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 I also listened to all kinds of things. I used to look forward to ’80s “Retro Night” on the radio each Sunday, but I also […]
Some girls wander by mistake. Read More »
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 to go out somewhere, and I looked at him and whined, “But I want to stay here and work on my website!” Thankfully for my
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 was a girl. Plus, these were book-length things for 13-year-olds. By contrast, my NaNoWriMo book was just over 52,000 words, and I was proud of
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 hard to say. There wasn’t a single defining moment when I decided. It came gradually, in waves. I would realize I hadn’t written anything in
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 the past about how we express that in our writing. For my part, I’d say about half of my stories have either fully Filipino or
Writing and Filipinos. Read More »
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 and a lack of funds (and discovering blogging probably helped), but I happily returned to it after a few years. I haven’t looked back since.
Books and video games. Read More »
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 a small child to describe a rather dull little girl who lived near us.” Her sister and the neighbor girl, she said, were “inseparable companions,all
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 vacation around showing Benj London! Peter is a super-nice boy, and he and Benj became bosom friends immediately. He called for Benj early this morning,
Decca and letters. Read More »
But then one day, you know, I suddenly realized with an absolute shock that there never was going to be a convenient time, and that if I didn’t make a beginning, I would be saying to my grandchildren, ‘What I really wanted to be was a writer.’ So I had to make time. – PD James, interviewed on CBC’s Writers & Company I’d never read anything by PD James. Even so, today I listened to an interview
PD James interview Read More »
Jonna filled the teakettle in the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, looking at her own face, she thought with sudden bitterness that it couldn’t go on like this, these short stories that were never finished and just went on and on getting rewritten and discarded and picked up again, all those words that got changed and changed places and I can’t remember how they were yesterday and what’s happened to them today! I’m tired! –
I know the feeling. Read More »
