It is somewhat troubling.

+ I live in beautiful Toronto again, and it is wonderful.

+ I am so completely bonkers in love that I often don’t know what to do with it all. So I am transforming into a new shape capable of holding it. This is a remarkable process.

+ My life is pretty great. Seriously, you guys.

+ For example, in the past six months, I have travelled to Portland, The Philippines, Michigan, North Bay, and just got back from London and Sheffield in England. While there, I saw a production of The Winter’s Tale at the Sam Wanamaker theatre by  candlelight, and a few days later sat side stage for Godflesh at the final Resistanz festival. So great.

+ I share a rad place with Izzie Colpitts-Campbell and Halina Heron, and one day we are going to make some pretty extraordinary art together if we can ever manage to be in the same place at the same time.

+/- I am no longer working on my PhD.

– There are a lot of incredible projects and conferences that are happening that I am not a part of because I decided to leave the academy, and sometimes this makes me wish I was a different person better suited to this kid of thing.

+ I am writing much more again, and rebuilding my freelance portfolio, and sorting out projects, and doing a lot more work that I want to be doing, which means a lot of my writing is about fan fiction and that time I worked for a porn company.

– I am in more debt and experiencing more financial precariousness than I have ever been before.

+? Probably I am going to figure that out?

+ I do have work writing games and and doing some long-form journalism, and am trying to make my own work writing fairytales and more games, and sometimes it feels very, very possible.

– Often it feels very overwhelming.

– I have been working and travelling so much, and being in love and away from my home so much, that there are absolutely no edible groceries left here at all.

+/- Probably I should get my life in order at some point.

+ I am going to go find some breakfast.

I was a lonely kid. My parents’ place was quite isolated, even considering the very small town I grew up in, and we were seldom allowed to go farther than the forest next to it. The few kids who lived nearby were mostly older and any way my parents pretty quickly came up with reasons that we couldn’t hang out with them anymore, preferring that we keep to ourselves. I went to a Catholic grade school when my family was indifferently agnostic, and I was a weird kid who read novels at recess and knew way too many facts about human anatomy; it generally didn’t go well socially for me. I had one friend who I could really count on until I was twelve; by the time I graduated high school, I maybe had three.

My adult life (or at least, my life after I was sixteen or so and no longer primarily living in my parents’ house) has been a sharp contrast to that. I consider myself one of the luckiest people currently walking the planet, primarily because of my friendships, and all the collaborators, allies and comrades-in-arms who grace my life. I’m not used to being lonely any more.

I knew many wonderful people in Montreal long before I moved here, and since I’ve come to live in the city I have met a small army more. There are dinners and brunches are RPG playtests and department parties and plots and shenanigans. I’m lucky enough to be able to travel back to Toronto much more often than I would have guessed, usually every few weeks. Whenever I am in town it’s a whirlwind to try and see everyone (which is always bittersweetly impossible). My friends also come us to visit me, and we explore the city or stay in and make crafts, cook elaborate meals or consume tequila and pixy stix.

So I shouldn’t be, but I’m lonely. I feel it  in a way I haven’t since I was maybe ten or eleven, old enough to know there was a big world with a lot of love out there but no capacity or ability to go and find it.  It’s a thin, mean, gnawed-at feeling. But this time it has nothing to do with an absence of companionship or solidarity, or with any kind of lack in what is frankly the embarrassment of love in my life.

There is just nothing I can do right now about the fact that the great loves of my life, my chosen family, live in a different city than I do. When we are all together there is a peace that settles over me that I don’t exactly know how to describe. It’s a quiet feeling that makes something in me relax, go soft. When I am away, there something like loneliness and something like homesickness that takes it’s place, a tension I am usually not aware I am carrying until can set it down again.

So one of the ways I’m dealing with having all kinds of inconvenient new feelings all over the place is by becoming a robot.

Like many great things in my life, it began with D&D. The group I game with wanted to keep me as part of the campaign after I absconded to a different city, and so one weekend they decided to Skype me in. I wore a headset mic so I could hear ambient noise in the room better, but basically figured it would be an annoying exercise. Instead, I felt entirely a part of things. On the other end, my friends had set up a laptop in my usual chair, on top of a stack of books so I was approximately at the height I usually sat. When I needed to see something drawn on the map, someone would lift the laptop and angle the screen so I had a better view. Everyone made sure to stick their heads into my field of vision when addressing me directly.

It wasn’t long before I found myself hanging out in the living room with my loved ones, a happy robot. Jairus set me up in a chair with a flexible webcam twined up the back the first time; later, he got me an official laptop stand, which he refers to casually as my “legs.” High quality webcams and better mics have made the feeds better, communication more seamless.  There’s usually a few moments of friendly awkwardness at the beginning of the interaction when the sound is being calibrated, but very quickly everyone seems to entirely forget that I’m a robot at all, and starts just casually chatting with me and acting like I am really in the room. And aside from being unable to physically touch anyone, I feel like I am a part of things, able to talk and heckle and crack wise, through my laptop and with my headset over five hours away. We’ve been able to watch movies and MMA fight cards together. I’ve been able to be a part of Chris Dart opening birthday presents, and of so many more real-time conversations and hangouts.

One of the most touching things is how nice everyone is to the robot version of me. They put in an effort to make sure my set up is as good as it can be, with the best sound and video quality. The height and angle of my stand is carefully adjusted so I can see everyone, and if the conversation moves to another part of the room, I am moved with it. If someone is out of my field of vision, they move back into it when talking to me. If someone accidentally brushes against the laptop stand, they apologize as though they’d bumped into me.

There are innumerable other little ways we keep in touch. There is the chat window that never closes, where we wish each other a good morning and good night and talk almost all day every day, and all the private channels and sub-branches of that ongoing and ever-evolving massive love letter. There are emails and selfies, songs and articles. Jairus and I will play Destiny together, chatting over headsets as we gleefully kill aliens in matching outfits; sometimes, he’ll stream a game on Twitch, chatting idly to himself and to me while I work, and I’ll pop the occasional comment into chat; the sound of him killing things in Rogue Legacy while I put a draft of a conference paper together lets me feel, for a little while, like we’re almost in the same room.

A lot of the space we share right now is digital, but it doesn’t feel any less real for the screens and wires and distance in the way. I thought love was going to be learning how not to be a robot; instead I’m learning how to be a robot in love.

One sweet plum of an insult came from Margaret Wente when, in the wake of my writing a piece about her for Torontoist’s annual Heroes and Villains feature in the wake of her plagiarism scandal, called me a “Marxist dilettante.” When I started the column Girls Don’t Like Metal, one of my favourite insult-threads of all time sprung up which game rise to the nickname Groce Count (someone tried to call me a “gross cunt” but misspelled both words). Much more recently, I’ve been called a “little feminist,” a “harpy,” and a whole bunch of exquisite barbs that I am for sure forgetting right now but that I gleefully tweeted about at the time (feel free to remind me of any I’ve misplaced).

My favourite type, however, are things that are thrown like they’re meant to hurt but are actually profound compliments, only delivered in a snarling voice. Unquestionably the nicest cruelly-delivered thing anyone has ever said to me is, “you’re the bright, warm centre that everyone clings to.” There is no tone, no matter how mean, that could dull how lovely that string of words sound hung together. I think about them often.

And, that phrase has made me think a lot about compliments masquerading as insults all over again. Especially with #gamergate (and to a sad, much lesser extent #metalgate ) still somehow horribly happening. It’s endlessly hilarious that a person who happily refers to themselves a troll (and means it in the Unseelie, Shadow Court way) would lob a term like Social Justice Warrior or White Knight as an insult and think it was going to sting. When a literal Nazi bestowed the title of High Inquisitor SJW in the Court of Star Chamber on me I was so thrilled that this happened:

I never thought I’d be so lucky to have my enemies think so well of me.

In the process of squirmingly, excruciatingly reading some of these posts, I also revisited some of the poetry I wrote in my late teens. It’s predictably, nightmarishly bad, and because I enjoy humiliating myself now and again, I sent Jairus Khan the files for the first chapbook I ever printed, way back in 2001 when I was 18. The poems in in were primarily written earlier, when I was 15-17, and I emailed the files over without re-reading them so I’d send them at all.

The only part I have since re-read, on his recommendation, is the bio I wrote in the back.

Natalie Zina Walschots is a blond and bespectacled 2^nd year English Literature Creative Writing student at the University of Windsor. She loves poetry and pasta, people and pens, and has a tendency to wander into telephone poles, unsavory characters and oncoming traffic. She will have carpal tunnel syndrome before she is twenty and will grow up to be a writer living in a tiny apartment with a typewriter, many cats and a single green pepper in the refrigerator.

It’s the last sentence that I keep coming back to. My apartment isn’t all that tiny anymore and my beautiful Underwood is in storage, but otherwise, that’s pretty accurate. You always had a knack for telling the future, kiddo.

little bird, little bird in the cinnamon tree

I have a recurring daydream where I manage to get ahold of a time machine, and have the chance to visit myself when I was fifteen. Fifteen was the age I feel like I became myself, in a weird way; like my consciousness fully blinked on, all systems go, and my sense of self solidified in some ways that have never been shaken. It was also an incredibly dark and difficult time for me in a lot of ways, when I was more raw and wounded I would be for another ten years, but with the added complication of a lack if independence and any real control over my life and boundaries.

I want to visit her; I think it would help. I don’t have any advice or anything really dramatic to say, exactly, but I’d like to show up, if only for a minute, so she can see me, and so I can say, “You’re going to be fine. There’s going to be a lot of shit but you’re going to survive it all and stay intact and it’s all going to be so much better than you can possibly imagine right now. It’s going to be great.”

What I say has never changed, but when I choose to go back has, repeatedly. Like, what version of me would I want younger me to see? When my first book came out, or my second? When I was married, or when I first moved to Toronto? When my hair was purple or blue or bleach white, or with one of my tattoo still bleeding under gauze? What would be most comforting, most hopeful, most strong and joyous?

It’s now. Right now.

Really, I know better than this. I should just start in the middle of things. It’ll work it’s way out eventually.

Two days ago, the weather in Montreal changed from a deep, lazy fall into a sudden and unforgiving winter. Huge, cottony snowflakes have been falling, and this morning the temperature went down to -9 with a wind warning. Everything is diamond bright and I’m finally, finally not overwarm all of the time. I love the change in seasons, but the suddenness of it, the drama, means that my sleep is wrecked and my extremely weird, active dream life has gone bonkers. Everything feels thin and raw and close to the surface.

While walking to get a coffee this morning, a man threw a rose at me from a moving car.

This might sound like a romantic gesture, something vaguely out of a fairytale. Except, I have no idea who the fellow was, and the car was moving quite fast, and he winged it at my head as hard as he could. One of the thorns left a little, ragged scratch on my chin.

So things are weird, is what I am trying to say. Trying to explain exactly how weird, and why, and in what combination, is something I’m not even going to attempt in one go. The solution, of course, is to just capture what I can, strange little slices, and hope over time it accumulates into something again. Going back and trying to sum it all up isn’t going to work. So, forward.

Winter is here, and I am in love. I’m dreaming of cathedrals made of volcanic glass and cold cities again. My exterior life is pretty much as weird as my interior one, which is actually very comforting.

Also, this remains one of my favourite things:

Even considering this, the last months have been completely out of control. It hasn’t been a flood of unmitigated challenges and hardships, though there have certainly been a metric fuckton of those; its been everything. There have been new jobs and crazy opportunities and dramatic changes; I’ve written and travelled and deepened friendships. There’s been so much excitement and joy. I’ve also been dragged underwater deeper and more often in the last six months than I have in the last several years combined.

Maybe one day I will settle in a place and stop being a hobo. Probably not though.

I’ve moved to Montreal. My relationship to Toronto is like that of John Constantine to London: we are deeply in love. This city has been home in my heart since I was thirteen and spent a barely-supervised summer here while my mom worked, cutting deep grooves into my feet from ill-fitting sandals and getting chased out of the Condom Shack. When I was a little older, my friends and I would drive up after school just to go to the Silver Snail and have a coffee, then drive home through the night to be in class the next day. Moving here when I was almost 25 and getting divorced helped reorder and redefine my life; this is where my heart is and my friends are. Leaving again, even for a while, is one of the hardest things I’ve done. I am comforted, however, because at lease the move is for spectacularly awesome reasons.

I’m starting a PhD. I know. I KNOW. I’ve talked about leaving academia the way a lot of people might about getting out of jail. It’s not just that time has passed and I’ve gotten soft and forgotten the horrors (remember being so tired you hallucinated rabbits were running alongside the car, Zed? Remember the lung infection?).  But. BUT. I’m starting a PhD in Interdisciplinary studies under the Humanities department at Concordia. I’m working between English, Journalism and Sociology with an indescribably badass team of advisors. I’m going to be doing a project on video games, feminist criticism and digital communities, and the adversarial relationship between critics and gamers.  I get to work with the Technoculture, Art and Games Lab and Ampersand Laboratory. It is going to be so much fun.

A draft of the novel is almost done. Holy shitballs, it’s almost there. I am teetering on the very edge of having something resembling a workable draft, which I can ten tear into and start revising. I recently worked through a troubling bit of late plot fuckery and feel elated. The goal right now is to try and finish the draft before school starts in September, which would be all great and fine if things stopped happening for five minutes.

I joined a game writing group. Pixelles, a mega rad organization devoted to women in games, has started a writers’ group, and I dove on it. The first meeting went swimmingly and I’m looking forward to bringing work to an awesome group of women who actually know what the hell they’re doing for solid critique, rather than bumbling along alone.

Everything is also terrible. In the midst of everything bright and good that is also the impetus for all this life upheaval, there have been a lot of very hard things. My partner’s father is extremely ill and has been in the hospital since February; where we once thought he’d be home long before we moved away, it’s clear his recovery is still a long way in coming. So many of my dear friends seem to be wrestling with challenges and demons, and I wish I could be closer, offer more present support. There are chronic illnesses being fought and major life structure changes on the horizon. Most of these stories aren’t mine alone and so I feel really uncomfortable writing about them here, but suffice it to say that it has been hard, and constant, and not letting up.

There’s more, so much more, that is good and terrible and wonderful and shocking. I’m working through still how to write about most of it — hell, I’m working through how to live through most of it — but it will come. Everything is always happening at once. And it’s going to be amazing.

Okay, so this first roundup isn’t a weekly roundup; it includes everything I’ve written in 2014 so far. This will continue to be a weekly feature from here on out!

Three of my reviews have gone up on Exclaim!: Catharsis Absolute by the solo black metal project AVICHI, which has a “a thick, undulating muscularity,”; Svn Eater by blackened death metal executioners Lvcifyre, which contains “pitch-black hate, roiling anger and ravenous hunger,”; and Meine Fesseln by German atmospheric black metallers in Waldgeflüster, which is defined by “a loam-like richness.”

For About Heavy Metal, I reviewed two new, related released from Ukrainian pagan black metallers Drudkh: A split record with Winterfylleth, entitled Thousands of Moons Ago/ The Gates, and a collection of rarities and EPs entitled Eastern Frontier in Flames (which includes the aforementioned split).

For Torontoist, my first Sound Advice column in the new year was a slightly unusual one: rather than focus on a single Toronto record, I examined three great metal records that came out of the city earlier in the year that had escaped my attention at the time of their release.  Each of these albums, by IRN, Crimson Shadows, and Pyres, are absolutely worth your time and attention. More recently, I wrote about the solid new Traditional Heavy Metal/ retro-thrash record Chasing the Dream by Skull Fist, which is ” filled with irresistible vocal hooks and incredible catchy riff structures.”

Also for Torontoist, I covered a talk that took place at the inaugural AGO First Thursday event of the year, entitled “21st-Century Art: Why Feminism Still (Really) Matters” and featuring Shary Boyle, Vanessa Dunn (of Vag Halen), Petra Collins and Aminah Sheikh. It was a collaboration between the First Thursday team, Long Winter, Hazlitt and After School, and was a great and necessary conversation in am important context. Also, the very first commenter compares my writing the piece to “celebrating Leni Riefensahi’s ‘aliveness’ in Hitler’s Germany,” and then later warns against the dangers of “feminist sandwiches,” which is ridiculous even for the level of comments I’m used to getting.

I wrote the first 20,000 words in about 10 days.

I have more than triple that number now, and am in the last push through the first draft. It’s exhilarating and terrifying and is by far and away the most fun I’ve ever had writing anything.

I asked my friend and colleague, the illustrator and concept artist Rachel Kahn (who you may know from her brilliant By Crom! comics) to help me out with some character concept development.

Everyone, I’d like you to meet Anna, a/k/a The Librarian.