January 2024

I hope this finds you well, dear reader. I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately, not all of it (entirely) creative, but writing nonetheless.

I’ve been working on a short story that I put off developing last year in order to get through the last pass of Book Three. What I love about the story is that it takes a familiar conceit — a group of people planning on robbing a store — and becomes something almost meta with the addition of being told as a comedy. Since letting humour take centre stage in Book Three, I’ve been more confident (and inspired) to let loose with it for as long as it needs expression. But boy is humour hard. I mean, humour’s always been hard, but especially when avoiding what’s called “punching down” (ie making sure the laughs aren’t at the expense of a person/group for what are typically classist/ableist/racist reasons). But guess what: if you want to produce at a high level of quality it’s going to take time and effort.

Last post, I talked about pushing a grant application out. One of my other writing projects this month has been –wait for it — working on another grant. A larger, privately funded one that is open beyond North America. Why? Well, for one thing: why not? And yet, I’ll be the first to admit it’s more complicated than this. I hate working on grant applications, which explains why I don’t exactly have an extra-thick dossier of them from the past. But I’ve done it enough to know that it’s a chore, and, because grants such as this (or, to be fair, Toronto/Ontario/Canada Arts Council grants) are often extremely competitive, what with shrinking investment in the arts, it sometimes feels as if I might’ve just as well put the time toward working on a manuscript instead. This time, however, I found that there can be something practical (even therapeutic) about answering questions which prompt you to explain your book. I don’t think it should be required that authors have meditated on the why of our writing ethos/project, but when we do, especially as part of an assignment, I think it can help sharpen one’s idea of what it is that we’re setting out to do. A book/author doesn’t need to have a mission, but…if they did, what would it be? And it doesn’t need to be lofty.

As I’ve said elsewhere, applying for grants makes you better at applying for grants. I might just take some of the material I was able to put together for this one and see whether I can apply it to couple of others, so that it doesn’t feel as if I’m re-making the wheel each time. It is a little stressful, however, because as I touched on earlier, there’s only a finite amount of writing time I have per-week, and I can’t make that pie bigger, so it’s about balancing grant work with the sort of creative writing that got me this far.

Stay warm and dry,

M