March 15, 2024

Routine Interrupted

This message is coming to you from outside of routine in a variety of ways, the first being that it’s not due until the end of the month, but I’m spreading things out so that, going forward, my Pickle Me This Digest (a monthly compendium of my blog posts) arrives in inboxes mid-month, my essays come at month-end, subscribers don’t get end up forgetting about me, or getting fed up with all my newsletters arriving at once.

Because it’s not been long since my last Pickle Me This digest, this newsletter is shorter than usual, which is probably for the best since—also outside of routine—it’s March Break and my children are on holiday. I’m fitting my work into half-days and adventuring with my kids in the afternoons. We’ve been to see the Nature’s Superheroes Exhibit at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, to Leslieville for Queen East shenanigans (including a visit to Queen Books!), and to the Aga Khan Museum for the Night in the Garden of Love exhibit (it was so great—and so easy to get to on transit from the 100A bus from Broadview Station!). We also went to see The Mighty Ducks at Paradise Theatre. It’s been the perfect combination of low-key and FUN. (My specialty is stay-cation visits to places that are never crowded… ever since that one time I went to the Science Centre on a PA Day, a day that will live on infamy and that my daughters will be addressing with their therapists well into the next century…)

The most essential element of my routine being interrupted, however, is that I received this message in my email inbox last Tuesday:

It turned out that a light fixture crashed down from the ceiling over the pool deck, shattering glass all over the deck and into the pool itself. (Thankfully no one was hurt.)

Notices of pool closures “until further notice” have destroyed me in the past (as I wrote here, I blame that on a period of precarious mental health and having recently read The Swimmers, by Julia Otsuka), but I’m in a fairly stable place these days and also have a closed-pool contingency plan, which is the nearly brand new and incredible Wellesley Pool, just twenty-some minutes away from my house by public transit. That I’d be working half-days, however, meant I wouldn’t be able to swim during the day (which is my usual plan) and so I resolved to get up early and head west on the subway before sunrise*…even though this is the week the clocks have sprung forward so it’s even earlier than early. (I have never been a morning person.)

*Okay, about fifteen minutes before sunrise, but still.

I love swimming, but I’ve never had occasion to discover if I loved it enough to wake up before sunrise and take a ride on the subway. My usual pool is very conveniently situated halfway between my house and my child’s school, which means I pick her up every afternoon with my hair wet (this is why they invented hats!) and I don’t have to go out of my way to swim at all.

But it turns out that going out of my way, as I have this week, has not just wonderful, but even magical? Leaving the house while the sky is indigo (though it gets lighter and lighter with every passing day—the sun rose three minutes earlier today than it did on Monday). Getting on the subway when everything is still quiet, the city buzzing with a calm and quiet hum. All the most terrific communal aspects of public transit without the rush hour stress and fuss, humans at their most wonderfully human, today with spilled milky coffee spreading across the train floor like a Jackson Pollock painting, passengers engaged in a delicate dance to avoid it. And then a walk down Sherbourne Street, which is never dull, and arrival at a pool where anybody who wants to is welcome to swim for the free. The water is much cooler than at my usual pool, and it’s been refreshing, along with the swimming itself, an investment of energy that always pays back in dividends, the goodness I feel in my body for the rest of the day.

It has been wonderful and magical to discover a little surplus time in my day, especially during this season of daylight austerity; to realize that a little trip across the city is closer than I think; to connect with a neighbourhood and people who are new to me; to find out that I really do like swimming that much. I really do!

And I look forward to a return to my regular routine on Monday when the pool is scheduled to open again (fingers crossed) but I’ve enjoyed my time outside it very very much.

January 22, 2024

Taking Stock for January

Getting: Ready to start booking summer camping trips, which is my favourite winter vice. (Ontario Parks reservations open up five months in advance!)
Cooking: Soup, soup, always soup. The chicken dumpling soup in Smitten Kitchen’s Keepers is a life changer!
Sipping: WATER. Water that’s not infused with tea, because water is one of my New Year’s Resolutions, in terms of ingesting and marinating in via frequent visits to a steam room.

Reading: Interesting Facts About Space, by Emily Austin, and just as wonderful as I’d hoped as a follow-up to Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead.
Thinking: About the person who tried to shame me on Friday for LIKING and then UNLIKING her Facebook post (even though I did like it, and explained as much, but I had pressed LIKE and immediately felt a sense of dismay at the gamification of my feelings AND then the whole ensuing fallout really underlined that my instinct to disengage was quite correct in the first place.
Remembering: to experience the moment/season I’m in right now rather than rushing to the next one
Looking: at the snowy powder on the porch outside. I don’t hate it!
Listening: to the Kara Swisher podcast conversation with Heather Cox Richardson. Why can’t I stop listening to US politics podcasts? I don’t know!
Wishing: The US politics was boring.
Enjoying: The slowness of January as we ease into the new year
Appreciating: Any time the sun shines and the sky is blue
Wanting: More opportunities to promote my novel this spring.
Eating: A McVities digestive biscuit! (Plain, not chocolate)
Finishing: The first essay in my new substack, which will make its debut next week! It’s about re-reading Danielle Steele after 30 years!
Liking: Spending less time on social media and improving my focus by writing long form
Loving: Taking more time in the whirlpool and steam room at my gym.

Buying: A new winter hat! (It’s so good!)
Watching: I introduced my kids to the 1990s movie MERMAIDS starring Cher, Winona Ryder, and Christina Ricci last weekend, and (to my great joy!) they loved it (and it really did hold up!)
Hoping: To be able to keep my January sense of chill as life begins to speed up again.
Wearing: A cardigan, OBVIOUSLY. Because I am a human person with arms and it’s January.
Walking: Carefully on the slippery sidewalk
Following: the trajectory of my 10-year-old’s illness (which is the first time either of my kids have been sick this school year. We’re pretty lucky!)
Noticing: The light lasting longer every day
Saving: A packet of Mini-Eggs that I bought right after Christmas on sale. My daughter asked me if I’d forgotten we had them. I haven’t forgotten. I just like having them.
Bookmarking: Every piece in TNQ’s Writing In/During Crisis series. Have you read them? You should.
Feeling: Good!
Hearing: The mysterious babble of my very noisy 15-year-old fridge.

PS Thanks, Pip, for the template!

January 5, 2024

Creative Goals for 2024

We woke up to 2024 with a thin layer of snow on the ground, surprise, surprise, particularly in this winter that isn’t—not that I’m complaining about that. But the snow delighted me, a fresh coat, a blank canvas, the perfect note on which to begin again. And for (at least?) the fifth year in a row, we returned to the lake to greet the year, to the edge of the land, where the waves come in again and again, where the beach is forever changing, never the same place twice.

A fresh coat, a blank canvas—these things invigorate me. I’ve spent the last three weeks laying low, staying quiet, coming back to myself after an autumn that left me quite exhausted and feeling creatively paralyzed, most uninspired. The space and quiet making me feel ready to create again, to get excited and make things. To switch up my routines as well and try some new things, to recalibrate. And to decide that the following are where my creative focus will be directed.

1. Finish my novel! This is my Emily Henry-meets-Katherine Heiny-with Barbara Pym as a maiden aunt-book, which I’ve been writing since 2021, and which just might be the freshest, funniest, smartest thing I’ve ever written. It currently needs its final third radically altered, and my goal is to have the draft ready to go by the end of January.
2. Focus on long-form writing (ie sign up for my Substack!): I spent all fall yearning to write an essay about why a museum takes up so much real estate in my novel, but lacked the time/focus to get it done, until I was called on to write an author talk for an event in November, and finally getting that piece on paper just felt so good. I want more of that! And I want less of the fragmentation of thinking that results from so much time spent on Instagram. AND SO…I am trading that time for a commitment to writing one fun, rich and engaging essay every month throughout 2024, and after the first three months, those essays are going to be for paid subscribers only on my Substack. (If you already subscribe to my newsletter, which is a digest of blog posts and book reviews, you’re automatically signed up for the Substack—watch your inbox for my first essay [on Danielle Steel’s Jewels, naturally!] at the end of the month!)
3. Create a podcast! Coming in March. WATCH THIS SPACE!! I am excited to learn more about audio recording and editing and to have some fun conversations about books and reading.
4. Begin a new book: There is a story in my head, or rather a sweeping family tree, and I think that all this might be a book I want to write (a book that inspired me to pick up Danielle Steel’s Jewels again, actually!). I want to write a saga! A saga necessitating the fact of historical fiction. Am I up to it? Can I pull it off? The only way to find out is to try….

October 30, 2023

Taking Stock

With thanks to Pip Lincolne for the inspo!

Getting: a new pair of goggles in the mail this week as my last pair…disappeared!
Cooking: Sweet potato leek chicken casserole from this crummy one pot cookbook I bought in 2006 that I will keep forever in spite of the crumminess for this one recipe, which I love, and which I thought was very complicated back in 2006, but now it isn’t.
Sipping: tea! Yorkshire tea (but not Yorkshire Gold because of inflation)

Reading: Valerie Kaur’s See No Stranger and Lesley Krueger’s latest Far Creek Road
Thinking: Of every stupid thing I’ve ever done or said…and it isn’t even four in the morning!
Remembering: yesterday in the soft light of my friend Jennie’s house and a glorious afternoon with my bff’s and our families.
Looking: Out the window as the leaves change from orange to brown
Listening: to 1989 Taylor’s Version, which my teenager plays on her phone as she walks around the house
Wishing: That military grade weapons would spontaneously evaporate
Enjoying: Watching Derry Girls for the third time, but for the first time with my kids

Appreciating: My daily swims, and also one more homegrown bouquet from my garden!
Wanting: to go to bed early tonight so that I can read
Eating: maple flavoured almonds, my most expensive treat, which are on my long list of reasons why I will never be able to afford a house.
Finishing: my work day, which had a different shape because my youngest child had a sports practice at 8am so I took her to school and swam first thing.
Liking: Having my winter coat at the ready this morning.
Loving: reading Halloween stories with my family
Buying: new sheets for my kids’ beds as there are holes in the ones they have now and I would like “providing my kids with unholey bedsheets” to be my legacy.
Watching: Not Ted Lasso, whose third season I haven’t been able to finish because I don’t really like it?
Hoping: to remember to cancel my Apple TV subscription. And also for a movement away from this not great time of right-wing demogogues. And that it doesn’t rain for trick-or-treating.
Wearing: A cardigan, OBVIOUSLY
Walking: the same route daily, from my house, to pool, to kids’ school. Living the dream.

Following: The Turning the Page on Cancer fundraiser, which has raised more than $60,000 this year. Thanks to everyone who helped me surpass my goal and raise $1180.00
Noticing: That it’s getting so dark in the morning.
Saving: the depth-of-my-bones feeling of summer to last me through the darkness of the months ahead
Coveting: Not much! Everything I’ve want, I’ve got. I would like the world to take a chill pill.
Feeling: Like everything is really heavy, but grateful for every single bit of LIGHT.
Hearing: The silence that is my 15 year old fridge no longer making a rattling noise, but also (inevitably) a leaf blower. Tis the damn season.

September 11, 2023

10 Things I’m Looking Forward to in September

• Getting back to blogging, both writing and reading!
• Not having a rash (maybe?)
• Cool nights
• Weekends in the city
• Turning the oven on
• Promoting my book. (Did I mention I have a new book out?)
• Squash season!
• the Victoria College Book Sale
• working on my WIP
• Autumn leaves…

January 20, 2022

On Resting

I am not very busy right now, and I’m leaning into it. I spent the second half of December really struggling with mental health, and then picked up my first bad cold in nearly two years on January 3 (maybe Schrodinger’s Covid? Rapid test was negative, but who really knows, though it doesn’t matter oh so much since everything in the province had already shut down anyway), and now the entire city has been covered with 50cm of snow, followed by above freezing temps, and then freezing again, so that the world is a solid block of ice, and I’m going to take that as a message from the universe that I’m probably well served by staying close to home.

I’ve been easing back into my work with 49thShelf, but going slower than usual. I submitted a draft of my novel in December and so the “writing a novel” space in my schedule has opened right up, and I’m keeping it that way. I was pushing my MAKE THE LEAP blogging course for February, but not getting any response…which is not so surprising considering how everyone is entering this new year uncertain and depleted (what if I made ANOTHER course called LIE DOWN ON THE FLOOR instead?) And have just decided to take that space as a gift, spaciousness being a theme in my mindset these days. For there to be room to breathe, to think, to sleep, to do nothing. I’m reading Welcoming the Unwelcome, by Pema Chodran, which accords with these ideas. To create space for letting the world in instead of trying to fight it, to submit instead of resist. To open my heart and let life happen—because it was always going to happen anyway.

I spent the Christmas holidays not exercising at all, because just didn’t have the energy for it, and this not pushing myself was new to me, and it was neat because two weeks later I started exercising again and it was because I wanted to, not because I felt like I had to. So giving myself space to rest, to be still, to not perpetually being driven to go go go. Which, counter-intuitively, gave me the space to want to go again.

I’m not a huge embracer of the idea of “rest” in theory (while I like it in practice), mostly because everyone who’s talking about it sounds very obnoxious and has jobs like “pet therapist” which means there’s not so much to rest from anyway, and I’m also wary of anything that people are talking about instead of just shutting up and doing. But oh, how excellent doing rest has been for me. Perhaps there’s something to it.

June 25, 2019

Jump In

The city swimming pools are open, and school is almost out, and I ALMOST went swimming in the lake on Sunday, and I turned 40, and celebrated my 14th wedding anniversary, and both my children had birthdays too, and Briny Books sold so many books that we ran out of money for postage, and my blogging course is nearly ready for launching, which is very exciting, and I am trying not to bemoan the end of May and June, which are my very favourite times, but there is still summer ahead, never mind all the work (ACK!) I have to do between now and then. Deep breaths. It’s going to be fine.

May 9, 2019

The Countdown is On

I have had a busy week as we finished the website for my TOP SECRET BOOKISH PROJECT, which launches on June 3. (The countdown is on.) I also put up a brand new literary matchmaking quiz and am pleased that response has been as enthusiastic as it’s been to the first one. And I’ve been working on Blog School too, which is going to have a site of its own soon, but in the meantime, the info I’ve made so far has been expanded, and I am excited. And I am excited, which is my favourite way to be, always counting down to something. (Overthrowing the patriarchy is next up on my list.)

April 26, 2019

Revelations

Remember in January when I was listening to Amanda Laird’s podcast and it changed my life? I’ve been talking for years about turning my blogging workshops into an online course. I’ve wanted to be more deliberate in my blog and my social media platforms. And there was one other absolutely wild fantasy that I’ve had forever and ever…but more about that in a moment…

Remember what I wrote in January, about how marketing was kind of gross…but what if I was really using that idea as a place to hide for fear of failing? If you never try, you’ll never fail, and you’ll never win either, but not failing is a kind of winning—but what if it isn’t?

And it’s not like I don’t know failure. I have two new novels in the bag [or in the drawer; time will tell], another in the clearance bin, and exist in a state of publication limbo, which is why thinking about ways to be more active in my own success was becoming important to me. 2019 began and I had nothing specific to be excited about, which was the very worst thing. I don’t even know how to move forward in that situation…which is why I was very susceptible to the message of that podcast I was listening to in January, a conversation with Amanda Laird and Kelly Diels. I was looking for something, for permission, for inspiration.

Here’s what being a blogger has taught me: absolutely everything about making it up as you go along, figuring it out in pieces, step by step, and always learning, always growing. Trying and failing and trying again.

Blog School is launching in September. (Are you signed up for the mailing list yet??) I’m writing the modules from scratch, and I’m so excited (yay!) and also so happy to be this confident that I have an excellent product to offer.

In terms of my second goal, I really have gone back to the blog, and I’m loving it—and I’m contemplating ideas like selling ads and thinking about how to boost my audience (but not by changing the kind of work I do here) and I’m really excited about all this too.

And finally, the wild dream. A wild dream that I cut down to size so it would fit properly into the life I have and not be overwhelming. A dream that is still in the pilot project phase, and there’s so much learning ahead, and figuring stuff out, but I’ve been happy to have others put faith in this project, which will be bolstered by their expertise (and also by mine!). All will be revealed in the next six weeks or so, but here’s a glimpse of what’s happening in the meantime—or a piece of a logo at least….

I guess this is really happening!! Stay tuned…

January 28, 2019

Can You Tell I’m Turning 40?

I bought a Brené Brown book a couple of weeks ago, in case it wasn’t totally obvious that I’m turning forty in the next six months and am currently experiencing a mild case of the kind of existential crisis that necessitates some reinvention. Although I must confess that I am not finding the book (Daring Greatly) to be such a revelation. As anyone who has read my blog for five minutes can attest, I don’t have a problem with being vulnerable, and perfectionism has never been a force that I’ve had to go to battle with in any part of my life. Instead, it’s with “imperfectionism” that I’ve found my strength as a creative person during the last decade, as a blogger in particular. Which is mostly the art of being a human—and I excel at that. (We all do.)

But what has prompted my mild crisis is the dawning awareness (which I alluded to in my ambivalent post about your stupid bullet journal) that imperfectionism has its limits too, and that it’s possible to be using it as a kind of a cover, a retreat. An excuse to not to bother to be any more ambitious, because that’s just not my brand, man. Because brands are not my brand, man, which is fine, but what if part of the reason I’m so comfortable being merely good-enough/imperfect and not having to make the effort is not so much because effort is distasteful, but because I’m afraid of trying and failing and having everybody see? Because I’m scared of trying to figure out a new path forward, of stumbling and making mistakes in public view. All those things that I’ve been able to counsel writers through with blogging—I’m comfortable showing my process here—but I’ve been hesitant to apply the same lessons in other areas of my life. Now I’m turning forty, however, and I think it’s finally time.

In the last ten years, without deliberateness and mostly due to persistence, luck and a passion for books that is as organic as gut bacteria, I’ve been able to create a unique place for myself as a writer, as a reader, as a reviewer, and a literary critic. It’s a place that I’m amazed by now, by the opportunities and connections I’ve been able to experience, and I’m grateful for all of it. But this place is also a tricky kind of place as well, because I’m not just a reader, I’m not just a writer, I’m not really an editor, I’m not just a blogger, I’m not simply an impartial critic, and I’m not a proper journalist either. And my failure to fit properly into these pigeonholes (in a newspaper/magazine/publishing industry that has fewer and fewer opportunities to offer all the time) has bothered me, and made me feel like I was doing everything wrong sometimes, made me feel like the space I’ve come to inhabit as a writer and a reader is the problem after all.

But it’s only a problem if I’m sitting around waiting for other people to deliver me opportunities, you see? Which is why I’ve decided on a new approach for a new year and a new decade, why I’ve decided to finally begin work on projects I’ve been wanting to do for years, why I am going to start being more deliberate and entrepreneurial in my professional life—because the unique place I’m in also offers opportunities. And my blog will be the centre of that—it’s been the centre of everything. Part of my distance from my blog last fall was because it felt like undervaluing my thoughts and ideas to be publishing them here rather than on a more legitimate publishing outlet. But then why wasn’t I feeling that way about the thoughts and ideas I was posting to Twitter and Facebook? This question clarified so much to me. What if, instead of composing Twitter threads and having Facebook arguments with your weird cousin, I was posting here instead? The back-to-the-blog movement, as I wrote the other week. It all coalesces here. I still love writing for magazines and newspapers, and the opportunity to work with editors, but what if I stopped looking at blogging as a kind of defeat. What if I worked to build my audience here, to build my newsletter, perhaps to have non-annoying advertising and make some revenue there? To build on something that is mine.

I am so excited about blogging right now. Yesterday I said that to my husband, about how on Sunday I look out at the week ahead and all the things I plan to write about—I wasn’t feeling so inspired a few months ago. But I really am now, with a renewed appreciation for the kind of space a blog can be, and a certainty that we need blogs more than we ever have—which makes it advantageous that I’m finally planning to launch an online blogging course in September. The Pickle Me This Blog School is in the works and I look forward to applying what I’ve learned from nearly twenty years of blogging and eight years of teaching blogging to show people how to create a blog that fits their lives and even makes life richer.

I’m also going to be working to engage people to connect with writing and storytelling in other ways, to inspire them to find and make time/space in their lives for books and reading. Partly through what I’ve always done via my blog and other platforms, but with other projects and initiatives as well, plans I’m hatching now. And I hope that you’ll be excited (and inspired!) too as it all starts to come together.