Trouble

It’s been a busy week around here, as you may have noticed from the complete lack of attention I’ve given to this blog (and Facebook and Twitter, for that matter).

Part of the reason came to us Monday night, when we surprised our daughter with the one thing she’s wanted more than anything for years: a puppy. It all happened pretty fast. We only found out about her on Sunday, and by Monday, my husband and I were on the road to Abbotsford through rush hour traffic to meet her and, it turned out, bring her home.

Are we nuts? Possibly. But the look on Isabelle’s face when she saw her for the first time made it all worthwhile.

5 1/2 pounds of sleepy cockapoo

It never rains…

The old adage holds true today, literally and metaphorically. It’s pouring here, with twice the average monthly rainfall for November expected in just three days. I live in an urban rainforest. November isn’t exactly noted for its arid quality at the best of times.

At the moment, things around here are less “life imitating art” and more “weather imitating life.” It’s a deluge. Too many people close to me are dealing with too many Big Things at the moment: ageing parents, major health issues, angry divorces… a lot.

The other night, one of those had-to-be-there moments gave one of those people a tiny break from the weight of all the Bad Stuff and had her in gales of laughter, the kind that leaves your cheeks and stomach hurting for ages afterwards. For those few minutes, there was no Stuff, just laughter. We all need more of that, I think. It’s too easy to get bogged down by all that’s stressful and energy draining. Sure, we have to deal with it, but having a little fun while we do makes it all just a little bit easier.

I was thinking about how much a good laugh changes the tone of my day when I read my fabulous friend Pam’s most recent blog post this morning. Fun is good. Go read her post, but in the meantime, here’s one of the videos she posted about the Fun Theory. Seems like a great idea to me.

Remembrance Day

It’s Remembrance Day today. We sat together as a family and watched the CBC coverage of the ceremony at our nation’s capital, as is our tradition on this morning. I’m a total mush about the occasion. The faces of the teary-eyed old men make me cry. Most of them don’t talk about their experiences easily, if at all, but the older they get, the more easily the tears seem to come. These are men who were brought up to believe that men don’t cry, and the seeing the stripping away of a lifetime of stoicism when they stand and remember breaks my heart.

And then, of course, there’s the mother, chosen from among those who have lost a son or daughter to represent all mothers. She puts a lump in my throat every year, whoever she is, her presence all the reminder I need to think about the fact that every single soldier is someone’s child.

Whatever political good comes or doesn’t come from Canada’s presence in Afghanistan, 133 Canadians have been killed there so far, mostly by improvised explosive devices. Their loss has added a fresh poignancy to Remembrance Day services here. TV coverage shows bigger crowds at every venue. There are children in our country who once again know first-hand what it means to lose a parent serving overseas. What was beginning to seem to some to be irrelevant history is new again, and with the new relevance, the boys killed in WWI and WWII are no longer too distant to mourn for those who had started to forget. Instead, they’re reflected in the faces of today’s soldiers, and we remember.

I’ve always believed in the importance of Remembrance Day, so I like to see the crowds, see the tomb of the unknown soldier covered completely in poppies, see hours of national TV coverage devoted to the day. But the heart of the day is always in the individuals, not the crowd. Here are some of mine:

- my paternal grandfather worked as a trainer at in WWII, in a job that meant he readied too many boys to go off to be killed, and it was too much for him to bear. He died a few years later, unable to recover from what his job had meant;

- my great grand uncle served with the Australian forces in WWI. He was wounded, but went on to live decades more. As the family genealogist, I was thrilled when Australia released digital versions of WWI service files online and I was able to read where he’d been and exactly what had happened to him. These are an invaluable resource to anyone researching WWI military history. You can find them here;

- my great uncle learned to swim when his ship was torpedoed off the coast of Africa in WWII. The story goes that he came ashore wearing nothing but his boots. He had a lucky unlucky streak: he was on two torpedoed ships and got hit by a jeep during his service, but died fifty years after the war at home in Scotland;

- during my teaching practicum, I invited a holocaust survivor to speak to my grade eight class as part of our unit on The Diary of Anne Frank. His story captivated us and silenced even the biggest handful in the class from the moment he showed us his Auschwitz ID tattoo until the end of his tale. I’ll never forget hearing his experiences and seeing the distant look in his eye while he related them because he was there, seeing it all over again, as he spoke;

- my best friend’s husband currently serves in the Canadian Navy. He served in the Persian Gulf. He’s away for a few days on an exercise, but it otherwise home at the moment. Long may that continue.

Whom do you remember?

One Singular Sensation…

I’m just back from seeing A Chorus Line at the Centre in Vancouver. I loved it. I saw the movie years ago, long enough to have forgotten pretty much everything except the premise and the closing number, but I was looking forward to seeing it again. And now I remember why I liked it the first time around. I love some of the music in it, but mostly, it appeals to my writer soul. It deals with exactly the thing that interests me most as a writer and one I’ve mentioned here before: the story behind the persona. The dancers in the show each come with a personal history that makes them unique, even though they have to be identical when they are dancing, and the show explores that. The director wants to know what makes them who they are, even though he specifically says he doesn’t want any of them drawing his attention when they’re in the chorus line.

We were lucky to see one of those moments when something happens that isn’t in the script and the actor has to keep going and fix it. I enjoy those moments, the sense of connection they seem to create between character and audience. Tonight, one of the characters, Cassie, was in the middle of her long solo dance, alone onstage, when she fell hard on her butt and one of her dance shoes went flying way up over her head and landed somewhere offstage. In true professional style, she simply got up and danced the rest of her solo with one shoe on. The only indication that it may not have been part of the script (it wasn’t) was when the director told her to “pick up her shoe” and head down to the basement with the others to learn the song, and his acknowledgement of the loss of her shoe made her smile. But even so, it wasn’t obvious that it was an error. She literally fell on her butt alone onstage, but because she kept dancing, kept smiling, and never let on, most of the audience didn’t have a clue she wasn’t supposed to do that.

So now I’m going to bed with “What I did for love” and “One” running through my head. Not a bad way to end the night.

Falling Back

It’s that time of year again. Saturday night we got our extra hour, and now it’ll be dark before afternoon’s even had a chance to take hold.

In the place I call home, at the corner of the Canada/US border and the Pacific Ocean (well, the Straight of Georgia if you’re being picky), we’ve begun the few months that can stretch our inner resources to the limit.

Sure, much of the rest of Canada has a well-deserved reputation for hard winters. They laugh at us when we get any real amount of snow because we’re ill-equipped to deal with it here individually, where many of us have all-season tires on our cars all year round, and municipally, where we have too few plows and sand trucks to deal with “real” winter. That’s okay. We get our own back on Valentine’s Day, when the flower count in Victoria always numbers in the millions while a lot of the country is still buried under dirt-crusted white stuff.

But in the meantime, a West Coast winter has its own challenge: rain. It doesn’t sound like much on the surface, but you’d be surprised. I have friends who’ve had to move away because of it and others who rely heavily on prescription lamps and mid-winter trips to sunnier climes.

It’s not the rain itself that’s the problem. The rain can be pretty, and it sounds lovely against the roof snuggled in at home on cold winter evenings with stew bubbling on the stove.

But with the rain comes the grey, oppressive clouds. They settle over the city for days at a time so that it never gets truly light out before the sun goes down and it’s dark again. It can be tiring and dreary and depressing. Yet most of us love it here, and not just in the summer. Why? Because no matter how wet and dark it gets, every once in awhile, we wake up to a day where the sky looks like it did yesterday:

The sun shines from beyond that expanse of blue, and it turns out that rain polished everything up so it’s all green and clean and lovely in the sunlight. And in just a few short months, it’ll be time for this again:

SiWC 2009

Well, Surrey’s over for another year, and thanks to a husband kind enough to turn off my alarm this morning and handle the getting-child-to-school routine alone, I’m not quite as physically and mentally exhausted as I expected to be today. Don’t get me wrong; I’m still far from functioning normally, as the quality of this post will no doubt reveal, but at least I feel like driving to the grocery store isn’t actually too risky an activity for my current capacity. Good thing, too, since the cupboards are bare.

I don’t know if it’s even possible to convey what a whole weekend at the Surrey conference is like in one post, but I’ll give it a shot.

This was a really different year for me at SiWC. As the incoming conference coordinator for 2010, I was in a unique position. I was at once shadowing kc dyer (coordinator extraordinaire), getting a sense of things from her perspective, meeting presenters, spending time with the board and so on while still being an attendee, sitting in on workshops, having meals with friends I see once a year, sitting in the bar, and all else that comes from being on that side of the registration table. It was an interesting challenge to find the balance between both roles, but I enjoyed it.

I arrived at the hotel late Wednesday morning, having picked up my good friend Pam from the airport en route. The Sheraton’s quiet on the Wednesday before the conference. Only a few people have checked in, and the hub of activity seemed to be mostly in the coordinator’s room, where we helped tend to some last-minute details including one that involved cardboard, chocolate, and ribbon. Any task involving chocolate is okay by me. A little time in the lounge that evening with karen, Pam, Michael Slade and later Jack Whyte, and Wednesday was over already. Never do days go by quite as quickly as they do in Surrey, and the rest of time continued in the same appallingly speedy fashion.

The rest of the weekend went by in a blur of friends, workshops, board meetings, meals, keynote speeches, comfortable lounge chairs, and altogether too little sleep. But even in the midst of the busyness, there were moments where things seemed to slow down long enough for me to realize I was seeing or hearing or doing something pretty special in that instant, and those are the moments I’ll remember long after this year’s conference blends and blurs with those gone by and those still to come. Some of them are simply ‘you had to be there’ things that I’ll take out, look at, remember, and enjoy before tucking them away again for awhile, flashes and moments that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else. But some of them weren’t just mine, or, if they were, still speak to the general experience of camaraderie and magic that is at the heart of Surrey. Here are some of those:

- seeing my friend Pam arrive at baggage claim at YVR and come toward me with a giant smile, arms spread wide, echoing my own excitement that Surrey time had come again;

- watching Mike Carson’s face when he found out he’d received an honourable mention in the storyteller’s category of the SiWC writing contest and had won the non-fiction category. Both had been kept as a surprise, with the help of his wife, until the announcement of the winners, and he had no idea until his name was called;

- listening to moving and stirring keynotes. I’ve never heard an Anne Perry speech I didn’t love, for example, that didn’t move me to write and to embrace joy, sorrow, and fear to make my fiction the best I can make it, and this year was no exception. It was a great year for keynotes all around;

- picking up tidbits from presenters including Jeff Arch, author of Sleepless in Seattle, who echoed beautifully what most presenters seemed to feel about why they write what they write: “Strip away all the details and it’s an idea that wouldn’t let go of me;”

- sitting in the ballroom for Michael Slade’s Shock Theatre, in which his version of War of the Worlds came alive through the vocal skills of an all-star cast that included Slade, kc dyer, Diana Gabaldon, Anne Perry, and Jack Whyte, the keyboard prowess of an amazing high-school student called Althea, and the pumpkin-smashing power of Sam Sykes;

- getting a little dressed up for Saturday dinner, a rarity in a mostly casual life;

- hearing the standard smattering of applause for a door prize winner swell when the attendees noticed the guy who won was a mountie in red serge;

- watching at least two writers get the sort of thrilling feedback they’d normally only dream of hearing and seeing them moved and changed by it;

- enjoying the conversation of like-minded people for hours on end in the lounge, the ballroom, and at a small private party a few of us arrange every year;

- joining in on the chorus of Saturday night’s traditional rendition of “Mud, Glorious Mud”, led by the inimitable Jack Whyte;

- goofing around with old friends and new;

- celebrating successes, including one friend’s three-book deal in five countries since last year’s conference;

- being introduced to all sorts of new people, presenters and attendees alike, and having conversations with random strangers in the elevators.

There are more, of course. I could go on listing little details for pages, but those are the first ones that came to mind when I started jotting them down. Like every year, I came away eager to write, reminded of the universality of storytelling and its importance and of the need for each of us to nurture that thing, whatever it is, that feeds our souls and isn’t for anyone else but us. (My friend Laura Bradbury addressed the latter brilliantly the other day in her post about her jardin secret at grapejournal.blogspot.com. We all need one.) And I came away this year excited about the future, about the big job I’m taking on and eager to get going with it.

Were you at Surrey? What did you take away from it?

Next year’s conference is October 22-24, 2010, with master classes on the 21st. Mark your calendars!

Craft is craft is… life?

My husband’s on his way back from NYC tonight following five intense days in a Jay Maisel photography workshop. He’s feeling that strange combination of exhaustion and exhilaration, sadness and joy that comes from a really good immersive experience. I recognise the symptoms: it’s the same feeling I come home from Surrey with every year.

What I realized reading his blog about his time there, though, is that the post-immersion haze he’s experiencing isn’t the only similarity between his photography workshop and my writers conference. The mechanics of photography and writing may be different, but the awareness – of self and of craft – that elevates your work in either medium from the everyday to something special are the same. And ultimately, the same things apply to life itself. Not sure what I mean? Here are a few of the ideas that were reinforced for him this week, taken from his blog:

1. If there’s a nervous feeling about the quality of any picture, it’s probably warranted.

2. Who cares how much effort it was to take a shot if it’s bad?

3. “If you’re not your severest critic, you’re your own worst enemy.” Jay Maisel

4. “What’s all this shit in the corners? You’re responsible for every square millimeter of your frame!” Jay Maisel

5. I’m learning to let go, and to truly have fun, and take the chance to either succeed gloriously or fail gloriously.

Take the photography context away, and every single one of those applies to writing, to cooking and housekeeping and parenting and to doing whatever job it is you do in life, don’t you think? I do.

They’re all part of my writing life, that’s for sure. If my gut tells me something’s wrong in a scene, something’s almost certainly wrong. I’ve had to kill more of my darlings than I care to remember, scenes I loved or even whole chapters, because of number 2 on the list. And so on. You get the idea.

Number 5…. phew. That’s a biggie. It’s what we should all strive for in work and in life, but it’s bloody difficult to do, risking failure for the chance of success, let alone having fun while we do it. But if we can manage to let go and take the chance, we’re in for a hell of an interesting ride. And isn’t that the point?

photo credit: Martin Chung, NYC, October 2009

photo credit: Martin Chung, NYC, October 2009

Surrey Excitement

Fall is in the air, complete with blowing leaves and weather that shifts from rain to brilliiant sunshine and back again several times a day. For me, the autumn air means one thing: Surrey. Exactly one week from when I’m writing this, at 9:00 on Thursday evening, I’ll be ensconsed in one of my favourite places: among writing friends in a comfortable chair in the lounge at the SiWC.

I attended a meeting at the hotel this afternoon. It was the first time I’d been there since last year’s conference, and even driving into the parking lot gave me a thrill of anticipation, the same as the one I get every year when I drive up for the conference itself.

The Surrey International Writers Conference is a highlight of my year every year. Where else can you get fabulous professional development, hang out with writer friends, watch a live performance of a radio play with a cast that includes no fewer than four bestselling authors and possibly a few little green men, and ride in hotel elevators that have a reputation for interesting encounters? Amazing stuff, and I haven’t even mentioned the swashbuckling sexy Englishman, the singing Scot, the storytelling lawyer… I could go on, but you get the idea.

I’m especially looking forward to this year. It’s my last as an attendee for now, because I’m taking on the job of conference coordinator as soon as this year’s conference wraps up. I intend to enjoy every moment.

The registration numbers are strong this year, already ahead of last year, so if you’re thinking about attending, don’t wait too long! A sellout is a definite possibility. And if you’re a writer, you should be thinking about attending. You definitely won’t be sorry!

Why do you write?

Four of the women I know from the Compuserve Books and Writers Forum have started a joint blog called All The World’s Our Page. It’s joint venture across continents: two of the contributors are Australian, the other two American. Four like-minded people coming together from totally different parts of the world appeals to me, so I’ve added them to my reader.

Their initial posts explore the question of why each of them writes, and reading their answers got me thinking about my own. It’s not something I think about very often, because writing is just what I do. I can’t imagine not doing it, can’t fathom ignoring the stories that bubble up in my head or missing out on the rush that comes with putting together a sentence that feels just right.

I’ve always written, in one form or another. I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t part of who I am, though it’s been channelled in different ways at different times in my life. When I was nine or ten, I won ribbons for poetry. Around that time, I got hooked on Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, and dreamed of writing that well. Anne’s vividness inspired me, as my love for those books still does. When I was a teenager, I penned really awful romantic short stories. As an adult, my writing energies went into teaching others to put coherent sentences together in my role as a high school English teacher. The stories still brewed in my mind, though I did little more than play with them here and there.

The decision to stop dabbling and get serious about writing came suddenly. The morning of my 30th birthday, my husband woke me up to come and see the news. Planes had just flown into the World Trade Centre and North America was in shock. For me, the double whammy of a milestone birthday and that violent reminder that life is short was the push I needed to put my butt in a chair and write. Every day. I joined the forum immediately after that and began learning about the craft. And I wrote. I wrote while my child slept, while her dad took her out to have fun without me, and whenever I could carve out a few minutes.

Since then, I’ve written an ‘under the bed’ book that probably will never see the light of day, completed a manuscript that’s had good feedback but hasn’t found a home yet, and am about a third of the way into my new MS, a story that’s a big challenge to write but is really exciting, too. I keep writing every day, even if some days it’s not working and in the end all I write is an email to a friend. So really, I suppose the short answer to the subject of this post, if I need one other than “Because I can’t not write” is “Because of LM Montgomery and Al-Qaeda.” Bet you’ve never seen those two in the same sentence before.

LM Montgomery's writing desk at the site of her home in Cavendish, PEI

Vicarious Enjoyment

Like most as-yet unpublished writers I know, I daydream from time to time about seeing my books on the shelves of my local bookstore. I suppose it’s a dream that motivates me on those days when the words don’t come easily, just like the dream of that new book smell I anticipate when the first copies of my published book arrive in the mail. (I’m not the only one who likes the smell of books, am I? It’s one of my favourites.)

Until I get to enjoy seeing my own books in print, I’m lucky enough to enjoy the experience vicariously through the books of some of my friends and acquaintances. Like any good writer friend, I dutifully check to make sure they’re on the shelves and talk them up to the bookstore staff at the slightest opportunity. It works, too. Bookstore staff are often book lovers, and they’re as much on the lookout for great new titles to read and to recommend as the rest of us who have towering, ever-growing TBR piles are.

Looking for a great book? Why not try one of these authors?

A Walk Through a Window

Book 3; book 1 is Kendra Kandlestar and the Box of Whispers

Book 4; Book 1 is The Scent of Shadows

Order in Chaos, book 3 in the Templar Trilogy

An Echo in the Bone, book 7 in the Outlander series

kc dyer writes terrific middle grade and teen fiction; Lee Edward Fodi is a favourite of my nine-year-old and her friends; Vicki Pettersson’s gritty urban fantasy takes us to a different Vegas than we see on the strip; Jack Whyte and Diana Gabaldon, both great friends of the SiWC, both have new books out in their current series: Diana’s is book 7 in the Outlander series, and Jack’s ties up the Templar Trilogy in style. (Apologies that kc’s name is up by Diana’s book; it’s a blip I can’t seem to get rid of, no matter how many paragraph breaks I put in the text. But in case you missed it, it’s she who writes the terrific middle grade and teen fiction. )

Enjoy!