My wife Jill reading the first copy of Adventures in Solitude out of the box.

Wow, what an surreal feeling to pick up, hold, sniff, flip through and examine something that for the longest time wasn’t a physical reality but just a questionable idea kicking around in my head. Credit a really good and trusted friend who lit a fire under my ass and got me to typing, and a few years later… a 280-something page book with a cover and everything is now here, in my hands.

I brought the first box of Adventures in Solitude down to the Rain City Chronicles story-telling night in Vancouver  last night. I told a story from the book and sold several copies to kind souls who may not know how much their purchases meant to me. And thanks to all those from around the world who have been pre-ordering it as well… you will receive your copies very shortly, and thanks to Harbour Publishing for trusting me.

For those in Vancouver, I’ll be at Word on the Street doing a reading (more like a “telling”) at 2pm this Sunday September 27. I’m also looking at adding new launch dates in Regina, Toronto, Ottawa, London, Halifax, Picton, and Swift Current! Thanks again for all your support.

The official release date of Adventures in Solitude is this Monday, September 27, 2010.

…So the fifth annual Polaris Music Prize is a wrap, and a what a celebration of Canadian music it was, bringing together rock ‘n’ roll, pop hip hop, electronic, stoner fuzz, and singer-songwriters all onto one stage for another historic broadcast on CBC Radio 3 and MuchMusic. Congratulations to winning band Karkwa from Montreal, and to all nine other nominees. My favourite performance was Tegan and Sara, my favourite moment was Tegan’s speech after their songs. Thanks for all the warm words, tweets, and emails. It was a blast and an honour to be a part of what Steve Jordan created five years ago. It just keeps getting bigger and better! Sleepy time now! Oh, and watch the MuchMusic re-airing of the show on Saturday September 25 at 9pm!

Here is the second in a series of videos that will hopefully give you a better idea of what Desolation Sound is really like, since the Sound is the wildly bi-polar central character in my book Adventures in Solitude. The first video put us in the middle of the Sound, bobbing in the ‘chuck, and this one takes us a couple hundred feet into the rainforest that surrounds it. And as densely wooded as it seems, it has been logged twice, a deadly, solitary practice, once in the late 1800s and again in the mid-1950s. That won’t happen again as a huge area of it was declared the largest marine park on the West Coast of Canada in 1973.