So, I did it! I finished the first draft of my novel! I finished it a couple of weeks earlier than anticipated, and I'm still not really feeling like it happened, despite the printed-out evidence above. Evidence, by the way, that looks way more daunting as a thing I can hold…
Recently I went down a Sisters of Mercy-induced nostalgia spiral, and this particular nostalgia spiral was of a different sort than usual, because it led me to a time period I'm not used to feeling nostalgic for. In high school I used to listen to the Sisters of Mercy, but…
Recently, it struck me that 2017 marks 20 years I've been blogging. I've written about those olden times here before. I started my first website in 1997. I used a pseudonym. There were rotating ankh gifs on it. I was obsessed with it. One day, my boyfriend at the time wanted us…
I'd been hearing about Elizabeth Gilbert's book Big Magic for a long time, about how wonderful and inspiring it was for creatively-driven people. I'd even heard that it was life-changing. And, I admit, when I hear something is life-changing, I tend to shy away. I have a natural distrust of things that…
In 2010, I completed NaNoWriMo. I wrote a novel called Practice, which was accurate. It was practice. I'd written two book-length things as a teenager - and I don't say this to make myself sound impressive. One of them was basically the plot of The Outsiders, except the Ponyboy character…
Maybe. Can one quit being a writer? This is a post I've wanted to write - and dreaded writing - for a long time. For about as long as I have no longer considered myself a "writer," at least outside of my freelancing career. How long has that been? It's…
My friend Teri has an article in the latest Ricepaper, titled Between Representations: Filipinos in Canadian Literature. Teri's one of my favourite writers so I am always eager to read anything she writes, but I was especially excited to read this. She and I are both half-Filipino, and have talked in…
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo games with my brother, and making that long suburban walk to the arcade on summer afternoons. In high school and my early twenties, I dropped the hobby for a while mainly due to lack of a console…
One of Decca's favourite words. In a 1977 essay in the London Daily Mail (reprinted in the New York Times and later in Poison Penmanship), she wrote that "frenemy" (which she sometimes spelled "frienemy") was "an incredibly useful word that should be in every dictionary, coined by one of my sisters when she was…
Arrived back at Joan's just in time for dinner. To it came Doris Lessing (you know who she is, a best-selling English writer of the Angry Young school) . . . and, joy of joys, 12-year-old Peter Lessing, who had learned about Benjy's arrival and has planned his whole Easter…