writing skills/profession

Something I Seldom Do


After a punishing massage, I indulged in a roam through Staples and a sit down at the Starbucks in the nearby grocery. I needed a notepad for rewrites of my current novel and a change of scenery. 

Since mid-winter I have been avoiding going into town unless I had no other choice. It gets tiring, the in and out of the truck, trudging through snow, shielding from the prairie wind, and tip-toeing over ice, but now that spring is stubbornly muscling her dainty self onto the scene like Tinkerbell on steroids, the cooped up feeling is pushing me out of the house.

As usual, I lost track of the time and had to hot-foot it home to get lunch for Rob. He comes home most days, but today as I was finishing the food prep, he called to say he wouldn’t be able to make it because a meeting was scheduled unexpectedly and he wouldn’t have time. Disappointing, but it happens. 

So there I was with lunch and no table-mate and no real urge to gobble in front of the computer screen. Surfing is provoking a “meh” feeling lately.

Mad  wrote a Buffy the V post recently that has run around in my mind ever since and it occurred to me that perhaps I could watch a bit of Buffy with my lunch and peruse the episode guide. Yeah, I am a geek like that.

And that is what I did. I pulled out my favorite season – six – and put in a disc then settled back with my soup for about a half hour of paranormal deliciousness.

Season six is my favorite. It’s dark, angsty and full of character evolution. It is everything that good story-telling is, including being experimental. The episode, Once More with Feeling, is actually a musical and I love me some bursting into song on a moment’s notice. I wouldn’t mind at all if real life was like that.

There was a time when I strongly identified with this collection of work. I still admire the craft that went into the creation and it was interesting to connect with it again.

Wrestled into Submission


I am still bone weary. I just do not bounce back from sleep deprivation. My body refuses to push the envelope anymore. It’s a direct result of years of getting by on 4 or 5 hours a night while carrying the weight of my small existence around on my back, stooped like a Chinese peasant tending rice paddies.

Since I know it can take weeks to get myself even again, I will have to modify my plans for the next three months a tiny bit. Yes, it’s the new quarter, and I am laying out the calendar.

April will see me finish Night Dogs. Thanks to Rob’s plot insight, I have plugged the gaping plot hole in a plausible manner and can now continue. Night Dogs will be the story I workshop in June when I have plans to take a course on revision at the U of A’s Women’s Writing Week. The revision class is the only one I found that was not fluff, and it bothers me a bit to support a program that equates women’s writing with “journaling” and poetry only but so be it. It’s the only game going and I need to take a class.

In May I will begin working on a novel whose idea came to me via a science article on Slashdot about solar flares and our planet’s scary dependence on electrical grids and gadgets. Rob listened while I outlined it as we drove and he answered my questions about what-ifs. He liked it. He is partial – to me – but if he thought the idea totally blew chunks, he would say so.

June is classes. Revision, drafting and the beginning of prodding Rob to write out his part of our story. The memoir is now a joint project. We will work on it over the summer with the idea that it might be a pitchable idea by the time I head to the Williamette Conference in August (where I am going to try to pitch Night Dogs for sure and hunt for an agent at least).

In the meantime, blogging is going to suffer, but I will continue – just not at my usual pace. I can’t say what my pace will be, but if you bookmark me or put me on your reader, you shouldn’t miss much.

If you are wondering about the trip, you can read about it here, here, here, and here – if you haven’t already.

Wednesday afternoon was spent unpacking, doing laundry and generally regaining our land legs. Slept in on Thursday  but as I mentioned, I am still whipped.

I finished up the presentation for the workshop on Saturday but I am not going to be practiced enough. Hopefully my teaching instincts will take over and all will be well.

Since I am too tired (I’ve mentioned that too much, I know), here are pictures from the trip to make up for the piteous Friday update.

Revelstoke Town Centre

Revelstoke Town Centre

Rob taking a photo of Mt. Robson

Rob taking a photo of Mt. Robson

The Okanagan Valley


It’s beautiful in the valley like something out of a Hollywood drama about the new rich and the wannabes who hanker after their wives and daughters, but it is stuffed like a California roll with people in search of a good life that doesn’t exist anymore and never really existed for most anyway.

To clarify, this has not been a vacation. Anything with family attached to it is not restful and is fun in only the most abstract of ways. There is always too much to do, and too many errands or odd jobs to take care of.  Elderly parents in particular are needy. There are things they cannot, or simply don’t do, on their own. They wait for opportunities like “vacations” to catch up on these things. For the past two years, all our trips have entailed duty. Our obligations as adult children took precedence over anything that we might have wanted to really do. We did manage to sneak in a couple of getaways, but they always felt rushed … because they were.

I have stated repeatedly that post this trip there will be a year long moratorium on vacations that include “family obligations”. We are going to rest and the family be damned. Anyone with the temerity to get sick, die or in any way need us does so at his or her peril.

We finally got a decent span of sleep Sunday night. It was not enough to right either of us, but I no longer feel like falling down. I am just a little light-headed and feel a tiny bit detached. Actually, I should say that I got a good night’s sleep. Rob was awake on and off waiting for a phone call or a text from ED, telling him that she and her sister had gotten back to Edmonton.

Despite reminding both the girls that he worried and wanted to hear from them that evening, neither of them called.

“They probably decided to stay over with Cee and Why (the newly married couple),” I said, trying to be reassuring.

It certainly made sense to me. Neither had gotten to bed much before 6AM Sunday and when we saw them before heading out, they were loopy from lack of sleep.

Around noon Rob broke down and called Cee, who was surprised to find out that Rob hadn’t known the girls had made plans to stay on a couple of extra days. Rob made his disappointment known to MK who passed it along to her older sister, who in turn sent a Facebook message trying to convince Rob that he had indeed been told about their plans. If he was then it was when I wasn’t around because I don’t recall that at all and I am the one who would have remembered it anyway.

I was always one to call my mom and let her know if I’d arrived safely. I still do that. My siblings never have and still don’t. People will scoff, but I think it’s a simple thing that requires nothing by way of effort, so I do it. That is just me.

The weather hasn’t been nice. Sunshine’s sporadic and it’s still quite chilly. We didn’t get outside much and Monday was eaten up with little things needing care and a futile trip to Apex Mountain only to discover the resort had closed for the season just the day before.

A highlight was our first sushi experience at a little place downtown. Rob was the only one who’d had sushi before and he walked us through the menu. The restaurant was just about empty as the ski season is over and the summer season hasn’t begun. Even BabyD managed to eat a bit of salmon which she liked more than the tuna. Mostly though she worked up an appetite trying to work out the chopsticks.

Our homeward journey begins tomorrow. Perhaps it will afford me a few more “vacation” like moments similar to the one of strolling Revelstoke in the hazy early morning or when Rob helped me work out the kink in my Night Dogs novel (I can finish it now) and helped me come up with the draft outline for a new idea (another novel with an “end of the world as we know it” feel and a strong female lead character). I can dream, can’t I?