Category: writing

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Goodbye 2025

Here we are: December. As years go, 2025 was a challenge on several levels.

On the writing front, it was quite productive in some ways; I polished and finalized a very good satirical short story for submission, and did a lot of hard labour on a personal essay that I hope to have finalized and doing the rounds early in 2026. The latter packed an emotional toll, given that it’s about my murdered uncle and the sometimes discouraging relationship between myself and my father. It would be fair to say that working as hard on this as I did threw me off my game for awhile; it was using a very different sensitivity than any nonfiction I’ve written previously. My third novel, The Stars Align for Disco Santa, remains on submission since March to various publishing houses. While the essay was challenging in its content (unknotting its story from my very subjective defences), having the novel out in the world in an undefined state–especially not knowing how it will do and whether it will find a home (let alone a good home)–also weighs on me quite a bit. I tell people that it’s like holding your gut for many, many months. I would like to breathe easily again.

Given all the above, it should come as no surprise that 2025 was perhaps the most challenging year for my confidence as a writer. I’ve had a good run since 2014, but I’m experiencing a lot of doubt these days, and this impacts my ability to push myself. I feel in some ways that a break might be in order, to get perspective and perhaps to take pressure off myself. I sometimes worry that Radioland, my second novel, did me no favours. It wasn’t The Society of Experience, which, while not a blockbuster, made a mark on readers and writers alike. Released during the tail-end of the worst of the pandemic, I have no clue who bought Radioland and whether it resonated with anyone. I’m not sure it was a comparably good seller, which isn’t necessarily surprising for a book that, while not nihilistic, is unapologetically dark and weird in nature. There’s a cliché about the sophomore novel, and I was well aware of this while I was readying it for publication; the cliché being that they tend of disappoint, or zag when readers are expecting it to zig. On more insecure days, I worry its overall lack of impression might’ve marked me as a novelist publishers might not want to take a chance on. So yeah, there’s that hanging around the periphery of my thoughts. It’s also entirely realistic to just accept what comes, and carry on. The good news is that I’m generally a “brush yourself off and get back on the horse” person.

It wouldn’t be much of a year-end encapsulation if I didn’t also mention the terrible situation with the United States under its current administration. The ridiculous tariffs sent a swift blow to the economy, and I felt it in my psychotherapy practice, what with people being less likely to open their wallets until there was a sense of stability. I’m managing that well enough, but what I can’t get over is how entirely avoidable all of this was. Not that Kamala Harris was a fantastic candidate, but people ended up choosing petty self-interest over any sense of common good, and now we get to spend the next three years dealing with a political self-own that is many times greater a disaster than UK’s Brexit. I could go on, but I feel I’d be preaching to the choir on this one.

In happier news, there were wonderful discoveries of music this year, and I look forward to spending the holiday break catching up on Shazam’d artists I’ve picked up on my travels. I also look forward to increasing my proficiency on guitar and maybe cracking open a couple of good books along the way. The rest will do me good, as I hope it does to you.

My best to you xo

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Update:

Of course, within a week of writing this, I had a very persuasive idea for a new novel (this would be #5 I think?) and sat down one day and churned out 1,200 words in the space of two hours. So, yeah, it looks like it’s hard for me to step away from the craft…

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Me @ The Drunk Fiction Reading Series

Happy to announce I’ve been asked to be part of the Drunk Fiction reading series this month! I’ll be joining authors Brooke Lockyer, Selena Mercuri and Andrew Robertson. The event will also feature the launch of host Emily Weedon‘s novel, Hemo Sapiens (incl a Q&A). I’m going to be reading from Radioland, and copies will be available for sale (and I’m happy to sign your book if you pick one up!). This is happening Tuesday September 23rd in Little Portugal, at The Caledonian (856 College St). Hope to see you there!

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August

I don’t know about you, but it’s been an active summer over here. Getting out, making the most of the weather, even when it’s been ungodly hot. This is partly due to summer traditionally being a slower time of year for psychotherapists, so let’s just say that I’ve been putting in more reps at the gym and visiting my favourite local places more often.

The only thing I haven’t been doing actively is writing fiction (or writing of any kind, other than texts to myself). Part of it, though it wasn’t intentional, is perhaps to take a breather. It’s a bit hard to communicate how writing has taken up a lot of emotional, mental and psychic energy, this year in particular.

I handed off Book Three to my agent in February, with all the angst that comes with this. The not-knowing, now in its seventh month, the having to work with the unknown around whether it will find a home, not to mention how this would inevitably affect me and my confidence as a writer.*

On top of this, I pushed to make some major revisions to a very personal essay, dealing with my uncle’s murder/guitar, and inevitably my childhood. I’ve never really worked on something like this, as raw as this, and I’ve found myself struggling to find my voice within the piece, discovering that I’m possibly holding myself at arm’s length away from it, no matter what progress I feel I’m making otherwise.

There’s also a fourth novel that I’m about 100 pages into, and I like it, but I’m struggling to fall back into it, and I can’t help but feel that the unresolved nature of Book Three’s future is adding some distortion to the proceedings. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m afraid of writing, but there’s a wariness. It feels as if I need to work to sort out my relationship with writing: why do I want to do this? What do I want out of this?

It’s funny to read the above, because I started it with saying that I was having a really active summer sans writing, and proceeded to list a series of writing-related issues; clearly my mind is still carrying on the business in some automatic or unconscious way. Ugh. In any case, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to take a breather, for some perspective. God knows I wish more writers would do this.

* there have been a few rejections but all have contained personalized feedback…which is rare. Everyone seems to generally like it, which I didn’t encounter when either of my two last books were being submitted around, so I’ll take what I can get.

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Flags

I have a conditional relationship with the Canadian flag. On the one hand, it’s the country I was born in, one which certainly came into its own culturally around the time I was born. It’s difficult to believe that prior to 1965 there was a much different (certainly more colonial) one. It’s a flag that, like any great design, makes the best of simplicity: two red bars and a leaf.

There’s the flag of one’s country and then there’s the nationalism that naturally gets attached to it. I’m averse to nationalism, though I recognize that in some situations it’s completely necessary, especially for existential survival.

In the winter of 2022, the so-called “freedom convoy” occupied downtown Ottawa. They were ostensibly against vaccine mandates (whether or not this was well-informed) and what they perceived to be the authoritarian impulses of Justin Trudeau and his government in terms of how they were handling the pandemic. They rolled into Ottawa, lining the streets with eighteen-wheelers and set up camp. And from there they basically held the nation’s capital hostage, terrorizing locals with the constant honking of air horns and making life hell for people there for the better part of three weeks. The significant piece about this was their ubiquitous use of the Canadian flag as part of their quasi-rebellious identity. During and after the occupation, if you saw someone driving with the Canadian flag on their car, there was a very good chance they supported this convoy movement (which, among other things, has its origin in white supremacist and Islamophobic movements). I hated seeing the Canadian flag as a result because I naturally associated it with stupidity and hatred, no matter how ambivalent I felt about Trudeau or the lockdowns. I had a tank top I sometimes wore on very hot days when I was out for a run, which had a maple leaf–not the flag, but just a red stylized leaf–and even that became difficult for me to justify for fear of being associated with the racist idiots.

And then Donald Trump came into power in 2024 and soon directly targeted Canada’s sovereignty. Suddenly, with our identity and existence threatened, the Canadian flag became a rallying point. Nationalism, something we don’t often reach for, became vogue. Like, in ways I don’t think I’ve seen since the signing of the Constitution in 1982. We took on the “elbows up” ethos of hockey, the national game (if you don’t count lacrosse, which is actually the national game). “Made in Canada” became (and remains for understandable reasons) a thing. And yet I feel I have a sort of cultural whiplash around the flag now flown, earnestly, by so many.

Nationalism, especially nationalism for sake of nationalism (which is what you see south of the border), can get ugly fast. It can be easily weaponized against imagined others, which doesn’t require a deep imagination to see how that can apply to the very people–immigrants, temporary foreign workers and racialized new Canadians–who actually help support this G7 country. It can become a bludgeon in the hands of those with dark hearts or small minds, as we’ve seen not only in what has transpired south of the border, but in countries such as Turkey, Hungary and most notably in Nazi Germany.

And yet, as I mentioned earlier, it’s naive to think that we, especially in the face of one of the strongest nations in the world literally threatening to annex us, to eliminate our sovereignty, would not reach for nationalist expressions. And the paradox is that, for all of nationalism’s ills, when faced with an existentialist threat from a much powerful neighbour, if we don’t define ourselves, if we don’t set out to reify our sometimes nebulous national identity, then someone else will.

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Me & Genre

What do I like in a book?

I like to feel immersed, whether it be in an environment, or character, or perhaps only a sustained tone; mix of any of the above is even better. I like books that make the everyday somewhat strange, or alternately making the strange seem ubiquitous. As a writer, I think this is what makes so-called genre books (typically sci-fi, fantasy, horror, western, etc) that much more challenging to pull off satisfyingly. I mean, sure, a lot of writers can pull of a few paragraphs or even pages of a genre story, but to do so in a sustained way, with a determined consistency…that’s hard. It takes a lot of work to do it well. Yes, yes, the literary small town book with the domestic intrigue also requires much of the above, but go ahead, you add menacing tentacles and see how far you can go.

I have a complicated relationship with the genre universe. I work in genre but I’m not wedded to it in as totalizing a way as many writers so firmly are. To the far end of what annoys me about genre works are tired tropes (laser guns! robots!) left unexamined, and to the far end of what what annoys me about what we call literary fiction, is the sense of an author proceeding to insert their head up their ass. I actually expressed this at a author talk in Winnipeg and I don’t think it went over well, but I reserve the fact that the other author I was supposed to appear with got his calendar mixed up, leaving me, the organizers, and the local audience (more than half expecting the author who didn’t make it) high and dry. In retrospect I wished I’d engaged more with the host–a much more committed author of genre than I–so that it was less about solo author me and my book, and opened up the discussion so that it was more a conversation and less what ended up being a short Q&A. That handful of author talks I did while publicizing The Society of Experience across the country (okay, Ontario and the prairies) were a learning curve for me, mostly in terms of learning to take more consideration of what an audience wants to hear, versus whatever thoughts are occurring to me while I’m in the spotlight. First rodeo, etc.

When you write a book like The Society of Experience, which riffs on a couple of genres–namely sci-fi, but also western (Derek’s The Lonely Cowboy stories)–but remains steadfastly literary, it can be easy to find oneself unsure upon which patch of the ice floe to stand on. I certainly felt more at home in literary circles because it’s largely what I read the most, and the novel was firmly that, however in the handful of more genre-forward appearances I made–conventions, reading series’–I found myself more often not seeing myself in the audience. They tended to be more capital-G genre readers, and I felt a bit like an imposter. I mean, there are worse problems to have in life, but being an artist is about connecting, and when you don’t see yourself in the room it can be weird, as if you’re doing something wrong.

With my novels, I’d like to think I’m doing something different. I’m kinda saying hey literary folks, you don’t have to make it so kitchen sink realistic, like The Diviners or Of Mice and Men, although those are excellent works (and knowing how to render a realistic environment is a huge skill). And at the same time I’m also saying hey genre folks, you can have three dimensional characters wrestling with things that aren’t literal tentacles. I have a suspicion Stanislaw Lem liked detective stories because so many of my favourite short stories by him involve the solving of a crucial riddle, often involving a terrifying event. And while he wrote almost exclusively in genre (sci-fi) his curiosity and want to mix these influences with his scientific  preoccupations make for fascinating reading. One story I would use as an example of this would be Ananke from the collection More Tales of Prix the Pilot; its use of a line from an Edgar Allan Poe story as a clue to an unravelling investigation on Mars is Lem firing on all cylinders. I swear it’s like taking a drug reading something like that; you just want to savour the rush for as long as you can.

A book is a book. A story is a story. It doesn’t need to correlate to any categorical expectation, other than it be worth the reader’s time and intelligence. And yet publishing–like any creative practice which survives on scant government funding and word-of-mouth– can get caught up in pettiness sometimes, which I find frustrating, and I don’t doubt, especially doing something different, that I’ve been the recipient of some sniping. I know I’m not a provocateur or some self-styled controversialist aiming to upset norms; I’m not trying to upset anything other than to demonstrate a hybrid style that is sometimes weird and different. Like most arts you need a thick skin for this, and I’m not just talking pub rejections.

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Contrivances

I’ve been thinking about the issue of contrivance in fiction, how it works as the everyday fabric but can be used also as a point of critique. This is to say, for starters, what does it mean for a piece of work (book, TV show, play etc) to be critiqued as contrived (as in “Oh that was such a contrived scene…”)?

It’s tricker than it seems because it’s in the very nature of something fictional to be, on a very basic level, inherently contrived. Fiction is fiction. Whether it’s happening between two robots on a faraway planet, or under our nose, it’s not real, though it might feel so, even if it is accurately based on the truth (not going to get into autofiction here).

To use a good concrete example, I’m thinking of the three seasons of the popular streaming show The Bear. In particular, their respective finalés. It goes without saying that if you haven’t seen The Bear and have been meaning to, you might want to skip this (and if you haven’t seen The Bear, I heartily recommend it). Also worth noting that I’m only focusing on the finalés. Season Two, for example, might have (for me) the weaker ending, but I found it generally more satisfying than Season Three.

At the end of Season One, our chef protagonist discovers, amidst the chaos of running a busy family-owned sandwich shop facing imminent bankruptcy (and someone nearly going to jail for manslaughter), not to mention his own bouts of post-traumatic anxiety, that the chef’s dead brother (and former owner) had hidden around $300,000 in tomato sauce cans, communicated to the chef in a cryptic suicide letter. The restaurant is not only saved, but plans are laid for a high-end version. Was it a stretch? On paper, absolutely. And yet I didn’t really mind because somehow it seemed deserved. Perhaps it’s because–a credit to the writing on the show–it pulls together some very tender emotional threads, consistent with the other episodes, as the chef contends with the mystery that his brother was to him, and the hole of grief he feels around losing him in the midst of the chaos around him.

Season Two ends with the opening launch of the renovated incarnation of the restaurant, as the chef contends with small margins and high expectations while balancing a budding romantic relationship with a family friend. Everything is riding on opening night and the chef, in mid-service, winds up locked in the walk-in freezer when the handle breaks off on the other side. Alas, he cannot carefully control the chaos happening outside and has a meltdown, while his cousin on the other side of the door is comparing the chef’s neuroticisms to his mother’s, who in a flashback had literally driven her car into their home after a tumultuous family dinner.  It’s funny, because on paper there’s clearly less outward contrivance in this finalé than Season One…and yet it didn’t work as well.

So what does this mean? I suppose it’s when something goes from the natural contrivance of fiction into an area that doesn’t feel deserved, either by flaws of logic, lack of genuineness or consistency with the whole. When it doesn’t “work” I suppose it doesn’t give me reason (or enough reasons) to believe that it’s a natural part of the landscape, no matter how far it may bend credulity (see Season One). It respects the limits of the world it resides within. Or another way of putting it: if I feel a bump in the road, convince me that it’s part of the ride. The more bumps, the more convincing I might require.

Certainly one of the things with the finalé of Season Two that doesn’t work, albeit on a very technical level, is the unbelievability of the chef getting locked in the freezer in the first place. Anyone who has worked in a restaurant (hello) knows that walk-in freezers have a release button on the inside that opens the door precisely because of such situations. It also lacks the comparatively symphonic threading together of Season One. Despite spreading the spotlight throughout the season to other characters, it comes back to the chef and his obsessive (likely traumatized) behaviour, his relationship with himself, his split responsibilities to his restaurant and to his girlfriend who is sitting at a table while all this is happening, waiting for him to acknowledge her. What bugged me mostly consisted of the chef squaring off with his cousin. What was this trying to achieve, I wondered? It felt like a too-convenient device to force a confrontation, where the cousin literally calls-out the chef’s unresolved inner challenges. Maybe because it was kinda lazy, given the confidence of the show overall? It’s a little too on-the-nose, even didactic, compared to the show-don’t-tell way in which Season One handled things. Am I saying it was bad? No, it just uses a plot-device that feels stolen from an 80s sitcom.

Where do they go from here? Well, Season Three manages to be the least capital-D dramatic of the three, but that might have to do with the reality of the overall arc of the series. They’re establishing themselves now. To grab terminology from group dynamics, The Bear went from storming (Season One), to norming (Season Two), and then performing (Season Three). In Season Two they launched the new restaurant without it burning down. In Season Three the pressure seems to be more existential, namely figuring out how to chase a Michelin star without skimping on the chef’s exacting standards, while needing to maximize table turnover in order to break even. The chef’s story is less centred overall, but the finalé features him–already experiencing anxiety attacks as he anticipates the first critical reviews of the restaurant to be filed–having a post-traumatic episode as he comes face-to-face with the chef he trained under, who cruelly undermined his self-worth–all while attending the closing of another mentor’s establishment.

I don’t have any big issues with the direction of Season Three; creating an emergency for the sake of having, say, Season One’s manic energy would seem somehow disingenuous here. I think it’s a sign of confidence if a show can shift gears without resorting to tricks. If anything felt off, it was the repeated depiction of the chef’s meltdown, his manic inner thoughts projecting themselves onto his world. After a while they didn’t serve to deepen or develop our understanding of what the chef was experiencing. Okay, meltdown, got it. Where does this wind up on the contrivance scale? Contrived? Stylistically perhaps, but not in terms of plot or story.

Anyhow, thank you for joining me on this thought exercise!

A cafe table (Voodoo Child on College St.) whereupon sits an Americano, glass of water. The sun shins in.
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Lou Reed: The King of New York, by Will Hermes

Lou Reed is like a magic uncle to me. His voice was there in my teens when I was very alone, feeling vulnerable and misunderstood. My real entry point was a best-of cassette, Rock and Roll Diary: 1967-1980 . It was there that I not only discovered his solo material (uneven a collection though this release was), but discovered his seminal early band, The Velvet Underground (with John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker). His voice managed to cut through the bullshit and yet was supernaturally intimate. It was through this intimacy–the inherent heartbreak in his poetically-charged lyrics and his speak-sing voice, the lurid provocation of (what we would now call) his queerness–that I fell under Lou Reed’s spell, and I count myself among many. Another best-of (I was a teenager, forgive me) was Walk on the Wild Side: The Best of Lou Reed, which was a more even introduction to his 70s solo material. I told myself, there was no way you could listen to his live version of Coney Island Baby and not feel an elemental longing combined with a stubborn conviction in the idea of salvation by love.

Lou’s work was uneven, perhaps not by his stated standards, but with each album (and each decade) you just didn’t know what you were going to get. And yet, even that was cool. He was the coolest person on this earth. Go ahead, Lou, release the Bob Ezrin-produced Berlin, and album of fantastically depressing yet inspired songwriting. Put out Metal Machine Music, the sonic equivalent of a root canal. If you were looking for iterations on his most well-known album, Transformer, he was already onto something else, and often something polarizingly different. Perhaps solipsistic, perhaps self-intoxicated, perhaps self-annihilating. Perhaps lost in the mid-80s, writing MTV pop songs with production standards that don’t age well.

The height of my appreciation for Lou Reed came as he released New York in ’89, when the quality of his output (and production standards) levelled up while I was turning nineteen. It combined his assured poetic chops with acidic social critique and a fuck-tonne of guitar. This was followed by Songs for Drella, to this day one of my standalone favourite albums. Brimming with empathy but with a Velvet-y stripped-down sonic aesthetic (that I wished the acoustic-driven “Unplugged” trend at the time embraced), it was a collaboration with his former collaborator, John Cale; an ode to their mentor (and one-time producer) Andy Warhol, who had recently passed.

I should probably talk about Will Hermes biography of Reed. And, in a way, I am. It’s a weird feeling, reading the intimate (and finely rendered) details about someone who was a spiritual role model in so many years of my life, especially under so many situations that seemed beyond my control.

I knew he could be, to put it lightly, difficult. He didn’t suffer fools. And yet as someone now in their 50s, with a lot of life experience and self-reflection, I’m inherently prone to interrogate phrases like this. Basically: isn’t that another way of saying “asshole?” They weren’t always “fools,” but people he knew, people he had a history with. Hermes’ accounts of Reed severing ties indirectly, through third parties, with figures no less important to his life (save career) than Warhol and Cale–even his wife, Sylvia Morales–are difficult to read. Difficult because, and perhaps I’m doing him too much a service in saying this, but in many ways he represents the sort of insecure artist that many have inside of us. The part of us that is more comfortable sending a witty indirect riposte than having the balls to actually sit down and speak with someone face-to-face, consequences be what they may.

He was artistically uncompromising and yet simultaneously his best enemy, hindered in no small way by spending the better part of a decade-and-a-half deeply entwined with chronic substance use (heroin, yes, but mostly alcohol with amphetamines). His songs came from deep injury and his MO was deeply insecure, lashing out, burning bridges, yet consistently championing the works of those around him he admired with the fire of a thousand teenagers (The Ramones, Talking Heads and most recently, Anohni).

This isn’t a book for a casual fan (if that’s possible to be). And yet, for those of us who are–in whatever way–beholden to Lou Reed’s music, no matter how inconsistent (note, my favourite solo album is Street Hassle, which is a deeply fucked fin de 70s meltdown, capped by the brilliant title track), no matter how maddening yet believable a depiction, what Hermes is able to show of Reed’s character is consistently inconsistent. A collection of contradictions almost built to self-destruct. A middle-class Jewish kid from Long Island who became known for the seedy NYC underground, a queer role model uncomfortable with his self-promoted ownership of that attribute. Someone who wanted it both ways: to be a provocateur, but without an instinct to reflect on the consequences.

Despite his self-destructive instincts, despite his sometimes terrible treatment of the people closest to him–including allegations of occasional physical assault of partners–I wept while reading Hermes’ deeply tender account of Reed’s passing by liver failure, accompanied by his longtime partner and soulmate Laurie Anderson, alongside local Toronto musician Kevin Hearn. It served as a sort of closure for me, a decade after the fact, helped by the unparalleled intimacy of the source material and the author’s judiciously light touch with prose when others would have opted for the sort of ham-fisted poetry Reed himself would’ve sneered at.

I’d like to mention that Lou Reed: The King of New York is not only a thorough document of a vital force in 20th century popular and alternative music, but an intimate glimpse of the 60s and 70s New York zeitgeist, as well as a compelling portrayal of the inherently dangerous world that those who belonged to the LGBTQ+ community faced (such as shock therapy for those young men institutionalized for being gay).

A brief note to Hermes, should he come across this: in the future please refrain from making the all-too-common mistake–particularly among American writers–of name-checking cities like Prague and New York City, only to refer to a concert in the same paragraph as happening “in Canada.” Um, we have cities, too.

[Update: I’ve been meaning to write this review for a while, and of course it turns out the day I pressed “publish” just happened to be Lou Reed’s birthday. Go figure.]

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Self-promotion

Hate it. Hate. I hate it. *spits poison from wound*

Promoting myself sometimes/always feels like putting on a clown suit and yodelling “Hey everybody, something I wrote that I think is good was published,” while squeezing a bulb horn and yuk-yuking my way until falling through a manhole.

I think it — this notion that self-promotion is a kind of fool’s errand — can come down to two things: a socially internalized idea of “selfishness,” and social anxiety.

A big part of it is the visibility. I have social anxiety, though some people who know me may not clue into this, and while it’s way better than when I was younger (thank you, therapy and age) it’s not non-existent, especially on days when I’m feeling conflicted about whatever personal or work-related conflict is afoot. But this is just part of it, a facet of a more complex whole.

Promoting oneself shares some Venn with “networking,” a word which can cause some people to feel the urge to vomit, largely owing to prolonged exposure to those who are just a little too slick and creepy — and sometimes strangely successful — in social situations. How can one be oneself-with-others in a way that is flexible — reasonably invested and and curious — which also makes room for our strangeness; our quirks and idiosyncrasies? I’m not convinced it needs to be the exclusive domain of the neurodivergent or the anxiety-having, who are more attuned to this idea owing to their need to otherwise “blend” in social environments. I think, for many people in the general population, being ourselves-with-others can sometimes feel like a series of situational disguises. Just how coherent are our identities? Is “identity” just an ever-shifting amalgam of self-adjustments to our social environment?

Anyhoo, self-promotion is a similar sort of pain. I don’t want to be that guy (insert image of shameless author plugging their wares to an annoying, kinda desperate degree and taking little interest in, you know, community). And yet it’s kinda naive to think that people will just find your work through a random series of adventures (though that can happen in real life, albeit often on an infinitesimal level).

Look, I will admit I’m luckier than 99% of writers out there: I’ve had the opportunity to visit several cities across the country promoting my books*. I was interviewed by Gil Deacon on CBC Radio*. However, not unlike crowd-surfing (IYKYK), in no time the glow fades out, your ass is on the floor and before you know it you’re abruptly just another chicken scratching at the same yard. (* thanks in large part to my publisher’s travel and publicity grants)

So, I suppose, a thesis: I promote my work because I think it’s good and I would like to encourage people to seek it out if it appeals to them. That sounds pretty straight-forward, right? This isn’t a particularly revolutionary or provocative statement.

This is where “selfishness” comes in, at least for those prone to this idea. I’m not talking about healthily putting one’s interests to the front burner, but rather the idea of self-promotion as an egotistical pursuit, an unchecked desire to put ourselves first in a gross, narcissistic, oxygen-depleting way. There are many reasons for having this play in our thoughts, particularly if you’ve been raised in environments that use guilt and shame as a means of “correcting” behaviour that strides to stand out (let alone celebrate personal accomplishment).

So, yes, doing something perfectly acceptable such as promoting the short story or essay or novel we wrote, the beast that took untold (unpaid) hours of our time to craft, can come across as craven and attention-seeking if we’re feeling less than confident, or struggling with self-worth issues…which, while acceptable within the purview of human complexity, is also kind of silly.

Writers, put your work out there. Shout about it from the rooftops. I might also suggest that, working in the same principle, you put forward the works of your peers along the way. We all deserve to have our works appreciated, and there’s no way of doing this without sticking our necks out in public — it is, I think, part of being an artist, whether or not we are comfortable with it.

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The End of 2024

It’s been an eventful year, insofar as there seemed to be a lot going on and yet seems to have passed by quite quickly.

I’m happy to have completed revisions to my next novel, The Stars Align for Disco Santa, and passed it on to my agent (who I hope reads it soon, but he’s a busy man). Fingers crossed that in 2025 it does the rounds of publishers and finds a suitable home. Otherwise, as writing goes, it’s been liberating. As well as the novel, I’ve been seriously working on an essay about my uncle’s guitar and the sordid personal story surrounding that. As I might’ve mentioned previously, it’s the sort of personal essay that requires much more contemplation (not to mention exploring my own blind spots) than even a novel. There’s nowhere to hide with something like this, not when you’re writing about yourself. I’ve had essays published before — one of them made 2017 Best Canadian Essays — but it wasn’t nearly as vulnerable as this piece; there’s so much woodshedding (to use a guitar term) involved, and yet I’m happy with how it’s coming, even if it hurts to reach into the places it needs to go.

I also began in earnest on a fourth novel, which is coming along well. It takes place just a little bit in the future and seems to be drawing out a lot of my more philosophical thoughts about society and the erosion of democracy. The main character is a psychotherapist who finds herself immersed in an unspooling drama while attending a professional conference. It has a title, though I’m too superstitious to reveal that before it’s been vetted by my agent.

I had hand surgery in October, which was an emotional experience for me (speaking of unspooling), combined with the pressures of my work. The good news is that I’ve given myself a couple of weeks away from the office to let things coalesce. The trick, as I’ve touched on over at my professional blog, is not to overwork myself. In short, there’s no winner if I’m dead at the finish line.

For the new year, I see myself being a little more public-facing as a writer. I’ve been toying with the idea of facilitating a seminar for authors, focused on how to read for an audience. This is a long-brewing idea that I’ve kicking around for a few years now, inspired (if that’s the right word) by the fact that so few authors seem to know what to do when they’re reading their work for an audience, which ends up doing themselves and their work a disservice. If I can swing it I’d like to aim for the spring. It’s a way for me to give back to the community (I plan to make it pay-what-you-can just to cover costs, with whatever proceeds remaining going to a local charity).

Of course, politically and socially, there appears a storm approaching, and I don’t know what to do about that except to direct my powers as an artist toward addressing it in whatever way I can that might (if I can make a wish) allow people to understand how we got here, or at least put the spotlight on those who have done a better job of describing this better than I can.

I wish you, dear reader, the best for the new year. You have more power than you think you have, and I hope you find a way to channel it in such a way as to cut through the divisiveness of our time. I think community is important, and ultimately this concept is more powerful the more local and intimate its location.

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Hands On

Hand update: I’ve got a pretty gnarly scar, but there’s progress. Two weeks ago they removed the stitches from my palm, and I would not wish that pain and discomfort on anyone (note: they can’t anaesthetize your hand for this).

Psychologically I’ve been up and down. I’ve had to work through a feeling of being violated, of having to re-familiarize myself with what my hand can do (via physio) while fighting the fear that I’m going to pull or tear something in the process of rehabbing it back to where it should be.

While this has all been going on the political world south of the border has erupted into a swirl of chaos and condemnation. It’s a type of deja vu, considering we went through four years of this already. In the end, one of the people running for the presidency represented change and the other chose stability; the problem of course is that stability is hard to defend (let alone promote) when the candidate in question is trying to be a celebrity-endorsed centrist while there are so many voices in the mainstream media complaining about a left-wing cabal sacrificing the sanctity of American values. Frankly, it’s only a matter of time before the same debate amps up on this side of the border (it’s basically already here), what with a thoroughly mediocre Prime Minister playing out his third term similar to a sitting duck Biden, with little regard for the public malaise around his party. Cooler heads prevail when there are reasons to stay the course and our current PM struggles to even sell his wins let alone address his weaknesses.

When I wrote my third novel, The Stars Align for Disco Santa, it was during the worst year of Trump (2020), and was certainly influenced by many of the things that have now come to fruition: authoritarian politicians abetted by corporatist tech companies running roughshod over and unveiling the frailty of democracy, exposing how much of the West is protected by evidently feeble gentlemen’s agreements and empty platitudes of decency. In other words, if Harris had won, my book–soon to be doing the rounds of publishers via my agent–would’ve still been relevant, but reflective of a dark time in society now past. Now? It seems more pertinent than ever, which is terribly sad (an understatement), but here I am.

You write the book you have to write. By the time it hits the market you have no say on how trends will have changed in the interim, how the landscape and zeitgeist will have shifted. When my first book was picked up by Wolsak & Wynn, I had to wait nearly three years before it was published; in that time the media landscape seemed inundated with time travel narratives, so that when The Society of Experience finally came out the conceit felt certainly less unique than during the years I’d spent writing and polishing the manuscript. In short, you really have no choice but to deal with it, and I can only hope that, by the time Disco Santa does the rounds, publishers will see it as rising to the occasion.

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