Christmas 2015

I'll set the scene for you: It's 9:25 on a Saturday night and I'm tucked into bed with my laptop and there are multiple spoons on the pillow beside me. They had cheesecake on them, in case you were wondering. If you're also wondering how many spoons there are, that's too bad. I'm not in the mood to tell you.

At this, some perplexed reader might knit their brow and say, "Wait, why spoons? Is there not only one of you?" 

And I might say, "Yes, but I was trying not to be a double-dipper. And I only meant to have one bite. And then only one more. And then, again, only one more..." And then I might look at the pile of spoons and sigh and say, "Perhaps I should've just taken a whole slice in the first place."

But a whole slice of cheesecake seems like a lot to have right before bed. Many spoonfuls feel, somehow, less. Even if they end up being about the same amount. You can kind of pretend it's just the same spoonful over and over, instead of a new one each time. You'll lay in your bed and think to yourself, I feel like I've eaten an entire cheesecake! You'll laugh, because you know it's all in your head. After all, you've only had one spoonful.

In any case, I've made a sizeable dent in the cheesecake left over from Krause Christmas yesterday. 

It's been a fun Christmas so far, but - man alive - I'm tired. And it's not even over yet. When it's over - next week - our stats will be as follows:

16 hours of driving (with a toddler, so about equal to 378 hours)

5 "Christmas Days"

3 Christmas parties

1,000,000 grams of sugar

Lots of other stuff

Not a lot of sleep though

We went to my parents' farm for a couple days, and then jetted over to Medicine Hat to see my mom's family, and then back here for Barclay's family Christmas. So far, it's looked something like this (I'll start with a totally-not-staged picture of us smiling in the car while Sullivan freaks out in the back seat, taken by some abstract Being floating just outside the passenger window with a camera):

This coming week we're heading up to Elbow for my extended Christensen family Christmas and then back to Regina for our own little family Christmas and then it'll all be officially over, which is absolutely sad but also quite good - for the sake of routine and sanity and stuff.

Routine and sanity and stuff - three things I could've done completely without just a few short years ago. This is what they mean when they say that kids change everything. Including Christmas.

But I'm sure you noticed the ratio of Sullivan pictures to anything else pictures in this post and guessed pretty quickly what my favourite part of all the festivities was this year: watching him hang out with his cousins and grandparents and great-grandparents and aunts and uncles, watching him open presents, watching him explore the places we visited, watching him...yeah. Just watching him.

That's kind of been my favourite part of everything lately.

Three Things: A Kick in the Butt Just for Fun

In another lifetime (almost ten years ago), I worked at a fancy jewelry store in a mall. I sold engagement rings and nice watches and junk like that. At Christmas, the mall speakers played a Christmas CD that was just various covers of the song I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. That one disc, on repeat. For the entire Christmas season.

Nothing else. 

Mariah Carey saw mommy kissing Santa Claus, Michael Jackson saw mommy kissing Santa Claus, John Mellencamp saw mommy kissing Santa Claus, everyone saw mommy kissing Santa Claus. The man in red seems to have ulterior motives for sneaking into people's houses every year. What a jolly old creep.

That song came on the radio at the Bean just now, the Jackson 5 version, and I had to blink hard to keep my eyes from rolling out of their sockets into my scalding hot coffee. As if reading my mind, the cafe owner scurried across the room and changed the station. Maybe everyone hates that song. Maybe we should retire it. 

A petition?

Anyway. 

It's been a while since I've written anything on here and my dad asked me this weekend why. I said I didn't have anything to write about, but that's probably not true. It feels true, but that doesn't usually mean anything at all. We've been Christmas partying and road-tripping and Sullivan has grown up into a toddler you can actually converse with and I've been writing and working on things. It's been a very full fall. It's been a pretty exciting fall, even. 

I guess it's just that sometimes every little event and thought and feeling feels like something that could and should be written down, and sometimes I feel like a simple paragraph saying we did this and this and this and this is more than enough. And sometimes I'll feel like writing something down but there's no time and then I forget about it. I'll probably look back on this season in a few years and think about how I should have written more down - stuff that doesn't have much of a point, stuff that isn't going to be picked apart by an editor or sent off to an intimidating literary agent. 

Consider this as a little kick-in-my-own-butt to get me moving again in the writing things down for fun department. You should do it too, because writing stuff down for fun is good for your mind. Actually. I'm not a mind expert, but I bet at least two in three doctors would totally agree with me on this.

Assignment: Write down three things. Any things. Do it for fun, and show it to people or not. 

Okay. My three things, off the top of my head:

1. Sullivan's thing lately is that he likes to brush my teeth. He takes this task very seriously; he grips the toothbrush in his tiny, grubby paws, jams it down my throat and pushes it around in there like he's plunging a toilet. He screws up his little face in intense concentration and peers into the vast cavern that is an adult mouth, mumbling to himself like a cantankerous dentist. I let him do it until he's gagged me two or three times. It sounds kind of violent and not fun at all, but it's not all that bad. It's more cute than it is painful, and for some reason this is how I measure things lately. 

2. I met an older woman the other day with a very unique way of remembering people's names. I met her in a store, and Barclay and Sullivan were there too. We were having a fairly normal conversation about drugs (she brought it up, I don't know) and suddenly she realized that we'd been talking for roughly thirty minutes (yup, about drugs) without knowing each others' names. "I'm Jenny. What's your name, dear?" she asked me. 

"Suzy," I said. 

"Okay," she said, nodding fervently, "Prairie Jenny, Prairie Suzy." 

Before I could respond (which was good, as I have no idea what I would've said), she turned to Barclay. "And yours?"

"Barclay," said Barclay. His eyes were slightly wider than usual but, to his credit, he looked mostly unfazed.

"Okay," she said. "Prairie Jenny, Prairie Suzy, Prairie Barclay. And your baby's?"

"Sullivan," I said. My voice was squeaky.

"Okay," said Prairie Jenny. "Prairie Jenny, Prairie Suzy, Prairie Barclay, Prairie Sullivan!"

And then she raised her hand in the air and waved it up and down. "Woof woof," she said.

My jaw doesn't often drop in real life. Most people's jaws don't actually drop, even though people are always writing that they do in books. Her jaw dropped. His jaw dropped. My jaw dropped. Their jaws dropped. Right then, though, I think my jaw might've come completely unhinged. My tongue and tonsils fell on the floor and my eyes popped out. Actually. Woof woof.

3. Death Cab for Cutie is coming to Regina in March. Barclay bought me tickets and I am so happy that my brains are shaking. There's a Death Cab song for almost every single major life event of my past decade; so much nostalgia. Nostalgia is the weirdest emotion ever. I love it.

There. Three things. That wasn't hard; maybe I'll be back again tomorrow.

This Day

The funny thing about my meeting yesterday was that it was held in a small room in the back corner of the library. As in, I had to walk through the library, past rows and rows of colourful books - published books - to get there. Walking through a library was one thing last year. This year, it is something else. Also, it was one thing on the way in and another altogether on the way out, something I'll try to explain later.

The librarian who led me to the room walked quickly, so I had to cram all of my thoughts into a much smaller time frame than if I'd known where to go and went there myself. I, personally, would have walked much slower; I had a lot of things to think. I was nervous, for one thing, and excited, for another. But mostly I was looking at the books around me and realizing, maybe for the first time, that a book is not just a book. It's months, or more often years, of hard work and years, or more often a lifetime, of dreaming and planning and thinking and researching and, ultimately, it's someone's dream come true.

Shelves and rows and racks of those things.

Add to this that a book is a much more personal thing than I'd ever realized before I tried to write one. Whenever someone I know asks me what my book is about, I get all awkward and weird. Like I'm thirteen and they're asking me who I like. I can't talk about it. I can't imagine anyone else ever reading it, but also: that's the point of trying to get it published. I have a whole new respect for the people whose books inhabit that library. There are big, meaty chunks of their hearts in those books.

Shelves and rows and racks of heart chunks. Gross.

And kind of breathtaking.

Anyway, I was thinking all of these things as I was speed-walking to keep up with the fast librarian. Thanks to her, I arrived at the office fifteen minutes early. If we'd dawdled, it might have only been twelve or thirteen, which feels a little less extreme. I didn't want to be extreme. I don't like to appear too eager. It turns people off.

But there I was, fifteen minutes early. Too keen.

So I stood and waited. And I remembered that I hadn't eaten lunch yet, even though it was 2 pm. I just hadn't thought of it. And I remembered that I'd drank an entire Bodum of coffee that morning. That was dumb of me. Add that to an already overwrought, nerve-wracked mind, and you get very shaky fingers. The Writer in Residence would notice this, I thought, and that made my fingers shake more. (She has a name, the Writer in Residence, but I prefer to call her Writer in Residence. It's just such a great title. I aspire to it.)

But you probably don't really care to hear about me standing in the back of a library shaking my fingers all over the place; you just want to know how the meeting went. That's what I meant to tell you from the beginning anyway.

It went...great. Really great. The greatest, actually. It went better than I daydreamed it could go, and I am a person given to extreme daydreams. I'm going back. We're going to keep in touch. She believes in me and in my little book and that is a fantastic, amazing feeling. She 'got' it, even though I think it's kind of a weird book and I mostly worry that people won't. She wants to help me find a home for it and she wants to read more.

My heart burst a thousand times over the course of the meeting. I didn't know what to say back to her most of the time so I just kept saying, "Thank you," and, "You're so nice," over and over.

We talked for over an hour and when I left, the corners of my mouth hurt from being stretched out so far to both sides. And this time when I walked past the books, like I said earlier, they looked different to me. Less like other people's dreams and hard work and heart chunks and more like mine. Does that make sense? Not that these books were mine, but that mine could be in there too. Less like these authors were mythical creatures and more like they were just regular people who worked very hard and had some neat ideas. Less unattainable. Mainly, I think, they just didn't taunt me anymore.

I have spent my whole life dreaming about writing a book but feeling cautious about it. I've been optimistic and pessimistic and nothingimistic and I've worked at it tentatively, not wanting to get too wrapped up in something that would probably go nowhere. And then along comes someone who says, "This could go somewhere."

And even if it doesn't go anywhere, I'll still remember this day. This day was important to me.

Here I Go

Today's the day.

To be more specific, which is a thing I like to be so as not to be vague, today's the day for my writing critique with the Writer-in-Residence at the RPL (see this post). I brought her the first three chapters of my book a few weeks ago, she read them, and today I'm going in to sit in front of her and hear her say the honest truth about them. 

Terrifying. 

I've handed my book, the whole thing, off to friends to read through and edit, but this is very different because this woman has no obligation whatsoever to be nice to me, to protect my feelings, to lie to me. In fact, her only obligation to me is to give me her honest opinion about my work.

Horrifying.

My appointment is in one hour and nine minutes. 

Thankfully (so thankfully) the dear WIR sent me the most wonderful email last night about the pages I sent her. She was so kind and so encouraging, and she made me feel like the Queen of England, and that makes this just a billion times easier. 

I still feel a little like I'm going to throw up and faint and drive into a pole on the way to the meeting, but at least I don't have to also entertain the fear that I'm going to show up and immediately be torn to shreds. Before I received that email, I was a nervous wreck. Now I'm just nervous, but more excited than wrecked.

Maybe that's the scariest part about getting your book critiqued: the part at the very, very beginning where the other person says either, "Yes, I believe in this/you/your writing," or...well, basically anything else. The part where they respect you and take you seriously or not. 

Anyway. Here I go. 

Why I'm Never Going to Clean Anything Ever Again

I cleaned the house yesterday and it turned out to be a bad idea.

I vacuumed the floors and washed them. I wiped the mirror in the bathroom. Scrubbed the toilet. Even filled the tea kettle with vinegar to get rid of whatever gets into tea kettles over time. I thought I'd let it sit for an hour or so while I did some laundry and then pour it out and give it a good wash. And then I forgot about it, because I always forget about everything.


Things Barclay Made With The Vinegar in the Kettle Without Realizing It Was Vinegar And Not, In Fact, Water:

1. A Bodum of coffee
2. Hot lemon 'water' for his wife
3. Porridge for Sullivan


A Conversation We Had As Barclay Left for Work This Morning:

"Ohhhhh..."
"What?"
"Did you, by any chance, dump the kettle and fill it with new water before using the stuff that was in there?"
"No, why?"


So this is actually a story about how I drank an entire cup of vinegar this morning and somehow didn't even notice.

I mean, it's not really that I didn't notice. There was one point where I thought to myself, vaguely, as I stood in the middle of the kitchen half asleep, "This water tastes like cleaning supplies." But then I drank it anyway even though it burned my throat as it went down. A testament to how tired I am, and also to how much I didn't want to hurt Barclay's feelings by telling him that he wasn't very good at making lemon water.

This is also a story about how Barclay had a friend over and served him coffee made with vinegar instead of water and how his friend politely drank his entire cup and didn't even bat an eye (this house is just crawling with polite people lately). But Barclay drank his whole cup too and simply thought, "Why did Suzy buy dark roast beans this time? She never buys the dark roast."

Shrug. Gulp, gulp, gulp.

Sullivan was the only one who noticed, pushing away his bowl of porridge without making much of a dent in it, a confused look on his tiny little prune face.

We're going to have to teach him how to be polite, like us.

Brave Days

Some people are brave all the time. For me, courage comes in waves.

I'm talking about the kind of waves that suck you under and hold you there until you think you'll never come back up again and then, at the very last possible minute, pick you up and throw you onto the beach. And the beach, in this particular metaphor, is where brave things happen. Maybe, probably, because there are no sharks on the beach and no water to drown in. It's always, always easier to do anything, especially anything considered 'brave', when you are not distracted by drowning or being eaten by a shark. 

What I'm trying to say is that I did something brave this week. 

There's this mentorship program at the Regina Public Library called the Writer-in-Residence Emerging Writer Connection. Basically, you make an appointment with the Writer-in-Residence and then bring in up to 20 pages of anything you've written. She looks it over, makes notes, and then you go in and sit with her and she gives you her professional feedback. 

It's an incredible opportunity, but it's also terrifying. It's one thing to send your work away to an anonymous literary agent in New York and have them write back that it's "not quite what they're looking for at the moment but thank you so much..." It's another thing entirely to sit face-to-face with someone you've only just met, someone who knows the publishing world and has already 'made it', and have them potentially hate every word you've put down on the paper. 

"Thanks so much for coming in, Suzy. Unfortunately, you are an awful writer and you use too many metaphors. You're like a fish who thinks it's a bird but isn't a bird and dies as soon as it hops out of the water."

What if she says that to me?

"Thanks so much for coming in, Suzy. Unfortunately, I lit your pages on fire one by one as I read them. They were that bad."

"Thanks so much for coming in, Suzy. I photocopied your pages and passed them out to all the librarians here; thanks for the laugh."

"Thanks so much for coming in, Suzy. Actually, I take that back: I wish you hadn't."

I would die. 

Pending death notwithstanding, I emailed her yesterday. I set up an appointment. I was having a Brave Day, and I know better than to waste those. 

(Thankfully, my friend Theresa signed me up for a writing workshop Dr. Nilofar is putting on at the library next week, which is nice because she won't be a complete stranger to me when I go in for my appointment in November.)

(NOVEMBER. November comes, like, right after October. Gulp.)

The problem with Brave Days is that they are always followed by Drowning Shark Coward Days, during which I second-guess and generally freak out about all of the decisions I made the day before. Today is that kind of day, so I'm writing it all out in an attempt to remember why I made the decisions I did yesterday. Like a person under the water reassuring themselves that the wave will push them up onto the beach again very soon. It's working, I think. 

Anyway. It really is exciting, and a privilege, to be a student, to learn how to do the thing you like doing better than you're doing it now (The WIR would probably ask me to reconstruct that sentence into something a person could actually read and understand, for example). If there's anything I've learned through this process, it's that you should always be learning. You should always be seeking out community and help and feedback and encouragement. And you shouldn't turn it down or avoid it just because you're afraid it won't be exactly what you want to hear (this is true of a lot of things in life, not just writing).

So, yes, I'm terrified. But I'm also excited. 

Cheers to Brave Days. 

Young People at the Orchestra

"It's so nice to see young people at the orchestra!"

I opened my mouth to reply to the first elderly woman when another, even greyer one leaned right across me like the comment had been meant for her and remarked, "Well, it's so nice to be young people at the orchestra!"

Amen to that, though.

I went to see the Regina Symphony Orchestra the other night with Theresa, and now I think all I want to do ever is sit in a room with a bunch of old people and strings and horns.

Have I ever told you I'm into classical music? I am. I wouldn't say I'm a big geek about it or anything, but I'm possibly a little geek about it.

Just a little geek.

My geek credentials: I have my grade 10 RCM and I taught piano for a few years and one of my favourite songs of all time is Rachmaninoff's Etude-Tableau Op. 33 No. 8 in G Minor.

Honestly, though, underneath the geeky part - the theory classes and the composers history book that I look through for fun sometimes and the trying to teach Barclay how to play my classical piano studies on his electric guitar - there's a hugely sentimental bit. Classical music is my Linus blanket. It's comforting and schmaltzy and tangible.

Remember how I hated high school? I talk about that on here sometimes. High school was so weird and lame, wasn't it? (I like to pretend that everyone hated high school and that I wasn't just a loser all by myself.) Well, back when I hated high school, like all the rest of you, that was when I loved piano the most.

I grew up in this tiny town where everyone left their doors unlocked all the time - including the church doors. And during school when I had a spare or a noon hour or whatever, I'd sneak over there and sit in the big, empty, echoey sanctuary and play. Sometimes I'd just play Etude-Tableau Op. 33 No. 8 in G Minor over and over and over, because it really is the most beautiful song ever. Sometimes I'd learn a new song or work on my exam songs.

But I played them like a 16-year-old. I played them like a teenager who was really into emo music (I was, after all, a teenager who was really into emo music). I slowed all my fast songs down and played everything two octaves too low and turned all of my staccatos into lingering, wailing legatos. I imagined that I was playing the soundtrack to my own life. Oh, man alive, it was pitiful. My piano teacher would've hated it.

But it was also soothing and comforting and maybe the only okay thing about high school.

And I guess that's what I think of when I think of classical music. I think of a safe, calm place. A sanctuary, literally. With a high, vaulted ceiling and rows and rows of wooden pews.

You think I'm more than just a little geek now, don't you?

Anyway, the point is that I went to the orchestra and loved it because of this deep-rooted connection I have with that genre of music as a whole.

But I also have to tell you about the intermission.

At the intermission, I met three people. The first two were men, both dressed formally and looking rather imperturbable. They were like a couple of pallbearers at a funeral. Theresa introduced them to me, and then she introduced me to them. She said, "This is Suzy, she's my son's piano..."

And then she trailed off, because she was distracted or something.

(Sometimes, Theresa gets distracted. It's because she's always so busy observing everything. I enjoy this about her.)

She had been about to tell the men that that I was her son's piano teacher, because I was that, once. The first, without cracking a smile, extended his hand to me and said, "Hello. I hear you are a piano."

And then the man beside him, also unsmiling and in the same dry way, said, "A-ha, that's grand." He had both of his hands folded behind his back and he spoke into the upper right corner of the room.

And I was just like, Was that a piano pun? Are you wanting a pun war right now? Because, hello, I can do piano puns. I will own everybody in this room full of grey-haired classical music buffs at piano puns. 

Because I'm sharp. 

Take notes, everyone. 

Puns are my forte. 

I didn't say anything out loud though. I had, like, fifty ready to go in my head just in case, but no one said anything after that, and I think I missed my chance. And these men never actually smiled, so I don't know. I may have been imagining things. Barclay and I always have pun wars, so I think I imagine pun wars where there aren't pun wars.

The third person I met was an elderly lady whose husband had recently passed away. She said she'd bought season tickets to everything you can get season tickets for. She said she was tired of smoking cigarettes and playing FreeCell. She said her and her husband had been crazy in love, like in movies. She said she was okay because she had to be okay because she'd told him that she'd be okay. And she looked like she might be about to cry and I wasn't sure what to do. Should I have hugged her? I'm never sure where hugs are appropriate. Some people don't want a hug, some do. And I don't really like hugging strangers, but I would've done it if I thought it would make her feel better.

But then the lights dimmed and the conductor of the orchestra came out and started talking about Brahms, and about how Brahms was therapeutic. And then the orchestra played Brahms.

And it turned out the conductor was right about Brahms, because when I looked over at the lady, she was smiling.

And I was smiling too.

And so was Theresa.

And as the music faded, an adorable old gentleman seated behind me exclaimed (enthusiastically and probably louder than he meant to), "That Brahms is so exciting!"

Amen to that too.

Mountains and Minefields and Query Letters

Writing a book is easy and fun. Trying to get a book polished and published is like having someone suck your soul out with a vacuum cleaner and put it through the washing machine on the heavy duty cycle with a bunch of thumb tacks.

In retrospect, that sentence seems to be filled with latent guilt about all the chores I haven't been doing this week. Stop it, subconscious, I'm trying to be an artist here.

When I first embarked on this ridiculous venture, I read a blog post by a guy who had written a book but never got it published. It was all about how the odds of actually finding a lit agent to represent you and then them finding a publisher who would buy your book was a lot like winning the lottery. He said, basically, that he never even attempted to get his work published because he knew how slim the chances were and how much work he'd have to put into it.

I was like, "Dude. You are grossly pessimistic and lazy."

It turns out, he'd probably just done his research.

Getting a lit agent is hard. It's hard. Harder than climbing a mountain, actually. Because in order to climb a mountain, all you have to do is find a mountain and climb it. The mountain doesn't have to like you. It doesn't have all these rules about your grammar and your online presence and your formatting (some of which you don't even know about until you break them). The mountain won't say to you, "Hey, climb almost all the way to the top! It's a lot of work and it might not even pay off!" only to fling you off of itself when you're mere steps from the summit.

Mountains are fairly easy-going, that way.

For those of you who know as little about this process as I did two months ago, here's the little bit more that I know now:

First, you write a book. You read what you've written and you fix it. Because it'll need fixing.

Then you get someone else to read your book and tell you if it makes sense and also if it makes them feel anything and also if they noticed a glaring lack of grammatical adeptness. You ask a few other people to read it too and ask them a bunch of questions about it. You take their responses super seriously even if you disagree with them, because you'll have a lot of blind spots.

(Aside: This is why it's good to choose your readers carefully. I chose a few friends whose taste in entertainment I really trust - the kinds of people I normally ask for music and movie and book recommendations. Two of them are librarians. And I said to them, I said, "Be stupid honest with me." Because otherwise, what's the point, exactly?)

Then you basically rewrite your whole entire book again. And then you read it again and you go, Oh, yeah, these people were all right even though I thought they were wrong at first. It makes way more sense now. I like this character better. I hate this character more. I patched up that massive plot hole. That's much better.

This goes on for a while, the fixing. It turns out you can't just sit down and write a book perfectly the first time. Well, I mean, it turns out I can't. Maybe you can. Good for you. Shut up.

Enter the lit agents. They're like real estate agents for books. Most big publishing houses require books to be represented by one, so they're important. But they're unicorns - catching one feels near impossible.

You start by picking an agent that you think might like your book. There are a grizillion different kinds of books, and all of the agents have different tastes because, despite what I said earlier about them being unicorns, they're actually people. And not all people like the same things. So, basically, research. You have to research these people and see what books they like and what books they're already representing and what kinds of books they're looking to add to their lists. It's a lot of work. It's, like, the first day of your climb up this mountain.

So, after you've picked an agent, you have to write them a query letter. And all of the agents have different rules for what they want in a query letter. Some of them want you to tell them about yourself, some of them don't. Some of them want a synopsis, or a word count, or a note about why you're the best person to write this book, some of them don't. Some of them want you to include a sample chapter or three, some of them don't. Some of them have their very precise preferences written out for you on their website (bless them), some of them, gulp, don't, and you have to guess based on what the majority of the other lit agents want. If you get it wrong, they most likely won't even read your letter all the way to the end.

It's crazy.

It's like this mountain is also a minefield. Imagine that. Climbing a mountain minefield. You're so screwed.

And you do all this work, you research this agent and write them a personalized letter and include whatever they want you to include and make sure it's error-free and lemony-fresh...and then you wait. For probably six to eight weeks. And then you get a form rejection that's really polite but very short compared to your initial query that says something like but not necessarily, "Good try! Keep trying! I'm flinging you offa my mountain!" (Lit agents are actually really nice though. They just can't represent every single book or else they'll die.)

So then you pick a different agent and start all over again. You can query more than one at a time, too, so some days you'll get flung from three or four mountains in a row. Those days are tiring.

Perspective? Do you want some perspective? I've heard stories about published authors who sent out more than 100 query letters before finding an agent. I've read countless articles encouraging authors to not even breathe a breath of defeat until they've sent out at least 80.

80 mountains. That's a lot of climbing. That's a lot of almost summits and mountain minefields. Phew. I am a little winded already.

But, if we can stay with the mountain metaphor for just a second longer, this is also the cool thing about searching for a lit agent: all this climbing makes you stronger.

You send out a letter, you get back a reply, you reread your initial letter or the chapters you sent and think, "Ah!" (and a cartoon lightbulb appears above your head) "I bet they rejected this because..." And before you send your next letter, you make some changes, you do a little more research, you ask a few more questions, you make more changes. You like your book more, you get better at writing query letters - it stands to reason that you get better at writing in general. It's good for you if it doesn't wring you out first, if your heart's strong enough for it.

All of this is to say that I'm enjoying this process, mostly. I'm learning a lot. I'm not discouraged yet. I have been catapulted, kicking and screaming but not crying, from nine mountains. I have written the equivalent of nine books, and the ninth one only vaguely resembles the first, but I like it much, much better. I feel like I've been part of an intensive literary bootcamp.

And I have a whole new huge respect for published authors. And lit agents.

I will definitely keep you posted. 

Continuing On...

I wonder if maybe one of my legs is longer than the other? Because a large amount of my vacation pictures are lopsided. They lean, is what I mean.

Or maybe I subconsciously took them that way to emphasize them. Like italics. Like, I really like this building, so I'm going to take this picture just ever so slightly slanted...

That's so smart. What a great idea.

Anyway. Just something to be aware of. The lopsided pictures are extra important and not at all just sloppy photography.

The week before we left for Montreal, a friend who just so happened to be in the city herself posted a picture on her Instagram of a cool-looking wall. I know that doesn't sound like much, but it was a really cool wall. I promise. I decided that I wanted to see it, but didn't know where it was, so this is the very logical and rational way we went about finding it:

We rode the metro to Old Montreal, because we wanted to see Old Montreal anyway, and got off when Sullivan started getting antsy. We came up from the train and I found a lady wearing a vest (because all women who wear vests know everything) (but also, she was sitting underneath a sign that said 'Information'), and I pulled up my friend's Instagram account. I said, "Do you know where this wall is?" and she pointed behind me and said, "Yes, it's just down that hallway."

The wall was cool, and so was the rest of the building (it's the Palais des Congres at the North end of Old Montreal).

From there, we headed south into Old Montreal. There's a very distinct place where the pavement ends and the cobblestone starts. It's like standing on the battle line between old and new, the straight, sleek lines of the skyscrapers over your head on one side and the jagged, turreted skyline of the old city on the other.




The Old Port is, predictably, right next to the Old City. We went there once in the evening when the mosquitoes and tourists were overwhelming, and once in the early morning when there were none of either. I highly recommend the latter. There's a little beach down there on the St. Lawrence River called the Clock Tower that costs $2 to get into and has a pretty sweet view of the Jaques Cartier Bridge and the city skyline.



On Sunday afternoon, we headed to Mont-Royal Park to see the Tam-Tams, a free weekly drum festival around the George-Etienne Cartier Monument. The cool thing about this event? It's not really an 'event' - in that it's not official; it doesn't have advertising, or sponsors or a fee or any kind of rules at all. It's just a bunch of people playing drums and selling stuff from blankets on the lawn. As far as I can tell, you just lug your little drum situation over there and have at 'er. For hours. There are little pockets of drum circles, surrounded by spectators. They start at, like, 10 in the morning and go until they feel like it's time to quit, sometimes late in the evening.

Our home base was right next to Jarry Park. We took coffees there from Cafe Vito one morning and let Sullivan chase birds with the umbrella stroller (kids have weird hobbies). There was a guy with a boomerang, too. I'd never seen a boomerang in real life, but I think now that I would like to own one. We found a little island, accessible only by stepping stones, and we sat on it and threw rocks into the water. So chill.



Let's see, what else...

I can't not mention Place de Castelnau, which was just a block from our house in the opposite direction of Jarry Park. It had two good coffee shops, a game store, an amazing little bread place, the chocolate shop I mentioned yesterday, painted sidewalks, and church bells that chimed every hour.



We also hit up (and quite loved) the Mile End, another place a short metro ride away known for its coffee (and bagels!) and shops. We found a record store and a book store, and I even bought a little French comic book as a souvenir for one of my friends' three-year-olds (but upon closer inspection on the way home, I discovered that it was maybe a comic book for an *ahem* older audience. Oops. Had a good laugh, not gifting it to a 3-year-old).



Aimless Wandering really was the theme of the trip though. We sat and listened to a guy play Pink Floyd and Yann Tiersen on a piano in a park, searched for (and found) crepes in Mont-Royal, poked around the Olympic Stadium a little, stumbled across a country music festival (left immediately; sorry, country music), and explored the McGill University campus. Just enjoyed being away together. Drank copious amounts of coffee. Poured water into our empty coffee cups so Sully would think he wasn't missing out.




We ended up spending a lot of time at our apartment too. Again: we have a kid who naps and goes to bed early (the time change worked in our advantage though - he goes to bed at 7, which is 9 Montreal time. It was nice to be able to do a thing or two in the evening without gouging into his bedtime). So our evenings were low key, but it was nice. We bought a game at the place in Castelnau and had poutine on the terrace and just hung out. Which, luckily, we like doing.

So, I guess, that's that. It was a really nice week. I'd go back tomorrow if I could. Unfortunately, real life is a factor in my decision making. Thanks for the memories, Quebec. You're so fancy.