February took us to Vietnam aboard the Silver Whisper of the Silversea cruise line. In our teens, Vietnam was a war, not a country. It preoccupied the nightly news then raged in the cinemas as Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Deer Hunter, and numerous others. Four decades later, in real life, the openness of Vietnam’s vibrant, peace-loving people lifted our hearts. They’ve built a safe, well-organized country from the ashes of the carpet bombing. The country feels rustic, not poor, and may keep motorcycle manufacturers in business forever.

December brought us Paul McCartney. I was twelve when he appeared with the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show; Lorna and I have been fans ever since. We flew to Paris for the ambience, the window shopping, the food. Sir Paul was there, too, within walking distance of our hotel. We snagged the best seats in the house for his fabulous concert. He sang for 2½ hours without stopping for even a glass of water; played our favourites with renewed vibrancy and sophistication; interacted wittily with the crowd; projected a youthful manner and appearance. The visuals were dazzling. His presence touched our souls.

All the best for 2010.

Ross

Frank Moher, a Canadian playwright, wrote a really nice review of TAINTED in yesterdays National Post. I’ve placed it here on the website under the BOOKS tab. (click on More reviews).

Last weekend, Lorna and I had a wonderful time in Owen Sound, Ontario. What a gem of a place: immaculate downtown business district, flowers planted everywhere, user-friendly waterside paths, bucolic picnic spots overlooking waterfalls, and beautifully restored nineteenth-century Ontario mansions (somehow, the funeral parlours do the best job of the restorations; too bad you have to die to be an honoured guest). Mayor Ruth Lovell Stanners and her husband Bruce Stanners (a doctor friend and colleague) hosted us in their home and organized a terrific book-lovers evening in support of TAINTED. After a delicious buffet supper that spilled into their back garden, we all trooped over to the Downtown Bookstore on the main street of Owen Sound. Hazel and Andre Lyder, the proprietors, were engaging hosts at their shop — one of the nicest I’ve been to.  After treating us to sangria, Hazel gave me a most simpatico introduction; then I spoke about the transformation of the doctor into the writer. I told anecdotes about famous figures in history who died of tainted food, and described the genesis of TAINTED and my first book, THE UNFORGIVING TIDES. I finished with three short readings.

I believe in keeping readings short. Mostly, the audience wants to know personal details about the writer and how the book came about. I don’t know about you, but my mind quickly wanders when I’m sitting being read to.  Linwood Barclay, author of  the highly successful thriller No Time For Goodbye, has been an inspiration to me on this score. He gives a lively, engaging monologue and tops it off with a very short reading.

Anyway, we had a terrific time at the Downtown Bookstore in Owen Sound and I’m raring to take the show on the road — hoping to be invited elsewhere.

It’s time I got back to writing about Zol and Hamish’s next adventure. We’re getting close to the climax where everything falls apart.

Cheers, Ross

I’m thrilled, and humbled, to say that TAINTED is being very well received in lots of places. Margaret Cannon in today’s Globe and Mail called it:

“[an] excellent debut novel… What works are the two likeable and convincing doctors and the scary plot. Pennie’s message – that no matter how safe our world seems, it’s still very fragile – is timely and true.”

And this just in! The original print run has almost sold out and my publisher, those talented folks at ECW Press, have ordered a second printing, bless them.

Thank you all for your enthusiastic support and for going out and purchasing copies with your heard-earned, after-tax income. Of course, sales figures are not the only measure of the value of a novel, but a second printing is just the boost I need to keep me working on the next Zol and Hamish outing. If I don’t get bogged down — or laid up — by an epidemic of real-live H1N1 swine flu, Zol and Hamish will be back on the bookshelves next year.

There are tears at the Survivor Ceremony, where cancer patients relive the painful indignities of their treatments and give thanks for their cancer-free days, months, or years. There are more tears at the Luminary Ceremony where friends and relatives light candles and tell stories that honour their fallen. My favourite time comes at nightfall, when everyone follows the piper’s Amazing Grace in a commemorative lap around the track, now lined with the glow of flickering lanterns. Each flame represents a life ensnared – some lives burned out long ago and are remembered with bittersweet joy, some departed only last week and the pain of their leaving is all too fresh, other lives are still burning bright and cancer free.

At seven in the morning, after an early breakfast cooked and served by the smiling faces of a service club, the total of the funds raised is announced with a flourish of pride and excitement. Our Relay raised $125,000 this year, a stunning accomplishment in difficult economic times.

But as I was driving home, I couldn’t help thinking about the money, which is the object of the exercise – the prize at the end of eight months of meticulous planning, frenzied emailing, energetic canvassing, and monumental collaborating by dozens of people. And then I thought of the NHL hockey player who earns $125,000 in just one hockey game, and the movie star who earns the same in just one day on the set.

I asked myself why we place outlandish monetary value on professional entertainment – sports and movies – and not on medical care and research. Why did it take so many volunteers eight months to raise the same number of dollars that the NHL pays a single high-profile player in just one game? If there is an answer, it’s beyond me at the moment.

Still, I’m proud of Lorna, her co-chair Vicky, and the countless others who made this year’s Ancaster-Dundas Relay for Life a resounding success. Of course, it’s not all about the money. It’s about honouring our community and bringing out the best in ourselves, and we did that in spades.

More than anything, the completion of a novel to the standard required for publication requires patience. There’s the slogging through the first draft, then the revising/reshaping/polishing/repolishing that prevent the work from inciting ridicule when shared with others, then the complete rewrite for the publisher who finally deems to read bits of it, the major changes/additions/deletions imposed by an editor, and finally, the multitude of minutiae that must be altered to please the owl-eyed proofreaders. Yes, patience and persistence are at the heart of the writer’s mantra.

But when your book finally hits the bookstores, online sites, and libraries, it’s timing that determines whether it succeeds or fails. A beautifully written novel, engaging in every way but published at the wrong time, may fail to catch the eyes of readers. It will sell few copies and end its life remaindered on flea-market tables. Luckily, (and good timing comes more often from dumb luck than expert planning), Tainted has landed in bookstores with perfect timing. What better time for a mystery novel about an epidemic than Phase Five of a super-epidemic sanctioned by the World Health Organization?

The doctor in me is far from pleased about the current crisis induced by Mexican Swine-Flu, 2009 H1N1 Influenza (it needs a shorter handle). I’m thankful that the illness induced by the virus is mostly mild, gets better on its own, and is not spreading like wildfire. What unsettles me more than the virus itself, is the world’s reaction to it.

The media, of course, are titillated and cannot help themselves spending half their newscasts on tales of pandemic flu; they tell stories for a living (so do I) and this is one that can be spun into one heck of a story. We need to remember that much of what we read/see/hear is either exaggerated or untrue.

Members of the public don’t understand the complexities of things like modes of transmission, incubation periods, N95 mask-respirators, neurominidase inhibitors, and overstimulation of immune systems by superantigens. It’s natural to worry and respond irrationally when facing a little-known agent that the press says is both dangerous and headed our way. That said, it’s okay for your neighbour to fret more than necessary, but it’s quite another for people in authority to go off the deep end – I was outraged at the story of that perfectly healthy Montreal boy barred from school for a week by his ignorant principal.

I would most like to see more members of my infectious-disease community being circumspect in their comments. Those who predicted a disastrous pandemic, in which schools would become morgues, are rubbing their hands with glee while telling us, I told you so. They’re exaggerating, of course. The statistics show it: deaths have been few, numbers of new cases have evened out in Mexico, and numbers are rising only slowly elsewhere. We’re not all going to get this. Far more people have died this year of regular winter flu than of this Mexican variety.

Why do some experts exaggerate? It comes down to office politics, academic investments, and personal ambitions. And if you read Tainted, you’ll see it all in action. It’s only fiction, of course, but I think you’ll agree that the timing is perfect.

Jack David, the helmsman at ECW Press, said some very kind words and then I talked about the book’s setting and characters before reading a few short excerpts. It’s tricky to do a reading of a mystery novel. You don’t want to give the game away, yet you want to engage the audience and impress them with your writing style. I chose short passages, which introduced four of the characters. There were a few chuckles and then a lot of hand clapping, as you’d expect when you’ve corralled 130 of your good friends and supporters.

Edna Barker, my skilled and patient editor, along with Simon and Erin from ECW Press, made the trek from Toronto to provide their continued support and encouragement, which have been essential to the success of the enterprise. At the end of the evening, three lucky winners took home Lorna’s specially made, and truly gorgeous, quilted table runners.

Now that the big launch is over, I’m looking forward to the next few Tainted talks and readings, which people have been kind enough to arrange. For me, meeting enthusiastic readers is the biggest bonus of being a published author. Please click on this website’s Author Events tab, and do come out and say hello when you can.

Soon after assuming his new post as an infectious disease specialist at Brantford General Hospital in 2003, Dr. Ross Pennie learned of two local cases of a deadly and particularly frightful brain disease. The cases “gripped me with terror,” Pennie said. He and his colleagues were awash in an “emotional chill” until it was learned that the two cases were naturally occurring forms of the disease and not a brewing public health nightmare.

Afterward, Pennie, already a budding author working on a non-fiction memoir of his two years practising medicine in the South Pacific, realized that the potential of an unexpected and frightening epidemic in small-city Ontario would be “a good premise for a novel.”

That idea has finally come to fruition, after years of writing and rewriting, in the form of Pennie’s fast-paced debut novel, Tainted: A Dr. Zol Szabo Medical Mystery. Taintedfeatures fictional medical sleuth Szabo and a cast of cohorts who race against time and battle bureaucracy to identify the cause of a deadly brain disease threatening to become epidemic in southwestern Ontario.

The notion of sleuthing and solving plague outbreaks fascinates medical professionals and the public alike.”Everyone loves it,” said Pennie, 57, who is the medical director of the laboratories at BGH, the hospital’s infectious disease specialist and a part-time professor at McMaster University.

Although medicine is Pennie’s profession and passion, he embraced writing as a youngster when, at the tender age of 10, the fledgling scribe diarized a four-day solo train trip from Medicine Hat, Alberta, to Vancouver. Decades later, he turned to a computer screen rather than pen and paper to set down a memoir detailing the medical challenges he faced as a CUSO volunteer working in the jungles of Papua New Guinea when he was fresh out of med school. The Unforgiving Tideswas published in 2004 to critical acclaim and has sold about 3,000 copies. “I enjoyed it so much, I didn’t stop writing,” Pennie said.

Another stroke of good fortune fell Pennie’s way when he met international best-selling mystery author P. D. James while on a cruise. “I sat down with her and she was so encouraging,” Pennie said. “Her eyes lit up” when he told her he was both a doctor and a writer, he said. James imparted a piece of advice that is simple but critical for any would-be writer. “She said, ‘You have to set aside time to write,’” Pennie said. Pennie took the advice to heart and embarked on a strict writing schedule. Seven days a week, he rises at 5:45 a. m. and is at his computer by 7 a. m. for two hours of writing.

The dutiful early morning writing sessions are not a chore for Pennie. Instead, he said he is “pumped and excited when I come to work. I feel terrific.”

Pennie spent the better part of four years crafting the novel, from plotting it in 2004, through two years of rewrites to its completion in 2008.
During that time, he took a brief hiatus from writing when his first book came out. On Jan. 1, 2006, he returned in earnest to his writing ofTainted.
The first draft was completed in a couple of months, but the rewriting took two years, he said.

The setting of Tainted is a combination of the real and the fictitious, Pennie said.The story is set in Hamilton, using real street names and descriptions of the escarpment and surrounding area. However, the names of stores, offices and institutions are fictitious.

The novel immediately caught the eye of editors at ECW Press — the first publisher he sent it to — and Pennie has been signed to a three-book deal.
Because it takes a year from acceptance to seeing a book in print, Pennie has already been long at work on the second Dr. Szabo novel and said he hopes to hopes to finish it by midsummer.

“It’s much easier this time,” he said. Readers who gobble up Tainted will want to know what the second book in the series has in store, but all Pennie will say is that it is set in a retirement residence “where nasty things are happening.”