Category Archives: Personal

Writing and Life in 2019

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Well, it’s time for that bienneial update post that is becoming tradition. In 2017 I noted that I had been busy with graduate studies, new parenthood, and a move from the classroom into school leadership. At the time I had recently finished my academic program, which was at the post-baccalaureate level, but now I am back in the academy, working on my master’s degree.

I have at least crested the steepest part of the learning curve in my role as an educational administrator, so while there will always be novel challenges and new goals to set, some portions of my job have become routine. If I were merely working, I would certainly be able to ramp up the amount of writing that I do, but the lion’s share of my mental and creative energy is devoted to my graduate studies for the time being.

By sheer coincidence, AE, a major outlet for some of the sorts of writing I most enjoy doing, experience an unplanned hiatus in September of 2016, which I will expand on in a separate post. More recently, Care2 has shut down its Causes blogging webzine, so that’s something else off my plate due to outside circumstances.

This happens. Sometimes publications fold or change focus, sometimes it’s the writer whose focus changes, and sometimes it’s both. I used to love writing for The Spectator Tribune, but a particularly hectic period saw me pass on one request after another until I hadn’t taken on a writing assignment for two years. I finally checked in to find the magazine gone defunct. Life is timing.

Likewise now, when a major former client in publishing asked me a few weeks ago if I planned to pick up any future projects or if they should take me out of the payroll system, I elected for the latter. Narrowing my focus is exactly what I need right now. I’m going to make it a purposeful decision rather than dragging it out or leaving anyone hanging.

Oh, I’ll still be writing. Academic papers, school assignments, and my own master’s thesis will make up the bulk of it, and if some of them are published, even if only in some niche research journal, I’ll share. Meanwhile, I expect I can still squeeze in the odd fun pop-culture essay or book review every two or three months, at the WFP or AE.

But if I’m going to get back to pitching to new markets and pushing myself creatively in my writing or simply getting my writing output back up to where it was at or near its peak (and that’s a big if), it will only be after I’ve graduated. It shouldn’t take too long, since I’m putting the necessary time into it.

On To-Do Lists

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Lately I’ve been all about lists. My day job, the still new experience of “owning” a home (the quotes are a nod to the mortgage which owns me), my decision to take on a second job, and of course, the writing, which I’ve been pretty good about not getting complacent about — all of these make for some time management challenges.

In the last month or two, it’s gotten to be just a bit much to the point where I simply ran out of time to do all the things I planned on doing, and had to start triaging. That meant one or two committed writing assignments made the cut along with all the urgent life stuff and ongoing (but piling up) requirements of my day job. So I’ve had very little output since March.

But for even longer than that, I’ve realized I’m turning into a list person. I’ve never been the dayplanner type, before. I just remember my appointments, my plans for the day, et cetera. But lately it’s been more of a challenge, and sitting down and writing down my tasks for the day, week, or month on a Post-It note has become more of a necessity.

This isn’t a bad thing, in my view. There’s a certain satisfaction in crossing items off that list. It’s helped me manage a busy schedule while ensuring that nothing gets put off indefinitely. It’s great for the day-to-day realities of work and life.

But I also have a particular long-term list of writing tasks, goals for the year, really, which is a little more aspirational and a little less straightforward to work through. It’s not on a Post-It but it’s short enough that I can keep it in the back of my mind. Sell a piece to such-and-such. Break into market X. This is important, too, and I don’t want to get too focused on the day-to-day that I ever stop moving forward with an aspect of my life.

So it’s important, I think, to have that big yearly goals list, that bullet-pointed five-year plan, even the bucket list. I want to be crossing items off all of those, as well.

Near CompuDeath Experience

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It began when I spilled soup on my laptop. A hearty, but nevertheless very liquid chicken soup. And my tiny little Inspiron Mini kept chugging along, as I mashed the keys with a damp cloth, and tried to ensure all the liquid had been drained out.

But as it began to freeze up and I went for a reboot, it . . . didn’t. It shut down on command but wouldn’t even consider starting back up. All the little indicator lights were dark and for all I knew the circuitry was entirely fried.

I left it, hoping that, with time, any invading liquid would evaporate away. The next morning, I hit a button and it started to turn on — only to release a high-pitched squeal like a burn patient coming out of a medically-induced coma. I put it back to sleep. That night, it finally booted up properly. But the keyboard didn’t work. Not one jot.

It’s surprising how much you can do with just a trackpad, as a matter of fact. I even realized I could technically write an email, simply by opening up my bookmarks, and labouriously copying and pasting individual letters with the trackpad’s clicks. But that ain’t gonna fly for a working writer. I need my QWERTY. So now begins the hunt for a replacement work computer.

State of the Freelancing Address

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Lately I’ve felt a bit overstretched. In one sense this has been an issue of the last month or two, as I started a new full-time job while continuing to work nights at a previous one, all while simultaneously trying to meet writing commitments, provide some TLC to the new house and yard, and ramping up on the final chores leading up to a wedding.

On the other hand, things have really been rather consistently insane since coming back to Canada nearly eight months ago. Upon arriving, I began the work at multiple jobs which has never really stopped, hunting for the house I have been currently neglecting (though my better half has more than taken up the slack), planning that wedding which was, at the time, still several months away.

And now that the wedding is over, the house is being lived in, and jobs have been won, I still haven’t quite reached the point of being able to take a breather. There are post-wedding chores, there’s the settling-in period of the new job, which has ratched-down in intensity, but is still keeping me quite busy, and the house which remains unfinished.

I want to make it clear that I’m not complaining here. All of these things are good things. I’m thankful at how everything worked out over the last eight months. I (or we, rather) looked for a job and got it, planned a wedding and had it, hunted for a house and bought it.

To be frank, I thought we were a bit full of it when we said we were going to come from Central America and get all these major things done, in such a brief time span, just like that. I think we both rather surprised ourselves.

But you know, I’ve missed deadlines for my writing for the first time since I’ve been doing this. Only two or three times, and not more than a couple days’ delay, but I missed them all the same. And I have these pitches and these contacts and these markets I was on the verge of breaking into, and it’s all gone on hold a bit.

In Costa Rica I had a surplus of time and thus had a little trouble keeping to a schedule, at least as far as unassigned work went. But with experimentation and query after query, even at only a few hours a day, I began connecting with new markets, making more sales,to the point that we could actually live off of this. Then I came back to Canada and got a real job again.

I don’t regret this, except in the same sense that I regret not being independently wealthy and not needing a paycheque. I’ll admit frankly that I appreciate career and financial stability, and I’m happy to have that, even though careers take up a lot of one’s free time.

In a couple of months, though, when the debt’s all paid off and my work hours ease up, I think I need to pick up where I left off and start pushing myself on the writing again. I have promising story leads to follow up, some unfinished fiction (yes, I do dabble in fiction) that deserves to be finished and shopped around, and some would-be publishers I’ve yet to produce anything for.

I really do want to get back to it.

Five Junes

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Not counting year zero, my graduation year from the faculty of education, wherein I was able to sub during May and June on a temporary teaching license (which assumed my final grades would all be satisfactory and my teacher status made official in a month or so), this is my fifth June as a teacher.

June the first: Came back early from a stint in China that was supposed to last the whole year. Ended my school year back in Canada as a substitute teacher the last few months of the term.

June the second: Split between two schools, but made it to the bitter end for one of them. Attended grad, mandatory for all staf, though I taught no graduating classes.

June the third: My first full year at a single school. Not a terribly good one, though. My second graduation, this one included a single student of mine actually managing to get enough credits to graduate on time, instead of two or three years later.

June the fourth: My first year where I was unemployed (or rather, subbing) more often than not. Had two terms, though, the last of which saw me at another graduation ceremony.

June the fifth: The year I went to Costa Rica and didn’t plan to teach at all. But somehow after returning I’ve found myself in an elementary school setting, where my students look forward to “graduating” and moving on to middle school. I just can’t get June off.

Am I looking forward to June 30 this year, as always? Evey moreso, in fact, as its a Saturday, which means I’ll be done June 29. Even after taking most of the year off, I’m sufficiently exhausted by this job that a two-month nap sounds appealing.

And my return to certain writing projects has already been too much delayed.

Dreaming of Astronauts and Librarians

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On more than one occasion I’ve thought about being a librarian. I’ve read that it’s a terrible field to get into these days; an overabundance of people with degrees in library science (consider a master’s, though the quality of programs, and therefore graduates, is said to be very spotty at the moment) competing for a small number of positions. A graduate program in library or information science would not be a good investment right now.

Of course I have a degree in education already, so I could become a school librarian tomorrow — if someone were to hire me. I trained primarily as a science teacher, but with a few exceptions, any registered teacher can theoretically be hired for any teaching position, even if it doesn’t typically happen in practice.

This is somewhat of an idle thought, and likely will never come to pass. I’m daydreaming. But why? Who daydreams about the exciting world of librarianship?

Frankly, I’m not sure if it’s a question of my love of books or a certain obsession with organization of knowledge. My favourite topic in high school biology was taxonomy, studying and relating different species, phyla, and other taxa. Similarly, I’ve made a point of both ordering and filling in my knowledge of literature, and I suppose I want some application for that knowledge. What better way than to be the living card catalogue for some eager students? (A dated reference; perhaps a living search engine would be more relevant?)

For example, I’ve lately been working my way through some of the major fantasy canon. The bedrock stuff that has influenced basically everything that is being written in the field today. That means not only J.R.R. Tolkien, but C.S. Lewis, T.H. White, et al.

But these twentieth-century writers have their own antecedents in previous centuries. Tolkien’s influences date to Chaucer’s day — works like Orpheus and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. White, with The Once and Future King, rewrote Le Mort de Arthur, also from the Early Middle Ages. C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, certainly must have thought about Milton, and perhaps Dante during his writing, if we’re limiting ourselves only to literary inspirations.

Of course none of this can be understood without a solid grounding in the classics of Homer, Virgil, and others in turn. And it can’t be only me who collects such information and wants to immediately organize a display of fantasy through the ages, to piggy-back on the buzz of the new Hobbit movie, for example.

It can’t be only me, for that matter, who wants to divy up a science fiction section into cyberpunk, steampunk, alternate history, slipstream, new wave, and so forth. Categories were made to be sub-categorized. Historical trends were made to be explicated to interested library patrons, celebrated via promotions and posters and whatnot.

But it’s just an idle dream. Perhaps I will get a chance to run my own library at some point, even for a year or two. But as likely, not. At least I do have some other application for my carefully organized reading: as a literary critic who knows what he’s talking about. That’s not a bad job either, and it’s not even full-time work.

ABCs of Sci-Fi Film, Results

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Well, since taking my sci-fi film quiz, the answers have been posted. Actually it looks like he had these up on his Tumblr account even before I made my attempt. So you’ll just have to trust that I really came up with my answers on my own. Let’s correct together, yeah?

A and B correct. C turns out to be Cube. Damn, I guess I thought it was too obscure for him to pick. Too bad. D was Dune and F The Fly. Very famous, but I wasn’t even close to getting them.

G to K all correct. But L was The Last Starfighter. Never saw it. Nor did I see Moon, so it was somewhat of a lucky guess. Nineteen Eight-Four? I keep forgetting the title is properly spelled out and not a number. And The Omega Man? I just wouldn’t have guessed he would have used both that and I Am Legend, which are both remakes of the same original movie (based on the novella by Richard Matheson).

And speaking of Mr. Omega, we have back-to-back Charlton Heston, with my Planet of the Apes answer being, obviously, correct. Q, which I left blank, is something called Quatermass 2. No idea.

R, S, T: all correct. I had no idea for U, even though I’ve seen Universal Soldier (and plenty of other crappy van Dame movies back in the day). And V, it turns out, is V. This seems like a cheat, though, since according to Wikipedia it was a couple of miniseries and a regular television series, never an actual film.

W and X I got right. Y and Z are both a bit obscure, at least to me, representing Yor, The Hunter From the Future and Zardoz.

So, grand total? 15/26, which is a shade under 60%. I pass after all, if only barely. If I had made the poster, I might have made some different choices as to which films to represent. But if I had made the poster . . . well, there wouldn’t be a poster because I lack the graphic design skills.

ABCs of Sci-Fi Film, A Pop Quiz

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Via Tor.com, the best SFF blog out there (yes, better than io9), a poster with the ABCs of science fiction film. The poster was designed by a guy named Stephen Wildish, who does lots of cool stuff like that. The thing is, though, the titles aren’t actually included. So, knowing the genre and the first letter, how many films can one recognize? This is the challenge.

I’ll accept that challenge, publicly, despite knowing I’ll never get a passing grade without cheating. I’ll note that, following standard practice, “the” does not count as part of the title for alphabetical purposes. Self-imposed rules: No Googling or web browsing of any kind until the quiz is finished.

A: The Abyss

B: Blade Runner (not really sure how, but I can’t think of any other “B”s and Ford was blondish in that movie, I guess)

C: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (or Cube, possibly)

D: The Day the Earth Stood Still (cause it kind of looks like Keanu Reeves, I guess?)

E: The Empire Strikes Back

F:

G: Godzilla

H: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I: I, Robot (I’m sure it’s Will Smith, and based on his outfit, this is the right movie, but he did another sci-fi movie starting with “I” — I Am Legend, duh)

J: Judge Dredd

K: King Kong

L: Logan’s Run (I’m basically sure this is wrong, but I’ve got nothing)

M: Moon (total guess)

N:

O:

P: Planet of the Apes

Q:

R: Running Man

S: Solaris (changed from Space Odyssey based on colour palette)

T: Tron

U:

V:

W: War of the Worlds

X: X-Men

Y:

Z:

Some of these seem like they should be easy, but I’m just not getting them. Considering the ones I left blank, I have a max score of 18. Considering how many I’m unsure of, though, I could certainly do worse than 13/26, i.e., a failing grade. I’ll check the results when he gives them out and share them in a post.

Can I recommend other sci-fi freaks take a crack at this?

Almost a Hero

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Did I ever tell you about the time I almost saved a baby in a carriage from rolling into rush-hour traffic? I was walking down the street when I noticed a father with a baby carriage less than a block away. The dad was distracted by something and was turned away from the street and the carriage. Slowly but surely the carriage began to roll towards the street.

I started running flat-out, but at that distance it was probably going to take me at least 20 or 30 seconds to get there. Before I’d covered half the distance the dad turned around, noticed his baby rolling away and quickly closed the distance and grabbed it. It had rolled onto the street but was still in the curbside lane where cars parked, when he managed to secure it.

At this point I realized I could have just shouted out to him some kind of warning, rather than trying to get there myself. After all, sound does move faster than a person on foot, even one who used to be a track star in high school. (Also, I was never a track star in high school.)

It’s not even necessarily true that there wasn’t time to think. I was running for five or 10 seconds when he noticed his rolling baby and moved to save it. That’s enough time to sit and think about the wisest response to the crisis.

But I guess the point is that I wasn’t sitting and thinking. My first instinct was to run for it, and I put all my energy and focus into continuing to run. Only when the baby was safe did my brain, now out of crisis mode, come up with the strategy of shouting a warning.

That’s the story of the time I was almost a hero. Feel free to almost congratulate me.