Up and Down (2012)

Behind the Novel: 1

I thought some of you might like a behind the scenes look at my novels, where they came from and how they were received. So here’s the first post in a new category: Behind the Novel. First up, my third novel, Up and Down. It may feel like I’m pumping my own tires here but I thought I’d start with a novel that did quite well. Not all of my novels have been quite so warmly received and we’ll cover those ones, too, in time.

Up and Down was my third novel, published in 2012, a decade ago (I did that math in my head). It was a critical novel for me as I tried to find my feet as a writer (let alone hit my stride). You see, my first two novels—political satires both—had done better than I had a right to expect as a rookie novelist. (The Leacock Medal and Canada Reads saw to that.) But I’d never written anything other than political satire and I wasn’t sure I could. But I was determined to depart from politics and see if I could write a comic novel about something else.

True to my approach, I plumbed the depths of my own life for ideas that required little research. As I’ve written here before, I’m a charter member of the “write what you know” school of writing. As I see it, novelists want to write with authority, conviction and authenticity. I try to make that easier by writing about worlds I know, experiences I’ve had, or issues I care about, without the resulting story being autobiographical. So in my third novel—this all-important first departure from political satire—I somehow decided to bring together my lifelong fascination with the space program with my now nearly 35 years in the PR/Communications agency world. Surely I could combine those two disparate worlds in a novel, right?

The Space Program

I trace it back to the summer of 1969, that infamous “toss your inhibitions to the wind summer of love.” Or, if you were nine years old at the time, as I was, it was more like the “sew name tags in your underwear summer of camp.” My twin brother Tim, who, yes, was also nine years old, and I were on a remote 20 acre island in the southwest arm of Lake Temagami, about an hour’s drive north of North Bay, Ontario. We were at Camp White Bear, an idyllic place that looms large in our memories. One night towards the end of July, a special “quiet campfire” was organized in the main lodge. The younger campers were encouraged to wear their pyjamas and bring their sleeping bags. So we did. We sang camp songs and enjoyed a few Robert Service tales read aloud in the dim light as the fire crackled.

Then at 10:45 or so, when many of the younger campers were asleep—though not I—a portable black and white television belonging to the ancient camp cooks, Jim and Flo, was produced. Rabbit ears were painstakingly adjusted and several strips of tin foil were strategically added until the snow on the screen receded and an unmistakable image appeared. I was utterly transfixed.

Neil Armstrong was just heading down the nine-rung ladder of the Lunar Module. As he completed each step, I would turn my head and look out the window of the main lodge to stare at the moon hanging in the night sky over Lake Temagami. Then I would whip my head back to the TV. At nearly 11:00 p.m., Neil Armstrong actually set foot on another heavenly body. It blew my young little mind.

Something turned in me that night. Something shifted. From that day, from that instant, my fascination with space has been with me, through school, university, jobs, nearly 35 years of happy marriage, two sons, a lot of hockey, and eight novels (with number nine almost in the can). It’s always there, not usually visible to those around me. But were you to scan my YouTube viewing history, you’d see lots of space documentaries popping up.

I won’t go into how this fascination shaped my childhood and teenage years, but stay tuned sometime for tales of the three full sized hang gliders and a single seater hovercraft a classmate and I designed, built, and tested, starting when we were both 12 years old. That’s a story in and of itself.

The PR Agency World

In 1988, after my nearly five-year stint in politics working on Parliament Hill and then at Queen’s Park, I became a public affairs consultant in the Toronto office of Hill and Knowlton, a large, New York-headquartered multinational PR agency. I spent nearly eight years learning the agency world including a stint as President of Berger & Associates, a Hill and Knowlton subsidiary, before a colleague, Joe Thornley, and I founded Thornley Fallis in 1995, a full service communications agency with offices in Toronto and Ottawa. I retired from the firm in March 2022 to write full time, but the the company carries on its good work. All that to say that I spent the major part of my career working in PR/communications agencies. I know that world—I’d better know it after almost 35 years.

The Story Told in the Novel

So I cooked up this story about a young PR guy just joining the Toronto office of a multinational PR agency (been there) and taking the lead on a new project to rekindle public interest in the space program, both in Canada and the U.S. Why? Well, the Apollo program ended, public interest in the space program waned, giving Congress the freedom to reduce the NASA budget with impunity. There was a slight uptick when the shuttle program started, but public interest again sagged shortly thereafter. NASA’s share of the federal budget in the 2010s was only about 10 per cent of its allocation granted during the Apollo years. NASA wanted and needed more funding, so public interest in the space program became an important commodity. (This premise is absolutely true even if the novel is—as novels tend to be—fiction.)

The novel’s narrator, David Stewart, comes up with this crazy idea to hold a citizen astronaut lottery where one American and one Canadian randomly chosen from the millions of entries would have the chance to train for a shuttle mission and spend a week on the International Space Station. One way to spark the public’s interest in space is to put the public in space. Out of this premise came Up and Down. The Canadian winner of the lottery, Landon Percival, was, shall we say unexpected. (No spoilers here.)

As I did for my first six books, I podcast the entire novel myself, chapter-by-chapter, and made it available for free on iTunes, where it remains available today.

Click here or on the image below to listen to the chapter-by-chapter podcast version of Up and Down.

Marc Garneau’s Support

As Canada’s first astronaut, I thought it would be a dream scenario to have Marc Garneau review the novel for the accuracy of all the space stuff, and, ideally, provide a blurb for the front cover of the novel. I managed to make contact with his office—he was then a Liberal Member of Parliament and soon joined the Cabinet—and he miraculously agreed to read the manuscript. I sent it up and then didn’t sleep for three weeks worrying about his reaction. Finally my phone rang in my Toronto day-job office. It was his Executive Assistant. He didn’t exactly sound effervescent.

“Um, Mr. Fallis, Dr. Garneau would like to see you.”

I had what felt like a minor stroke, but agreed to fly up for the meeting. I assumed I’d botched the novel and had gotten all the space shuttle and mission details wrong but Marc Garneau wanted to tell me face-to-face, you know, the honourable thing to do. He was an astronaut, after all.

When we met in his Parliament Hill office on a Wednesday evening, photos and mission patches from his three voyages beyond our realm hanging on his walls, I was unable to construct complete sentences for the first few minutes, so starstruck was I.

I was very nervous that he was about to impart bad news. It didn’t help when he pulled my manuscript from his desk drawer sprouting dozens of yellow Post-it notes. I’m not kidding. I took this photo of the manuscript when I got back to my hotel that evening.

He took me off the hook in short order. He really liked the novel. I had nearly all of the space mission details correct, save for understating the G-forces astronauts feel upon re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere. An easy fix. So I bet you’re wondering about all the Post-it notes, right? Well, I had asked Marc Garneau to read the manuscript just to make sure what I’d written about the shuttle, the ISS and the mission, was accurate and/or plausible. Turned out Marc Garneau did more than that. He proofread the entire manuscript, catching each typo and each instance where I’d missed a little word, like “a” or “the.” I do this often when I’m writing. My brain moves faster than my fingers—and that’s more a comment on my fingers than my brain.

I had proofread that manuscript multiple times before sending it up to him, so paranoid was I. But still he managed to find 53 little mistakes. The moral of the story is, if you want a thorough job done, ask an astronaut. A week later, he provided this lovely blurb that you can find on the cover and inside the novel.

I was thrilled. Who wouldn’t be?

Then it Hit Bookstores

To my great relief, the novel seemed to be a success. Perhaps I was able to write about more than politics. In the fall of 2012, shortly after the launch of Up and Down, it was thrilling to see the Canadian Fiction bestsellers list one September morning and discover that all three of my novels were in the top 15. In my wildest dreams I’d never expected to see my entire literary output (at that time) on the bestsellers list in the same week.

In early 2013, Up and Down was named a finalist for the 2013 Leacock Medal. It didn’t win that year, but it was still a great feeling to be on the shortlist.

If that weren’t enough, in November 2013, Up and Down won the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen Award.

Up and Down finished 2012 as one of the top selling novels of the year even though it wasn’t released until mid September. The Best Laid Plans was actually ahead of it in sales that year, another tangible testament to the power of Canada Reads.

Well, this seemed to be going quite well for which I was honoured and very grateful.

Optioned for a Feature Film

Also in November 2013, Robert Mickelson, a Canadian producer in Los Angeles secured the film and TV rights for Up and Down. He worked very hard for a year to make it happen but it never quite crossed the finish line. So the rights reverted to me. He’d been trying to persuade Lily Tomlin to play the role of Landon Percival, the star of the novel, but as happens most of the time in Hollywood, it never quite made it. Then Robert secured Susan Coyne—who co-wrote the TV miniseries based on The Best Laid Plans—and the three of us made the rounds of Canadian broadcasters, CBC, Corus, and I think it was Global if memory serves, pitching the story as a film. Nope. No takers.

I still think it would make a great movie and I hope one day it happens.

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If I’m honest—and I always try to be—Up and Down may well be my favourite of my novels. I still really love the story and the characters.

If you still haven’t seen or read enough about my third novel, here’s a keynote I gave at a Canadian Public Relations Society conference in Gatineau, Québec in June of 2013. I spoke on the topic of my short trip from Public Relations to writing novels. I’m not suggesting you watch it all, unless insomnia is an issue, but I do some brief readings from Up and Down as part of the talk given that the novel’s narrator works at a multinational PR agency.

Next up? Not sure yet, but in a week you’ll find another post. Thanks for reading this and I hope you’ll subscribe if you haven’t already.