October 30th, 2009

C’est l’Hallowe’en!!

Oh, I love this holiday. Perhaps most fictions writers are, as we are so dedicated to that which isn’t. There are not enough days on the calander when one is encouraged to go out in costume!

I love making costumes, though unlike with writing, I have little interest in audience for my costumes. Nobody every understands what I am, and the explanation required is often quite long. I am happy to explain, and also happy to remain a mystery for those who don’t care about the explanation. The best question I’ve been asked in a long time was the recent query, “So, Rebecca, what abstract concept are you being for Hallowe’en this year?”

So costume highlights from say 1996 onward (when I was a whippersnapper and costumed by my parents, I wore mainly standard superhero/witch/alien/hula girl costumes, which enevitably disappeared beneath a parka and sometimes snowpants. I did not, overall, fare terribly well during the years I was being dressed by my parents):

1)Bunch of grapes
2) Chalk outline
3) Carrot (something of a produce theme emerges)
4) The Universe
5) Fire
6) Evil Toothfairy (she takes teeth that aren’t even loose)
7) Dryad
8) Television test pattern

There were (gasp) a few years in there that I didn’t dress up, as well as a few in which I was my standard fallback costume, a butterfly.

But this year is going to be the best ever! Or I’m going to get ink poisoning!! Whatever, I don’t care, I love Hallowe’en so much and I’ve already had SO MUCH SUGAR!!

Whatever you are going as (and if you choose not to wear a costume, I choose to pretend you are going as a plain-clothes cop) I wish you a very happy Hallowe’en! Try not to egg any houses tonight!
RR

October 24th, 2009

Break

If you count the week as Saturday to Friday, I attended four literary events this week, and spent a similar number of evenings up after midnight. I also did some work, two readings, saw a bunch of awesome people and took some fair-to-middling pictures. And now am so very very tired.

And now, though of course have blogged *The New Quarterly*’s fall launch for you despite any exhaustion, I have a delightful break, because Alex James, who provided the musical accompaniment to the evening, is also a profession blogger, and has a wonderful (and flattering!) post about the event. Hooray! It really was a terribly fun night, with so many friendly writers and delicious food only one jack-knifed tractor-trailer (my publisher, Dan Wells spent only five or so hours on the highway to be there and bring us books!)

So that’s it–I can concentrate on small, easy, non-exhausting tasks for the rest of the weekend–Hallowe’en shopping at Zellers, getting the DVD player to work long enough to play the last two episodes of season one of Slings and Arrows (the first tv show in a long time that I’ve been willing to argue with the DVD player for), maybe a nap in there somewhere.

Weekends are nice, and I hope you enjoy yours! Seeya Monday!
RR

October 12th, 2009

Gratitude

Ok, so on Friday I went on about the historical meaning of Thanksgiving being tied to food, the action on the day being centred around food, and the fact that the holiday is really about food, full stop. But of course its cultural relevance today is tied up in gratitude, that it is a day of blessing-counting, appreciation, hugs, and acknowledgement. And still food. I’m going to try to put my money where my mouth is (ha!) and make this year’s list of thanks as food-oriented as possible.

I am grateful for:

1) The ability to bite and chew. About six years ago, I went to the dentist with a pain in my jaw that I thought was stress-related and found out that the bones in my jaw were totally out of whack (that’s what you get for not seeing a dentist for three years, and, er, going to really loser one as a kid). After retainers to braces and finally very scary surgery and a long recovery period, I could eat whatever I wanted without pain, and food almost never falls out of my mouth while I do (unless someone makes me laugh). It was weird to be, as an adult, forbidden certain foods, and the experience certainly makes me appreciate walking down the street eating an apple, as I did this afternoon.

2) Dining companions. Food is often the social glue, the ostensible cause for a gathering, but really it’s the cooks’ presence, much more than the food they offer, that makes the meal special. In recent weeks, I’ve been invited into people’s homes for paella, chili, two Thanksgiving dinners and an ice-cream social. On all occasions, the food was delicious but far more so was the warmth with which it was offered, and the conversation with which it was enjoyed.

3) The infinite variety of breakfast cereals. No matter how many I try, there will always be more on the shelves, and new ones every day. The upside of capitalism.

4) The ability to feed myself. I like using the economic crisis as an excuse for my inability to get my laundry folded or show up at the movies on time, but the fact is, things are not excellent in the world of employment right now (the downside of capitalism). The fact that I still have a job that keeps me in breakfast cereal and veggie burgers is no small victory and I am grateful for it. I am also grateful for the fact that I get to eat my (brown-bag, natch) work lunch with awesome humans everyday, even if they make fun of me for my addiction to canned tuna.

5) Books. Sorry, I couldn’t make this one fit (though J. M. Coetzee did profoundly warp my relationship with meat, a testament to the power of prose if there ever was one) but writing, reading, and thinking about books fills up all the time that I have that isn’t taken up by the above (or grocery shopping), and I feel lucky indeed to have that.

6) Hey, while I’m already off the theme, thanks for reading Rose-coloured. I really appreciate it.

RR

October 9th, 2009

Thanks for the eats

Canadian Thanksgiving, for those from elsewhere or just confused, is a harvest celebration. There’s some murky bits of American tradition in there, but we have no silly mythology around the holiday (other than Tom Turkey, I suppose)–we’re just glad there is stuff to eat.

This used to make a good deal more sense to me when I actually experience the harvest. Where I grew up, Thanksgiving was the last weekend of county fair season (after that were only the big fairs, like The Royal Winter Fair). All through fall, we’d be bringing in tomatoes, peppers, corn, beans, pumpkins and squash, the prettiest of which were entered in some fair or other (I would like you to know that I won a ribbon for my butternut squash in grade 3; not sure if it was a first-place ribbon, but I choose to believe it was).

In short, at this point in the year, we’d be coming to the culmination of a harvest that began in May and June with lettuce and strawberries, and it would make perfect sense to be sitting down to a meal that both featured and celebrated the fruits of that harvest.

Now that I get most of my food from Metro (though my folks are constantly thinking of reasons to come visit with quart baskets in the trunk), the celebration makes slightly less sense. But I like it very much, not only because of the nostalgia, nor yet the enforced grade-school grace-saying (yes, it was a public school, but in a *very* small town) that makes it seem logical to me to owe my supper to someone greater. I like to cook and I like to eat, and when I was younger I liked to garden to. The harvest has always been a good time.

Food is a fraught business in 2009: between genetically modified tomatoes, body-image dismorphia, peanut allergies and gluten intolerances, sometimes there’s no one at the table that has a purely peaceful relationship with their plate. But it’s the stuff that makes us live, and whatever role we play in the food chain (gardener, chef, shopper, restaurant-orderer) can be a lot of fun. I like that, though most holidays are celebrated with food, this one *is* food.

May you eat well this weekend.

RR

September 24th, 2009

To the semi-colon, a respectful love note

The Rose-coloured Mafia has become aware (thank you, Mark!) that today is National Punctuation Day! When asked what my favourite punctuation is (yes, this is what authors talk about…some authors), I would have to say nervously, the semi-colon.

“Nervously” because the semi-c is a notoriously “advanced” bit of punctuation, one I’ve only learned to use properly (I hope) in the past few years. It’s got subtly and gradations, nuance and force. Let me explain.

Usage 1: to divide items in a list when there are commas (or conjunctions) within the individual list items. Confused already? I understand. Ok:

As we all know, if you have more than two simple things you are listing in a sentence, you mark them off with commas (eg., “The period, exclamation point, and question mark are all terminal punctuation.”) [Note: the comma before the “and” is optional, but that’s another post.] But if they are items that themselves contain lists, a reader might get confused, so you use commas for the lists internal to the items, and semi-colons for the larger list (eg., “My favourite suppers are mac and cheese; tomato, ham, and swiss omelettes; and turkey, bacon, and avocado sandwiches).

Usage 2: to link two independent clauses and imply the relationship between them. Independent clauses are clauses that *could* stand alone as sentences, but they don’t have to. For example, “Philip is married to Nina. I hate Nina.” is just an enumeration of facts, some of them unhappy. But, “Philip is married to Nina; I hate Nina,” implies that their is a causal link between these two facts–perhaps I hate Nina because she is married to Philip. Perhaps I love Philip. Perhaps inherent in this grammatical example is a great novel.

The relationship has to be pretty obvious and self-contained for the semi-colon to make sense. You can’t just match up any two sentences and sometime later explain the link: “Philip is married to Nina; I like pie” is a bad semi-colon use, even if it comes out 30 pages later that I am planning to murder Nina with a poison pie…

Usage 3: to link two independent clauses if a transition is used between them. Transition words–properly called “conjunctive adverbs” for reasons that are a little confusing–are ones like however, therefore, moreover. These words make the link between clauses explicit, yet because they are not conjunctions we still need that semi-c. For example, “Nina is devouring the pie; therefore, she’ll soon be dead.”

***

Something I tried and tried to tell the first-year Effective Writing students I TA’d for is that a full life–and deathless prose–can be lived WITHOUT the semicolon. Yes, it adds nuance to a sentence, but only if you use it properly; otherwise, it looks stupid, same as any other error. This is higher-end punctuation, but only in the sense that unlike the comma and the period, you don’t *have* to use it, and probably will only really need it for complicated ideas. But it doesn’t *make* an idea complicated. There no such thing, really as a 50-cent word, or 50-cent punctuation: there’s just 50-cent ideas and the best way for an individual author to express them. But my students kept sticking semi-colons in after “and” anyway.

Up in the club
RR

April 1st, 2009

Setting It Up

As you might have been able to glean from the occasion dysphoric comment here at Rose-coloured, or my eye-rolls in person, my current manuscript is not coming together as well as I’d like. Of course, it’s very early days, but I feel that if I could just establish a strong set up for the initial plot developments, the writing would roll on smoothly from there. But that simple structure keeps getting mired in extraneous detail, so I thought it might help me to lay it all out simply here on the blog, and perhaps a helpful reader will know where I’m going wrong, or perhaps simply getting it all out of my head and into a public space will clarify things for me all on it’s own.

Ok:

We begin the chronology with a young woman in a high-school chemistry class. She is both late and unprepared because of an argument with her mother that morning, and as she walks to her seat, her teacher notices her face is streaked with tears.

The teacher is a bit of an asshole, though, and he only makes her be lab partners with the other tardy student, a burnout named Kevin who is stoned at 8:30 in the morning, and who knocks over their retort stand midexperiement, spilling the suspension all over the Lululemon Groove pants that the girl–her name is Genevieve–worked all those hours in her uncle’s Tim Horton’s franchise to afford.

Genevieve runs out of class and down to the gym to hide under the bleachers and brood, and then attempt to sew up the acid-burned hole in her pants with her pocket sewing kit. Just when she’s got her pants off, though, Kevin somehow manages to find her there, and she stands frozen before him in her thong. There is a moment of eye contact in the shadowy, sweat-stained space, and then Kevin comes closer and Gen drops her pants and sewing kit, and without a word they embrace.

After they lose their collective virginity in 20 minutes of safe-sex passion, they pull themselves off the crashmat and have a frank and earnest discussion about all the disappointments and frustrations in their lives. Then Kevin cuts off one cuff of his baggy jeans to help make a patch for Gen’s jeans. She is deeply grateful, but as she sews it on, she begins to sense that the contamination in the lab room has given her super-human abilities. She also feels that she can trust Kevin with the knowledge that her mother is emotional abusive and withholding.

To her shock, he only believes the emotional abuse and not the superpowers. Kevin insists that the suspension was only supposed to smell like bananas, and Gen rejoins that it wasn’t the right suspension because he put in twice as many drops of the green stuff as he was supposed to because he is a giant waster.

Hurt, Kevin runs out from under the bleachers, out of the school, and into the parking lot where he is run over by a Hummer. The driver is narcoleptic, and passes out at the wheel when she brakes on top of Kevin. Gen had only gone outside to see if she could bum a smoke from someone, but when she notices the massive ugly vehicle parked on top of her true love, she remembers all the love and joy of the past hour and a half, and she races to his side.

Kevin is of course only barely conscious, but he manages to whisper, “You were right, I f*cked up the suspension and your mom is a total b*tch and I will always love you!”

And Gen says, “OMG, I love you too,” and then she notices that supernatural-powers-tingle once again, and she lifts the car off Kevin. Then they kiss.

I’m not totally sure what happens after that, but I think it’ll involve Kevin and Gen totally destroying her evil mom, and maybe that science teacher too. And then the epilogue is a year later and the happy couple are celebrating the birth of their first child, and Kevin gives Gen a bottle of banana-scented perfume, and they remember how far they’ve come. And then they kiss.

As you can see, obviously this is going to be a kick-ass book when I actually get around to writing it. But really, working out the general ideas for the plot is the hard part, and it looks like I’ve got that in the bag. Go, me!

He rewards my good behaviour
RR

February 13th, 2009

Niceness

So, my “Family Day is Fascist” position is not winning many supporters (Family Day, right up there with eyebrows and butter on popcorn on the list of things everyone else finds benign but Rebecca despises). Which is fine, really, I probably need less arm-waving rants in my life, anyway. And since Family Day weekend coincides with Valentine’s Day weekend this year, and last year I finally came up with a suitable position on V-Day, I have extrapolated that to include Family Day, another day of dictated affection!

And the position is, of course, for many of us, families and romantic others are amazing presences and deserving of whatever they desire on any given holiday and also every other day of the year. And for some, that is not the case, temporarily or permanently, for whatever reason. Which might be fine with them, or not at all fine with them, but is certainly none of the government’s business! Sorry. Arm-waving.

*Anyway*, I think there a lot of important people in everyone’s life that don’t have a formal title like mother, sister, partner, second-cousin. I think that people who we interact with in small ways–the colleague that checks the printer and finds your lost invoices, the supermarket cashier with the really long fingernails who is still superfast, the woman who helped me scramble out of a snowbank a couple weeks ago–are also deserving of a good deal of niceness. Maybe we won’t be cooking dinner for them Saturday night (man, that cashier would be surprised), but maybe this weekend could just be a weekend of niceness to everyone.

I guess I don’t like the restrictions of these “days”–this is who you should be kind to, *exclusively*. But there’s nothing stopping me, someone pointed out, from expanding the definition of “family” to include everyone I like. Which I think the OED people would have something to say about, but in the interests of limited arm-waving, I’ll try it. And then I’m going to try expanding the day into the rest of the year.

I promise not to cook dinner for you unless you want me to.

I’ll dig a tunnel / from my window to yours
RR

December 29th, 2008

BIRT 2008 (review)

I had a little head-down-on-the-table moment a few weeks ago, when I realized that my 2008 Resolution tally came to about 15% achieved. Not very pretty. The wise council I received, once I pulled my face up from the wood-grain, was that actually, my 2008 resolutions were mainly stupid, so I shouldn’t feel bad about not achieving them, although possibly I should feel bad about making them in the first place.

So, fine, whatever, I’m not even linking to the 2008 resolutions–there were some “interesting” ideas in there. A few were actually ok, though: I succeeded on “attend more readings,” in the best way possible: I had much fun, heard much great poetry and prose and met many lovely folk. I am so addicted to hearing readings now that I don’t think that resolution needs to be repeated.

I came most of the way on “floss every day,” “eat healthily” and “buy non-corporate,” but not fully-completely, so those go back on the list. And then I failed utterly on “stop eating gelatin”, but in retrospect, I think the cosmos aligned to expose me to an abnormally huge amount of gelatin in January and February 2008, making it difficult to get any traction on that particular resolution. So I’m going to try it again, despite some heckling from the peanut gallery.

Ok, so that’s one resolution success, four resolutions to repeat, nine failures and six new resolutions to come up with before Thursday. Not a problem. Just let me rest my cheek here on the desk for a moment.

Tried it in my very own dreams
RR

December 26th, 2008

Gifts

Of *course* Christmas is not really about pretty objects wrapped in pretty paper, much as I do like such things. I occasionally lose track of what Christmas *is* about, it not really being historically my family’s holiday, much as we do like it now. Mainly, it’s just a time of year when kindness as well as prettiness seems more apt to happen, and to be accompanied by friendliness and food and frolic. La! This year, a few of the gifts I received:

–orange scarf with *curly tassels*
–hugs
–glitter cards
–apple-flavoured KitKat
–baking support (because as soon as a ruler, a candy thermometer, “egg wash” or extreme patience is called for in the recipe, I can’t do it by myself)
–lunch at Allen’s
–Deborah Eisenberg’s *Twilight of Superheroes*
–thoughtful review in The Westmount Examiner
–out-of-town friends in town
–baby pictures
–Bill Murray in *Scrooged*
–Christmas carols on every station on FM radio (I listened for about 2 days, which is about right. I firmly believe that people who hate Christmas carols have just been over-exposed).
–new hoop earrings to replace the ones I wrecked 1.5 years ago and never got ’round to buying for myself
–somewhere in the depths of Canada Post right now, a mixed tape
–the happy realization I can finally get my foot above my head (though only if I am leaning on a wall/fridge/car)
–leisure time and naps
–fancy tea towels
–tidings of comfort and joy

I hope it was very similarly wonderful in your neck of the woods.

Star of wonder / star of night
RR

PS–What are we celebrating on Boxing Day?

December 24th, 2008

The Merriest

This has been my standard Christmas wish for some years, but it does still very much apply, and hell, it’s worked for June Christy since 1961.

I’d like to fix this bag of tricks
And hand’em out with a fleeting greeting:
Smiles for the frowners
Saluts to the uppers
Boosts for the downers
May the day be the bowl-of-cherriest,
And to all, the merriest.

Hope you swing during the season
Hope the days go great
Hope you find plenty of reasons
The whole year long to celebrate.
Sun for the mopers
A laugh for the criers
Luck for the hopers
To the strange and the ordinariest
Me to you, the merriest!

Thoughts for the musers
A cheer for the winners
Breaks for the losers
To the beats and the debonairiest
Greetings like the merriest!

Hope there’s oil under your rose vine
Hope you get that raise
Hope you hope everything goes fine
The next three hundred and some-odd days!

Friends for the loners
Songs for the singers
Grins for the groaners
Make the day nothing-can-compariest
At the most, the merriest!

RR