Copy. Write.

Ten years ago a guy broke into our house and stole my laptop which contained all my short stories plus research and early scenes from a project that would eventually become The Boat People. I wasn’t backing anything up at the time (I know) so it was a blow.

But that was nothing compared to the dread and rage I feel in the dystopian present where a cylon is hoovering up our literary souls in order to teach itself how to shit formulaic turds.

Maybe I’m naive or in denial but I’m not worried about AI taking my job. I’m not prolific enough, for a start. And my work is too nerdy. The Boat People was a fanfic of the Refugee Law text book. Who wants an AI version of that? The new novel-in-progress is even nerdier. Even nerdier.

What I mourn is the theft. Stories come from a deep well of experience, memory, and freighted emotion. It’s a collage of personal insecurity and insight. I remember the moment when the character of Grace finally clicked and I realized her primary motivation was fear. It happened when I was in the middle of a fraught conversation about Syrian refugees that made me feel sick for days afterward. There’s a scene early in The Boat People where Priya is in an elevator and her name is being butchered. My first year in Canada was grade three. The teacher asked me to repeat my last name (it was longer then - Balasubramaniam) so many times out loud in front of a class where I was the new kid that I came to hate it. I had never known my name to be a burden before that. I had never hated my name.

The character of Savitri is an homage to my Appama who, like Savitri, was fair-skinned. She fled Burma as a child on foot to Sri Lanka. Her brother died along the way. In Point Pedro, she was so fair compared to other girls that the family was afraid she’d be abducted and her step father slept by the front door with a gun. I can’t remember if that detail made it into the final cut of the book but that’s part of Savitri’s biography.

These are my characters. They come from me. They come from my people. They are part of an older, wider community that is historic and contemporary because of course I am also taking from experiences I have or things people tell me or things I overhear or intuit by watching and listening. I write human stories and AI cannot do that. But AI is really fucking good at stealing. It robs our work, our words, our ideas, our stories, our syntax, our phrases. But it’s also pillaging something more personal and that’s the worst, most perverse, most inhumane part.

On the morning of the break in, we woke up to the sound of a stranger rummaging through our cupboards. The imagination defaults to the worst case. Mine went to heavy boots. Big man. Weapons. The thief turned out to be a scrawny eighteen-year old with glasses. The things he stole were found nearby, all unharmed, including my laptop. His sentence was nine months in prison. What do you think Zuckerberg et. al deserve for their grand larceny?

The one about friends

This one isn’t about writing.

Last week everyone was talking about that article in The Cut. The one about friendship and children. You know the one. For some reason the discourse remains fixated on children, as if their arrival is the only thing that can transform relationships. But we all lose touch with work friends after leaving a job, school friends after graduation, neighbourhood friends after a move, parent friends after the kids grow up or apart. We shed relationships like skin and if we’re lucky, and put in the effort, make new ones. It’s curious that the level of bitterness heaped on kids doesn’t rear its head when a friend moves or gets in a new relationship and goes MIA.

It’s like this. You’re rowing your boat and along the way you come alongside someone else in their boat. They’re going your speed, seem to be on your wavelength, and for a time it is smooth sailing. Then something happens - a big move, a career change, a new relationship, a break up, illness, whatever - and the other person can’t row as hard. You can wish your pal well and move on. Some friendships aren’t meant for the long haul and that’s okay. You can resentfully flip them the bird as they drift away. Or you can hitch their boat to yours and give them a tow.

The true love, long haul, till-death-do-us-part, Big Friendships are the ones where two people take turns giving each other tows without keeping score, without expectation, on faith, trusting that when it’s your turn, you can put those oars down, someone’s got you.

Care a lot

Recently, a straight white guy tried to mansplain threading and bikini waxes to me. I smiled and wandered away. No, actually, I’m not sure about the smile. It might have been a scowl. Difficult to say. I’ve never had much of a poker face and my days of tolerating the senseless monologues of idiotic men are over.

A few days earlier, at the park a different white man had asked where my accent was from. I could have said Ontario. Or Japan. Instead, I channelled Lucille Bluth (RIP), called my puppy, and walked away.

via GIPHY

We are living in a liminal time, still in a pandemic but partially vaxxed. Like hibernating animals, gradually, sleepily, returning into the world. I don’t know about you but I’m finding the transition strange. Small talk is a forgotten language. I’m happy to see friends but interacting at length with acquaintances is a bridge too far. And navigating awkward or infuriating conversations? That’s a core competency I’ve lost. I propose this is for the best. Why did we waste so much time and energy frantically searching for the verbal off-ramp in nightmare conversations with people we’d never met before and please god would never meet again, when all the while we could have been at home in soft pants re-watching Spaced?

Let’s leave politeness behind in the beforetimes. Politeness is toxic waste anyway - gaslighting and/ or misogyny and/or racism poorly concealed in the guise of civility.

“It is the summer of caring a lot but not giving any fucks,” says writer Lyz Lenz. AMEN. For me 2021 is shaping up to be this kind of year: lots of care, zero fucks given. Last year, I worked a lot. Too much. Because it turns out the only holidays I take involve planes and since all my trips were cancelled, I just kept thoughtlessly working. And then it was the end of December and I hadn’t taken a break beyond the 10 days I was in Ontario and I was furious. Sometimes burn out manifests as rage. This year my resolutions were: 1. get a puppy and 2. work less. The two are incredibly compatible.

Yeah, I like money. But I’m also a writer and a lot of the work I was doing was unpaid or underpaid. This year, I’m focusing my energy on work I care a lot about. Some of this is mentorship. Some of it is volunteer. A lot is my actual work: writing. For the rest I’m being strategic, saying no quite a bit more than yes.

I used to feel bad (okay, I still do sometimes) turning down requests. Which is illogical. Feeling bad about not wanting to do something is akin to politeness: a waste of energy. Heading into the after times I want to give zero fucks about the silliness that doesn’t matter and care a lot about the things and people that do.

No

Years ago, in the waning minutes of what would be my last day at a certain mediocre job, the HR rep hustled into my windowless office, pushed a piece of paper under my nose and declared: “You have to sign this.”

“I don’t have to do anything, Belinda*,” I said, before tossing a lit match on a trail of already-poured gasoline and burning the damn place down.

via GIPHY

Metaphorically, of course.

Everyone who has toiled in 9-5 servitude knows all the myriad and cliched ways a workplace can suck so there’s no need to itemize my grievances against this particular job or why I peaced outta there. The incident is only noteworthy because it was the turning point after which my whole professional life changed. Though of course I didn’t realize it at the time.

In the novel I’m struggling to write, the turning point is proving elusive. Which is a serious issue that’s been stressing me out. Maybe you’ve noticed the obsession? But the other night, as I was going to bed, that day from a decade ago, the unexpected pivot in my own life, returned to me. Along with the words that proceeded it.

I don’t have to do anything.

It’s a good bit of direct dialogue, isn’t it? Concise. Pointed. A struck match. I wrote it in my notebook and then took that sentence on a meditative walk.

There’s very little we actually have to do. And yet we all do a hundred, thousand, million strictly unnecessary things, things we don’t want to do, because of some vague sense of hafta. So what makes a character who has spent 200-odd pages of a novel sloughing through these self-imposed obligations, finally say enough? I don’t know. I’m still working it out. For me a lot of writing involves pondering esoteric questions and waiting for insight.

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Meantime, I’ve been reading Richard Wagamese’s profoundly beautiful last (unfinished) novel, Starlight, and Genki Ferguson’s delightful debut Satellite Love (it has illustrations! a book for adults with pictures!). Lots of e-newsletters have popped up during the pandemic and this piece about furniture catalogues and longing at Grief Bacon is very good. Tom and I have re-started our two-person book club and are tearing through Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

We’ve also been watching the last season of Dark, which is an excellent study in plot and an example of a story that takes a circular shape. Trashy Britcom Toast of London is our palate cleanser.

I listen to podcasts almost non-stop. A recent stand out was Code Switch’s episode A Shot in the Dark about the Covid vaccine and the Tuskegee Experiment; I promise they don’t tell the story you think they’re going to tell. And I’ve been catching up on the back catalogue of NPR’s Throughline (a history podcast). This episode about astrology was fun.

There isn’t a whole lot to do in these lockdown days but I gave online yoga a go and am a reluctant regular. And recently, I got a set of grips which are coming in handy on icy trails.

*not her real name

Community spread

The handles of a bright green Sobey’s bag loop around a door knob. Moments later, inside the house, a text bubble appears on a phone. “Dropped it off. Enjoy.” A couple of days later, another ping to a different phone. “Hitchcock mystery. 1,000 pieces. Difficult. Interested?”

Jigsaw puzzles are something I deliberately avoided during the lockdown last spring. Not because puzzles seemed hopelessly dull (they did) but because I had a feeling we were trapped in a long game and some pastimes would need to be saved for later.

Towards the end of summer, after life had settled into a pandemic normal that allowed us to see friends again - albeit in small groups, often outside, with precautionary hand sanitizer and a polite Regency-era distance - I started a note on my phone. Covid Winter: a to-do list that included a couple of TV shows, cooking projects, and, yup, puzzles.

For months the list remained theoretical. September turned to October became November, then December. There was a long stretch where the case count was zero. Even when cases appeared they were travel-related and the two-week arrival quarantine meant they were immediately contained.

On New Year’s we went out to dinner with some friends then back to someone’s place for board games and laughs. We sat around a table, elbows nearly, though not quite, brushing, slapping down cards and collecting tricks, tallying up points. Everyone was eagerly discussing the vaccine which our friend the ER doc had already received. January rolled in snowy but quiet and it felt like we might avoid a second lock down, sail into the vaccine queue and straight on through to the “after” times.

Needless to say.

Puzzling

Have you ever done a mystery puzzle? It’s like this: you get a whodunit scenario. The puzzle, when completed, reveals the crime scene, full of clues you must decode in order to solve the murder. The catch is there’s no picture to guide you. The image is revealed only through assembly.

Of course this is an analogy for novel writing. It’s equally tedious and frustrating and even when you know you have all the pieces, that somehow they do all fit together to form a coherent whole, there are moments of doubt.

Turns out puzzles are fun. At least in lockdown when cracking into a new puzzle on a Friday night with a bottle of wine constitutes a big weekend “plan.”

First time around, when we hunkered down last spring, everyone was baking. Cinnamon buns, root beer cupcakes, and lemon curd doughnuts materialized on door steps, their bakers waving through the windows as they went by. This time around, there’s a brisk trade in puzzles. I think about those cardboard boxes being shared between households, crossing thresholds we can no longer enter, all the ways we hold fast to a sense of community.

On Saturday we venture out to a lake we’ve never visited to tramp around a warren of winding snowy trails. A perk of lockdown: discovering gems that have been here all along. In the car on the way home, a text from my friend Joel arrives: a photo of a leaf in a jar of water. I’d admired his ZZ plant and he’s propagating a cutting for me. One day, a plant will appear on my door step and Joel will stand on the street waving through the window.

Even as every square on the calendar remains blank, even as lock-down is extended and we’re not sure what the new normal will be when we re-open, as long as anticipation remains, so too will joy.