I am tweaking my site this evening and the time has come to engage in a bit of judicious experimentation… I expect there to be a good deal of fiddling in the days ahead, but hopefully most of it will be behind-the-scenes stuff. An adjustment here, a new photo there, that kind of thing. But right now I need to beg your patience, because I need to see how this will look when it makes the rounds of LJ, Facebook and the like.
If you are curious about the source of the mess-in-progress, it’s here.
There is a community garden about six blocks from our apartment and Kelly and I had a short walk-by on the weekend. The sunflowers are full blown and ready for the eating. In the past, we’ve been treated to hyper-spastic squirrel antics as the seedquest becomes desperate, but this time the visitors were more finchy:
Walking through East Vancouver in this way, taking pictures of the same things over and over and then winnowing out the ones that have something special to them, is, obviously, something I do for pleasure. But it connects up to other things. For one thing it’s physical self care, as much as it is mental. I get out, I walk, I stretch.
I also see it as writing, in its way. Paying attention to something so familiar it might be invisible, noting the variations, absorbing the sensory experiences on offer in the world: this is one of the things that keeps the universe from narrowing to the desk, the screen, the cup of tea beside the keyboard, and the occasional misbehavior of the cat.
“The Children of Port Allain” is the example I pull out when someone asks me where I get my ideas… because I happen to remember exactly.
The story is a distorted vision of life on the rainy, forestry-dependent West Coast of B.C., this place:
It was back in the days when I still followed current events, which would put it before 2001. I would usually have CBC Radio One on for an hour or two when I was cooking or playing Asheron’s Call, and in that time I might catch the local news twice, as well as a national or international broadcast.
On one such occasion, the B.C. news had two stories back to back. The first was about a Vancouver Island town whose core employer, a pulp mill, was closing down. The town council was, therefore, wooing a medicinal marijuana operation to come in and set up shop, the idea being that the government-anointed pot growers would replace the lost jobs.
The second story was about a newly paroled pedophile who was getting hounded from town to town. He’d settle somewhere, there’d be an outcry, and eventually he’d try somewhere else.
“Where should these people go?” the interviewer asked one of the most recent hounders in this story.
“What do we care as long as it’s not here?” was the reply.
What happened, naturally, was my writerbrain came up with a mashup: the same desperate pulp-mill town, working up a scheme to create jobs by becoming a haven for paroled child molesters.
“The Children of Port Allain” is a prickly, uncomfortable story. There’s no overt violence in it, but it’s unsavory by design: if it was something you found in the back of your fridge, you’d imagine you could still smell it weeks later, even after giving your kitchen a nice bleach flambe. It’s about how kids live where their parents do, whether it’s next to a toxin-emitting mill or a prison; it’s not a great conspiracy, just a fact of life. It’s about the idea one hears lofted, sometimes, that anything is okay as long as one’s creating jobs. It wasn’t much of a surprise, once it was written, to find I had a little trouble finding it a home. But then I found myself at Norwescon on a panel where someone asked where my inspiration came from. I told the above anecdote and my friend, Derryl Murphy, who happened to be in the audience, said I should send it to On Spec.
“It’s too long,” I replied automatically. (Their word limit, then as now, is 6000 words.)
“Tell ’em I said it was okay,” Derryl said, and the eventual result was that the story appeared in their Summer 2003 issue.
I had a good clamber over the new habitat island in False Creek last Wednesday, and caught all kinds of birds including this northern flicker, who was cleaning itself and soaking up the sunlight:
I am also flickering across the horizon at Benbella Books, guest blogging about last week’s Glee episode “Duets”. This is something of a tie-in to my essay “Who’s the Real Lima Loser? The Curious Friendship of Finn Hudson and Noah Puckerman“, which will be out in their unofficial Glee companion, FILLED WITH GLEE in November. And over at Tor.com, my third Quantum Leap rewatch, “The Color of Truth,” is live.
Another delight of the week gone by: Kelly read me The Uncommon Reader
The Uncommon Reader
I have been trying to give the arachnophobes a break lately, but this (spider-free, just the webs!) is a shot I’ve been stalking awhile and I am quite pleased with it.
In more bad news for the web-fearing among you, I have more. Lots more. Barb and I went to Burnaby Lake Sunday and it is a fairyland of dew-spangled cobwebs.
The mail Friday brought a CD from my aunt and uncle, trip pictures from our cruise. I took the opportunity to phone and thank them, and we had a nice catch-up chat. Predictably enough, I raved about the beauty of Vancouver in the autumn–all the things I always blog about this time of year. The migrating birds, the squirrel we saw burying acorns yesterday, the cobwebs, morning fog, the leaf shadows on the pavement… it is a stunningly gorgeous and really variable season.
Saturday I got up to go cafe write and it was maybe an hour before dawn. The sky was all the shades of a Stellar’s Jay: no true black, just a spectrum that ran from soot to a hint of indigo. The Big Dipper hung over the North Shore Mountains and as I watched a gull flew past, coming between me and the stars, its white underbelly stained a soft powder blue by the coming light of dawn.
I stood, watching, and I was thinking very specifically about how I would describe it if I was writing for Snuffy. This, for me, is a useful exercise in constructing prettier sentences than I might otherwise be inclined. (And the ‘boxing the poll’ line, from a few days ago? Was for 
Kelly).
Anyone else do this?
photo by Kristy Boyce
The Color of Paradox
The Cage