Back on the blog...

...after a busy end of term and relaxing (if rather unadventurous—except for swimming with manta rays and jellyfish in Mexico) holiday.

When we got back, I was delighted to learn from a friend that Fatal Tide had been mentioned in the Xmas round-up of book picks selected by callers on Rex Murphy's Cross-Country Check-up. You can get the whole list here—mine was one of the few Canadian-authored books picked by Canadian listeners, which suggests some of the many challenges of the domestic publishing industry. It turned out that the caller was one of my students from a few years back, a talented writer named Wayne Potoroka based in the Yukon. But, honest, no money was exchanged or grades inflated for the plug!

The book also made at least one blogging reader's top ten list for the year.

Then, the new issue of Sea Kayaker magazine—the biggest kayaking publication in the world—ran a good review of the book (despite its lack of an American publisher), written by editor Chris Cunningham, no less (but not online). The kayaking community has really embraced the book and the lessons to be take from it about safety preparedness and the perils of cold water.

The adventure racing community? Less enthusiastic.

Finally, this weekend, the Vancouver Sun ran a fun little article by local author Barbara Julian about the ups and downs of self-marketing for Canadian authors. She mentions a couple of low points from my own oddball efforts to drum up interest for my book, which I'd described on this blog. Apparently, the Sun also ran a photo of me, but I've yet to see the article.

One of my vain efforts was the "Ride to the Readers" campaign last summer. So I thought, now that it has been mentioned again in the Sun, I'd resurrect my offer to bike to interested book buyers and sign their copies in person, with a few twists: 1) I'll limit the geographical range (at least until the weather improves) to Victoria, Oak Bay, and parts of Saanich not too far from the university; but 2) and I'll actually bring a copy of the book to your house (while supplies last) and sell it to you for $30- flat fee (a toonie off the list price, and w/o any tax).

Surely, with that kind of CRAZY GOOD offer, I can improve on my statistic of one reader ridden to....

Medal Haul

My old employer, explore magazine, had a fantastic night this past Friday at the annual National Magazine Awards. James Little (editor in chief), Gary Davidson (art director), and explore's coast-to-coast cadre of freelancers (led by former Canadian Alpine Journal editor Geoff Powter) brought home two gold medals, five silvers, and seven honourable mentions, including clean sweeps of the Travel and Sports & Recreation categories. Not too bad for a publication that has a tenth the editorial staff of larger magazines and only comes out six times a year.

Of course, CBC.ca didn't bother to mention explore's results in its NMA round-up. Somehow, three golds and a silver each (for ROB Magazine and L'actualité) add up higher in the "medal haul". Call it Olympic math. I hope the CBC can learn to add by the time they cover the Beijing Games.

Congrats again to James and his team at explore!

Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned From Reality TV

Okay, not quite.

But I thought this story from CBC Manitoba proved that not all reality TV makes you stupider (just most of it): "Snowmobiler credits Survivorman for his own survival".

I met Les Stroud, the solo star of Survivorman, when I was working at explore magazine in Toronto and he was just setting out as a reality-TV producer. He's an interesting guy with a great sense of humour, which frees his show from the paleolithic macho chest-beating of other prime-time survivalists. Here's what I wrote about him in my book, for a background chapter on the rise of reality TV:

At least one reality-TV show tried to out-Survivor the popular series. By the time Burnett’s show went supernova, Les Stroud, a music-video producer from Toronto turned survival guru, had won several awards for his first film, Snowshoes and Solitude, an intimate video diary of his year living alone with his wife in the boreal forest of northern Ontario. He figured the hour was right for his own reality-TV concoction. Stranded first appeared on the Discovery Channel in 2001, and Stroud later appeared as Survivorman in Canada and the United States. In each series, he ventured into exotic wilderness locations to live off the land for a week and tell the story of his travails. He separated his methods from those of other reality shows by doing all the filmwork himself. Viewers no longer had to suspend their disbelief and ignore the fact that the on-screen survivors were being monitored round the clock by Big Brother-like teams of cameramen and boom-mike operators. In Survivorman, Stroud had to wrest nourishment and shelter from desert canyons, tropical jungles, or blackfly-infested bogs while simultaneously worrying about light readings, battery charges, and picture compositions. Watching a savvy outdoorsman like Les Stroud struggle to light a fire, catch a fish, or find anything remotely palatable to eat destroyed the delusion of many urban viewers that getting by in the wild was as easy as they might imagine.

I saw the rough cuts from his first season but have since only caught the occasional episode of Stroud's show while staying at motels. I've always enjoyed it—his approach is about as "real" as reality TV gets... at least within the current "ethics" of the contemporary entertainment biz.

Of course, network execs would be happy to feed their American gladiators and Big Brother contestants to real lions if they could get away with it... and get good Nielsen ratings.