Literature relief

The entire family went into Toronto for the Word on the Street yesterday. We took Duncan, too, since it would look good for his English class. Even though it rained on and off all afternoon, there was enough cover between the booths and the trees in Queen's Park to keep us from getting completely soaked. We all split up once we got to the main exhibits. Charles Wallace went with my mother and looked at science magazines, and then waited in line with her when she went to McClelland and Stewart's booth to get her new Margaret Atwood book signed by the remote control pen. (Margaret Atwood was in Scotland, but the book signing was in Toronto. Go figure.) My father got a lot of baseball-related statistics books at ECW Press, and Duncan and I just wandered around. Duncan swore that he saw Michael Patterson dropping bad novel-sized packages into every publisher booth; considering that some of the publishers there were (for instance) architecture book-only publishers, or children's lit only, he might not have much luck.
When we caught up with my mother and brother, Charles Wallace was sulking. He had seen the end result of the Michael Patterson play he'd been involved with this summer. The workshops ended suddenly, with no reason. Charles Wallace just found out that Mirabell had hijacked the script, rewritten it himself, and presented it as a one-man show about madness, with the main character reminiscing about a non-existant childhood and equally non-existant adult success as a writer. I think it was called "A Scream From the Attic."