Category Archives: True Stories

Anecdotes from my past and present.

Wild Things art and random personal stuff

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Look! It’s the cover art for my novelette “Wild Things,” which will be out on Tor.com on October 3rd. If you went to any of my BLUE MAGIC readings, this is the story whose beginning you heard; it’s set in the same universe, between the events of the two novels, and deals with the effects of the mystical outbreak in British Columbia.

wild things cover art

Here in the real B.C., (though there’s a lot of stuff about phones in “Wild Things”, oddly) our home phone stopped working, probably sometime last week. Maybe earlier. Did you fail to get through to us? Sorry.

It wasn’t just that we both have mobiles now that kept us from noticing. We’re neither of us much for the phone in any case, so everyone in our lives tends to e-mail us when they need us. Except, you know. The doctor. The pharmacist. The bank. Work.

I spent an hour yesterday futzing around trying to get it fixed, while simultaneously trying to get the tech to give me the number for the people who’d cancel it altogether. Here’s what being on hold looks like at Telus these days:

The new version of on hold for tech support.

In the end, the technician walked me through 90% of the let’s fix your phone script before I managed to convince him to tell me who to call to just kill the landline. I’d forgotten, though, that the phone jacks also control our door buzzer. And that too seems to be dead dead dead, so now I’m asking our property manager and strata guys to look into fixing a problem that probably wasn’t Telus’s fault in the first place. But which made them notice we weren’t using the phone, and which thus cost them a monthly more-than-pittance for phone fees.

Letting go of our old phone number was a little weird–we have had the same phone account and number since 1991. But paying to hang onto the number for nostalgia purposes seemed a little silly. It was weird, too, because it feels like a thing you do when you’re moving. And though we’re not moving, you can’t tell it from the state of my not-yet-painted office:

Still disassembling the office. Everything is now in about ten square feet.

Chillin’ with the polliwogs @vangarden

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One of the great delights of this year has been having membership to the Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. We like the walk through Strathcona to Chinatown and Gastown (not to mention the impeccable coffee to be had at Revolver) and being able to stop in on the garden on the way is a marvelous luxury. It’s peaceful and gorgeous, and you can just sit and take in the splendor, or even read. I keep meaning to go there and write under the trees, but that hasn’t happened yet.

What did happen, though, was polliwog sightings. Tads, turning into frogs with tails! Transformation in action! Does it get any cooler than going from this:
Two visits to Sun Yat Sen

To this?
Two visits to Sun Yat Sen

Unclear on the concept of Tuesday

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Disruption and discombobulation – I am packing up the office as thoroughly as I can while still working in it, the better to patch the walls and paint them. Kelly and I left them as they were when we moved in because the office is so very full of me being busy all the time, and full of the stuff, including a billion books, related to that. But it’s time to stop putting up with the various small things that annoy us about this place. The kids who were raised here put literally hundreds of small holes in the office walls with a blue ballpoint pen. They’re dirty, they’re dingy, they’re severely perforated and it’s been eleven bleeping years. And paint is cheap.

Looks like moving, but no. Packing up the office so we can paint.

It doesn’t much matter, but yesterday’s book post was supposed to go up today. I spaced, yesterday, on what day it was. The only part of the day when I knew it was Tuesday was when I was on my way to or actually facilitating my mid-day mentoring gig.

I’m sure my blogging schedule is of limited interest to anyone but me, but anyway–oops!

Nesting, nesting

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On Saturday K and I took a Modo car to the wilds of South East Marine Drive to see if we could track down a new winter-weight quilt at a DaniaDown warehouse outlet. It had been about ninety degrees in our house for the better part of a week, but summer’s when you get cheap bedding. Or so went the rationale.

Our previous duvet had also come from DaniaDown, I’m pretty sure. It had been a toasty and delicious winter snuggler, but time had ground the fill down to powder and our cat Buddha had done some pretty unspeakable (but easy to guess) things to it.

Anyway, we scored: found a duvet, good and poofy, with a hypo-allergenic exterior and lots of stitching to keep the filling from wandering. We got a new set of sheets and a cushion for good measure.

Upgrading some of our oldest, beat-up stuff–even as we toss a mountain of clutter–is part of a big Alyx and Kelly plan to nest, to make the house prettier and more comfortable. We’d meant to get started in the spring but strata repairs got in the way. No complaints, of course, as that got us pretty new windows. But there may be a few more strata things on the horizon. So, sadly, we’re going at this fixing up the house thing a bit judiciously.

But a cozier bed is an awesome start!

And speaking of cozy, don’t you just want to cuddle some baby ducks?
Ducklings at Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake

This place, this time

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Here’s one of my early great blue heron shots, from 2010.

Great Blue Heron

It’s not bad, I know. The point is not this picture is great or abysmal… just that it’s not my best. I went looking for one of my earlier shots and this is the one I can bear to post. Herons were shiny new photographic subjects for me, and I remember the day I took this one, and I remember it was a happy experience.

This week, I took some shots I’m quite pleased with; they’re still on the camera. I also recently, in my pursuit of the best damned heron shot I could manage, knocked “Full heron in flight” off my personal list:

Stanley Park

Usually when they take off I’m not quite ready. This time I knew.

So… I can go for a better heron flying shot, but in some ways I can consider that a Thing I’ve Done.

I’m no ornithologist, but in many ways, I have these birds sussed. I chase them around the beaches and I know when they’re too busy looking for food to care if there’s a human around, and I can usually tell when something’s got them thinking about flying off. I can see if the sun’s so bright it’s going to wash out their white bits or if it’s too overcast for the camera to pick them effectively out of the grey of the sea. I got adolescent heron pee on my hat and my camera bag this week (thank Chaos for the hat) scoping out the newest crop of high-flying fishers.

There’s plenty of room above my best heron shots for me to keep improving at this. I am no pro. The bar has lots of room to go up. In my writing, I pursue this like a fiend–the ever smaller but oh so satisfying slices of ‘did that better!’ and ‘Oooh, so pretty!’ The things I wrote in the Stormwrack universe today blew my mind with joy. You’ll like them too.

But photography’s a hobby. It’s part of my day to day practice of making myself happy. The heron’s a familiar challenge, and getting pretty good shots of them has become easy. And while I’m not giving up picture-making or bird-chasing, because I really enjoy it, I also recognize that I am in a space where I need some challenges that come with a heavy dose of the unfamiliar. I need to take up some things that I know nothing about, am interested in but also daunted by. Things I–at least to some extent–suck at.

Which is a long-winded and literal but also metaphorical way of saying I’ve been very engaged lately in looking around at my life, and the herons in it. The things in it that are familiar, and comfortable, and easy. And I am considering ways to reframe some elements of that life so that they are uncomfortable, at least in the short term, and harder, and with any luck, even more gratifying.

It’s a good process, not entirely fun–because who wants to run toward discomfort? And, thus, it’s not been exactly painless. But even beginning has made me look at the familiar with refreshed love and an intense, electrifying sense of awareness.

I’ll keep you all posted on how it goes.