Escape Clause

Escape Clause, which includes my short story "Five Dragons", is now officially available. This is a lovely volume and I'm honoured to be a part of it. Clélie Rich and Kit St. Germain have made an awesome contribution to speculative fiction with this book.

You can order a copy here:

http://www.inkoinkartinc.com/shop.html

NaNoWriMo 2009 Day One

The plot thickens! The coffee brews! The fun begins!

I guess I'm blogging this month, since this is a fun way to track progress.

First of all, people, I have to say, if you're NaNoWriMoing on your lonesome, don't. It's far easier to tap into the amazing collective consciousness that is NaNoWriMo if you're in touch with your local people.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here:

www.nanowrimo.org

But hurry! National Novel Writing Month began about 25 hours ago!

Day One Stats:
Words: 3066
Vampiric attempts to write personal ads: 1
Cheesy pickup lines: 2 or 3
Cheesed off vamp wannabes: 1

As you can see, there's a lot of cheese this year. Don't worry: the quality violence is on its way.

Revenant Army Map

I'm beginning work on my summer novel, a modern-day horror piece I'm tentatively titling Revenant Army. It looks like it's going to be a blend of The Seven Samurai, Northern Canadian hijinks, and the dual legacies of the Hudson's Bay Company and Dr. Frankenstein.

Lo, another treeless vista, milady!

I've been collecting images from our North, like these of Prince of Wales Fort, which stands across the Churchill River from Churchill, Manitoba. This fort was built out of logs in 1717; the stone structure that still stands today was begun in 1731.

I wonder if, given the right kinds of weapons, a modern group of vigilantes could hold off something nasty in an old Northern outpost like this one?

ETA: Apparently not. Evidently in my education as a proper Canadian youth, I skipped a significant Vignette!

Now I've got a travel bug as well as a research bug (not to mention a plot-devising bug...).

In any case, as suggested by the first of the Summer of Fantasy challenges, I've been playing around this afternoon with mapmaking / animated gif construction. This is fun, people. I've found some potentially useful fun facts and a hole. First the hole:

And now the fun facts (courtesy of good ol' Wikipedia):

When Earth's gravitational field was mapped starting in the 1960s a large region of below-average gravity was detected in the Hudson Bay region. This was initially thought to be a result of the crust still being depressed from the weight of the Laurentide ice sheet during the most recent Ice Age, but more detailed observations taken by the GRACE satellite suggest that this effect cannot account for the entirety of the gravitational anomaly. It is thought that convection in the underlying mantle may be contributing.

Sleep

If I'm doing chi kung (qiqong) meditation at home, I have a little routine I like to follow. First I do a little chanting. If I need to, I stretch. And then I sit meditation.

When you go into a sitting chi kung session, you often go very deep. Numerous fascinating things happen: you see colours throbbing and pulsing in front of you. Reality goes in and out of focus. Sometimes there are special guest stars: I recently watched as globs of light dripped down from the ceiling of my room, and two sets of luminous footprints laid themselves out in a counterclockwise circle around me.

When you come out again, you have to settle back down into yourself before you can stand up and walk around. You've been in touch with another, higher level of consciousness. Plus in my case, I've been sitting in half lotus, so things are...numb. I usually have to take a minute or two of just sitting with my legs stretched out before the feeling returns, my energy settles, and I can stand and head out into my day.

One of the things I have on hand for this time is Deng Ming-Dao's book 365 Tao: Daily Mediations. This is a cute little book that gives you a word, a Chinese character done in a gorgeous calligraphy, a snippet of verse, and a prose extension of the snippet of verse that tie in with the word for each day of the year. During my wind-down time after sitting, I'll read the entry for that day and think about it.

The word for June 1 is "Sleep". The poem I thought I'd share because it's uncharacteristically horroresque for a book of cute daily meditations:

Sleep is like a swift train
Plunging into long black tunnels,
Slicing day with red and black light,
No worry about the skeleton engineer.
Head to pillow is like head to track,
Listening to the rumble of destiny,
Knowing that the opening will come.
In sleep, as in the tunnels,
The sound seems ever closer.

Stringing Words

Sometime over this past winter, I began to realize that I was lacking a solid writing community. "Twist," I said to myself, "there's just no excuse for being a solitary writer these days." So I checked in with my local NaNoWriMo region and began stalking some writers.

If you're looking for writers in your home area, National Novel Writing Month's regional forums are a great place to start. (And why aren't you NaNoWriMo-ing? It's fun, addictive, and often wildly productive.)

Our local region here in Hamilton is great. Throughout ScriptFrenzy, we had regular in-person meetings that were really helpful. One of my fellow screnziers and I are still soldiering on with weekly meetings, which is awesome.

Of course there's also the online writing community. Through one of the Hamilton region writers, I was introduced to Stringing Words, a writing forum that she and two other women founded. This is an awesome group. There's a huge range of experience and ages here. There's a core group of people who it seems have been around for a while, and let me tell you, these are nice people with great senses of humour and an impressive passion for writing. They are writing fiends.

So if you're looking to hop on a bandwagon, these people will let you call shotgun and tell you you're gonna fly that thing to the moon.

Right now, plans are cooking for something called "The Summer of Fantasy". It's looking like it will be a three-month extravaganza. June is dedicated to world-building exercises, and July and August are set aside for drafting a fantasy novel based on what you build in June. I'm ultra excited about it. Come join us! I dare ya!

Forums are mostly members-only, so you'll want to join to get a full browsing experience in.

stringingwords.com

Five Dragons

I got word from the good people at the new anthology Escape Clause that they've accepted a piece of mine called "Five Dragons". I'm bursting with pride, especially because this is a Canadian speculative anthology. And, you know, we're a speculative nation.

Spring comes to the woods

Hey, it's spring. Let's take a walk.

Come on!

Come on!

Everywhere, the trees are bursting with life.

Winter's back is broken. The old gives way to the new.

What was frozen flows again.

The trees reach for the sky.

These are trout lily leaves, poking up out of the forest floor. Our friend Wendy showed us that these are edible. They taste a little like sweet peas (the bean, not the flower!). You can eat the roots, too. They're nice in a salad.

Here's a bunch of them, growing at the base of a tree.

They also flower (hence the name, I suppose!). Isn't it beautiful?

These tiny purple flowers started growing everywhere a week ago.

Some of the things that grow here are a little strange. This plant has rust-coloured flowers. I can only imagine the insects that are attracted to this!

Even the slightly nasty plants are growing like crazy.

Look, an alien pod!

There's still the meadow up ahead. Come on!

Come on!

The meadow grass is slowly greening.

It's time to celebrate spring. All the best to everyone this season.