October 30, 2013

Scared and Excited!

I love the summer season, with it’s warmth and the freedom of bare feet upon the earth. I need to take the time to appreciate it, and every season my writing suffers. Maybe it doesn’t suffer, but not much gets written.

I’m learning to accept that as a part of my life right now. Life needs to be lived in all of its facets. All of life contributes to who I am as a writer, even if I wish that I had more time for the actual craft of writing.

As I write this, it is almost November. I am poised to write a brand new story. I’ve been preparing for this most of the past year, in one way or another. My previous blog posts reflect some of this preparation.

I’ve changed my story plan somewhat. It will still take place in Canada, with its indigenous peoples and its settlers, but what I’ve changed is the time frame. I’ve moved it well into the future. At this point, the year I have imagined is 2099, although that may well change.

I think I have set myself an incredible challenge, one for which I could never prepare enough. And yet, it’s the story I need to write. At the beginning of the month, I said to someone that I am “scared and excited” about NaNoWriMo this year, and that hasn’t changed. I am much more ready now than I was then, and still I am scared and excited.

The world at the turn of the next century is mine to create, but I’d like it to fall within the realm of possiblity. I am not intending this story to be a fantasy, or even science fiction, although I expect it'll fit the dystopia label. I’ve read a lot about climate change. I have no problem believing it is happening, but no one knows what it will really look like. I have an even harder time envisioning what kind of technological changes there will be. Somehow, imagining political types of change isn’t so hard. There is a lot of history to help with that. Regardless, it is all up to me to create this future world.

This is my fifth year doing NaNoWriMo. I achieved the 50,000 word goal the last two years. In the process, I’ve learned to trust my inner writer. This year is going to be a big test of that, but I have a lot of faith. Excited and scared! I’ll see you on the other side of November!

May 22, 2013

Don't Just Write, BE a Writer

The sunlight beckons me, and my soul responds. It was a long, cold winter in Canada. It doesn’t matter how much time we spend outdoors during winter, we still crave the spring sun.

Along with the sunlight, the sprouts beckon me, and my soul responds. Mother Earth awakens, exploding in an exuberance of colours, shapes, and textures. I am one of the lucky city dwellers with a large yard. I miss the rural living of my youth, but in my yard, I can garden amid the birds and the bees. This is my connection to our Mother, and it feeds my soul.

Small wonder that as I contrast my image of the trees and bright green grass around me with the devastation of the tar sands, I become more and more determined that we need to support each other in nurturing our amazing planet. We all need to be rejuvenated by the land. I see it in the faces of people using the waterfront trail in this city. Our population growth necessitates that we live in cities, but I know I’m not the only one who craves green space.

This spring I have become very aware that my love of the outdoors has a connection to my writing. Previously, I saw them as separate, as competing for my time. They still do that. But they also complement each other. My connection to Mother Earth enhances my writing. She is real and good and nurturing. She awakens my passion for all that is real and good and nurturing.

I have often read that the best way to become a good writer is to practise the craft of writing. There is truth to that, but it is by no means the complete truth. Everything we do in life contributes to our ability to be a good writer, all the things we learn and all the things we experience. When we are open to our experiences, they become a part of us.

Writing is so much more than just putting out words. Being a writer is much more holistic than that. It is a state of being. It is a way of looking at the world. It is a way of thinking about the world. To develop as a writer, I need to view the world as a writer. I need to see everything around me as a potential for learning. I need to look for meaning in everything around me, but especially in the things that I am passionate about. I need to be open and receptive.

And sometimes, instead of just writing and observing, we need to jump right in and experience life. I did that on the 12th of this month. An avid biker in my younger days, I haven’t had the opportunity to do much cycling lately. But that day I jumped right into a 70km group ride in cold temperatures, high winds, and bouts of hail. That 70 kilometres was longer than all the preparatory rides I had made this spring so far, combined.

As you can well imagine, this was not an easy ride for me. My muscles were not conditioned for a ride like that. They hurt the entire time, relieved only somewhat by periodic stretching. I had thought of cutting it short about ten kilometres in, but I just couldn’t give up on the adventure. So I pulled on my inner strength and kept going.

It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I fully processed the impact of that ride. I paid attention to my body, and wrote about it:
The fallout is quite significant. I have many, many stiff muscles. I am weak and fatigued. My brain is not functioning as well. My patience is not quite what it should be. Even my digestion is a little off. Paying attention to my body is making me realize the enormity of what I did on Sunday. It reminds me of how I feel after being really sick, when my strength is wiped out and it takes a while to get it back.

Three days later, I was fully recovered and ready to start exercising again. I got back on my bike and headed out to the pool.

I am proud of myself. Proud for the physical exertion of the ride, and my persistence despite pain and fatigue. But I am also proud of how this experience affected me as a writer. Certainly, the living of the challenge will enable me to have a better sense of what my characters are going through. The experience was more than that, though. I approached it with the consciousness of a writer. And in the process, I am realizing that the more I think of myself as being a writer, the more I process as a writer, the more I feel like I am myself.

You can’t always put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, but you can always BE a writer.

April 22, 2013

Worldview Out of the Box

When I saw the word “Aboriginal” in the title of the course offered by the University of Toronto and coursera.org, I jumped at it. This was my opportunity to do some focused learning about the aboriginal people of Canada. It was only once I was immersed in the course that I really took into consideration the rest of the title: “Worldviews and Education”.

The word that impacted me was “worldview”. The second word “education” meant that the course was a wonderful resource for teachers, but not as relevant to my situation.

In sharing what I learned from the course, I have this temptation to compartmentalize my new knowledge. My sense is that I am supposed to stick to the facts of the course and tell you only about that. Not only is that very difficult, because what I learned has melded with my own learning before and after, but it is not at all reflective of an aboriginal worldview.

I did learn details and facts in the course, things like the medicine wheel, the seven sacred teachings, and the historical facts. They all helped me to understand the aboriginal worldview and what it means. But a worldview is a way of looking at life. Details and facts help illustrate a worldview, they don’t tell us what it is.

The view presented in this course is very different from the view espoused by the cultural majority in Canada, the view developed by European settlers. Those of us who grew up learning the predominant non-aboriginal view don’t easily let go of it. It is so entrenched in who we are, that even if we want to change, it takes work and time.

We don’t need to become like our Indigenous friends. We don’t need to participate in and borrow their ceremonies. But we do need to understand their worldview. The predominant one isn’t working. Our land continues to be raped and our people continue to be oppressed. Most of us don’t want it to be that way. We don’t want our environment destroyed. We don’t want our Prime Minister to act like a dictator. We don’t want to feel helpless and boxed in.

We who descend from the settlers have to find a way out of our boxes and lines. We need to do this in a far more expansive way than we normally think of when we use the phrase “out of the box”. Perhaps this quote from an editorial on the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society site, commenting on Idle No More, will go some of the distance toward illustrating what I’m trying to say.

Idle No More is not dead. It lives as a genetic legacy in all who have taken part. It’s in our nerve endings. It’s coursing through our veins. It’s in the memory of our muscles. It lives as a gift to the generations yet unborn, because it has changed us, our perspective, our pride and our confidence. And it will re-emerge in a thousand different ways, some subtle, some overt, because it’s in us now.
http://www.ammsa.com/publications/windspeaker/idle-no-more-will-never-die-editorial

When we who know the “Western worldview” think about Idle No More, we tend to think about the individual elements. We might go on to think about how the different actions and people might interact and have an affect on one another. We might imagine that each group is encouraged by seeing and hearing what others are doing. I know I didn’t think about it in the words of the writer I just quoted. That's a holistic way of looking at life that usually eludes me.

I saw this tweet posted on April 19, 2013 as another illustration of the aboriginal worldview:



I expect the character in my next novel will find a way to to change her or his worldview. That will surely be a test of how well I understand the difference in wordviews.

In this process of preparing for my next novel, I am going through my own changes. I’ve been working towards the development of my novel idea for a few months now, but I don’t have a lot of anything concrete to show for it, other than a long list of bookmarks in my browser and a couple of books I’ve read. Most of the preparation is internal. It’s settling in and becoming a part of me. Somehow, when I get to writing this novel, I don’t think it’ll fit into anyone’s box. And that suits me just fine!

March 28, 2013

An Unexpected Education

The past month has been another surprise for me. My writing plan is not at all going as expected, and yet my personal movement toward a next novel is going quite wonderfully.

I started February by doing as I had planned, with some odd bits of writing and a good focus on a short story. Then a tweet came in from an acquaintance, with an invitation to join her in taking a MOOC from Coursera: Aboriginal Worldviews and Education. After a quick check, I determined that it was a quality course offered through the University of Toronto and would not offer a challenge financially. The time allotted for the course seemed just manageable, so I signed up.

I usually take a lot more time to think about something before going ahead. Had I thought about it longer, I may have convinced myself that I didn’t have time. Instead, the four weeks following February 25 have reminded me of November, with such an intense focus on one thing. All my spare moments went into the course. I didn’t do any writing other than for the course. I did a lot of reading and a lot of listening, and when I couldn’t do those things, I did a lot of thinking.

I am very glad for having taken the course. It was very well done and I learned a lot. Having been out of any educational setting for at least 20 years, I was glad to be back at focused learning for a while.

One of my main goals in starting my blog was to put myself out there as a writer. It is a way to share my writing journey and in so doing to help myself along in my process. I’m not blogging about actual writing this month, in this belated post, however, I am moving myself along in my process.

I took this course because I see it as research for my next novel. I don’t know exactly how it will contribute, as my story is really still quite a vague idea, but I do know that it will help. Part of my process is learning to trust myself, to trust the internal process that will lead itself to the novel that I NEED to write. So far, I’m finding this to be rather fun.

The plan for my next blog is to put some words to the things I learned while taking the course.


February 05, 2013

Novel Thoughts

The first month of 2013 has passed me by. As all the months of my life seem to do these days, it passed by very quickly. However, I’ve experienced it quite differently than most.

One thing that has proven true is that things don’t often turn out just the way you plan them. I had hoped to do a lot of writing; that didn’t happen. But I completely surprised myself by coming up with my novel idea for NaNoWriMo, even though it’s many months away. This is a first for me. My previous Nano novels were both fantasy. They didn't require much for research. This time, I have my work cut out for me.

I began January by spending a lot of my free time paying attention to the hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence here in Canada and the IdleNoMore movement. I was trying very hard to understand what was going on and finding myself very drawn to it. There are a lot of things in the world around me I’d like to understand better; I often tell myself that I just need to ignore whatever that thing is because I don’t have time for it. That wasn’t working with this situation. I told myself that I would soon have to leave it alone so that I could get to my writing.

Then I learned about The Journey of Nishiyuu. I had a strong emotional response to that. In case you don’t know what it is, I’ll explain. A small group of young men, with a guide or two, is walking from Whapmagoostui, which is on the eastern shore of James Bay all the way down to Ottawa. By the time they are done, they will have walked around 1500 kilometres. Probably the most significant thing isn’t the distance, but the type of walking. They are not walking on carefully manicured roads but through great stretches of snow covered forests and fields, following the old paths of their ancestors. This is a snowshoe walk, pulling supplies on toboggans, in weather that is so much colder than what most of us experience we can’t even imagine what it’s like. The other thing of great significance is that this is seen as a spiritual journey by the Indigenous People. This isn’t a demonstration, or a fundraiser, or even just an attempt to get the attention of our Prime Minister. In the hearts and minds of the Indigenous People, this is about connecting with Mother Earth, about prophecies, about drawing people together, and about leadership.

I remember thinking that I would love to write a story about their journey. But I realized that I would not be the one to tell that story. It would need to be told by a Native writer. But my thoughts continued. I thought of the whole picture. There were the hunger strike, the Journey and the many flash mobs taking place all over Canada. There were also the oil pipelines, the fracking, and the omnibus bills. I have a sense of history taking place in my own lifetime. Now that is a story! I can wait for it to play out, or I can tell the story this year, in my own way.

There is a strong connection between what is going on today and the first novel I wrote; I find that quite stunning. My first novel involved a small group of young people going on a journey for the purpose of saving the earth. The setting was very different, and it was a fantasy novel, but they did save their earth.

Saving our earth is something I am passionate about. I’ve heard that what you really need to write a good novel is to find something you are passionate about. Well, I’m thrilled that I have found that!

Now for the logistics. I want to write a story in a real place and time, but I want it to be fiction. That means I have to invent my own characters, and likely also my own businesses and organizations. The characters have to be different from real-life people in more than name. They will need to be unique, stand-alone characters. The beauty of unique characters is that they will tell their own story. It is a very good thing that November is a long way from now. I have a lot to figure out before then.

I feel like I am a gigantic sponge right now. I’m trying to absorb as much as I can about the issues facing our great land of Canada and its people. What better reason to learn more about the history, geography, peoples and politics of Canada than so that I can write a novel about it? I’m looking forward to seeing how this unfolds, while constantly having this niggly doubt that suggests this is way more than I can handle.

But it’s only a niggly doubt. I’m determined to keep moving forward with this. I know that one day this will be more than just a vague idea that probably doesn’t make sense to anyone else. There is a story to be told here. It’s not the story of what actually happens in the next few years; it’s the story of the native and non-native people in Canada who come together and prove the inherent worth of humanity, of Nishiyuu.

January 01, 2013

Peering Ahead Into the Year 2013


It’s the evening of the day known as New Years Day. For me it has been a wonderfully quiet day with very low expectations. A rare jewel in my life.

I’m not a person that makes New Year’s resolutions. The whole concept is far too cliched for me.

I do think it would be worthwhile, however, to stop and write about what I hope the year ahead will hold for me. I don’t recall ever doing that before. I would like to make my claim as to what my life could be. I would like to put it out there so it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy of the right kind.

I want the year 2013 to be the year in which I experiment with different types of writing. Last year I spent a lot of time editing. This year I want to do more creative writing. I will write short stories and flash fiction and poetry. And along the way, I will come up with a great idea for my next Nano novel, which will also happen in 2013.

I learned the basics of social media in the last couple of months of 2012. In the year ahead, I will learn to use social media to benefit my writing. I will learn to showcase myself as a writer. I don’t expect great progress in this regard. I need also to do the writing to be able to showcase it. But I will learn.

I will begin blogging this year. I will not be a frequent blogger, as I don’t have time for that. But I do believe that I have a voice for blogging, and I want to give that voice a place to be heard. My hope is for a blog with monthly posts.

I learned something really important during NaNoWriMo 2012. The previous year, I was able to believe what I always wanted to be true, that I am a writer. In 2012 I came to believe that I am a writer that will be published some day. What I want for 2013, then, is to give more place in my life to my goal of being a published writer. That means allotting more of my spare moments and stolen moments to the craft of writing. Some of those stolen moments will surely come from time I would otherwise spend reading, but for this year, that will have to be a sacrifice I make. I cannot sacrifice my job or my family for writing.

Time is an extremely valuable commodity for me. Writing takes time. It can’t be developed without practise and without trial and error. It can’t excel unless there is freedom and time to just write for fun, for the sake of creativity instead of production. I don’t expect to have an increase in available time in the year ahead. All I can hope for is to use it more wisely. Sometimes the only way to write is to just do it. Sometimes, it’s better to spend only ten minutes writing than to say at the end of the day that I had no time again. It’s sort of like saving pennies, just a few at a time, but it’s better than that, because writing is not arithmetic.

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