June 8th, 2008 writerspice
Rising gas prices have finally raised the question. Should we stay or should we go?
It’s not an easy one to answer, but since airplanes deliver one of the worst doses of carbon, it’s long overdo that we stop treating travel like it is sacrosanct in the discussion about climate change and start thinking about what staying home can give us.
Read more about this – “the first real end of the exciting and engaging world that those of us in the more prosperous part of the planet (who are prosperous enough to afford it) have learned to enjoy over the past hundred years” – in my most recent post on Celsias.com
Photo by Malias
Posted in Contemplations, Going Green, Issues | No Comments »
May 20th, 2008 writerspice
Here in Canada, despite our long-standing sovereignty, we continue to celebrate the birthday of royal monarch Queen Victoria. Known affectionately as May 2-4 (get it?), the long May weekend, which just passed, always reminds me of those oh-so-brief relationships that peppered the tedium of high-school.
You know the type. For weeks before actually getting together, the spirits were drenched in infatuated anticipation. A butterfly broke lose from its chrysalis every time he cast a glance your way in chemistry class. And then, the moment came. You got together with some sloppy dance-floor kisses, only to quickly discover in the coming days that he was either a) drunk, b) actually seeing someone else, or c) really, really into hockey.
We spend so much time waiting – a whole white, frigid winter – for the first weekend of summer and nine times out to ten, those three precious days are still bogged down by bad weather. This year, the annual May 2-4, proved again disappointing.
J. and I had great plans. We were going to head out into the wind for an overnight with my mom and step-dad on our co-owned sailboat. Only problem, the wind would have knocked us flat, to then be pounded by rain, to then be frozen solid by the plummeting temperatures.
Sailing plans cancelled, we were still obligated to bring the canine baby to the kennel. So, we dropped him off and ended up at what we call commerce-land to catch a matinee.
Unfortunately, everybody else in town had the same thought.
We got advance tickets for the early evening show, grabbed a disappointing bite to eat at a nearby cafe and ended up taking advantage of our dog-free time by, um, wandering the aisles of Future Shop, Home Depot, and, yes, I admit it, Walmart, where we purchased a Pyrex measuring cup, some smaller measuring cups and fish hooks. J. also romantically squired me into a Dollar Store where we cruised the craft aisle and he bought a single square of yellow foam and some beads.
After killing those couple hours, we ended up watching that new Patrick Dempsey rom-com, Made to Honor or Made of Honor, or whatever it’s called. Despite the clutch of teenage girls actively pretending they owned the place in the back row, it wasn’t all that bad. The best part? Both the stunning Scottish scenery and beer, afterwards, at a downtown pub where we talked about the movie, writing and extreme wrestling. Mostly.
Once I was stuck in a small village in Argentina with nothing at all to do. So I went to a movie. A scrawled sign on the outside gave the ticket price for something like “a man and his family.” I’m not sure what I paid for the film – that Nicolas Cage one, where he wishes he was single and wakes up into an alternate life without his family – but it was fun and gave me a break from both my solitude and my book.
Yesterday morning, lying in bed finishing up a Jane Austin novel, I realized that sometimes, no matter where you are, no matter what high hopes you have for a holiday, what exotic food is appearing on your plate or what language floats through the air around you, plans just don’t work out and life becomes, well, boring. Back before we had the privilege of easy travel, it was that way more often (especially for women who couldn’t randomly announce they were leaving the children and the spouse to go shoot something in the pastoral countryside and had to rely on needlework to vigorously stab away the time).
That’s just the way things are.
Book finished, I got up and weeded the garden and felt a bit better. And, hey, no matter how many disappointing, sloppy kisses the weekend gave us, it’s still a four-day work-week and nobody can be annoyed by that (well, except maybe Queen Victoria, who, in all her portraits, never really seems happy about anything at all. Maybe she was sick of all that needlework).
Posted in Contemplations, Orillia, Seasons | No Comments »
April 30th, 2008 writerspice
I don’t know if it’s because I recently finished re-watching the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or all the bad news lately but if ever there was a time when I was tempted to grow a long, white beard and hoist a sign on the street corner, this is it.
The end, I told Jason this morning, is nigh.
I know, I know, it’s my own damn fault. As mentioned last week, I’ve started writing a post here and there for Celsias.com, a gig that’s keeping me increasingly invested in the chaos steadily creeping across the world.
My first piece was on Bill C-517, currently in the House of Commons, to enforce labelling of Genetically Modified Foods (for those of you Googling, as I was unsuccessfully, to find the date of the final debate and subsequent vote, it is May 6th, with voting on the 7th – had to call my MP for that information, as the issue hasn’t made even a squeak in recent mainstream media).
This led to a teary-eyed viewing (the last scene is a killer) of The World According to Monsanto (pour a stiff drink grab the bottle and stay away from all sharp objects for the duration of this film) and the compilation of an epic amount of information to try to convince my MP to vote in favour of the bill, despite his opposition. After all that, exhaustion set in.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not apathetic. I care. I’ve even been a tireless activist. In fact, for a long time I was out there standing against stupid environmental ideas like Adams Mine, getting people to sign a petition for free Toronto transit on smog days, running a neighbourhood newspaper, organizing peace rallies and lots of other stuff. But after awhile, I realized that I could feel my soul pooling on the floor beneath me. And I decided I needed it, all to myself. I had no quiet corners. And, practically speaking, it is, in my experience, impossible to be a writer without them.
So now I just write. Every now and then I leave the house. But for the most part, I am in my chair, trolling the net for the latest in travel, environmental and other news. Practicing my craft. This solitude is probably part of my problem vis-a-vis the whole end-is-nigh thing.
When I get out of the house, it’s nice to learn I’m not alone. This past weekend, J. and I went down to Toronto. We spent Friday evening and Saturday morning with friends. It was a great time; so nice to reconnect with people we hadn’t seen in a long while and just to hang out in the city.
Over local organic beer, I found myself talking about GMO foods. Quickly, my friend Lina’s boyfriend put his hand up. “I’m too worried we’re going to run out of water,” he said. “I can’t really go there.” The next day, my friend Phil interrupted the start of my sermon over diner eggs and homefries on the Danforth. “I’m on peak oil,” he said. “Sorry.”
Maybe I could have an end-is-nigh party, I thought.
This weekend, Jason and I are going to rent some, um, funny movies.
I’m going to try to remember how to laugh.
With that on the agenda alongside the first sail of the season and the opening of my mom and stepdad’s joint art show at the quaint Coldwater Gallery (if you’re in the neighbourhood…), it should be a fine last weekend should the hellmouth decide to stretch itself open anytime soon.
Photo by Jason Cartwright
Posted in Contemplations, Going Green, Issues, Writing Life | No Comments »
April 21st, 2008 writerspice
A few weeks ago, bloggers Peter Davidson – a fellow Canadian currently writing out of Shanghai, China – and Julie Schwietert – a prolific writer who splits her time between New York, Mexico City and San Juan – asked me and a few other travel writers how we decide whether to pitch or to blog.
The collected answers – in an article for The Traveler’s Notebook called Travel Stories: Knowing When to Pitch to an Editor and When to Blog – make for some interesting reading, especially for newly emerging travel writers trying to make a go of it while both blogging and pitching and selling work.
It seems to me it must be a tougher go nowadays. I’ve often wondered how things would be different for me, if I was starting out now and not when I did, in the days just preceding the Internet, when being published meant carefully writing a query letter, affixing a stamp and sending it out with sample writing clips enclosed.
Part of what drove me to learn to write a query and craft those first pitches was the urge to see my name in print. These days, it’s so easy to satisfy that need for gratification, and instantly, too. It makes me wonder if I would even bother learning how to craft a query and pitching editors if I was just now beginning to write.
If I was in the early days of writing freelance, I might just start a blog, or four, and find another way to make a steady living.
Don’t get me wrong, I realize that there are lots of new opportunities for writers these days and if it weren’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t be living in a small city nearly a two-hour drive (during rush hour) from Toronto. I’d have to be in the big city. I’m thankful for that, but it is also hard to know how exactly to capitalize on the new reality of lots and lots of words for, seemingly, less and less pay. Or, even, for free.
There are some great ideas out there, and certainly writers are doing it, including those interviewed for Julie and Peter’s story. Blogging can build your reputation, Abha Malpani pointed out. It can also help you gain a readership, including a literary agent, says Kelsey Timmerman, blogger at whereamiwearing.com in another discussion, at WorldHum, about how important blogging is for a travel writing career.
Lots of interesting perspectives and important questions keep coming up in this debate, an important one as advertising profits for traditional print media continue to shift into the online world.
But what I’m wondering is what does it mean for a conventional career as a writer?
Can we make it?
Yes, blogging attracts attention and does result in getting gigs but are those jobs enough to put a turkey – or tofurkey – on the table every now and then?
Posted in Contemplations, Issues, Writing Life | 1 Comment »
April 9th, 2008 writerspice
The New York Times recently published a great article about the perils of the blogging sweatshops that have formed in the new reality of writing for the Internet. In a word, death. It seems a few tireless bloggers have suffered coronaries possibly caused by the incredible stress of being ‘on’ all the time, in order to do the job and get paid for it.
In the article, one blogger “says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled — by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.”
For me, this article couldn’t have come at a more perfect time.
Over the last few days, with one of my main markets having temporarily dried up, I’ve been surfing for work. As usual, there are lots of places looking for writers willing to write for peanuts. One job, posted on a Canadian Craigslist page, offered $7.00 an hour to start. In the skewed reality of writing for the web, this might not seem so bad, when so many of the blogging jobs offer a measly $3.00 to $5.00 per 250 word post. Still, it contains an irony.
On March 31st, the minimum wage here in Ontario, Canada went up to $8.75.
Just imagine: the lucky writer who gets that job will be making less than the pre-teen at Tim Horton’s.
With this new industry developing online, I wonder a lot why our main associations for freelance writers seem to stay mainly fixated solely on all-rights grabs at print publications instead of addressing the reality of workers churning out hundreds of articles for measly pay.
And other writers seem to think this is primarily a personal decision of weighing priorities, but to me it’s way more than that. It’s an industry issue. If that server at Tim Horton’s died of a heart attack because of the stress of having to serve coffee 24/7 in order to make enough money to live, wouldn’t someone assess the situation?
Wouldn’t something change?
Posted in Contemplations, Issues, Writing Life | 4 Comments »
March 10th, 2008 writerspice
Thanks to T.S Eliot, everyone calls April the cruelest month… Well, maybe in England.
Maybe in England April is all about soggy skies and flaccid flowers but here, in Central Ontario, April is more about, um, Hope, Sun, and, ultimately, The Big Melt.
In fact, I can’t wait for April.
In this neck of the woods, March is, in fact, the cruelest month. Or at least one of them.
It makes perfect sense that it’s named after the God of War. Just when you start sniffing some odour of spring in the cool air, WHAM, the weather turns and things like this weekend happen – double-digit metric measurements of snow dumped on the landscape. A sneak attack, an invasion.
And today it’s freezing cold; the alarmingly tall snowbanks are frozen into fortresses. Walking home from the library the other day, J. and I tried to kick one over. No luck. It was solid, like stone, and our feet smashed against its hardness as if we were kicking at a mountain. They’re all over the place now – these solid sentries narrowing the streets, standing like obstacles to anyone in a comparably midget car trying to peek around the corner to see if anyone is coming.
The only remedy for all this is either to Get the Hell Out, a prescription that requires available funds which, unfortunately, are all being consumed by the sky-rocketing cost of the oil fuel that heats our house. Or, two, Daydreaming. (I know I’ve written about this before but that’s because I’m a writer who lives in the snowy part of Canada…)
As a kid, growing up in Blind River, I mastered this art while standing on the silent beach, my body wrapped mummy-style in scarves and other woolen clothing items, staring out at Lake Huron and imaging it was the Mediterranean, the Dead Sea, the Red Sea, any sort of ocean that promised the slightest inkling of Exotic Warmth.
My fantasies have changed a bit. These days, while J. plans every detail of the week-long solo canoe trip he’ll be embarking on this summer, I’ve been stuck in England. He moves his fingers along the blue routes of rivers and I flip the pages of a guidebook to walk the Coast-to-Coast Trail or Hadrian’s Wall. It’s the north I want to see – mostly, the Yorkshire Dales in August when the purple heather makes a richly-coloured rug of the landscape. We’ll walk on it all day, returning to cook up some dinner and sip some tea at a home-base a wee bit like this.
It likely won’t happen this year, but that’s okay. A large part of the process is the dreaming. It gives relief from the cold that everyone is complaining about, from the wind that seems extra biting on this last slim bridge towards summer.
Photo of the Yorkshire Dales by Stuart Hamilton
Posted in Contemplations, Seasons | No Comments »
February 14th, 2008 writerspice
Okay, Okay. I know. I know!
I have fallen prey to the blogger’s disease, procrastination, abandonment, evident in the long delay between posts, that vacuous sense of time that must greet any of my regular readers as they wander over to my site only to see that, no, I’ve yet to update and haven’t for nearly one whole month. Where is she?, I imagine someone wondering, sitting in a cool adobe hut in South American summer or cranking up the generator to get on-line somewhere around James Bay.
But perhaps that is simply my ego and these words actually unfurl into a void.
Whatever the case, here is my update.
My computer crashed a couple weeks ago, just before J. and I began gradually, slowly dismantling our house in the constant pursuit of renovation. In an empty space that joined our bedroom and my office we, well, actually, he and his dad, built a wall. You know, dry wall, plaster and hours and hours of puttying and sanding and puttying and sanding… Needless to say, currently my office is a mound of desk-books-chairs-computer (minus the box, which is still in the shop) shoved into a corner and covered in plastic. I am writing this at my alternate work area – the bed, a cup of tea beside me, a newly-caught cold gripping my chest.
And then there was Arizona.
Four blissful days exploring the desert and indulging in Phoenix during a press trip. There is something magical about Arizona. Not to sound new age (been there, done that) but the energy seems somehow clearer. New ideas and understandings ricocheted through my mind. I just felt so grounded.
I love that.
And so I’m back. More or less. Ready to pop open a few more cans of paint today and keep on going. But, dear reader, propped on a wooden platform in a forest swamp or tucked into a 300-square-foot office in a city centre, I will do my best to keep the accounts a-comin’.
Even without my own computer…
Posted in Contemplations, News, Other, Writing Life | No Comments »
January 19th, 2008 writerspice
Last May, in downtown Santiago de Chile, I found myself laughing my head off in a brightly-lit diner. It was around midnight and a few of us, gripped by hunger, had sauntered up the street from our hostel to find something to eat. Little did we know the menu would prove more entertaining than the sauce-slathered chicken sandwiches, spilling slabs of avocados (although that does sound pretty good right about now).
Without a camera, I couldn’t surreptitiously record the pages, nor did I want to insult the staff by stifling giggles as I asked for a copy. Instead, I committed a few of the jucier bits to memory and wrote them down in my journal back in my room.
Isn’t this one of more amusing aspects of travel? Finding English words twisted into phrases that are just so funny… In that diner last May, I laughed harder than I had in months. My three Hungarian friends eyed me, alarmed, probably afraid I’d soon slip into convulsions.
In reality, I simply couldn’t make up my mind between “meat for the poor thing” and a pork dish called “he she differs / he she cooks”.
It’s a shame that the Beijing Tourism Bureau is working so hard to wipe out “Chinglish” in time for the Olympics. Not only are these abstract little phrases amusing, they also provide some poetry. Anyone up for an “attache pan of mold?” Yum.
Posted in Contemplations, Just For Fun, World | 1 Comment »
January 16th, 2008 writerspice
My interview with TravelBlogs.com is up today. Read my responses to questions about the relationship between travel and writing, when I first found my wanderlust and, of course, what advice I’d give to newbies. Then come back and tell me what you think. Does travel feed your creativity? What is inspirational (or not) about that other place, just over the horizon…?
Posted in Contemplations, Writing Life | 2 Comments »
December 18th, 2007 writerspice
Travelling on my own in Argentina a few years back, I read about the ruins of San Jose de Lules, a Jesuit mission outside of the small city of Tucuman. There wasn’t much to do in Tucuman. I barely spoke Spanish and I’d already seen the sights of the town, so of course I decided to go. It seemed easy enough. Climb on the bus, get out at the chapel, wave down a bus going back when I wanted to return home. There was a museum there, my guidebook said, which in my mind meant people, especially since it was summer holidays. Mid-January; hot as blazes.
Let out on the dusty side of the road, I followed a quiet dirt path to the chapel. Nobody was there. This was okay by me, as it meant I could actually be alone for the first time in ages without having to hide away in my hotel room, buried in Dracula, the only English novel I’d been able to find.
But the lack of people meant the presence of something else.
Dogs.
They entered the chapel, their low growls resonating in the empty stone space. There were three of them. As I slowly backed up, they barked ferociously. When I was far enough away, I turned around and hustled back toward the road, their breath hot on my calves. When I got to the road, shaking, I discovered they had torn the leg of my cargo pants.
It was terrifying. Needless to say.
Once I returned home, for months afterward, I kept meaning to write to Lonely Planet, to tell them about this omission of information that could have cost me my life. But I didn’t ever get around to it, a fact that still makes me squirm.
This is what I thought about today when I read blogger and traveller Julie’s excellent post on Matador about the inadequacies of guidebooks and her reasons for not reading them. I still use guidebooks but I learned a big lesson in Argentina. Namely, they are not the authority on any given place.
It is always better to ask a local, especially when planning to head out, innocently enough, into open, empty, countryside with no idea exactly what you’ll find.
Photo by Ian Hsu
Posted in Contemplations, Issues, Recommended, World | 1 Comment »
