January 2nd, 2017

1000 Things We Like: the fourth thousand

Fred reminded me recently that 2017 marks the 15th year since we did our first 1000 things we like, a list we made in 2002, and then again in 2007, and again in 2012 of things that we like. I can’t find the post that explains the original ethos, so here it is again: I once read a novel, title and author now lost to the mist, that was about adult characters but had two teenage girls in the background. The girls were making a list of 1000 things they liked, and this was thought to be silly and dismissible by the adult characters. But I thought it was great–what a revolutionary act it would be, to work that hard at simply being pleased. And I liked the “we” too–the collaborative act. Fred and I were the spearheads of all three lists so far, but anyone we knew could and did contribute, and we got a lot of great and varied ideas about what is likeable. The exercise itself, as well as the specific liked things, brought a lot of joy, at least to me!

As I’ve mentioned, I wasn’t crazy about 2016 and I’m feeling a lot of trepidation about 2017 as well, so let’s dive right into the good stuff–won’t you play 1000 things we like with us? Here’s how it works–the rules are pretty simple and more for clarity than anything:

a. Send me some things you like–in the comments of this post or subsequent ones, as an email to rebeccabooksATexciteDOTcom, or any of the varied social media I am on. I’ll number the items appropriately and run them on the main blog, and credit you however you like (let me know!)
b. No sneaky negatives–no “when other people DON’T step on my feet” or that sort of thing. It has to be an extant thing that you genuinely enjoy.
c. Don’t worry about going through old lists unless you want to–some things will repeat and that’s fine (we have had “little staplers” several times on multiple lists). And don’t worry about contradicting other likes, either–if someone else has already liked “eating the frosting first” you can still have “saving the frosting for last” as well. Both are likeable, and “we” is a multitudinous thing.

And just to get things kicked off, here’s a few likes from me, which taken together form a summary of how my holidays were, or at least, the highlights:

1. Better news than expected
2. Merengue
3. How driveway salt works, every time
4. Tom Stoppard
5. Record players
6. The tiny brush you use to clean the needle on a record player
7. Billy Galecki
8. Spooning a cat and he actually stays
9. My parents
10. My brother
11. My cats
12. Thai food
13. Waiting patiently at the airport gate with a good book
14. Being picked up at the airport
15. Pink squares (a very sugary type of bake-sale treat, I can’t really explain them)
16. Scrabble
17. Hugs
18. Overheard song
19. When children are pleased I’m paying attention
20. Christmas tree lights
21. Spice racks
22. Balloon animals
23. Dirty jokes (when I get them, anyway)
24. The game “Things”
25. Having zillions of in-laws
26. Olive Garden
27. That Seventies Show
28. Marriage
29. the TTC
30. Holiday cards
31. Old friends
32. The playground next to my building
33. Being home

December 12th, 2016

Application portfolio advice for creative writing masters

A reader named Nedda recently commented on my most popular post ever, Should I Get a Masters in Creative Writing? to ask me about seeing my application portfolio. Sadly, I put that thing together and sent it off in fall 2004, 12 years and 3 computers ago, so I no longer have it–and Nedda actually didn’t leave me any contact info anyways. But since I’m thinking about it…

The advice I’ve generally gotten is that porfolios should contain a variety of work. Even if you have a single piece that is the full page count required by the portfolio and that piece is REALLY GOOD, you should still consider sending only an excerpt of that, and some other stuff too. You want to show range and breadth of interest, because the worst thing in a classroom where everyone is supposed to be learning and exploring and growing as writers is someone who just cares about this one kind of thing and doesn’t really want to explore or grow. I believe UBC actually requires multiple genres in their portfolio (I keep thinking it’s portfolii, though I know it isn’t) and that’s kind of a good idea even if not required, if you can swing it.

Portfolios should also be existing polished pieces that you maybe tweak or fine-tune for the submission of your portfolio. This one is going to have exceptions, people who thrive under pressure or like to create artificial deadlines for themselves, but in general writing new pieces for the portfolio is an additional challenge you don’t need. You want to have made the piece as good as you can, with feedback from friends and mentors. Yes, workshops thrive on messy, half-finished writing, but the application process is about showing the best you can do–so the assessors know where you’re starting from and in which direction you are going. Submitting portfolio pieces with flaws you could have fixed–or even typos–does not present as accurate a portrait of your skills as you would want.

Think about what you want the grad program to do for you when selecting pieces for the portfolio. This is less about the portfolio itself and more about why people actually want to go to grad school. I have been asked multiple times if fan-fiction is ok to include in a portfolio, and while I guess it’s possible to include it, I wonder why. If what you honestly want is to get better at writing fan-fiction, which has a specific goal of matching in tone, content, and characters something your mentors and classmates might have never seen, is grad school a good fit? Ditto submitting text version of spoken word to a program that doesn’t emphasize spoken word, or multimedia pieces ditto. Basically, look at the program and see what it can offer you and if your portfolio addresses that. If not, it might not be a question of changing the portfolio but changing where–or to what–you send it.

Anyway, this is just advice from one person’s standpoint–I’ll bet there’s quite a few successful folks out there who did the opposite of all of the above. But this is how I’ve found things, anyway. And at least one piece from my portfolio got published, in edited format, so I offer it here to read if you care to.

December 11th, 2016

In translation

This site was down for a few days and no one complained outside of my immediate family–not a great sign. So I’m going to work towards a revamp early in 2017 and also try to step up the posting a bit. I’m not sure if that’s akin to offering bigger portions on nicer plates of a food no one is eating, but it’s actually what I want to do, so let’s just see how it goes.

In other, better news, my wonderful agent Samantha Haywood and her co-agent Agata Żabowska have sold Polish rights to my forthcoming novel So Much Love to PRÓSZYŃSKI, and you’ll be able to read the Polish translation in a year or two (I’ll update you). Here’s the deal announcement. I’m so delighted!

If this isn’t immediate enough–or you don’t read Polish–how about a story in French. My short story How to Keep Your Day Job was translated by Miguelina Kroeh from English into French and published online at K1N Litra. If you’d like to read it, it’s here.

I’m feeling quite jazzed–and quite cosmopolitan–about all this!

November 10th, 2016

Rose-coloured Reviews This Lousy Week

So, I usually watch and report on the Giller Prize broadcast and here we are again at that time of year. I didn’t do a live-blog, taking notes in the moment this year, because I had had a brief choking incident about half an hour before and spent the show lying in Mark’s lap. I did pay pretty good attention to it though, and had a bunch of cheerful, gently snarky things to say about it that I was saving for this space, but then Tuesday happened with all of its apocalyptic strangeness, and it no longer seemed worthwhile to comment on weird musical segways or lovely evening gowns.

Nor, however, am I able to comment on the election, except to say that I am unsurprisingly unhappy and that we  terrified our cats by getting up repeatedly in the night to check returns, never a good sign. Kerry wrote a great post about getting to the work of reacting to this change in global politics, and I really hope to do that very soon.

In the meantime, though, I feel like telling you about my evening last night. Even before the choking and the election, I am having by any standards a pretty terrible autumn, and last night was the first time in a while where I just had a peaceful productive evening and didn’t have anything to freak out or waste time being miserable about. It was great. Here’s what I did:

I had a doctor’s appointment downtown so I got to leave work early, and then the buses actually ran on-time for once so I was able to use my buffer time to run an errand and then read John Metcalf’s book in the waiting room. And then the doctor was running late as the doctors in this office ALWAYS do, but instead of meekly accepting it I said I needed a realistic time when they’d see me. I’m disappointed in the universe that what it took to win this argument was “My husband is picking me up and I need to tell him what time” but as I have been kept waiting up to two hours in this office before, any victory is helpful. And they actually did give me a time that was approximately correct and I was able to meet Mark and walk home with him. And it was a cold but bright evening and all the downtown people were heading home and it was nice to be one of them for once (I work in the burbs).

When we got home I fed the cats and caught up on the work emails I missed while Mark put in the laundry and checked his own emails. Then I got started on a batch of cookies and the sun went down and Mark put the clothes in the drier and made dinner. Dinner was fish-sticks because I have decided that we can have convenience foods once a week because life is exhausting. I haven’t had fish-sticks since I was a child and they weren’t truly good, but they were filled with nostalgia and that was nice. I put hoisin sauce on them though.

And I finished the cookies and did the dishes and Mark brought the laundry up and we chatted and folded it while the cats ran around being nuts, as is their wont. And then we were finally done all the chores and ate a few cookies. Then Mark read for a bit in the living room and I got to work on my essay on Russell Smith that I have been trying to finish forever. I finally had an evening of work that didn’t feel like a failure–I actually felt a little proud of what I wrote.

And then I felt tired and went to bed–an incredible luxury, to just go to bed when you’re tired–and I actually slept well, also rare lately.

Such a nice, normal, useful evening. I am grateful

October 26th, 2016

So Much Love, Mitzi Bytes, March 14, 2017

Guys, I finished my book. I know, I say that every few months–I finished a draft, I finished a later draft, I finished the draft I sent to my agent, I finished the draft my agent sent on submission…long pause…I finished the draft that was sent to copyedit, I finished all the changes the copyedit entailed, I finished all the changes the proofread entailed…and that was last week. And the ARCs are out and cool people have them, and if you look to the right, you’ll see the gorgeous cover by Rachel Cooper, and if you click on that, you’ll be taken to the M&S page where you can preorder your very own copy if you like.

It’ll be out March 14, 2017, amazingly enough the same day my brilliant friend Kerry Clare‘s novel Mitzi Bytes will be released. I read an early draft of MB–as Kerry read an early draft of SML–and Mitzi really is a wonderful novel, finely crafted and funny, a novel that feels utterly real even though I would never have predicted how the plot works out, full of characters I know I’ve met before.

It’s so nice how these things work out, not that I even realized until Kerry wrote this gorgeous post on her blog about our books and our friendship. The post is on how to get over literary envy and it’s all really good advice, but especially this:

Make sure you’re doing what you like, so that even if nobody else likes it, you’re having a good time.

So I love my book and I mainly loved writing it most of the time. Or, ok, sometimes I hated writing it, but I loved the story enough that it was worth the drudgery of getting it written in order to be able to read it, share it with others.

Kerry’s the real deal of writers, and she has built her career around joy and generosity–joy at writing, joy at reading, joy at sharing what she’s read. I am honoured to be the spark that fired that amazing blog post, but really it is all her voice and her wisdom.

October 6th, 2016

Stuff going on

It has been so long since I had multiple things going on, writing life-wise, I can’t even remember. Years, probably. But this is good stuff, guys, so it was worth the wait:

—Emily Saso’s fascinating new novel The Weather Inside came out in September, and is blurbed by me (and Bradley Somer). If you click on the book link you can even find me being quoted down near the bottom of the page, calling the novel “heartbreaking and hilarious.” So you should probably buy it!
–my short story “How to Keep Your Day Job” (aka the most successful thing I ever wrote) is being included in Room magazine’s 40th anniversary anthology, which is a lovely honour from a lovely magazine, and a thrill to be included with so many other brilliant women (if you click the link you see a partial list). Maybe you should buy that one too?
–I did a short interview with Danila Botha, author of the For All the Men (and Some of the Women) I’ve Known, which you should buy (there may be a theme here. Anyway, the interview was part of Danila’s tenure as writer in residence at Open Book, and I was thrilled to be included. This also constitutes the first press my book has gotten since its deal announcement back in 2014, and it’s really really really exciting and scary. If you’d like to read the interview, it is posted here.

See, I told you–excitement!

August 31st, 2016

Video from Burst at Pages Unbound

Back in May, I did a reading with a group of wonderous folks including Suzanne Alyssa Andrew who so kindly invited and presented me. There is now video evidence online, and despite my horror of ever seeing myself on film, I kind of like it. If you like, you can watch it too. Enjoy!

August 25th, 2016

The Last Hip Show

I very rarely comment on current events on social media (or in person, actually). It’s not that I don’t care, but that I care in exactly the manner everyone else does, and have very few original insights that anyone needs to hear about. I am as worried about Trump, ISIS, and zika as most of my friends, and I too would like Canada to win lots of Olympic medals and for the heatwave to abate a bit. Me personally reporting this thoughts on Facebook would help no one. I’m definitely not shy–if I had a thought I hoped no one else had had, or even a joke, I would share it. But mainly I don’t. I have better luck having original insights about my own life, as fewer people have had the chance to think about it–that’s why most of my social media presence is so me-specific.

I also have missed a number of cultural phenomena that people like to discuss–I never saw Breaking Bad and now I’m missing Stranger Things, I have promised myself I won’t get Pokemon Go until my book is done, and I don’t eat beef so all those impressive hamburgers are lost on me. When Prince and David Bowie died (to cite recent examples), I was sorry as I am when anyone walks offstage before their time, but their music didn’t mean much to me personally. I’d be hard pressed to think of more than one or two songs by either. So I kept my mouth shut.

The Tragically Hip thing is different because I genuinely care about the band in a personal way–not a huge fan, but I know their songs off by heart and they mean stuff to me in my life other than just what the words say. I know, that is an extremely childish way of expressing it, but I do think a lot of us feel that way–unique feelings, felt in exactly the same way.

So I watched the whole show on television with a few friends and it was a lovely experience–sad but hopeful, inspiring and interesting, and full of music I like. It was a lovely experience that a third of the country had, apparently. And that kind of solidarity, solidity, was kind of great–I read all the tweets and statuses with a little joyful me-too in my heart. It was nice to be a part of this feeling for once, even for a sad reason, even when I had nothing new to say. Sometimes it’s great to just cheer along with the crowd and not worry about what anyone thinks of my individual voice.

August 3rd, 2016

The Givendale Experiment part 2: midsummer report

The Failures
–garlic did not come up on first planting, nor on second, then we found out we should have planted it in the fall. We threw away the (now shrivelled) remaining cloves and postponed the problem until October
–lavender did not come up from seeds. We bought a seedling pot at a garden centre, which thrived indoors for a while, then promptly died when planted in the garden. So we gave up.
–cucumbers should have been started as seedlings indoors but weren’t, so started as seeds in the garden itself–never came up.
–zucchini–never got around to planting
–oregano was planted as seedling indoors but took forever to grow and then died when it was about an inch tall
–soybeans planted 6 indoors as seedlings. Two never sprouted, three sprouted and then died. The sixth grew huge fast, then tipped over and continued growing sideways. It has only a few leaves and essentially a green wire on my balcony, but is alive. I do not understand.
EDIT: I posted this last night and this morning, my weird soybean plant had produced an actual peapod, with seemingly two peas inside it. So maybe that elevates it out of the failures??

The Meh
–chives came up but are quite tiny still, while our neighbours’ chives are huge and proliferating
–cilantro was amazing at first, but quickly “bolted”–got very tall and flowered, and the leaves became extremely thin and tasteless. We found out later this was reaction to the really hot weather, so not our fault. I wanted to keep the plant for seeds, but it got so huge it threatened the tomatoes, so we had to pull it out before the seeds came. I have a teeny one on my balcony that did the same thing in miniature, so I will at least get a few seeds to replant and try again.
–hollyhocks are thriving, but are just a big pot full of green leaves–I don’t know when we get the blossoms (yes, I am freely including things in pots in the garden report–really only applies to this, the mint, and the soybeans)
–mint is, I was warned, incredibly invasive, so these folks told me to grow it in a container instead of the garden. I had grown two plants from seeds, so I put one in a pot and gave the other to the Mighty J. Hers died and mine, while nicely alive, isn’t growing very fast and still doesn’t really seem big enough to harvest leaves from. It could stand to be a bit more invasive, in my opinion.

The Successes
–lettuce were planted from seeds directly in the garden and was one of the first things to come up and is continuing strong. I harvest a couple little lettuces every week and so does J. Nice flavour, and if you put the root in water in the fridge it stays crisp. We added a few more seeds to the same area and it seems we will have lettuce for a while. Some do “bolt” and get tall and skinny with fewer leaves at the top, but I’m trying to eat them before they do that.
–onions were the other first up, also planted directly in the garden from sets, and they came up almost immediately. Initially we were picking them to eat the green parts as scallions, and we nicely thinned the row that way. They are actually white onions, not really scallions, so we are letting the rest grow as big as they care to get so we can eat the white parts. We tried putting in a second row of these, but only two came up. I think onion sets get old, so we gave a few to our neighbour and threw the rest away. 
–sunflower was given to us by another neighbouring gardener as a large seedling. We planted it and it grew like crazy, eventually growing three buds, the first of which opened on the weekend and which you can see above.
–kale is something J picked up as 4 seedlings at a farmer’s market, and it’s growing great and is delicious. We pulled one up by the roots to eat but our neighbour told us if we just pick the leaves they will regrow, so we replanted that guy (and it rerooted, thank goodness) and it’s what we’ve been doing ever since (you could actually do that with the lettuce too, but since we have so much I don’t bother)
–basil is two huge plants I started indoors as seeds and are now doing great. We pick off the flowers and so far that has kept the plant leafing, which is great. On Tuesday I picked a tonne and made some pesto–hopefully I’ll get to do more.

The TBD (but very promising)

–peppers were started from seeds indoors and seemed healthy but spindly. They were very slow to take hold outdoors when we transplanted them, and even when the perked up and seemed healthy, were quite small. They are finally getting bigger and bushier and even have some blossoms.
–the TOMATOES ARE AMAZING! Huge bushes of San Marzano (Italian/plum) tomatoes that I started from seeds indoors, thinned and transplanted. We caged about half of them, because this is my first experiment with cages and also that’s all the cages we had. There are tonnes and tonnes of tomatoes on the bigger bushes (they have grown at all different rates and some are still quite small), and the fruit is getting bigger though it remains green. I cannot stand the wait until we can eat them and am terrified a raccoon or blight or something else will get there first. But oh man are they gorgeous.

The Random Bonuses
–the previous inhabitants of plot #120 abandoned midseason without pulling anything out or turning the soil, so it was a huge mess when we got it. Hidden in the dead plants and weeds was a corner full of thriving leeks. We let them grow a bit in early spring while I looked into it–the internet indicates that leeks are a two-year crop, so this was the fruition of whatever was planted last year. We wanted the garden organized by our own whims, so we dug them very early and had a bunch of delicious baby leeks to eat.
–our French neighbour gave us a big bag of flat-leaf parsley from her plot. Our Italian neighbour gave us a few white radishes, which were tasty, and the aforementioned sunflower. Our Jamaican neighbour let us use his bucket and gave a bunch of unsolicited advice, which would be annoying if he weren’t usually right (and save that kale plant). Our east-side neighbours have never been seen, but their lettuces are doing nicely.

…

Stay tuned for part three!

July 31st, 2016

Just a general hello

Yikes, over a month and no post. It’s not that I don’t have anything to post about–part of the time I haven’t been posting, I was away travelling with my husband on our long-awaited European vacation. It was a pretty great trip, but hectic–4 cities in two weeks, plus assorted train and plane transfer points. here’s a picture from Sforza Castle in Milan, which is a massive fortress-type construction now transformed into a labyrinth of different museums. It came complete with moat. The moat was drained (by Napoleon) and now–it’s filled with cats:

Moat cats, chilling in the midday sun.

You get the idea , I assume. Other things that have been going on including a very high-stress time at work (which may or may not end soon), my ever-ongoing about-to-be-finishedness on my book, and perhaps most joyfully, the fabulosity that was Ghostbusters. I’ve long been a fan of Kate McKinnon, the SNL-starring comedian (comedianne?) that plays Holtzmann. I discovered her I think because my fandom of Tig Notaro prompts the YouTube algorithm to put other lesbian comics into my feed. Whatever the reason, I think she’s brilliant, but I’m so cut off from what is actually going on in the media that I didn’t realize that other people thought that too. Somehow I thought it was just me–until Ghostbusters came out and everyone was totally on team Holtzmann. There are little girls in the world who want to grow up to be just like her–and that fills me with glee. The other cast members were great too, and the affects were as cornball-cool as any summer blockbuster–you should see this movie.

That’s it–I’m sorry. I started writing a bunch of different post–a play-by-play of my trip, a serious review of Ghostbusters, various things about my garden and writing and people being dicks on public transit–but I am very tired these days, and posts seem to get abandoned about 1/3 written, ie., when I have to actually think about where I’m going with it.

Hopefully I’ll get my blogging game on again soon. Until then, please know that I’m here, working and complaining and napping, and enjoy the moat kitties.