Come on — what’s one more hat, really?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/02/2019 (2714 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It would be a bit of an understatement to say G. Geoffrey Banjavich has worn many hats in his diverse working career.

For starters, at the age of 15, he was a model for a number of local and international clothing companies.

“I was the Shoppers Optical guy from 1997 to 2001,” Banjavich, 47, says with a laugh over dinner this week at the Prairie Ink restaurant in McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location.

“Those billboards were up all across Canada.”

He’s also earned acting credits for a wide range of movies and TV shows, including portraying a doctor in the upcoming feature film Breakthrough and a lawyer in the second season of the CBC drama Burden of Truth.

He can also lay claim to being an inventor, having patented the Easy Flip Revolving Cooking Grid, a device that slashes the time it takes food to cook in the oven.

Not to mention stints as a professional musician (he plays the guitar), script editor, screenwriter, speechwriter and the fact he’s the constituency assistant for Andrew Smith, the Progressive Conservative MLA for Southdale.

But Banjavich is most proud of the newest line on his resumé — published author.

Last week, at McNally Robinson, this jack of all trades launched his first book, The Adventures of Georgie Sheppard: Georgie Meets Nikola Tesla, the first of what the fledgling writer hopes will be a five-book series for young-adult science-fiction fans.

“(Writing a novel) rates at the very top,” Banjavich says during an interview.

“I love it! There’s nothing I adore more than writing. Acting is a close second, but when it comes to writing, you’re creating an entire universe.”

Banjavich’s book, published by Austin Macauley Publishers in the U.K., is a time-travelling coming-of-age story with a dash of youthful romance thrown in for good measure.

It’s available at McNally Robinson for $20.95, and at online retailers such as Amazon.ca.

It follows the adventures of 14-year-old Georgie Sheppard, who finds himself travelling in time back to the end of the 19th century, where he hooks up with his hero, the legendary inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla, who becomes his mentor as Georgie is bedevilled by schoolyard bullies and a mysterious and menacing shadow organization.

(For the record, I am not going to review the book, though I zipped through it in a few days because, like Banjavich, I am a longtime sci-fi nerd.)

This first novel likely would never have come about were it not for the influence of Pulitzer Prize-winning Winnipeg writer Carol Shields, who was Banjavich’s English literature professor at the University of Manitoba in 1991 and ’92.

“She said, ‘You have what it takes to be a writer.’ When you hear that from Carol Shields, you listen,” he says.

“If it weren’t for her, I don’t know if I’d have become a writer. She gave me the confidence.”

The actor/writer/political staffer became obsessed with the genius of Tesla when, at eight years old, his parents took him to the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto to see an exhibit that featured a Tesla coil, a device that allows for the wireless transfer of electricity and produces a stunning display of Frankenstein-style electrical sparks.

“They held up a light bulb, turned this thing on and there was a big electrical spark and the light bulb in this person’s hand lit up,” he recalls with obvious awe.

“You couldn’t see the electricity going to the bulb. It was like magic.”

In the book, our hero Georgie whips up a Tesla coil for his high school’s science fair, and gets zapped to within an inch of his life.

In reality, Banjavich created a working model of the invention for his Grade 9 science fair at St. Paul’s High School. The results were, fortunately, not fatal.

“I built it at home and took it to school for the science fair and it wreaked havoc,” he recalls, laughing at the memory.

“It blew the breakers several times at my house. The garage doors in the neighbourhood, including mine, were going up and down, up and down.

“At school, I warned them there was a chance of a power surge. They unplugged the office computers, but the computer lab didn’t listen and suffered the consequences. It took out the power grid in the area. It was the weirdest thing. It was kind of cool.”

The idea to turn his lifelong passion for all things Tesla into a book came to him as he was driving around the city in 2007 after returning from Vancouver.

“I was driving down Bishop Grandin Boulevard, looking at the power lines and I’m thinking, ‘You know, without Tesla, we’d never have any of this. What if when I was a kid, I could have met Tesla? Oh my God, I have an idea for a book!’” he says.

From that aha moment, it took more than 10 years to turn his idea into reality, but Banjavich promises it won’t take that long to produce the sequels to his cliffhanger.

“I’ve already worked out what happens,” he says.

“There are going to be some real surprises.”

The writer concedes there is more than a little of himself in his protagonist, Georgie.

“I’m not a time traveller, but there are excerpts from my own childhood and youth experiences,” he says.

The story unfolds like a screenplay, which was intentional.

“It’s always been my dream to be a published author,” says Banjavich, whose portrayal of a psychopath in the 2014 docudrama The Psychopath Next Door was so chilling it reportedly creeped out his neighbours.

“That’s what I wanted most. But I’d love to see this book come to life on the screen.”

No doubt, there’s room for one more hat in his collection.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca