fun anyway."
Meanwhile, in case you didn't hate me already, I'm having a lovely and sweltering time in Paris (and am way too busy doing so to read LJ.)
