Aug. 11: Little red Corvette
The summer that I was 18, I
wrote anovel that was loosely based on my experiences in high school. It
wascalled The High School Days of Dusk and Horsie and that’s a
totallylame title. I should have called it Little Red Corvette because
(a)it has an emotional connection to the Prince song and (b) one of
thetitular characters owns a red Corvette.
A brief plot summary: Horsie (real nameis Stanley) is a freshman in high school and he befriends a juniornamed Dusk. Dusk learns that Horsie’s dad died one year ago andunofficially left him his red Corvette, which Horsie keeps under atarp in the backyard (he is still too young to have a driver’slicense.) At the end of the book, Horsie decides to sell the car sohe can pay his college tuition. The Corvette, of course, is a symbolof his past and as Horsie lets it go, he opens himself up to thepromise of the future.
I guess that sounds like a pretty coolpremise even though the story itself is pretty lame. There’ssubplots involving a school bully and a pretty girl Horsie has acrush on. The people I showed it to at the time thought it was prettygood (one magician friend of mine, who was then about 30, liked it somuch that he said it should be required reading for high schoolstudents.) My best friend, Jason, told me he appreciated that I wasbeing vulnerable but he thought the book was pretty lame. Lookingback at it, I think the book is pretty lame too.
But that’s not to say it can’t berescued.
-
I once entered a contest to win a redCorvette. There was this car stereo store in Calgary that was givingone away and all you had to do was draw a picture of a Corvette. Idrew one and I even drew a crappy drawing of Prince next to it. Ican’t draw to save my life so Prince wound up looking more like ahorse with a plate of spaghetti on his head.
-
I’ve long said that a red Corvette ismy dream car (actually, a Lamborghini is, but that’s justridiculous) even though it’s not practical for me anymore. For onething, I have an 18-month-old son. You can’t drive a toddler aroundin a Corvette. It’s just not safe. Corvettes don’t have frontseats. Also, Corvettes don’t have the storage space I need to cartmy magic gear from gig to gig. Hyundais, like the one I have rightnow, are far better suited to that.
-
The epigram to my novel, by the way, istaken from the Prince song Little Red Corvette. It goes: “LittleRed Corvette – I need a kind of love that’s gonna last.” Thebook is basically about how much Horsie loved his father and how hegoes about trying to find another source of that fatherly love. Dusk,just one year older, is too naïve to see what Horsie is reallylooking for. He doesn’t know that Horsie looks at him as a fatherfigure instead of a friend.
The book was written from the points ofview of both Dusk and Horsie as students. If I decide to rewrite it,I think I will have Dusk writing it from the point of view of a manin his 30s looking back at his high school life. Horsie’s willremain in the present. I think that will give the book more contrast.
I’m dreaming when I say I’llrewrite it one day. Being a new father means I never have time foranything at all.
-
Once I went dancing at an 80s night inOttawa and I asked the DJ if he would play a Prince song and he saidsure and the song wound up being Little Red Corvette. You can’treally dance to it – it’s sort of slow but not really. However,it is funky and it got Prince on MTV and so I applauded the DJ andwhen the night was over, I drove home in my Hyundai.
Which was blue.
A brief plot summary: Horsie (real nameis Stanley) is a freshman in high school and he befriends a juniornamed Dusk. Dusk learns that Horsie’s dad died one year ago andunofficially left him his red Corvette, which Horsie keeps under atarp in the backyard (he is still too young to have a driver’slicense.) At the end of the book, Horsie decides to sell the car sohe can pay his college tuition. The Corvette, of course, is a symbolof his past and as Horsie lets it go, he opens himself up to thepromise of the future.
I guess that sounds like a pretty coolpremise even though the story itself is pretty lame. There’ssubplots involving a school bully and a pretty girl Horsie has acrush on. The people I showed it to at the time thought it was prettygood (one magician friend of mine, who was then about 30, liked it somuch that he said it should be required reading for high schoolstudents.) My best friend, Jason, told me he appreciated that I wasbeing vulnerable but he thought the book was pretty lame. Lookingback at it, I think the book is pretty lame too.
But that’s not to say it can’t berescued.
-
I once entered a contest to win a redCorvette. There was this car stereo store in Calgary that was givingone away and all you had to do was draw a picture of a Corvette. Idrew one and I even drew a crappy drawing of Prince next to it. Ican’t draw to save my life so Prince wound up looking more like ahorse with a plate of spaghetti on his head.
-
I’ve long said that a red Corvette ismy dream car (actually, a Lamborghini is, but that’s justridiculous) even though it’s not practical for me anymore. For onething, I have an 18-month-old son. You can’t drive a toddler aroundin a Corvette. It’s just not safe. Corvettes don’t have frontseats. Also, Corvettes don’t have the storage space I need to cartmy magic gear from gig to gig. Hyundais, like the one I have rightnow, are far better suited to that.
-
The epigram to my novel, by the way, istaken from the Prince song Little Red Corvette. It goes: “LittleRed Corvette – I need a kind of love that’s gonna last.” Thebook is basically about how much Horsie loved his father and how hegoes about trying to find another source of that fatherly love. Dusk,just one year older, is too naïve to see what Horsie is reallylooking for. He doesn’t know that Horsie looks at him as a fatherfigure instead of a friend.
The book was written from the points ofview of both Dusk and Horsie as students. If I decide to rewrite it,I think I will have Dusk writing it from the point of view of a manin his 30s looking back at his high school life. Horsie’s willremain in the present. I think that will give the book more contrast.
I’m dreaming when I say I’llrewrite it one day. Being a new father means I never have time foranything at all.
-
Once I went dancing at an 80s night inOttawa and I asked the DJ if he would play a Prince song and he saidsure and the song wound up being Little Red Corvette. You can’treally dance to it – it’s sort of slow but not really. However,it is funky and it got Prince on MTV and so I applauded the DJ andwhen the night was over, I drove home in my Hyundai.
Which was blue.
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