Hello all, it’s been a while since I’ve updated Imaginary Magnitude. I’ve been focused quite intently on revising some current works for submission in my spare time, and unfortunately the blog just doesn’t rank as high on the priority list when it comes to writing projects. That said, I don’t like leaving things untended for this long and hope to be a little more active in the coming weeks. Helps that I’m going to be a writing retreat at the end of November 🙂
I had a wonderful interview with Giller long-list nominee Hollay Ghadery for the New Books Network, about my dark literary thriller, RADIOLAND. This was one of the more insightful interviews I’ve done for this novel. Hollay brought a deep reading of the book to the interview. I especially appreciate her touching on how the twisting perspectives of the two protagonists intersect with a neurodivergent perception of the world. I previously wanted to be more verbal about this in interviews and promotional material but felt that, as someone who is undiagnosed (possibly neurodivergent but not motivated to pursue a diagnosis) I felt that this would attract criticism from some circles. In any case, she “got” the book and that doesn’t happen very often. Please enjoy!
I gotta say, it’s been a pretty exhausting time as of late–pretty much all of July to be honest. Not exhausting in a necessarily bad way but there were challenges posed by work demands combined with existential writer dread. And then there was also the World Cup, which my city co-hosted. As much as I love the game (play it, watch it, own at least three jerseys) these big competitions can become distracting time-sinks.
I took a week off and spent the first half of it sauntering around town and idea-generating for the novel-in-progress. The latter half I spent with my partner in Prince Edward County, which was a wonderful escape from all of the above. If anyone is looking for winery or brewery recommendations in the County, feel free to hit me up in the comments. I should also mention that I took a social media break during this time–it wasn’t intentional, but rather came out of discovering something a publishing colleague had done which I felt was disrespectful towards me (that’s as much as I’ll say). Not exactly the best way to be inspired, no, but during the break it was helpful to note just how reflexive it can be to open Bluesky or IG…and watch time slide away in ways that aren’t really healthy (unsurprisingly I uninstalled those during that week).
This is my first week back and I find that my writer’s brain is firing on all cylinders, which is a relief. For a long while–we’re talking months–I found it hard to devote myself in the way I have in the past to writing (writing anything). It was easier to revise works-in-progress and submit existing works which is good…but it’s kinda like making every workout a leg day–you’re avoiding the other big part above. (Speaking of workouts, I recently dived further into doing eccentric exercises and I’m enjoying the difference, if only to get a little more variety in my routine). Writing is something I’ve never had to worry about; I can sit my ass down and do the reps as good as anyone else. But over the last 6-8 months it had required more effort. Especially with no word on the future of my novel on-submission, it’s been harder. Lot’s of why the hell am I doing this? I’m reminded of the movie Awakenings where Robert de Niro’s character, having had his bodily ability restored after decades dormant, say that he didn’t want to go to sleep that first night for fear that he would wake up with his old affliction once more. For me, it was the idea of taking a break from writing and the question, when I came back to it, would it still be there? It being the skill and confidence, the real-time generation of scene description and dialogue. So I didn’t push myself like I normally would.
It feels like the rest did me good, and for that I’m thankful.
It’s harder than ever being an artist. I think many people can relate to feeling that they have to work harder just to have the same standard of living as they did five years ago. That said, I look at other writers on social media (I know, this never solves anything; in fact it can often make things worse, as I mentioned) and I sometimes ask myself anxiously Do these people even have jobs when I see them having several works published over the course of a month and openly workshopping their latest works-in-progress. Anyways, the short version for me is that it feels as if there’s less time in the pie chart for writing, but we’ll see. With the burst of ideas I’ve had recently I hope to make the space available to get down to business.
On a less dour note, one of my fave current bands, Sweeping Promises, are coming to Toronto in November. Here’s a track from their forthcoming album, You Say I Romanticize.
in this presentation I focus on my latest novel, Radioland
Big thanks to N.P. Thompson who was responsible for organizing Canada Fiction Fest. Sometimes when I kick the tires on efforts such as this– I’m generally wary of ambitious literary efforts owing to the fact that they can quickly implode and/or include elements not to my liking (like AI or, you know, intolerance of many sorts)–I can find myself walking away feeling that I’m avoiding a headache. This was not that. It was extremely well-organized and professional, with good curation, including both traditionally and independently published authors. Also, a big shout-out to Steve Westenra who moderated most of the thirty-six (!) presentations. If you are a published author reading this, I would keep your eyes open for next year’s edition (if they decide to make this a yearly thing).
I’m going to be taking part in the inaugural Canada Fiction Fest, a nationwide celebration of Canadian fiction authors, which is happening between June 21st and July 4th (that’s two whole weeks of live events)!
As mentioned back in April (note: I just realized that I DIDN’T PROMOTE IT ON THIS BLOG–JESUS CHRIST, CAHILL), I hosted a workshop at The Tranzac called The Writers’ Voice, something I’ve been cooking up for more than a year, the idea being to help writers who are either emerging or established with their public reading skills–something that no one else seems to have offered, which was sorely needed in the community (in case you’ve never felt your soul leave your body when someone at a reading series goes so over-length in their presentation). I’m proud to say that it was a success! There was so much interest, and the event itself produced so much interesting discussion, that I’ve decided to make it a semi-annual event. To make it more accessible to the greater writing community (hint: not everyone is easily able to make it downtown) I’m looking at rotating the venue. I’m still undecided about where the autumn event will take place, but am currently looking at Scarborough and North Toronto. Stay tuned! But also, I’m so happy that there was interest in this, and that those who showed up brought their A-game.
My review of Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues was more abbreviated than I would’ve liked, but this is what happens when you’re pressed for time and juggling making space for revising other works. To add some flavour, I was pleasantly surprised to see some of my favourite musicians focused upon, namely the likes of lesser-known guitarists such as Otis Rush (the Muddy Waters shout-out to Rush’s authenticity is something you couldn’t pay enough money for). It’s allowed me to give a closer listen to artists who I might’ve never given a second thought to checking out. One being Snapper Blackwell, whose formidable technical chops add such a depth to what would otherwise be par-for-the-course Delta acoustic blues. Most recently, I gave a listen to Junior Wells and the Aces–a live recording from 1966 in Boston which blew my mind. I’m not a harmonica guy typically, and truth be told I was more interested in the backup band (based on Palmer’s attestation), and it’s so rewarding. As I wrote on BlueSky, there’s something about listening to live recordings of blues artists that can be uniquely revealing of their quality and technical chops that is sometimes lost in their studio work (especially given that sometimes the “studio” is a hastily arranged hotel room in those days). This also goes for the works of previously mentioned Otis Rush–the 70s may not have been good to him otherwise, but his live work from that era just sizzles.
I hope you’re doing well in these turbulent times xo
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.
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…
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
