Category Archives: Uncategorized

Dear Blog: Today I did Stuff

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–Wrote but did not type words on the new story.

–Took big weekend project from 75% to 95% done.

–Decided I didn’t need rain gear and left house. Goggled at the sky: green-slate Apocalypse clouds, a day late. Went in, packed rain slicker. Came out, caught a spider with my face, relocated it.

–Tried to tweet about spider and realized a) I’d left my phone indoors; b) it probably wasn’t Tweetworthy.

–Fetched the phone and finally headed up the north False Creek seawall. Stopped ten minutes in to put on slicker. Walked in deluge to the burrito place in Yaletown. Which was, surprisingly, full of televised hockey and its worshippers, but their chorizo taco is so good I stayed anyway.

–Took Skytrain under False Creek and examined iGadgets at Best Buy. I was going to ask if any of you knew if the Belkin bluetooth music receiver was any good, but these guys say it’s about average and glitchy. Those Belkin guys! I suspect them of always making crap. Why is it they’re always the ones making the stuff I want?

–Walked the south seawall side of False Creek. Stopped halfway and stripped off rain gear to shoot ill-lit and no doubt fuzzy pictures of my Kingfisher friend. Raindrops kept falling on my head.

–Hit Safeway, Donald’s and La Grotto for groceries.

–Burst o’ teaching.

–Prepped flip chart for week’s mentoring.

–Italian homework!

–Another hour on big project. Got it to 96% and 10k words.

–Polished and submitted an article.

–Heated up the second half of godlike carnitas burrito.

–And now this!

Tomorrow, if I like, I can make like a slug.

Slug

Horse tails and assorted bloggage

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I am alternating bits of blogging and correspondence with bursts of work on a big project today, so there are lots of photos going up in the usual places: my Flickr page, the Tumblr blog, all my virtual real estate. Some will come from yesterday’s dawn walk in Stanley Park.

I was at the park by 6:30 a.m., having walked Kelly to the bus so she could catch a plane to her aunt’s funeral. When I got to Lost Lagoon, it was me and about a dozen joggers, some with dogs. Later, when I picked up the lake trail, I had the entire place to myself… I saw maybe three other urban hikers in ninety minutes.

All but one of the swans seems to be off their nests but I’ve seen no cynets; in terms of photo ops, the best subjects were turtles, who were very happy indeed with the sunshine.

I don’t know Stanley Park all that well, despite having lived in Vancouver for twenty years. Now that I have a reason to be in Coal Harbor more regularly, I’m getting to know the place. I printed off a map and yesterday’s goal was to find Beaver Lake, which turned out to be gorgeous and smelly and apparently home to newts.

After three hours in the park (the herons sound like they’ve hatched, but are apparently too small to poke their baby dinosaur heads up yet) I came home and tackled the work pile in fits and starts, with naps and errands in between. It didn’t go all that well: my mind was too much on Auntie Joan, and the family, and when I embarked on a long errand I strained an already-tired muscle in my foot. But things got done; the day passed. At eight I knocked off and rewatched the first Sherlock, rang my wife, and dragged my butt off to bed.

Turtle in Bright Sun

Literary blackmail, televised DIY surgery and other lite squicks

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I wrote a post this week for TOR.COM, about blackmail in fiction, and in Veronica Mars. The post is here; I hope to follow it up with some musings on other varieties of crime. Let me know what you think?

Second: I dunno how many of you have seen this past week’s new episode of a certain medical drama, so I’ll confine my comments on that to “OMG, squick! Ewww!” Either you know what I mean or that evil chuckle you hear is your DVR, waiting for you to boot it up.

Also TV adjacent, I am 3/5 of the way through watching Mildred Pierce on HBO and should probably hold my tongue until I see the conclusion, but I have to say that as viewing experiences go, this one so far has been entirely bizarre. Kate Winslet is fantastic, as usual, and her Lauren Bacall accent is a marvel to hear. And I’m always so happy to see Melissa Leo in anything.

But the story–I haven’t read the original novel–has all this peculiar class and gender stuff.

The message so far seems to be that men are useless parasites, and… um… something about social class and snobbery involving Guy Pearce’s naked bum. Seriously. The class stuff is, at this mid-point in the story, entirely murky. Mildred was a snob, but now she seems to be evolving. Unless she isn’t. It’s incredibly hard to tell.

The story is just intriguing enough to keep me watching, but it’s also very cold. Kate as Mildred seems as though she should be poised to be a source of joy and warmth in an otherwise harsh and chilly world, but she’s as icy as everyone and everything else. I am entirely baffled by it.

Fall From Grace

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You know how, in a certain type of (often-British) mystery, your protagonist has some big, self-destructive flaw? He drinks too much, he has intimacy issues, he’s all hung up over his lost love or he’s Sherlock Holmes and shoots heroin? It’s sort of grittily romantic, if you have that thing where you sometimes imagine taking people home, feeding them soup and kindly sorting out their lives?

Yeah. So Wayne Arthurson has raised the bar on this particular literary convention. The sport isn’t even high jump anymore… he’s taken it into the realm of pole vaulting.

In Fall from Grace we meet Leo Desroches, a guy so spectacularly screwed up he makes Cracker seem cuddly and functional.

Leo’s a journalist and a full-time mess on legs. He’s been in jail, he’s been homeless, and even though he currently has a job, it’s in Edmonton. (Okay, Edmonton, sorry for the swipe. Where was I? Ohhh… balmy balmy Vancouver.) He has a regular gig at a local paper and a place to live, but he’s also a howling black hole of gambling addiction and bad choices, and he’s found a devilishly inventive and thoroughly shocking way to keep himself out of the casinos.

When he is first on scene at a murder, Leo gets a chance to put his career back on track. And since there are two Leos–the Gambler, and the earnest guy who wants to put his life together and maybe even reboot a relationship with his kids–he makes the most of it, turning one anonymous murder victim into front page news. As he digs deeper, of course, it turns out that poor Ruby Cardinal is hardly the first strangled sex-trade worker of Aboriginal descent to turn up in an area wheat field. The police are officially unaware of the trend, but they’re also more than a little sensitive about the suggestion that there may be a serial killer in the city.

Which is great for Leo, because what self-destructive person wouldn’t want to antagonize the hometown police?

Leo’s investigation brings him all the danger his self-loathing side could hope for and then some. Because Fall from Grace doesn’t pretend to be gritty–it embodies grit. It’s rough-edged and scary, a fascinating crime novel about a guy who can’t quite surrender to his own darkness, even as he continually, compulsively sets himself up to lose every single thing he’s got.

Opportunities for new writers

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A very exciting newsflash: author Saladin Ahmed is offering one on one mentoring for interested writers:

I am pleased to announce that I am currently offering a limited number of one-on-one creative writing mentorships. These mentorships will be individually tailored to the needs of the client, involving a combination of detailed manuscript critique and advice on publication and professionalization. My areas of teaching expertise include poetry and fantasy fiction.

Full details are here.

Second, PEN USA’s Emerging Voices Fellowship is open for applications. This is a terrific program. One of my students, Natashia Deón, was a PEN fellow, and everything I heard about it from her made it sound like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.