World Book Night

It may be fortunate that Vincent Pratchett knows his way around a fire hose.

His career as an author is liable to get red hot in 2014.

A veteran of 23 years with Toronto Fire Services, Pratchett’s first novel, The Raven’s Warrior, was selected as one of the works to be given out on World Book Night in April.

“Oh my God . . . it’s really mind blowing,” the 58-year-old smoke jumper says of his book’s selection and early success. “I would never have imagined that it would have gone the way it’s going. It’s fantastic really.”

Already a winner of the 2013 USA Best Book Award for visionary fiction — handed out by USA Book News — the novel is set in 10th-century China. Its protagonist, a Celtic warrior, is taken in battle by Vikings and dragged and sold across Europe and Asia until he ends up a slave to a Taoist priest and his daughter in the Middle Kingdom.

Under his masters’ Eastern tutelage, the Celtic slave becomes a king in a story Pratchett describes as a kind of Arthurian legend.

The World Book Night selection makes Pratchett’s novel one of 38 new and established works that will be handed out free to some 550,000 occasional or non-readers across the United States on April 23: Shakespeare’s birthday.

And it puts the rookie author in some august company, with books by Joseph Heller, Agatha Christie, Garrison Keillor and Scott Turow also on the distribution list.

Pratchett — who works out of Station 135 in Forest Hill — is as surprised as anyone at his book’s award recognition. Indeed, he’s still shocked that he’s a professional author at all.

“I never imagined writing a novel, period,” says Pratchett, who has also been a martial arts instructor. “I just thought it was too impossible to get published, especially if you’re not a writer per se.”

But when he submitted a 12-page version of his tale to YMAA Publishing, a small U.S. house, editors demanded more.

“That’s when all the red lights you have in your mind for not writing a novel . . . just sort of fell away.”

Writing, Pratchett says, has helped sustain him since his boyhood days as a dedicated diary keeper.

“I was always writing things and when my daughter was young I wrote a (unpublished) children’s book for her,” the father of two says. “Writing has always been integral to what I do and who I am.”

He is working on a second novel.

But Pratchett, who has two years left in his “bread and butter” career, says he’s still a firefighter first.

“I do envision myself as being a full-time author, but I am a firefighter,” he says. “It’s so funny to say that, but it’s more than a regular job.”

Despite the long and often tedious stints between alarms that firefighters face, Pratchett says he could never use that down time to write.

“For the day job, I’m dealing with reality and functioning as a team member,” he says.

“But when I’m off duty, that’s when the writing thing kicks in and provides a beautiful balance where I’m dealing with imagination.”

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Want to read the book? Get it here. Buy The Raven's Warrior