Scary Hallowe’en stuff

It’s Hallowe’en, the best holiday of the year, and so it’s so long October. Those peak woodcock flights I mentioned in my last post ought to be done with (but I don’t think they are), and with the wind and rain out of the way I did set book business aside and get out yesterday and put some birds in the bag. So the dog is happy, at least.

A round-up of recent goings-on:

On the 29th, I did a local event, for a change: a reading and talk at the Masonville Branch of the London Public Library.

On the 26th, I travelled up to Ottawa and did an interview for CBC’s All in a Day, followed by an appearance at the Ottawa International Writer’s Festival. You can check out the CBC interview here.

Last week, an excerpt from the book went up at rabble.ca. It’s from a chapter on the history of the gun lobby, and it deals with how pressure for gun control in Canada in the 1970s created for the first time a coherent, national gun lobby for Canada — one that quickly rattled apart under the pressure of competing interests. Flash forward almost forty years, and not much has changed: Canada’s National Firearms Association has imploded under the pressure of competing interests (and egos), and the hard core is still preaching that everyone needs to stick together to protect the hard core’s interests. Le plus ca change.