I had to get away; away from my too-familiar city, away from the barking dog in the apartment downstairs, away from my darling partner whose comings and goings to the daily grind of his office reminded me of the routine, society and paycheck I’d abandoned. I needed to know: would writing be easier if I changed settings? If I removed the temptations of cooking, cleaning and reliable Internet?
Just like that, I bought a cheap flight to the Dominican.

The salt air blowing off the sea is soft and moist, impregnating the paper of the books I brought along, bending the pages into curvy waves. By noon, everything looks like it has been dropped in a bathtub, including me.

My body, unprepared for a sudden thirty degree change in weather, is sweating like a bucket that has sprung multiple leaks. My hat, shirt and shorts are soaked in a potent stew of sunscreen, bug spray and intermittent rain.

Hours of grinding my teeth over downtown noise pollution seem hilarious now. I should know better; planet earth is noisy by nature. You can’t travel expecting silence, just a change of audio scenery.

Leaving behind the week-long fire alarm testing in my condo, I now have the operatic yawps of tree frogs in the bamboo outside my mesh-screened bedroom window. Instead of wailing sirens I have the roar and bellow of tropical storms, rain pounding on the metal roof, winds howling through the palms. In place of the high-pitched yapping of a toy canine, there are the mournful caterwauls and angry hissing of feral felines, and the distant boom of Latin beats from trucks parked on the beach.

On my first night, I lay awake, not so much from the new sounds I could hear, but straining for one that was missing. Staring up at the gauzy curtain of the mosquito net I’d brought from home, I waited for the tell-tale bzzz alerting me to the fact that I was about to donate blood without consent. I heard nothing.

My bug fear approaches the levels of paranoia that some people have about zombies, nuns, or republicans. I can’t help myself, the little bastards terrify me. But the beach is not the jungle, and armed with an extremely liberal coating of DEET (I spray my legs and feet so vigorously that they look shellacked – my toenail polish has melted off in several places from the chemicals) I have so far managed less than 10 itchy bites, all on my legs. We’ll see how I fare over the next 10 days.

There are, of course, other bugs. This is the tropics; living things of all shapes and sizes thrive in a hot, damp climate. Unseen but distantly present are the creatures of nightmare: tarantulas, cockroaches, millipedes. Ever present but equally invisible are minute sand fleas, midges and ants so incredibly wee that you could easily mistake one for an eyelash or a speck of dirt until you see them moving.

While not as small as the head of a pin, Dominican ants are smaller than the head of a pen, and move easily under and over my laptop keys looking for who knows what. Miniscule vultures of the bug world, they collect trash and keep things tidy. In a real-life Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I’d killed the one mosquito I found and left its tiny carcass on my desk, as a warning to other winged marauders. Within twenty minutes it had vanished, carried away like Gulliver by the Lilliputians.

Beauty is extravagant here. Lizards and geckos repose on shady branches and sun themselves on red tiles. Hummingbirds sip from hibiscus blooms. Carved wooden parrots look out at trees rustling with yellow-bellied Bananaquits and the abundant brown-and-cream streaked Palm Chats, beaks chattering, feathers fluttering.

Gardening in the Dominican is not the delicate activity of care and preservation that it is in Canada. Back home the tools of the trade are greenhouses, watering cans, fertilizers, shovels and hand-held pruning shears. In the tropics it boils down to two essentials: the machete and the rake. First you chop back, then you clear the debris.

Plants I know only as indoor exotics grow in the open air here, and seem to have been fed magic growth serum. Avocados are massive, the size of a child’s head, falling with a heavy thud from roadside trees. Coconuts abound, and I’ve been warned not to fall asleep under any shady fronds in case a ripe husk succumbs to gravity and plummets to earth, delivering a fatal conk to my head. At the market, fat plantains and jumbo papayas sit on the shelf next to massive jugs of vanilla extract, green and brown bottles of cerveza and fragrant bags of rich, cheap coffee.

Eating has been entertaining. I’ve tried the traditional meal known as La Bandera (“The Flag”), which is a simple, inexpensive and tasty dish of rice, beans and meat. Yesterday I had a bony but delicious goat stew with arroz (rice). My first night, on a gourmet splurge, I had coconut shrimp with Cuban appetizers full of taro and plantain at a patio on the beach. I’ve enjoyed the local beers, Presidente and Bohemia.

Tonight I hope to taste the local wine. There is only one; grapes aren’t a big crop on this island. Made in Puerta Plata, it’s a light red – just 8% alcohol, but the packaging is pure genius.

Here is my description of the label: A smiling bodybuilder with a physique like the Incredible Hulk and a face like David Hasslehoff flexes his muscles in front of a violently yellow background. Below, a slender purple band insists that this is not actually liquid steroids, but in fact, red wine or “vino tinto”. At the bottom, a bright red band tells us the macho brand of this honest brew: La Fuerza! This translates to “The Force”, suggesting that drinking enough of this stuff will help you perform Jedi mind tricks.

Despite the compelling name, I strongly suspect that this will not be the wine I am looking for, and that I will move along, shortly after my first sip.

Hasta luego, Pipes.

In case you haven’t heard of it, NaNoWriMo is an annual (November) novel writing project that brings together professional and amateur writers from all over the world. “Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!” they proclaim on their site, as folks who feel they have a book in them try to squeeze, wrench, pry and jackhammer it out over the course of 720 grueling hours. That guy who cut his arm off after a mere 127 hours knows nothing of our suffering. No time for editing. No time to reach for a thesaurus. Just write, write, write.

My modus operandi does not often result in linear storytelling, so I shudder at the idea of trying to patch together dozens of disjointed scraps of scenery and dialogue into a publishable piece in just 30 brief days. However, I do like the immediacy and panic of the thing, and the sort of wartime “we’re all in the trenches” mood brought on by thousands of disenfranchised literary souls striving together to carve their letters into the shining firmament, etc. etc.

So, in honour of this month of extreme creative force, I will try to post some writing tidbits for the enjoyment of the public, in a serial fashion, just like early Charles Dickens only with fewer coal scuttles and absolutely no monetary compensation for my pains. Here is today’s short piece (about 600 words), brought forth by my excruciating afternoon encounter with a car alarm. Enjoy!

~~~
THE FOLLOWING IS MOSTLY FICTION, EXCEPT THE BIT WHERE I IMAGINE HITTING THE CAR, WHICH WAS BASED ON ACTUAL RAGE. I DID NOT COOK A TURKEY TODAY. ALSO, MY NAME IS NOT DREW.
~~~

The car alarm had been going off for two solid hours now, blaring away, a demonic metronome. Drew stood, teeth clenched, eyelids narrowed, and glared out the window at the street below. The offending Audi was flashing its hazards on and off, on and off. It reminded her of the annoying light show at a downtempo rave she’d attended during her unfortunate teen years. No menacing thief skulking nearby, no apologetic owner fiddling with the lock; no silence in sight.

She wanted to run outside and wreak havoc on the car with a blunt instrument. In her mind, she envisioned the baseball bat or broom handle or rolling pin smashing down on the hood, breaking through the windshield with a satisfying crunch, peppering the dashboard with shattered glass and all the while, hitting, hitting, the flailing rhythm of her devastating blows keeping perfect time with the incessant honking like a mad animal percussionist.

The pounding would continue until her makeshift weapon ploughed deep enough into the car’s circuitry to find and destroy the Central Honk Apparatus or whatever that damned evil source of noise was called. Then, bliss, as the honks hushed to a hoarse flatulent whisper, falling out of tune, and at length the three-thousand pound steel music box from Hell would wheeze its last foul breath.

It was probably for the best that she had a turkey slow-roasting at 325º, and water boiling on the stove, as overseeing the kitchen meant Drew could not follow through on her dark fantasies of vehicular annihilation. Snap! On went the oven light, a quick bend at the waist, and she peered upside-down into the greasy darkness. The bird was browning nicely, oozing clear juices into the pan where they bathed waiting carrots and parsnips, releasing a pungent smell of sage and pepper into the air.

Striving for holiday cheer, Drew took a calming breath as she straightened up, and exhaled into sudden, peaceful silence. The racket had finally stopped! She peered out the window, but the driver was nowhere in sight. Either the coward had used a remote-control keychain to deactivate the alarm, or else the kind manufacturing engineers at Audi had built a pity-timer into their anti-theft system.

Drew gathered a dishtowel into her hand, reached over the front burner, and lifted the heavy lid to check on the potatoes. Hot clouds of steam billowed forth, revealing dancing vegetables bouncing up and down in their salty, starchy tub. Done. Boiling water was sluiced off into the sink, and the resulting roar seemed to resolve itself into the resurrected rhythm of the car alarm.

“Lord, no!” Drew thought, “Please not again.”

She held herself rigidly still and listened, muscles tense with expectation, but the alarm was no more: it was only the ghost of the dreaded sound, haunting her. Sailors often feel waves under their legs long after leaving the sea for the steady shore; so did Drew’s ears now play ventriloquist’s tricks on her, projecting phantom sounds into her brain. Time to quit cooking and take a walk, perhaps.

Checking the turkey with a fork, she covered it with tin foil and let it rest. Nothing else needed urgent attention; broccoli could be steamed later, cheesecake was chilling in the freezer. Pulling off the apron her brother had given her last Christmas that read, “I like cats, too! Let’s exchange recipes,” she washed her hands, pulled on her black pea coat and purple mittens, and decided to treat herself to a seasonal latte. Something spiced or maple-flavoured, full of syrup and joy.

At Spadina, the gardens and orchard were beautiful, and the apples plentiful. There were two long wooden tables covered with plates, hand-labelled, and ordered on one side by generation (ye olde small French St. Lawrence begat McIntosh, who begat Cortland, fathering Macoun and Spartan also…)

…and in a more eclectic grouping on the other side by age and family, dominated by russets and other peculiarities including a pink-fleshed crabapple hybrid (the Pink Pearl). So many great names! Sunrise, Baldwin, Burgundy, Freedom, Golden Reinette, Gravenstein, July Tart, Jefferis, Tolman Sweet…

Many of the varieties in attendance were on the endangered apples list: sadly, since commercial farming is all about maximizing yield, the diversity of breeds is dying out, and many apples are disappearing not just from marketplaces, but from existence.

Think: when was the last time you went to your local Sobeys, Loblaws or Metro and saw more than the usual 10 standards? (Red or Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Macintosh, Gala, Pink Lady, etc) One hundred years ago, North America sported over 15,000 apple varieties; now, only about 3,000 varieties still exist and most of those are endangered.

At the tasting, I heard stories from people who are friends with small orchard owners, saying that lots of local farmers are chopping down stands of Russets because they’re too hard to grow commercially. Extreme sadface. I love Russets.

Some of the more obscure varieties we tried were, alas, some of the tastiest. On the Macintosh table, there was an old parent-of-Macs variety that was described to me as “something you’ll never taste again”: the Princess Louise apple was a sensory delight – sweetly perfumed, crisp, with a rich honeyed flavour made all the more poignant by its rarity.

Before I select the pick of the crop, I should give a disclaimer: not only do I love Macintosh apples, I adore all apples, and could eat them until I have a full-on bellyache. There is no stopping me with apples. I have a witness to the fact that, after eating apples for two solid hours at the tasting, I went home and had TWO slices of apple tart for dessert. True story.

My favourites of the day were Mother, a rich red beauty with a cream-coloured interior that had a bright, snappy sweet flavour, and Chestnut, another rare find, a crabapple with an edible, nutty-sweet flesh. The Chestnut was hardly bigger than its namesake, a glowing ruby red on the outside and a warm yellow on the inside. I could have eaten the whole plate.

As LeVar Burton would say, “you don’t have to take my word for it.” There were food bloggers a-plenty in attendance, snapping photos with cameras that were far superior to mine. Here’s a list of some other Toronto writers who might have covered the event, go check out their opinions of the tastiest pommes:

• Kate from IKnowWhoGrewIt.ca
• Lex from Unsweetened.ca
• Andrea from CanadianFoodieGirl.com
• Lisa from VeganCulinaryCrusade.com
• Chef Matt of MattKantor.ca and SecretPickle.com
• Laura of CubitsOrganics.com

Feeling left out? Wish you were there? Don’t despair! As Yoda would say, “there is another.”

Another heritage apple tasting event coming up, that is! Yes, great news; Toronto’s own Cookbook Store at 850 Yonge Street (Yorkville) is holding a combined heritage apple tasting and apple pie contest on October 1st. I will, of course, be competing in this baking competition. If you choose to enter, be forewarned: you will be throwing down against Moi. I HAVE PUFF PASTRY AND I’M NOT AFRAID TO USE IT.

Switching from PC to Mac about 4 years ago opened my eyes to a wealth of new software options, exposing Microsoft’s Office suite as NOT the ultimate device for electronic document creation.

Pencils: the digital alterative

So, what did I discover?

The App Store has a bundle called “Apps for Writers: from Scribbles to Stories”, which was a good starting point for research. Of course, it only showcases Apple’s selected options, but I liked the categories it used to organize the types of apps you may need to write, and have organized this post along the same lines, adding a fifth category for digital library organization: e-book readers, online reviews and virtual book catalogs.

1. Manuscript Makers
2. Distraction-Free Writing
3. Journaling & Blogging
4. Notes & Clippings (aka Research)
5. E-Reading and Library Organization

1a) MANUSCRIPT MAKERS (Books/Stories): The big players in the manuscript creation game are Scrivener 2.1 (created 2006), Ulysses 2.0 (the original, created 2003), StoryMill 4.0, Mellel 2.9 and Pages ’09 (really a layout tool for image-heavy text, but created by Apple, so obviously promoted heavily by them). These programs cost between $20-50.

Scrivener logo

I was so impressed by Scrivener‘s toolset that I shelled out the $45 immediately and bought it.

What can it do?
What CAN’T it do!

I love the:

1. Corkboard view, that lets you organize digital index cards,
2. Ability to split your text into chapters and scenes and then drag and drop them to change the order of your story as needed,
3. Full-screen editing,
4. Editable templates for setting locations and characters,
5. Word count and word target options,
6. Metadata tools that let you build collections to follow the plot of a single character or family, or tag stuff as “draft” or “finished” and then see only chapters that need work,
7. Autosave and backup tools that work with Dropbox or any other virtual service,
8. Floating quick-reference panels, if you need to check a photo or document for reference while you write,
9. “Snapshot” tool that lets you create a version and then rollback changes or compare revisions,
10. Powerful compile function, that can build you an e-book, or a totally correct thesis with footnotes,
11. Awesomesauce.

… seriously, this thing ROCKS. And no, I swear I do not work for these people, nor am I being paid to endorse them; I’m just really into their stuff.

Added Bonus: If you’re anal like me, and you want to build a timeline to keep track of historical events of significance and milestones in the lives of your characters, then StoryMill might seem to be the only option, as it is one of the only programs I’ve found with a built-in timeline option. However! The Scrivener forums have given birth to a beta program called AeonTimeline. It’s free, in active development, and can be exported to rich text, image, HTML table, or OPML which is Scrivener-compatible. Ta-da!

1b) MANUSCRIPT MAKERS (Scripts): If you’re writing a screenplay, the options are limited. Really, there’s just one contender: Final Draft is costly at $250, but is far more than just “the industry standard”, it is worshipped. They drop big names in the promotional material (Oliver Stone, Tom Hanks, Alan Ball, J.J. Abrams and James Cameron all use it), but the real selling point is that in order to be taken seriously, you must submit your manuscript in FinalDraft (.fdx) format. Other options do exist, to provide different views on scriptwriting or to get the job done for less money. Montage is just $50, fairly mature at version 1.5.4, but has not been updated since Feb 2009. Scrivener has a template for screenwriting, as well as several other scripting options for comic books, etc, but even they tacitly acknowledge the supremacy of Final Draft, as their scripting option compiles into .fdx format.

2) DISTRACTION-FREE WRITING: If you don’t want to shell out the $40-50 for a full-throttle manuscript program, but you want a more zen experience than using Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or TextEdit, you can consider the “Distraction-Free Writing” options. These include $5 for WriteRoom, $10 for ByWord, $5 for OmmWriter, $5 for iA Writer, $1 for CleanWriter… meh. Frankly, if you want distraction-free writing, I suggest turning off your wifi. Seriously, these programs can only help so much. Spend the money on a proper manuscript maker instead.

3) JOURNALING & BLOGGING: I simply cannot understand why you would bother blogging with an app when there are so many free, web-based options available. WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr. Seriously, why pay $10 for Day One, $15 for Memoires, or $30 for Chronories? Okay, that last one is weird, actually. It’s for lazy people who want to blog without blogging, and kind of want to… stalk themselves? Listen, that whole concept of auto-generated diary entries freaks me right out, so I’ll just pretend it doesn’t exist and we can move on. ‘

Evernote logo

Personally, I use a combination of Wunderlist for task organization and deadline setting (try it, it is INCREDIBLE), Evernote for gathering clippings while surfing the web and organizing them into neatly tagged, easily searchable notebooks, and Dropbox for backups and large document sharing. Skitch is also a great little free tool for grabbing digital images or screenshots when you need them.

5) READING and LIBRARY ORGANIZATION: This may not seem crucial to writing, but I assure you it can be. While I’m a devotee of printed, paper, bound books, I acknowledge that a benefit of having digital versions is a writer’s ability to dissect and learn. You can search for instances of a name, a word, clip scenes and review their structure, word count, etc.

I don’t have an e-reader, but I do use e-book software on my laptop and iPhone for this purpose. Most people know about the free Kindle and Nook software, but I submit for your consideration a little-known but very impressive open-source alternative called Calibre. With this, you can organize a library of e-texts, tag them, sort by author, title, add metadata for series, publication date, change the book cover, explode the e-pub and fix typos, search across multiple vendor sites like Amazon, Kobo, eBooks.com, Waterstones, Gutenberg and so on to find the cheapest version of a book. It’s excellent.

Goodreads logo

For finding a wealth of reviews of books you’re considering reading, I recommend GoodReads.

PS – If after all this you can still stomach further musings on the subject, I found this blog post by Antony Johnston to be quite good. He provides additional useful content such as templates and examples of drafts created with some of the writing software I mention here.

Historical fiction must be one of the most challenging exercises in this arena; there are plenty of authorities, professional and amateur, on any era who will read your work with a critical eye. Yet many details – particularly linguistic idiom – are based on pure conjecture. The greatest trial is choosing a setting in an age just bordering on the modern, where sufficient records in story, surveys and simulacrum survive to set obstacles in the path of invention.

An age like, say… the Regency era (1795 and 1837).
Which is when I want to write one of my stories.

In fantasy, you can define your own rules and paint a unique portrait of a world that has never existed. Contemporary fiction allows for research and observation that can inform your text. But historical writing is a difficult fusion of established rules, regimes and records and a total lack of ability to put yourself into the space as it was then.

Some authors skirt the pitfalls of period detail by glossing lightly over the why’s and wherefore’s, adding a sprinkling of authenticity by dropping a popular name (Byron, Brummel) or well-known location from the period (Almack’s, White’s), and building characters that are transported from the current day and given a coat of paint that presents them in petticoats or redcoats, as needed.

A popular way to “research” if you’re not really into reading historical texts about the 18th century and Napoleonic war is to just crib notes from Austen, who published P&P in 1813, and Georgette Heyer, who wrote a slew of excellent Regency romances, and whose passion for including “minutiae of dress and decor” invests her novels with the “tone of the time” – so said feminist critic Lillian Robinson.

Other writers treat research differently. The best example I can think of for a gung-ho historical researcher is Diana Gabaldon, whose Outlander Series has sold about a gazillion copies, and who researches her time period as only a computer-database nerd with a B.Sc. in Zoology, a M.S. in Marine Biology and a Ph.D. in Ecology can do. This woman lives in libraries. I imagine that after researching for her dissertations on hermit crabs and pinyon jays, reading up on Scotland in the 1700s was a blast.

I am trying to find a happy medium between detail-oblivious and detail-obsessed.

When I came home from the library on my first day of reading up on Brown Bess muskets, dueling pistols, and the evolution of technology in war from 1800-1850, DC was concerned that my “light Regency romance” might evolve into a thousand-page behemoth, more closely resembling a volume from a Neal Stephenson cycle than a Heyer romp. Well, I can think of worse things to have my work compared to, but I doubt I have the stamina to expand my story to Mr. Stephenson’s prodigious lengths.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to gather my little nuts of intelligence, including these puzzling little enquiries:

1. What are the standard tools and equipment used in a stable or horse stall in 1790?
2. What is the difference between straw and hay?
3. What was the state of plumbing in 1800? How did the upper class fill their bathtubs?
4. Were nicknames common in the Regency era? Would a teenager call a boy named Jeremy “Jezzer”?
5. What was the average age of boys when they were sent to Eton, then Oxford, or off to a regiment, vicarage, etc?
6. Were towels used in 1790? By whom? What were they made of? If not towels, how did people dry themselves?

If you should happen to know the answer to one or several of these questions offhand, feel free to save me time and agony and post a response. In the meantime I’ll probe the Internet and plunder my local libraries. Research ahoy!

• set the tone for the whole book,
• capture the interest of your prospective audience,
• impress them enough to buy your work, and
• avoid millions of cliches (“It was a dark and stormy night…”)

Around 1995, I remember Penguin Books ran a contest, giving away an entire library of Classics to the person who correctly identified 50 opening lines taken from selected novels under their imprint.

The contest was challenging as it required people to go to the library or bookstores, since e-books at that time were limited to Gutenberg.org, which had less than 1000 public domain works available online before 1997 – ’95 was not exactly “pre-Internet”, but early days to be sure.

Luckily, I was working at a bookstore at the time, so I slaved away during breaks, scribbling authors and titles on my entry form, trying to decipher which words belonged to whom. For an English nerd, it was a fun game, exposing me to tidbits of great literature, and showing me how Melville, Joyce, Woolf and Flaubert kicked off their stories.

With the proliferation of e-books, Kindles, Kobos and Nooks in the last few years, text is easier to find online, and many authors have websites that give readers first-chapter excerpts. So, I rounded up the opening lines from a wide sampling of popular romance writers, and created a miniature contest of my own. Here is the result: a short, silly quiz.

CAVEAT: I know many of you don’t read romance. It doesn’t matter – take the quiz anyhow. It’s very fast, just ten questions, and I promise you’ll get a laugh out of some quotes and most titles; and yes, they’re all real, I didn’t invent anything. Wait ’till you get to the rutabagas. No cheating please!

Romance Novel “Opening Lines” Pop Quiz: if you get all 10 right, I will buy you a timbit.

I have one year to figure out the answer to that question. If you are reading this and feeling the sting of envy at the thought of 12 months of freedom from the daily grind of demanding bosses, commuting and office drama, well… I wish I could say I was living up to the imagined glory.

Perhaps you are imagining what you would do with all this unscheduled time? Days spent reveling in hedonistic excess; wine and chocolate for breakfast, spa treatments, trips to the beach, French lessons, casual meandering through coffee shops or mid-day yoga, hours spent perusing Netflix…

Alas, my capacity for unbridled joy has atrophied after years of cudgeling my brain into the conformity of office life. Like a kidnap victim trapped in a beige cubicle, being told to finish that PowerPoint presentation and also to rub the lotion on its skin, I am having considerable trouble unwinding, for fear of getting the hose again.

The first week brought with it chilly weather and oppressive cloud-cover. My autumnal instincts took over, and I slaved away in the kitchen, preparing for months of hibernation by baking unhealthy treats and obsessively hacking through those items that continually sink to the bottom of the “to do” list due to their total unimportance (reorganize cupboards, put up proper window blinds in the kitchen, sell old DVDs, obsessively sort papers in den…).

I’m sure I’ll find equilibrium eventually, but it’s going to take a while to get into a new groove. Last time I took a leave of absence, for the much more pleasant occupation of globetrotting, I kicked off with a month in Colorado and a camping road trip to the Grand Canyon – a wise choice, as the trip was amazing and my friends in Denver helped me find my traveling pace.

Why not just travel again? I could, but I’m worried that if I start I won’t be able to stop. I might head for the horizon and fail to buckle down and write anything more than blog posts about where I’m going next. So, for now, I’ll stay rooted in Toronto and try to find my writing routine. I’m prescribing for myself a gentle reordering of the mind and the development of some new habits:

• try to go for a run at least 3 times a week
• visit different libraries to see where I work best
• spend time with my mom, who has a mellowing effect
• long bike rides on weekends, to get some sunshine
• recording my reading, both for research and pleasure
• blogging more, to overcome self-consciousness about exposing my writing
• auditing a few writing classes at George Brown and U of T

I’m also going to dial down the reading of “helpful” books on The Craft, and embrace a more casual practice of writing down a scene or two of my own invention every day. While it was comforting reading the soothing advice of Anne Lamott’s ‘Bird by Bird’ and hearing the wise words of Nat Goldberg’s ‘Writing Down the Bones’, I started to get panicky after hitting the “how to” manuals, like John Truby’s ‘Anatomy Of Story’ where he gives “helpful” advice like “Step 1: Write Something That May Change Your Life”. Fuck me. Really? That’s a tall order. What if I just want to ENTERTAIN people, hmm? I won’t even talk about ‘The Artist’s Way’, which is driving several of my other friends in their 30s who have not yet achieved their desired level of creative output completely insane.

So this is my beginning. Next post: starting with a bang, my research on opening lines.

Where to begin? Well, I’m still alive. Although this blog has suffered from neglect, I have continued to record my life online, but in a more divided way. Running and exercise has been recorded on Daily Mile. Knitting projects and stash are faithfully catalogued on Ravelry. I’ve been Tweeting. I will now sum up the past twelve months in less than 1000 words. Here goes…

Plenty has happened since last May, with the most significant change being my father’s death in February 2011 at the age of 78 after a long and difficult struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease. I am grateful for the peace and dignity of his passing, but he is sorely missed.

Chronologically speaking, D and I finished our renovations last June and moved into our new condo near St. Lawrence Market in mid-July. At the end of July we took a short trip to Montreal, and drove out to meet D’s extended family at a place called Magog in the beautiful Eastern Townships of Quebec.

In August, I did the Midsummer Night’s Run again, and we had a slightly longer holiday, this time to Croatia, where D enjoyed scuba diving and I ate lots of pasta in cities whose names began with Z.

In September, I ran the Scotia Half-Marathon. After that, it’s all a blank.

In October, D got his full motorcycle license and I started an Editing Principles course at George Brown, taking up my Thursday evenings. We made our first batch of homemade wine, a tasty Malbec called “Drunk Robot”. We also did an ill-advised trip to Canada’s Wonderland for the Hallowe’en Haunt (never again!!), and went for a cheesy romantic 2nd anniversary dinner at La Maquette. I knit a lot – two hats, two shawls, a shrug, a cowl and a tea cosy.

In November, we went on a road trip to Stratford and Port Dover to visit friends and play board games. We also got stuck in an elevator during the Annual General Meeting for my condo – not fun. As usual, we had an incredible American Thanksgiving dinner with our American peeps. Yum. More knitting shawls, a baby jacket for my cousin’s son, and some more cowls for Christmas.

December was a lot of holiday parties and a total birthday party fail, followed by a madcap Christmas Eve trip to upstate New York to visit Darren’s mom for Christmas. We had a beautiful drive through postcard-perfect snow-covered mountains and enjoyed fine hospitality at her fire-heated cabin in the woods.

January 1st was a triumphant day – I finally completed my audiobook recording of Susanna Moodie’s “Roughing It in the Bush” for Librivox. 18hrs 48mins total OMG. I started my Grammar for Editors course at George Brown, eating up my Tuesday nights. My good friend Nona did her thesis defense, so I got to see her after a long absence, and we went to our friend Emma’s housewarming. I also knit a toy crab. Fun.

February was a bit bleak – D went on his long-term goal trip to Thailand to dive, soaking up sunshine and eating delicious spicy noodle dishes, while I huddled in our apartment in the frozen tundra we call Toronto. I did manage a few outings: one brunch with my friends Adam and Jenny, one ladies night with my girls that had some marvelous hot tub fun, one fateful trip to an antique bookstore and also an archery store in Toronto to look at bows with my friend Zeena… but otherwise all I remember is a lot of cold, stormy weather. My Dad passed away peacefully on February 26, and I’m grateful that D was home to support me as I helped my Mum through the arrangements.

March was quiet. D and I bought recurve bows and did some shooting at the outdoor range near the Ontario Science Centre. I caved to peer pressure and bought an iPhone – my first personal smartphone. We visited our friends Amy & Paul at their home in Newmarket and saw their sweet daughter.

In April, D tested for and got his G2 license, allowing him to drive without me in the passenger seat. We celebrated by driving Zeena to the Bow Shop in Waterloo, furthering the archery frenzy. I realized I had missed most of my Editing for the Web course at George Brown but pulled a hail mary and passed the course by scoring 100% on the final exam. We flew Porter to New York City to visit Lara and Aaron, and went over the bridge to Brooklyn to join the wonderful Bill and Heather in Park Slope for Easter dinner. We enjoyed Central Park and Chelsea and Alphabet City and touring the United Nations, and I bought a small laptop while drunk after a great night at P.D.T. Good times.

And now it is May. We held my father’s funeral on May 14, where I reconnected with my lovely godparents from Philadelphia and their many children and grandchildren. I started a new course at George Brown in Copyediting, eating up my Monday nights. D sold his motorcycle, and we are making plans for our staggered upcoming leaves of absence from work. I have one month left in my job here at Cabinet Office before heading back to my home position at the Attorney General. In September I will be taking a year off work, where I hope to buckle down to some creative writing at long last. D will follow me, taking his year off starting next summer, so we have a few months of overlap, possibly for some traveling time together.

…bringing us up to today. I can’t honestly say that it will be easy to get back into the swing of blogging again. The combination of being busy and contented with life makes it hard to write consistently. But I’ll do my best to not leave it so long next time. Even if I’m no longer as interested in the “know thyself” aspect of keeping a diary, I do think it’s useful to have an external hard drive for the brain – memories recorded for when memory fails.

Until next time.

QUESTION: Who made you the expert on this?
ANSWER: Foursquare is just over a year old (launched March 2009) so nobody’s an “expert” yet, but I’ve been playing with it for the last 6 months and have 170 checkins under my belt. If you check in at the same location often enough, you can become the “Mayor”, which some companies reward with free goods or discounts (in the US, Starbucks gives the mayor of each location free coffee). I’m the Mayor of my dentist, bank and workplace, which probably means I should party harder. The ladies at the Whitney Block Tuck Shop stubbornly refuse to recognize my Mayorship by giving me free donuts. Yes, I’m bitter.

QUESTION: What’s been your best experience so far using Foursquare?
ANSWER: Exploring St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, I checked in at a restaurant I’d never eaten at before called “Le Petit Dejeuner“. Foursquare had multiple tips for this place, all recommending the spaghetti bolognese and Delerium Tremens (beer). The meal was absolutely divine and I’d never have thought to order it normally. Second best experience was using Foursquare while traveling to Boston. It was a perfect travel guide! I kept track of where I’d visited and where my colleagues were. Also, I unlocked some fun badges (achievement trophies) for checking in at the last stop of the Freedom Trail and going on a boat.

QUESTION: Worst experience using Foursquare? Biggest downside?
ANSWER: Unless you’re paranoid about someone stalking you, or are worried about damaging your squeaky-clean reputation by checking in to more than 4 bars in one night (there’s a special “Drunk” badge for bar-hoppers), there’s not much downside. I never check in at my house, to keep that information private. Remember that information you share like this can be seen by anyone – you can use Foursquare to see where your kids are at (are you sure you want to know?), but they can also see where YOU go.

QUESTION: Where is all this going? What’s the benefit from a business perspective?
ANSWER: Tourism is an obvious angle – what better way to promote your city or province than with an up-to-the-minute electronic guidebook that knows where you are and makes recommendations accordingly? Chicago and New York are all over this angle. Badges are also a fun and free motivator to get people to attend major events or visit certain locations. Foursquare also offers venue analytics to business owners who partner with them, showing how a location or special offer is performing over time. And for nerds, there’s an API, which means developers can use their little grey cells to imaging new ways to check-in or visualize data generated by the foursquare community, then build their own applications.

So… those were my questions and answers. What are yours? Anything you want to know about Foursquare I might be able to help with? Or any other mobile apps? Write a comment, let me know!

Further Reading:

• Mashable:
  Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter
• Ad Age:
  Building an Army of Hyper-Local, Mobile-Connected Advocates
• Techcrunch:
  Foursquare Shows The Business Potential Of Location-Based Services
• Charlie O’Donnell:
  Why Yelp (…and Every Single Retail Establishment) Should Support Foursquare

For those of you who got really sick of seeing the booties in my last post getting dusty in my blog, and are mad at me for not writing anything about my recent trip to PAX East in Boston, or the purchase of my new condo in the St. Lawrence Market area, or any other little personal things I may have been up to lately, all I can say is: BLAME POPCAP.

My life has been brutally annexed by the game Plants vs Zombies lately. It’s a simple little tower defense game – zombies are attacking your back yard (or roof, or pool), and you have to garden quickly to stop their brain-eating rampage from invading your home. I can’t explain to you why it’s so addictive, it simply is. For those of you who have had hours or days of your free time swallowed whole by the devastation of some of PopCap’s other delectable goodies, such as Bejeweled or Peggle, I hope you understand my predicament. On the plus side, it goaded me into making a nice container garden on my balcony (see above) in case of zombie attack on Yorkville. You never know.

Now that I’ve taken pains to explain why I’ve been such a naughty blogger lately, let me try and make amends.

First, the day to day minutiae. After making a companion stuffed fleece and terry cloth toy dragon (named Lloyd, see above) to follow up on the triumph of my stuffed knitted Linux penguin (Grumpy), I am taking a break from toy making for a while and focusing on finishing my green triangle quilt (also see above). Desperately avoiding the desire to embroider tiny plants and zombies onto it. Knitting a pink version of Ysolda Teague’s Cloud Bolero, and am already off my stitch count (I hate yarn overs!). Reading a bunch of things – just finished a whack of obscure Agatha Christie (The Clocks, The Listerdale Mystery), and am working on re-reading Bird by Bird, Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert (on loan from MintyNinja), and a tentative start on Terry Pratchett’s massive Discworld series, The Colour of Magic, which has been aggressively marketed to me over the years by a series of maniacal fans, including Edwud, Philip and David.

Next, Travel. Pro Tip: if you are flying to Boston from Toronto, take Porter airlines, their service is AMAZING and their marketing is killer, and on top of all that, if you have a mobile phone with Foursquare and you check in at “Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport Ferry” while traveling the 400 meters to get to the Toronto Island Airport, you unlock the “On a Boat” badge. Wicked.

Boston was lovely. Darren and I decided two PAXes in one year was a bit too much, so avoided most of the heavy nerdery to do some sightseeing and sampling of the local restaurants with my friends HA and BW. Things I did enjoy at the con were the retro gaming room, which had a library of classic NES, SNES, Colecovision and Sega games, and the ancient but beautifully preserved systems to play them on. Right next door was the classic arcade room, where you could play free pinball to your heart’s content. I had a go at Dragon’s Lair and a completely bizarre Japanese game where you play pigs with dart guns being attacked by floating foxes held up by balloons (no, seriously) called… Pooyan. *snicker*

In Boston itself, we tried both ways of getting from Logan International Airport to Hynes Convention Centre. Another Pro Tip: don’t bother with the new “Silver” line. It sucks. It’s not even a subway, it’s just a bus that runs underground for a while, then gets insanely crowded, then lets you off at your terminal. Seriously, just take the shuttle to the Blue line, then transfer to Green. It’s WAY faster! We walked the whole Freedom Trail, starting at the Boston Common and going all the way to the USS Constitution. This was my second time walking it and it was every bit as amazing as the first time I did it. Also, the stupid crazy scary rusty see-through bridge between Copp’s Hill and Bunker Hill was still scary as hell, but I crossed it without plunging to my death, so that was okay.

Food-wise, the best place we ate, hands down, was the Parish Cafe on Boylston. Gourmet sandwiches from local celeb chefs all over Boston. Every bite was fabulous, nice patio, and a handsome wooden bar. Emma’s Pizza in Cambridge ran a close second for tasty, with great ambience, nice wine, and thin crust pizza that I could have kept eating all night. The rest of our noms were found on Newbury Street, including TeaLuxe which provided us with some powerful chai and matcha action.

I won’t bother writing about the new condo purchase, since we don’t get the keys until next Monday, and it won’t be much to look at for a while after that, since we need to renovate the bathrooms and kitchen, paint, buy furniture and move in. Hoping to get all this done before the G20 arrives in Toronto in late June.