Tag: writing

Be a Voice, Not the Noise

~ Graham Milne ~ 3 Comments

So, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted…

It’s a weird feeling doing this again after over a year away.  It took a tremendous lurch forward from a rather apathetic lull to even dare to log into the site and brush away the digital cobwebs.  And it’s not as though the world helpfully pressed pause in the meantime.  The way information is consumed has changed, and appetites today crave short bursts of salty pith rather than the more languidly composed thousand-word meditation.  Never the sort to use one word when ten will suffice, I wondered often over the past few months if it might be better to quietly shutter this old blog and slip unnoticed off the stage.  It wasn’t as though the nation was turning its lonely eyes to me and begging me to come back.

Where have I been all this time?  To continue the “Mrs. Robinson” reference, the story goes that Joe DiMaggio approached Paul Simon after that song charted and insisted that he hadn’t gone anywhere.  Well, neither did I, really.  I was still here, quietly scrolling my social media feeds, reading friends’ posts, buying their books, silently supporting their success wherever possible, but at the same time, feeling that there wasn’t much of a place for me in that world anymore.   I began seeing so much unfiltered ugliness everywhere across the Internet; venom and sewage gushing from every available orifice, a constant flow of hateful effluent swallowing everything that had been good and hopeful about these marvelous technologies that allow us to reach out and connect with each other across the world.  Election Night, November 2016 really did feel like the moment Biff gives his younger self Gray’s Sports Almanac and skewers reality into a dystopian alternate version of itself that was never meant to be.  I won’t pretend things were perfect before, but there was a distinct tonal shift at that moment in that the bad guys had unexpectedly taken the hill and the good guys were suddenly under siege in a way they had never been before.  The very rules of the conflict had been rewritten right from under us.  You’re not supposed to be able to win this way.  Moreover it didn’t feel like a fight I wanted any part of anymore – dueling trolls is spiritually exhausting and for each one you vanquish, fifteen more will rise to take their place.  Was it really worth courting that kind of intrusion on my sanity just to be one more participant in the boundless cacophony trying to find the most clever, clickable manner of pointing out the terminal stupidity of the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

I tried to write about other things.  I got back into baseball only to see my team collapse, and there are only so many compelling narratives to compose about constant failure in sports.  Eventually I lost my passion for that as well (writing about it, not actually watching the games in constant hope of a surprising turnaround) and 2018 came and went without me writing a single word, apart from a couple of holiday tweets to reassure friends and followers I hadn’t died.  Like a gym membership purchased with the best intentions on January 1st and cancelled before February, it is incredible to me how easy it is to not write a word.  It wasn’t as though I had nothing to say about what was going on in the world, I just didn’t feel that my saying it would be terribly helpful in the Age of Rage.  Did the universe really need the natterings of yet another cisgender white male, however well-intentioned, handed down from upon his privileged perch as though it were etched upon stone tablets for the ecstasy of the masses?  I felt utterly phony, and that the best thing I could do was shut up and retreat into the ether without waving a flag about my oh-so-noble departure, and let others far more deserving have the microphone.  It does often seem that the most appropriate approach in certain debates is not to enter them, so I stayed out, week after week, month after month – cheering my side, facepalming at the machinations of the opponent, and always keeping my own counsel.

The desire to write again never truly ebbed, even as I refocused on family and career (and not always, regrettably, in that order), like a chronic itch in need of periodic scratching.  It was too easy to talk myself out of it though, to submit to more passive pursuits or offer up the common excuse of being incapable of finding the time.  However, life still felt that something was always missing at the edges, as if I was just idling at 95% of the way to what I was supposed to be.  But every time I thought about opening up the laptop and banging something out, the counter-argument roared to life again, asking me if I really wanted to add to the cesspool.  As I had no decent answer to that, I shrugged my shoulders and let another day slip by without touching the keyboard – surfacing only periodically on my locked-down Instagram account to share a picture of me at a Jays game or some interesting creature wandering through my backyard.

As the calendar finally turned on 2018, what likely should have been a very obvious thought struck my addled brain:  whoever said you had to add to the cesspool?  Why such a hopelessly narrow perception of the possibilities?  The list of topics one can discuss are literally limitless, and moreover, why should they be filtered through a cheesecloth of negativity?  No one is telling you that you must weigh in on the pitiable state of Western democracy or that you can’t offer a thoughtful commentary on The Last Jedi without calling for heads to roll.  Why not write about the things you like about the world instead of spending hours editing and re-editing ripostes about the things you don’t until they are polished sabers of snark?  Isn’t the better way to be heard above the noise to simply sound a different note?

Be a voice.

When I am gone, hopefully many, many decades from now, the things I’ve written will survive me, and I would rather they (and I) be judged as someone and something that tried to engender smiles and thoughtful reflection in readers, rather than the tired wails of a perennial malcontent who bemoaned the state of the world but couldn’t be arsed to try to improve it, however incrementally.  What good does that serve anyone, least of all myself?  Who is Graham Milne, and what does he really want to be?  Angry or hopeful?

Pardon the rambling; you’ll forgive me for being a bit out of practice at this.  The Coles Notes version is that despite a few false starts, I’m here, I’m back, and I’m sticking around for a good while.  I respect the limits of your time and while I cannot always guarantee it, I will do my utmost to ensure that what little of it you are able to spend here with me is not wasted, and does not leave you feeling worse than when you first clicked the link.

Allons-y, mes amis.

Anxiety vs. Creativity

~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

SAMSUNG

Over the holidays, I read I Am Brian Wilson, the erstwhile Beach Boy’s second memoir (after the first, written under the heavy influence of his therapist/Svengali Dr. Eugene Landy, Wilson eventually disowned).  I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for anyone looking for a deep insight into his process or a comprehensive behind the scenes chronicle of the Beach Boys’ history; it is very much the fragmented, personal recollections of a man looking back through a peripatetic lens from a lifetime’s distance.  To my generation, Wilson is known largely as the subject of a Barenaked Ladies song, and as the Beach Boys’ records fade from airplay on all but the stubborn classic rock stations, he is remembered at a glance more for his struggles with mental illness than his musical contributions.  To his credit Wilson does not shy away from describing the impact of his illness in his book and what has allowed him to manage it.  It is sad that even in 2017 mental illness remains dogged by stigma; one can only imagine with horror what it was like to endure it under the celebrity spotlight in the era where it was still acceptable to call such individuals crazy and fling them into asylums tended by Nurse Ratched types.

In one passage, Wilson talks rather nonchalantly about seeing a report on television about a link between anxiety and creativity, identifying that the very same part of the brain which can cause us to worry incessantly about things that may never happen is what also allows us to conceive of worlds that never were.  Maybe I’d always instinctively known that, given how many creative types throughout history have experienced some form of mental illness (or have even been described as merely having extremely difficult personalities), but I’d never read it put so simply and directly.  It led me to reflect on my own experiences with anxiety over the years, and to think about how the two forces are linked far beyond the daily battles that may be waged in one particular individual’s brain.

My anxiety would not be termed crippling by any means, as it has never been so debilitating that it has kept me from getting out of bed or functioning as a capable adult, not once.  But there was a time when it kept me fairly isolated from the world, where family and existing friends were ignored and the thought of initiating new relationships was as appealing as the proverbial root canal.  On many consecutive nights alone with West Wing DVD’s playing on a loop in the background, disappearing into the fictional worlds I was creating was the only way I could calm a turbulent stomach and silence the mantra repeating in my head about how I was bound to fail at everything lying out there in wait beyond the door of my one-bedroom apartment.  When fingers touched keyboard, those stresses vanished, and while I was in the process of creating, they were kept far at bay, locked in an impenetrable adamantium cage.

As soon as I hit save and close and stepped away, however, the anxiety roared back – questions of what now, assurances that no one would ever like this, that I’d never find a way to support myself with it, and that it was all a colossal waste of time.  I could never talk about what I was working on either, as my fear of the hated “oh, that’s nice” response or that people would think I was weird or simply wouldn’t get it made it easier to gloss that part of me over or pretend it didn’t exist.  So writing became more and more of a narcotic, as I shunned the outside in favor of the blinking cursor, but a significant part of me still wanted that outside, even as much as I feared entering it or didn’t seem to be able to function very well while navigating it.  I wanted to be as confident in interacting with real human beings as I seemed to be proficient in writing fictional dialogue, and I could never quite understand why the two did not complement one another.  Whatever the case, it was not a recipe for happiness.

Even years removed from those lonely nights, when I am now married, a parent, a homeowner and gainfully, stably employed, the anxiety lingers, reminding me how much of a failure I am each day – even though an objective observer would confidently argue the reverse.  With dogged determination, anxiety has crept into the previously impenetrable sanctuary of the creative process as well, leaching away what used to be the most reliable source of my confidence.  If I were somehow able to plug into my thoughts as I write this post, here is what they would be saying:  who are you kidding, this is pure shit.  This makes no sense, this is self-indulgent and pretentious, the writing is godawful, high school caliber, and hell, even high schoolers can write better than you.  It takes you hours what some of your peers can toss off effortlessly in fifteen minutes, and you might as well just delete this post because nobody’s going to read it, let alone like it anyway.  You should give up and get on with your life and leave this field to people who know what they’re doing and actually have people listening to them.  No one cares.  NO ONE CARES.  (Repeat to fade.)

I thought that eventually this would go away as I wrote more and published wider, but it’s gotten worse, to the point where literally dozens of posts have been strangled in the cradle, never seeing the light of day, because the voice of negativity has been too strong to overcome – expanding from mere inadequacy about one’s capabilities to sheer terror that some pissed off Trump-worshiping Internet troll is going to go to town on them.  But if anxiety and creativity are the same part of the brain, then it stands to reason that an increase in one would be directly proportional to an increase in the other.  As ideas spring and percolate and yearn to take shape, so too does the counterforce in equal measure, belittling and slapping those ideas down; apathy rears its slouching head to nip persistently at the heels of effort.  This doesn’t do any favors to goals of becoming more productive and prolific, but it would seem that you have to accept this rather Faustian trade in order to get on with things, and the less time spent bemoaning it, the better.

Towards the end of his documentary The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, Stephen Fry ruminates about the possibility of trading away his manic phases to the benefit of owning a more stable emotional state of being, and he offers bluntly, “I need my mania.”  It is a rather potent question to be asked even of those of us who don’t veer to those sorts of extremes:  would we give up our creativity to live without our anxiety and much more confidently, in order to be that guy who can walk into the room and charm the pants off everyone he meets, who always knows exactly what to say in every single situation, who never has the slightest doubt about who he is or what to do next, who never worries about what tomorrow might bring?  If you’re a writer, a painter, a musician or anyone who finds their passion in any creative works – whether it’s a casual hobby or how you put food on the table, could you answer with a yes?  I suspect that for many, there are days that you might, when it all seems to be folding in on you, when the abrupt ring of the telephone is a blade filleting every last nerve into shreds of spaghetti and you can’t fathom how you’re going to make it till tomorrow.  Yet in the calmer moments, you can look back at the impressive body of work that you’ve amassed and shake your head and say of course not, are you kidding me?  It is a lingering question with as many layers of duality as the integration of the two states themselves.

Even after reading his memoir I don’t know if Brian Wilson could definitively say one way or another, if he would have preferred a quiet, certain life over the chance to gift the world with “God Only Knows.”  But there might be a serenity to be found in learning (eventually) to accept that, in the words of Frank Sinatra, you can’t have one without the other – that the pitiless snarls of the beast salivating for your failure are mere fuel for the imagination that will ensure your success.

When you figure out how, let me know.

A Recipe for Making Sausages

~ Graham Milne

keyboard

That title probably sounds a little too innuendo-ish for your liking (and even now I’m regretting the potential algorithmic implications), but rest assured that the discussion to follow is SFW to the highest degree.  Having recently completed a long work (Vintage) and looking back on it now from the safe perch of a few months’ distance, I feel the time appropriate to offer a few reflections on the process of the thing.  Perhaps it’s for posterity’s sake; when I’m looking back through cataracts from thirty years further on and my brain has become addled with age and lost memories, I might find it enlightening – or possibly embarrassing, who knows, really.

Back in “the day,” long before Internet and the age of instant gratification for even the slightest itch, there would usually be a healthy distance between the author and the work – you could receive and evaluate the story on its merits alone without getting overly bogged down by the storyteller’s intentions and inspirations.  You might see a cryptic print interview here and there providing hints, but the author would usually remain an enigma with the work forced to its betterment to stand on its own.  But that’s not the case now, with the world’s glut of writers actively pushing their stories across social media while at the same time being more accessible than they ever have been before.  Work and creator are irrevocably intertwined and intent is as important as event.  I’m forced to wonder if this is healthy even as I find myself doing it as I read (current slog:  Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, which halfway through is teetering precariously on the knife edge of pointless self-indulgence).  It might be better, truly, to let the work stand on its own.  At the same time, if learning about the “how” inspires a few more readers to check out the “what” – and tell a few more readers in turn – then maybe it’s worth the exercise.  So enough navel-gazing and let’s get on with the show, presented in the form of a hard-hitting self-interview.

What inspired you to write Vintage?

Simply put, I hated what I was doing.  I felt that I was stagnating as a writer.  I was not having any luck with the querying process and it was discouraging to accumulate rejection after rejection while witnessing what seemed like a perpetual stream of other people’s “I got an agent!” and “I got a book deal!” tweets pouring through my feed.   (You want to be happy for those folks but you still question what the hell you’re doing wrong that it’s not your turn yet.)  And I was finding it difficult to keep coming up with engaging topics for my blog – both subjects that I would enjoy writing about and those I felt would draw some new eyeballs my way.  I felt a compulsion to do something different, and fiction seemed to be a most logical outlet – where I would be creating an original story in which I could decide what happened and would not be restricted to commenting on events occurring around me.  There was a pretty good chance too that it might alienate some of my audience, but I don’t think you do yourself any favors by remaining predictable.  The best musicians are those who keep trying to do something different instead of always relying on what made them popular in the first place.

And then into my dreams one night popped this image:  a man half-frozen in the ice while a beautiful woman in a cloak looked down at him.  No context or anything, just this single image that stayed with me for a few days.  It seemed to be something that a story could wrap itself around.  Turned out it was, as details began to fall in place around it – the notion of a man who thinks he’s powerful in his own right but finds himself completely beguiled by a woman with a power he can’t duplicate or even fully understand.  I always want the stories I tell to have depth and meaning – to be about something – even if they seem on the surface to be a fairly airy, mindless romp.  Otherwise, it’s just a waste of words.  You have to be careful with this approach in that you don’t want to sledgehammer your reader with THE BIG LESSON.  I try instead to weave it in there so you don’t even notice that your assumptions are being challenged while you’re breezing along.  Whether I’m successful in that or not is for the reader to decide.

Was the story always intended to be what it turned out to be?

No, not at all.  As I alluded in a few of the chapter introductions I thought it was only going to be about four or five parts at most.  I began to worry a bit when the aforementioned image of the man in the ice didn’t turn up until Chapter Eight.  If I’d been more disciplined in my initial intent to do a short serial then I would have created a proper outline and written strictly to that.  But frankly I was just enjoying the creative exercise of writing away and finding out where the story went on its own.  This is the nature of the “pantser-vs.-plotter” debate that many writers have undergone, and it’s become abundantly clear to me through the Vintage process that I hate writing to outlines and that I’m much happier as a pantser.  I love discovering the story as I go and when I am writing to a predetermined end I find my words weaker and more forced and obvious.  Publishing one chapter at a time was an interesting challenge in itself as you had to pick up where you left off without the benefit of being able to go back and tweak things to get yourself out of jams.  You had to dance with the one that brung you, so to speak.  (I only retroactively changed one minor thing, and that was the location of the entrance to the secret storehouse beneath the Bureau Centrale headquarters, which was a pretty inconsequential detail but would have made for an awkward transition in the big finale.  So sue me.)

How did the story evolve in your mind?

I think the best way to articulate it would be to say it was like crafting a series of independent jigsaw pieces and then figuring out a way to fit them together.  I had this image of the man in the ice but I obviously had to get there, so with the understanding that the man was a witch hunter and the woman was his target, I started by writing a series of scenes that were – without sounding too pretentious – jazz riffs on other stories.  Etienne’s monologue where he figures out that the people of Montagnes-les-grands have been using magic to augment their wine took inspiration from Christoph Waltz’s long speeches in Inglourious Basterds.  The scene with Etienne in the casino is very obviously a riff on Casino Royale, and him getting his assignment from the Directeurs is the first fifteen minutes of Apocalypse Now, right down to the takeoff on the “terminate with extreme prejudice” line.  There’s an echo of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Etienne’s solo flight from Le Taureau’s village.  As a writer I’m just playing, playing different notes, having fun, trying to get a feel for what works and where this is going, until I get that lightbulb moment and think “aha!  Okay, now I know what this story is about and where it should go.”  I think that is the reader’s experience as well.  You’re standing at the bottom of the hill trying to get your hands about the tow rope, and once you latch on, you’re off like a shot.  Going back and reading it from start to finish, all those disparate early scenes fit into the spine of the story very nicely, but in a way that was almost a happy accident.  It could have just as easily not worked out.

How did the characters change from how you originally conceptualized them?

I should tag this answer with SPOILERS in case you haven’t read Vintage yet.  The major difference was that Etienne was never intended to be redeemed.  He was going to be a bad guy to the bitter end and ultimately be done in by his own arrogance and hubris, hauled off in irons while Nightingale laughed in the shadows.  His parents were never going to be part of the equation.  But really, “bad guy comes to bad end” is not that interesting a story.  Watching a bad man have a revelation and then try to atone makes for – at least in my opinion – a more compelling experience.  My own philosophy – my liberalism, if you will, is that I want to believe that the worst of us is capable of being and doing better, that there is no such thing as absolute evil.  At the same time, there is no coming back from a lot of the stuff that Etienne has done in the past.  Yeah, he got screwed over, but the answer to that is not necessarily to screw over other people yourself.  He himself recognizes that he can’t be forgiven, and so that’s why his story ends the way it does, and really, as I wrote it, as much as I began to grow attached to the character, I knew it couldn’t end any other way.

I can admit that Nightingale is a cliche:  the beautiful, seductive witch who leads men astray with her mysterious powers (she’s drawn from the same cloth as Melisandre in Game of Thrones among many, many others.)  Fantasy is full of one-dimensional sexy sorceresses placed there to appeal to our more prurient interests, but that doesn’t mean that a sexy sorceress can’t have depth and intelligence and an allure that isn’t predicated on the skimpiness of her outfit in the cover art.  Take the cliche and tear it apart, twist it around, poke at it, stretch it, flip it inside out.  What would someone like that really be like?  What would move her heart and drive her actions?  The story is told from Etienne’s POV but I wanted Nightingale to transcend the cliche and be as complete a character as possible.  I also wanted to ensure that the relationship between her and Etienne was handled properly.  It did not seem to me that someone like her could ever truly fall in love with someone like him given his history – though they could connect on other levels, most certainly the physical one.  You’ll note she never tells him she loves him, not once, and even in the epilogue she is evasive about her true feelings.  Really, they are her business, and no one else’s.

Without giving too much away, I can say that there was not a single main character who did not end up in a radically different place from where they were originally scripted to be.  Le Taureau, for example, was a one-off obstacle I dropped in to separate Etienne from his group for a little while.  I had no idea when I first wrote him that he would eventually come back at all, let alone become an important ally for the good guys, nor that his colorful language would be such a distinguishing trait.  (As an aside, until I literally wrote the line “The last time I saw him, I stabbed him through the hand,” I did not know I’d be bringing him back.)

How did you go about the worldbuilding?

Worldbuilding is my nemesis.  It really is.  I’m much better at characters and dialogue (see the blog post entitled “I Suck at Description” for a more thorough read on this particular boggle).  I just want to get on with the plot, so to speak.  But I think with Vintage I took a big leap forward in this regard.  Starting out by deciding to set it in the same universe as the novel I was querying removed a big burden as I could just start writing with the same basic rules in place vis a vis who has magic and who doesn’t and what the general society looks like.  The home country in the novel is written in a very English idiom, and quite frankly English accents in fantasy stories are yet another cliche, so I thought it might be fun to flip that on its ear and do the whole thing with a French feel instead.  (It also let me drag out my underused French language skills.)  Placenames and character names were drawn from French baby name websites, usually mashing unrelated syllables together to keep the French feel while creating brand new, unfamiliar monikers.

From there it was a matter of filling in the blanks while remaining true to the overall “French-ness” (even though the story obviously doesn’t take place in France).  For the scene in the casino I wasn’t going to rip you out of the story by using a real life card game, so I just made one up.  Calerre is a port city and the origin and center of the country’s gambling industry so it stood to reason that the cards might have a nautical theme to them, hence ships, oceans and moons instead of spades, clubs and diamonds.  (Don’t ask me how to actually play route de perle though, I just made up enough of it to fit the scene.)  When Etienne meets the two sisters and the other Commissionaire in Charmanoix, there was no specific reason to putting the whole community on stilts over a river other than we were now in our fourth different town setting and I wanted it to have a much different feel than the others, otherwise you’d get bored (and so would I).  But out of that setting grew the chase across the bridges and the fight to the death on the burning rope, so it was a terrific exercise in seeing how even the most basic worldbuilding could inform the evolution of the characters and of the plot.  Obviously these folks who go on about worldbuilding are onto something.

Why didn’t you put Chapter Eighteen on your blog?

I went back and forth on that a dozen times.  Maybe that was off-putting to a few folks, I don’t know.  What it came down to was that I was going to write a pretty racy and descriptive (yet tasteful) sex scene and I just didn’t feel that belonged here with posts about being a dad, the Toronto Blue Jays, U.S. and Canadian politics and the lion’s share of the rest of my work.  If you’re tuning in to hear what I thought of The Force Awakens I’m guessing you probably won’t appreciate stumbling on titillating depictions of tangling naked flesh.  I certainly don’t make any apologies for writing the scene, I think it was a logical progression of the story, it accomplished what it set out to, and I’m not in any way embarrassed by it – it was crucial to me that it was passionate yet completely consensual, and I think it was.  Interestingly enough, if you skip from Seventeen to Nineteen you can still follow the narrative and just guess what has happened, so I don’t think making Eighteen a little harder to track down harms anything in the end.  And nobody complained, so there you have it.

What would you change if you could do it all again?

What’s that great line of Woody Allen’s:  “If I had my life to live over again, I would do everything exactly the same except I wouldn’t see The Magus.”  I’ve looked at Vintage a couple of times since finishing it and I haven’t really found anything that screams out at me as a major sore-thumb error.  I guess I would have liked to have gotten it done faster, but overall I’m pretty happy with it, and I’m glad I wrote it.  I think the exercise of it sharpened my description skills; I made more of a conscious point to delve into the other senses when depicting scenes, and the writing feels far less clunky to me.  I also like that it moves at a better and faster clip than the novel, coming in at a relatively lean (for the genre) 95,000 words.  I like the twists, especially given that most of them were totally unplanned.  Do I think it’s the most magnificent thing ever put to paper?  Umm, no, of course not.  What I do like most about it is that I think it represents a maturity in my ability to write and to create a story, and with it I’ve learned lessons that I’m eager to apply to the next one, whatever that may be about.  Maybe we might even see Nightingale again some day in some unexpected setting.  She does have a tendency to appear in a flash of white light whenever she feels like it.

Never say never, especially where magic is involved.

In either case, thanks for letting me ramble on here.  A reminder that Vintage is available in its entirety on Wattpad or here at the main site, with all the chapters helpfully indexed for you on their own dedicated page.  If you have any comments or questions about Vintage that I haven’t addressed here, feel free to so advise in the comments.  Thank you for your patience during my radio silence and I look forward to posting on a more regular schedule once again.  Speaking of which, man, does that Blue Jays bullpen need help…

2015: A Year Off the Beaten Path

~ Graham Milne ~ 2 Comments

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys, cuddly little chimps that they are, prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Well, here we are all over again.  December 31st, a little less than 6 hours left in the year, and a man’s thoughts are entirely absent from the moment at hand, instead both reflecting and looking forward.  I wouldn’t say this was the greatest year of my life – it did have more than a generous share of challenges, and it departs largely unmourned and leaving much uncertainty in its wake as 2016 rolls up to take its place.  I don’t feel it’s necessary to elaborate more than that; I always think there should be a healthy distance between the words and the body that types them out, or rather, what I have to say is of more interest to the rest of you than what I or my family might be going through.  Anyway, nobody’s dying, nobody’s getting divorced, nobody’s shaving their body hair and moving to Nepal to join a monastery.  We row onward against the current, our boat no more or less special than anyone else’s.

So let’s look at the writing year that was 2015.  Not quite up to the productivity levels of years past.  That’s largely because I poured most of my efforts into Vintage, the little short serial that metamorphosed into a novel.  I was joking with my friend Joanne that it is symptomatic of my inability to get to the point.  It really did come as something of a surprise to me.  I wrote it without an outline or any plot of any sort, just a collection of scenes that turned out to have a fairly solid narrative spine underneath.  While I didn’t get to complete it this year as I had hoped, it should wrap up very shortly after January begins.  The question then is what to do with it.  I have thought of doing what Ksenia Anske does and leaving it here as a free download.  (There is a line in Live and Let Die where the villain opines that “when entering into a crowded marketplace it is advisable to give away free samples.”  Of course, he was talking about heroin, but given the oversaturation of material out there you do have to do whatever you can to get some notice.)  Anyway, we’ll see on that one.  It needs a decent cover first.  (My graphic design skills are crap.)  I know it probably hasn’t been to everyone’s taste, and it is kind of difficult to keep up with it as chapters are published on an irregular schedule, but I just wanted to thank everyone who has been reading it for the support.  If I’m a bit lackadaisical in responding to comments sometimes please know that I do appreciate every single person who takes the time.  I hope it’s been rewarding thus far, and I hope you like how it ends.  (If you are new to it and would like to catch up, you can read the whole thing start to finish by clicking the Wattpad icon to the right.)

A couple other points of note:  I was lucky enough to get the Freshly Pressed designation for the second time this year, for a post about Justin Trudeau’s majority government victory back in October.  (Given that my first Freshly Pressing was for a post about Justin Bieber, I should clearly be writing only columns about people named Justin from now on.  Look for pieces on Justin Timberlake and Justin Smoak coming soon.)  I was also fortunate to be asked by one of my favorite singers, Emilie-Claire Barlow, to review her latest album.  She sent me a wonderful note afterwards, the details of which I won’t share except to say that it was tremendously complimentary and meant a great deal to me.  One of the things that the Internet is great for is closing the distance between ourselves and those we admire in the public sphere, and as my most recent post about Carrie Fisher illustrates, I do wish that we could make greater use of the positive aspects of our digital closeness rather than always descending into the gutter to vent unnecessary spleen.

What lies ahead?  Well, I like to visualize my goals for the coming year by imagining what my Twitter biography will read.  “Author of XXXXX, rep’d by XXXXXX” would be a good start.  And call me a materialistic jackanape, but I’d love to actually get some sort of financial compensation for some of this work that I churn out.  I do have a few avenues in mind for that, so we’ll see how it plays out.  In the long form realm, I have a non-fiction book idea that I’ve spoken to my wife about collaborating on, a memoir about our journey to our adoption and our life since.  In the last few days I’ve been mulling over a YA love story about a girl who loves baseball and a boy who most definitely doesn’t.  I’d like to do more interviews with some of my online writer friends.  And I want to establish a more regular schedule of posting here and seeing what other sites out there besides HuffPost might deign to have me.  There’s no reason why I won’t be sitting here 365 days from now have accomplished all these things; it only requires dedication and commitment, and a stubborn belief in one’s own capacity for greatness given the right amount of hard work.

In the meantime, thank you as always for reading and subscribing, and following me wherever I choose to wander.  I hope that the new year brings you the things that you wish for and work for, and that next December finds our world in general in just a much nicer, happier place.

All the best.

Graham