curiouser and curiouser

- I went to New York! My best friend and I snuck in there right before the pandemic (October 2019), and it was a wonderful adventure. We ate delicious bagels and went to the Bronx Zoo and saw the Stonewall Inn (I didn’t cry but it was a close call) and twacked around Central Park and just generally touristed out. Times Square was overrated, and we saw a subway station caked in human excrement, but other than that, 11/10, would go again. Here is a picture of me on the Brooklyn Bridge!

- I finished a novel! A whole one! For the first time since 2006! It is called Grey Dog, and it is about a spinster schoolmarm in 1901 dealing with spooky things happening in a small town. And also mental illness, kind of. And also lesbianism. And also animal carcasses. And also bad dads. I am currently chugging through revisions and fending off the urge to just pretend it doesn’t exist and start my next project. Revisions are super fun, but there are about five other stories tugging at my sleeve right now.

- I graduated from the SFU Writer’s Studio program! It was a fantastic experience and I cannot recommend the program highly enough. My mentor was a fantastic CanLit author named Jen Sookfong Lee, who is very funny and very smart.

- I started working as Jen’s apprentice for the 2020-2021 iteration of the Writer’s Studio! Mostly what this means is I get to read writers’ work before anyone else does, which makes me feel extremely important. I also get to make increasingly unfunny pop culture references. Sometimes the students laugh politely, sometimes they wonder why I am talking about Rock of Love with Bret Michaels in a literary fiction workshop.*

- I was accepted into the Writer’s Studio post-graduate workshop! This is explicitly for the purpose of keeping on track with Grey Dog revisions, as without the proper supervision I will wander blithely into a field of daffodils and ignore all the restructuring that needs to be done.

- I published more stories! Two of them I have linked to in previous entries, here and here. The others are not available online. One is called “Judas Goat” and is available in Vastarien. One is an excerpt from Grey Dog, and appears in the 2020 emerge anthology. And one is a very, VERY short piece about werewolves called “What Happened When I Met Lucy in the Woods” for the 42 Stories anthology.

- I did my first reading! And then another, and then ANOTHER. The first reading was put on by the Dalhousie Review, and I read my short story “What Brings You Back There,” which TDR published in 2017 (my very first acceptance!). The other two were both virtual readings, one for the end of the Writer’s Studio program and the other for the Vancouver Writers Fest’s launch of emerge. Turns out that readings are TERRIFYING but also exhilarating, just like anything that involves people paying attention to you in public.

- COVID-19 came along and screwed up the whole world! I was laid off from my library job for the summer (which turned out to be a blessing, we’ll get into why in a minute), and although I am back to work now, the library has changed in some huge ways. No more programs, everyone is masked, there are no toys on the children’s floor... it’s all very different. But I am glad to be back to work!

- I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis! Perhaps the exclamation point is a bit misplaced here. Yes, back in May I called 811 about some strange numbness I was experiencing in my tongue and cheek. The responder told me to go to the hospital, which I thought was an overreaction, given that the numbness was probably due to burning my mouth on a cup of hot tea. Two days, a CAT scan, and a few trips to the MRI later, I learned that the numbness was, in fact, due to my immune system attacking my myelin sheaths and making my nerves go BZZT.

As you can probably imagine, this was (and is) pretty devastating. No one wants to hear that they have an incurable disease that lowers their life expectancy, especially if that disease is one of the most frustrating ones. (“We don’t know what causes it! You may be fine or you may be paralyzed! It’s maybe genetic but not always! We have drugs for it but we’re not sure why they work! Wheeeeee!”) Because I had the summer off work, I had a little time to grieve, to cry, to get very very angry at no one in particular because there really isn’t anyone to blame,** and now I am kind of back to normal. Mostly. Except I still get very angry and very sad, and I will occasionally tell people that they can’t get mad at me for doing or not doing something, because I have holes in my brain. I am not sure how long this excuse will be viable, but by God, I am gonna milk the hell out of it.

So, yeah. Worst “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” ever. I am trying not to let this diagnosis become my whole self, because there are so many other parts of me- bad puns, too many opinions about children’s books, a shameful appreciation of the Purge film franchise, et cetera- but some days I wake up and cannot think about anything else but this thing happening in my brain that may take up to a decade off my life.

- I watched I May Destroy You! It was the best.

* It made sense in context.