Sigmund Brouwer Kids

Thought I’d start my blogging with a post to thank Nolan in B.C. for helping with Hitmen Triumph, an upcoming sports mystery. The main character is a hockey player who uses an FM transmitter to help him overcome his hearing difficulty. Nolan uses a FM transmitter, too. He’s in junior high school now, but what was one of his main memories from all his years in elementary school? When he heard his teacher in grade four in the bathroom.

I took his memory of it, and turned it into this passage:

“In elementary school, sometimes teachers who wore the FM transmitter for me would forget to turn it off when they left the classroom. In the staffroom or the washroom, I’d be able to hear them because the FM sent sounds to my processor, even if I was in another room. I can tell you that it changes how you think about a sweet old lady teacher after you have heard her on the toilet talking to herself about hoping the prune juice would deliver more than a good toot. It changes even more after you’ve heard something from her on the toilet right after that. Something loud and rude, like a startled duck quacking when you step on it. Something you want to make sure you don’t smell. Yup. A good toot. That was in grade four. Every time I looked at her for the rest of the year, I giggled and she didn’t know why.”

When Sarah, my editor at Orca Book, read the manuscript, she included this note about that passage: “Do we need this? I think it might be enough to say that he heard things he wasn’t meant to hear – leave it to reader’s imaginations.”

My reply? “No such thing as too much bathroom humor for guys.” (Especially hockey team guys!)

Maybe I shouldn’t have kept going with it, but later in the book, I couldn’t resist the temptation, when the main character, needs to get his FM that he had left behind in a video store to listen to the bad guys:

“My FM was still in the movie rental place. It was worth a lot of money. I couldn’t leave it behind. . .
Halfway back to the door, I froze at a new sound that reached me from inside the store. The sound was loud and rude, like a startled duck quacking when you step on it. Something you want to make sure you don’t smell.
“Dude,” Counter Guy said to himself. “Good one!”
Then a few seconds later, he coughed and gagged and muttered, “Dude, bad one. Trying to commit suicide?”
I decided to wait a few more minutes before I went back into the store. It was a small store. I wanted to make sure the air had cleared out before I went in for a movie. I wasn’t interested in any bonus features.”

I guess if you don’t think this is funny, you’d better stay away from the book Timberwolf Hunt. It has a chapter where a poor kid gets locked in a closet with a dog that has bad gas. . .