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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