I’ve noticed a couple of things in my walks through some local parkland over the last few days. First, the squirrels are getting chubby. Squirrels are ubiquitous in Toronto. Common enough that visiting for a while, and certainly when you’ve grown up here, you don’t think twice about them. Common enough that with seeing them…
I just completed a walk that took me upwards of 6 km. That wasn’t just because I really should walk more often, but in particular it’s for my Movember commitment to walk 60 km this month. A few observations I made along the way: 1. When I’m walking with intent for distance instead of pleasure,…
In my sporadically taking poor notes, I realized today that I’d totally forgotten to include Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott, in my read books of October. It’s another book from a writer offering advice to writers, which I seem to have an endless taste for. That remains the…
I didn’t get to as much reading as I would’ve liked to this month. That’s not remotely new, of course. But the reasoning for it has recently changed. It’s increasingly evident that a) my LCBO job drains an unprecedented amount of both physical and mental energy from me, paired with b) my tending to read…
Movember was an idea that became an annual fundraising movement. People grow a moustache over the month of November to help raise money for men’s health and well-being. I participated once over a dozen years ago, inspired by the idea and by how close to home it hit after my grandfather was diagnosed with prostate…
I’ve got a new idea for a story. This isn’t unusual. This isn’t unusual for this year or this month or even this week. I get new ideas for stories all the time. Writers of all stripes will tell you they’re in the same boat: Too many ideas with nowhere near enough time to use…
I realized about a decade ago that everything happens in phases. This may come across as old news to some — “the only constant is that everything changes”, as the saying goes — but that fact seems to hit me at particular times that stand out as a clear shift in something. I was at…
A short list this month. In fact, scratch that. A non-existent list. September was, for one reason and another, a month when I got zero books or graphic novels completed. Big ol’ goose egg. I’m still reading Rebels by David Liss, which I had just started at the end of August. But I’ve only been…
As a writer, my mind is turning out endless “What if…?” scenarios (at times not a good thing, as I’ve explained). And of course artists of all other stripes can play the same game. It’s fun for me to see how they do that; not just their thinking process for merging ideas to come up…
I’ve talked before about digital privacy — among other places, here and here and don’t forget here — but after making some choices then to help myself (and the ongoing effort to help my family) get some of that, I find myself coming around to revisit it again. A bit of a freshening up, as…