Greetings from Singapore

No, not really; but in the phantom world of freelancing I spent a good part of the day in Southeast Asia.

The situation was this: I got a contract to do a text and functionality review of a website that is going live very soon. This is work I love to do, and do really well, so I was happy with the job.

One little hitch: the person offering the job was on the other side of midnight from me, and the freelance site where I found the job wouldn't let me start tracking my time because the job was not supposed to start until "tomorrow" (the client's today). We spent a lot of time trying to figure that one out, and found that the only immediate solution was for me to change my location on the freelance site to Singapore.

So I did and all worked well. I found lots of text issues (team in India writing under the direction of management in Germany) and not a few functional errors. You know that trick where you copy all the text of a long, long document and paste it into the text entry field that's supposed to hold a short title for something, and then try to submit the form? I love the error messages you can get to show up when they weren't prepared for you to try that.

I imagine that when I change back to my real location sometime tomorrow, all my hours worked will unspool themselves and the freelance site itself will crash.

But in the meantime, now that I've tested as far as I can until they fix what I already found, I will stroll over to Upper Buckit Pimah Road and visit Beauty World Center. We had friends who lived here in Singapore once, and I always had meant to drop in on them...

A slow-growing idea for a play

I think I have an idea for a play. Not saying it too loud, as I don't want to panic the idea and make it evaporate. But I understand its contours just enough that I can start making notes and asking myself questions on a mind-map.


For me, nurturing an idea to the point where I can begin to ask questions about it is often a long, slow process. Something comes into my mind, and I make myself a little note about it; maybe do a couple of thought experiments about how this thinglet might seem as a short story, a play, a song...And then I set it aside and just let it be there.

I revisit the idea, by accident or on purpose, from time to time. And every once in a while an idea lets me know it might be ready for a closer look.

This particular idea first came to me in its fledging form at least 30 years ago. And it has stubbornly stuck around all that time, slowly gaining facets and and depths, so I guess I should do it the honor of trying to wrap a play around it.

A nice thing about being a writer is that you don't really have to know why you write about certain things, why certain ideas make your eyebrows wiggle. If you get good enough (and lucky enough) as a writer, people will do that work for you in their reviews and doctoral theses. If your body of work never gets so prominent that critics want to dissect it to see what makes it tick, that's just fine, too. It's the body of work that's the primary thing, not the analysis of it.

The writer, unless he's Henry James, is more inside the story he is writing than outside it. He is as avid (and maybe as scared) to find out what happens next as is any of his characters. And that's how it should be. The writer should pull critical functions off to one side during the writing process, and bring to bear a naive enthusiasm for the unfolding story. Time enough for critical scrutiny in the second and further drafts.

The why of Black Friday

In the United States, the day after Thanksgiving is the traditional start of the gift-buying season leading up to Christmas and Hanukkah (and, more recently, Kwanzaa). It's hugely important to merchants, who tend to make the money that makes the year profitable from the end of November to December 24. Calling the day "Black Friday" seems to have started as an observation of the crowds filling the sidewalks in Philadelphia as they went from store to store.

I was getting ready to hold forth on how this US event has leaked into the assumptions and practices of Canadian merchants and consumers...but I found that the excellent Tim Bousquet had gotten there ahead of me.

Tim, a super journalist, runs a website called The Halifax Examiner. You can subscribe there to a daily newsletter with juicy information and observations; for a modest fee you can subscribe to the site and get access to the really powerful articles where Tim fully deploys his investigative and writing skills. A site like this restores my faith in the art of journalism.

On Black Friday and consumerism, Tim touches on the counter-suggestion of Buy Nothing Day, and how it is utopian at best. But he continues:

But Buy Nothing Day is important all the same because it introduces thinking into the equation.The point isn't to rag on consumers per se, but rather to ask broader questions: How'd we ever get into the situation where people flocking to malls to buy crap they don't need on credit is the foundation of the economy? What can we do about it? How do we introduce values like economic justice, environmental protection and simple respect for craftsmanship?

What he said. And he said more than what I just quoted. Go look for yourself.

The Weekly Wednesday Storm

We had some slippery sleet last night, and at that we were much better off than our New Brunswick neighbours across the Bay of Fundy. Tens of thousands of customers there are without electric power today.

We discovered the sleety conditions as we were getting ready to go to a class we attend on Wednesday evenings, so we cancelled out of the class. This is the same class that had to be postponed or cancelled something like eight times last winter--it seemed like a storm blew in and made driving treacherous every Wednesday, and on few other days, last year.

Being Canadian means you take the weather seriously. You aren't appalled by a few snowflakes, but you don't bull through things regardless of the conditions.

When we were in the Arctic, in one of the villages where we lived there was a sort of elephants' graveyard of broken trucks and cars. There weren't all that many four-wheeled vehicles in that part of the north in those days anyhow, and certainly the means to repair a truck were very, very limited. But a lot of the vehicles looked like they had suffered something catastrophic, as opposed to being laid up for the lack of a spare double-sided positronic choke release valve. I remember people telling me that most of the wrecks were the result of people from "the south" (by which the locals meant Toronto or Montreal) driving around as if they were in the south, rather than north of the tree line.

When you're in the south, the clock rules you far more than when you're in the north. In the south, if there's a meeting you're supposed to be at, you head out for it even if the roads are a bit skiddy. The alternative is to take a sick day or look like not-a-team-player. In the north, the weather trumps the clock. You may have an appointment, but if you look out the window and see nothing but flying gray pellets and cannot make out even the shape of the building next to yours, unless lives are at stake it is generally expected that you make a pot of tea and find something that needs doing at home.

In this shiny digital age, we can do a lot online that we used to have to do in person, so we can often cock a snook at the weather. We no longer absolutely have to brave the elements and drive an hour or two to the meeting (and an hour or two back, natch) in order to watch and respond to somebody's 20-minute Powerpoint.

This is not a solution in every case, alas. In our part of Nova Scotia, the areas of really good wifi are interlarded with areas where you are lucky to have dialup access. Oh, and our Wednesday classes are in tap dancing.

F-ing the ineffable

I used to have a recurring nightmare where I had to fight someone, as in a physical brawl, with fists. And in my dream I would try to hit the person, but my fist would get slower and slower, as if moving deeper and deeper into a pool of rubber. Then the other person would start to punch me and I would snap awake in a sweat.

That experience comes back to me whenever I am trying to deal with bland inanity. I never, ever mind an energetic exchange of views that has the possibility of some middle position appearing that is actually better than where I or the other person started out. I come very quickly to the end of my tether, though, when the other side's position is either "never mind the facts" or "because I say so, is why."

Last night, in a meeting, we were looking at a set of proposed rules for an event. One of the rules says something like, "Under no circumstances are you allowed to do A before date B. However all the expenses of A that you do before date B must be recorded in the following manner..." I can't even find the best way to sink my teeth into that thing. With my editor hat on I could say, "Let's lose the first sentence, since you seem to be presuming that nobody will follow that instruction." But I anticipate the response will be, "But if we don't say not to do it, folks will do A before date B, and we can't possibly have that."

Decades ago I was completing certification for a thing (a different "thing" than the "thing" at the end of the previous paragraph). At one step in the process they wanted to see evidence that I had done some other thing (yes, a different, earlier, thing), and the evidence was to be a document. I didn't have to send them the document; I just had to say it existed and where it might be found if they really wanted to see it.

The line in the form was "Document sighted: _________________"

Uhhhhh.

I spent more brain cells than it was worth trying to get the issuers of the form to see that the word they wanted was "cited", to no avail. Just fuel for nightmares.

Tangled loglines

I am updating the loglines for my plays. This is a task that very few script writers enjoy, and even fewer do well. I am not among the few.

Loglines started out as a little summary for busy film executives. They were pasted along the edge of the bound manuscript and the executive--always with many more scripts submitted than time or money to produce them--could browse a stack of scripts and grab the one with most enticing logline.

a logline tries to tell you, Mr Short Attention Span, what this complex, rich tale that the screenwriter has slaved over for months--the screenwriter's baby--is "about". It tries to tell you before your eyes flick away in search of something more interesting.

So there's a real art to writing a logline. Richard Polito imagined a logline gone bad for The Wizard of Oz:

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to do it again.

As you can see, there's even artistry in doing it badly :). Patrick Kirkland says it's an art the scriptwriter has to master unless he or she is relying entirely on luck to get produced, "Because if you can’t get people on your side in one sentence, then you’re not going to get them in a hundred pages."

Kirkland provides examples of loglines that would encourage him to look at the actual, you know, script, like this one for Titanic:

A young man and woman from different social classes fall in love aboard the ill-fated voyage of the Titanic.

You have to tell enough, but at the same time you can't tell too much. You don't have time in maybe 25 words; and anyhow if you tell the producer how it comes out, he won't have an itch to find out how it comes out by reading the damn script.

I am thinking about loglines because I have added a page to this blog listing some of my recent plays. These are all (mercifully) short plays. If one of these loglines makes you say, "So what happens?" click the link to see the first page of the script. 

And if that makes you say, "But what happens next?", and if you are connected with a theatre, contact me and I'll send you the whole thing. I may even hand-deliver it.

No subtitles: we're knitting

I am occasionally known to take up needles and knit. More than half of the time I manage to turn out something that someone can say, "Oh, thank you!" about with a straight face. For the other projects I learn a lot about un-knitting.

Last winter my office was in the downstairs part of the house, an area which the builders obviously worked on during the summer as they paid no regard to the need those rooms might have for HEAT in certain months. So I knut myself a pair of fingerless gloves to keep my hands warmer while typing away on the keyboard. They work beautifully! I am tempted to open an Etsy shop.

Having knitting underway almost always makes me think of plot points or bits of dialog for the current play that I really need to write down before I forget them. This is generally when I am making my first pass through some subtlety in the pattern (Row 5: K5, M1R, K21, M1L, K5) and my hands are cat's-cradled together. If I had needles that incorporated a roller-ball pen at the blunt end I would be better off.

I am rather fond of cable knitting, and that often involves a pattern that repeats over as much as 20 rows. I keep track of what row I am on with a little stack of coins--get to the end of the row, move a coin from the left stack to the right stack. Inevitably, some need will come up (the fish man at the door with fresh-caught haddock) and one or both of the piles of coins get scooped up to be counted out in payment. I then have to try to figure out where I was in the pattern: this is what gives my cable-knit sweaters their distinctive, if somewhat unsettling, visual quality.

Knitting also affects my cultural development. I am nowhere near as good as my mother was: she could clack away on the needles without hardly looking at them. (When she got to the end of a row, if she felt like it she would knit the next row backwards--that is, without changing which needle is in which hand. If you don't appreciate how cool that is, you need to get some knitting needles.) I, on the other hand, need to inspect every stitch with some suspicion and dread. Is that a purl stitch? Is that supposed to be a purl stitch? This means that, if we are watching a movie, it had better not be a movie that relies on sight gags or subtitles.

I miss a lot of punch lines, but at least I am less likely to incorporate the sweater I am wearing into the one I am knitting. Where have all the radio plays gone?

Tweaking the text

Like most creatives, when I am making something I find it hard to think about what I will do with it when it's done. If you're a painter, part of the decision is made for you: it's got to go on a wall, ideally a wall where people can see it. A website with thumbnail images is a modern-day extension of that wall; but usually people actually have to get intimate with the painting, close enough to smell it, before they can decide to buy it.

Not that painters paint primarily to sell--they paint because they must. But it sure is convenient to sell a few works, both to get the means to buy more high-quality ultramarine blue (made of ground-up semi-precious stones from Afghanistan, dontcha know) and because the artist's house only has a finite amount of wall to hang paintings on.

I write because I must (although I manage to resist the mustness of it for long stretches), and I almost never know when I start writing what I can possibly do with the new play or screenplay once it is done. The idea snugged down over my brain is to get it done--to find out what happens next, and next, and next until the conclusion happens.

I'm fortunate because my characters generally take over the script within the first few pages and improve whatever half-baked idea I started with. Sometimes I can't wait to get typing to find out what they say and do next; sometimes I dread the keyboard because of what they may say or do next.

But that's the creating part. This morning I am pondering a wrinkle in the process of getting works out before the world: tweaking a text for a specific market.

There's this little play I wrote about two people who meet on the "quiet car" of a commuter train. I was near Boston when I wrote this and a daily commuter (See Mayor of the commuter car). So it was obvious to me and to the folks who did a table reading of the script what a quiet car is and what might happen in one.

But now I'm thinking of submitting this play to a contest in a more rural part of North America. I'm not sure if they even have commuter trains there. Do I insert a little explainer at the start of the play; and, if so, how? Does one of the characters turn to the audience and do a David Attenborough whisper-voice ("We have just left the quiet car, one of a rare breed of rolling stock that migrates in urban environments")?

Similarly, I have a play where a character talks of going off to Alberta to seek his fortune. Perfectly clear, and possibly poignant, to any Canadian audience. But is it going to be clear at all to the readers for this contest in Texas, or for this one in West Virginia?

Mind you, this is a good problem: the plays I have mentioned are complete, make sense, and will eventually find their audience. But I am still puzzled by how much I need to torture their details in order to get productions for them.

More than just the right word

I've been doing some proofreading recently of documents by authors who are "subject matter experts", but who aren't all that good about transmitting their knowledge. For some, English isn't their first language; others have been so intensely educated that they can't stand to use a short word to describe something when there is a seven-syllable alternative that does almost as well.

Sometimes proofreading is sort of mechanical: a matter of pulling twenty or thirty commas out of a paragraph like burrs off your trouser leg after a walk in the meadow. At other times one could use the Bletchley Circle to help decode what the writer could possibly be trying to say.

There are perfectly respectable phrases in common use in English in India, like "do the needful", that have to be re-rendered into something like "do what is necessary" or "follow the normal procedure" for a global audience. Working with texts like that makes me ponder how often I write and say things that are only truly intelligible to that subset of the English-speaking world who are me.

Sometimes you run into an error in the text so painful that, if the intended reader met it, he or she would just quit reading. I love tracking down those errors and correcting them—preserving at the same time the author's credibility and the reader's sanity. I remember a Kansas romance I edited some years ago: the manuscript as I got it was about 70,000 words long, and I sent back a memo of suggestions and questions that topped 20,000 words. Although the author declined many of my suggestions, as was her right and duty, she picked up many others and made a much better book than it would otherwise have been. The correction that sticks in my mind has to do with a day on the farm when some cattle are being encouraged to go from one place to another, and the author had them going down the "cattle shoot". I was tempted to leave it, but in the end pointed out that "cattle chute" was not only correct, but would distract the reader less from the romantic glances the main characters were throwing at each other during the scene.

Someone asked me why, in the end, I like editing and proofreading. It's because I am happiest when the words and the grammar line up with the meaning of the text, and am all itchy when they don't. I hate it when people—even people I disagree with—undercut their own arguments by bungling their word choice or their sentence structure. I like a document to flow so well, delivering the author's argument in the author's unique “voice” so smoothly, that the reader never, ever thinks, “Well, that was well constructed.”

Presenting a document speckled with typos, misplaced modifiers, and suchlike is like showing up for a first date in a grubby shirt and with broccoli between your teeth.

And I hate it every time I do that.

Different kind of tenterhooks

I mentioned that I had taken part in a theatre workshop and was waiting to learn the results of the tune-up the five participating playwrights did on their plays under the guidance of Stephen Massicotte. We worked with Stephen on our scripts, did feverish rewrites based on his wise questions, and then enjoyed a table reading of the scripts with local actors.

I just learned that my short play, "Sprite Fight", will be part of the production Script Happens at the Saint John Theatre January 22-24, 2015. They will present three of the plays, including one with a very engaging devil and another where the main characters are two pigeons. This will be the first production for "Sprite Fight".

You never know that you get the gig until you get it; but once you get it, you land on a different kind of tenterhooks. Between now and January I can't do any rewriting, and probably the director would not appreciate a flow of helpful suggestions from the playwright. So I just need to get on with writing other stuff, and enjoy the tingle of anticipation of opening night.

See you there!

Blame it on everyone else

C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce is about a tour bus trip from the gray outer edges of hell to the bright beginnings of heaven. The narrator starts in an endless rundown small city, finds a line of people waiting for a bus, and joins the line. One of the people ahead of the narrator in line tells him about the great and famous who reject the bus trip and linger on in the outskirts of hell:

‘The nearest of those old ones is Napoleon. We know that because two chaps made the journey to see him. They’d started long before I came, of course, but I was there when they came back.’ …. 
     ‘But they got there?’ 
    ‘That’s right. He’d built himself a huge house all in the Empire style—rows of windows flaming with light….’ 
    ‘Did they see Napoleon?’ 
    ‘That’s right. They went up and looked through one of the windows. Napoleon was there all right.’ 
    ‘What was he doing?’ 
    ‘Walking up and down—up and down all the time— left-right, left-right—never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. “It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English.” Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn’t seem able to stop it.’ 

This passage came into my head ysterday while I was thinking about what to do about a collision I am involved in with some powerful people in an organization I care about. The organization suffered a major setback recently, and recovery may take years.

I have been getting worked up about how little the leadership seems to have learned from its recent debacle. But this morning I decided to see if I could find and propose some sort of new position so that instead of colliding with the folks I disagree with, we can all start pulling on the rope in the same direction.

I sent off a proposal a little while ago, an elegant piece of writing I wish I could post here :) . I was moved to do it because I sat up in bed in the dark hours realizing that the Napoleon passage is about me, too. It is not always the other people who have to see the error of their ways, who have to revisit their positions and revise their texts. In fact it is on me to stop the squabbling far, far more often than I am usually willing to acknowledge.

Approachable

I had to cold-call an icon yesterday.

Okay, so it wasn't an actual, like, call. I availed myself of email. But I still had a question that I had to ask of a well-known and much-admired writer. The last time I spoke to this fellow I was in my twenties and didn't know yet how much I didn't know, and he even at that time had such a reputation and following that he was part of "what people knew" about Nova Scotia, even people who would not be caught dead reading a book.

So I wrote my note, drawing on two tiny threads of relationship, and I asked my question. And, lookie: the fellow wrote back right away! He provided a thoughtful, friendly, and open-ended answer, just as if he wasn't famous.

This is, of course, not the first time I have had a gracious response from a famous person. As a teenager I wrote a letter to novelist Arthur C. Clarke about a point of science in one of his novels, and I had a faint typewritten response (because the typewriter ribbon was near the end of its days, not because the text was timorous, which it was not) within a week, all the way from Sri Lanka (and possibly typed on that custom typewriter that he had with the added blur key that he could use when uncertain whether the word was spelled "i-e" or "e-i").

I keep having to re-learn that lots of accomplished people have not let fame go to their heads: they have not become aloof and snooty and unapproachable, If that's how they are, that's probably how they were when they were more nobody than I am.

What happens is that I let their fame go to my head; I set up importance-barriers around accomplished folks that they generally have had no intention of setting up for themselves. I probably miss some very interesting conversations that way.

Where I was when

I am filling out a form that asks at one point where and during what periods of time I have lived since I  turned 18. That's a lot of places, although nowhere  near as many as it would be if I  had served in somebody's  military or had run away to the circus.

Having to make a list of where I was when, and what I was doing there, has been a very interesting exercise. At one level, I have had quick snapshot reminders of events, conversations, discoveries that happened in each house I have called home. Nice to revisit in my mind the various cats that have curled up on my lap, the bicycles the hall, the early morning sounds of a wide range of neighborhoods.

At a second level I am forcibly reminded of how thin a path I have walked. My family came to the Colonies in the 1630's and got kicked out of the United States to Canada in the 1780's. We (me included) moved back to the States in the 1950's and I have lived on both sides of the border since. However, with a couple of excursions (notably living in the Arctic for four years), I have not really lived anywhere that my great-great-great-whatevers could not conceivably have walked to from West Hartford, Connecticut. I am not sure what to draw from that, except to suspect that my understanding of the world and of people is much more constrained than I tend to assume it is.

Literary chef

When we lived in the Arctic and I needed to be able to function in both Inuktitut and Cree, washing dishes was my favorite chore. I would prop on the window sill my daily file card of ten words or phrases, and work my way through them while cleaning away the remains of whatever meal we had just had. Competence in Cree is closely associated in my mind with the smell of dish soap.

In our current situation, I generally cook breakfast (early riser) and sometimes take on other meals, but the list of dishes I am comfortable cooking is quite limited. I realized today that, to recommend itself, a recipe has to include periods when nothing much is happen ("let simmer for twenty minutes, or until the buzzards start to circle above the carcass"). Because that's when I read.

I read at other times, of course. I always have a book or two on the go. But nothing beats the rhythm of, say, putting the next two pancakes in the fry pans over slow heat and then, since nothing can possibly be done that will improve the situation until the little bubbles form on the uncooked side of the pancake, going back to whatever book I am reading for a few more sentences.

In this way I am helping Caesar conquer Gaul, watching as a detective named Perez solves a murder in the Shetland Islands, and giving myself nightmares with the story of the way the current Prime Minister governs Canada.

We will not dwell on the occasional tray of goodies ("bake for twenty minutes at 375") that goes directly from oven to bin because I look up when a long chapter finally ends and, lo and behold, it is a multiple of twenty minuteses later. It happens only often enough to keep me, if not humble, then aware that humility should exist.

I wood be warm this chilly morn

I have become quite fond of the local seniors' newspaper--eight or twelve pages per issue on newsprint. I also keep my eye out for non-glossy circulars. Yes, I own a new wood stove--how did you know?

They say wood heat warms you three times: when you cut it up, when you stack it up, and when you burn it up. With the temperature dipping down and actual snow lingering on the grass outside from the first snowfall of the season, I am delighted to be able to coax the wood stove into warming us just one time when I get up in the dark of pre-breakfast in a chilly house.

It would be simpler to turn on the oil furnace than to spend time kneeling on the hearth and coaxing the paper-then kindling-then small chunks stack of fuel into consistent flame. But with the oil furnace we have a different kind of heat, and the accompaniment of a deep rumble as if the dwarves under the hill were rolling their darkling wagons toward our basement. The wood stove converses with itself, ticking and crackling and hissing, and we get to watch the flames. I also have come to see heating with oil as lunatic, spendthrift behavior, and want to move away from it as much and as quickly as possible.

Ironically, we bought the wood stove in a year when there is a firewood shortage in Nova Scotia. The province was late in granting licenses to cut wood on crown land, and a few seasoned woodsmen have left off cutting except for their own purposes. On top of that, over the past couple of years there was a well-intentioned but ill-thought-out move to provide energy for the power grid by burning "biomass". I won't go into all the details here, but the result is that a lot of wood that used to be available for residential heating use is now being turned into electricity.

We have enough wood on hand for this winter, although it is far from being as dry as we would have preferred; and next week a nice man will deliver another whole truck load. That wood will warm us for the first time this month, as we stack it in the yard where it can slowly dry out for a year. Then, around next October, it will warm us the second time as we split what needs splitting and smash some of it into kindling (interesting underused back muscles one discovers by using a splitting maul...). And then our winter of 2015-2016 should be warm and cheery in the living room as the stove chuckles and growls its way through the logs we feed it.

Ghosts under the floorboards

We have had occasion over the last few months to observe several local workpeople close up, and the ghosts of several others. The opportunities related to repairs and renovations we were doing to the house we have moved into.

It's well-known that one of Nova Scotia's chief exports is its youth. Its younger, more ambitious--and, yes, more capable--folks tend to head off to Alberta, Toronto, or the Boston States to experience the larger world and maybe make their fortune. That leaves behind many folks who are content doing what they do right here and do it well (or well enough); and a bunch of other folks who have not yet found the work or avocation that ignites them. Those latter folks take jobs that appear because they need the money, but may have no affection for the work they have to do, the structure or system that results, or the people who pay them.

Our household goddess

Our house was once a tiny summer cottage on a slope. It is now a somewhat larger year-round house with a ground floor tucked in under the main floor. The silent-movie actress Theda Bara spent summers here, which must have made a refreshing change from vamping around with Rudolph Valentino in Hollywood.

Every couple of decades the house has had some improvements: new windows here, new kitchen there; the aforementioned lower level. And the ghosts of some of the workpeople who made those changes come out to haunt us as more recent workers help with the changes that we want to make (even more windows! fewer frozen pipes in January!!).

We have had a couple of really, really solid craftsmen helping us, and it is a delight to look at the improvements they have made. It was less of a delight each time they showed us something previous slackers had done, a decade or decades ago, and then hidden behind wallboard or under gravel, some ghoulish bad idea now needing attention before things got even worse. Those are the ghosts of past workers who were just putting in hours, who couldn't be bothered to use a right angle if one walked up and volunteered. Our current, competent folk would sigh and look rueful on behalf of their predecessors, and then do the best they could to save the situation.

To add to the fun, we had a couple of modern-day slackers who seemed to spend a lot of time avoiding doing the sensible thing in order to do the half-assed thing and then cover it up real quick. I don't think they hate us, or really want the house to suffer. They just are not ignited, not engaged; would rather be anywhere else than where they were.

It takes a while to figure out what kind of worker each person is. And then, because we are kindly souls (and because we doubted the evidence of our own eyes) it took a while to get quit of the slackers so the craftsmen could do their thing. And I apologize in advance to some future owner of this house because, along with the pleasant and clever changes we have ordered up this year, this summer's slackers have laid down some nasty ghosts--ghosts we are barely aware of ourselves yet. But they will rise at some inconvenient time.

I only hope there will still be some solid craftsmen around to come to the rescue.

Making adventures

I am having a lot of fun these days writing two choose-your-own-adventure games. You may remember print-based adventure books from years ago: at the bottom of a scene there would be a statement like:

If you attack the monster with the marshmallow gun, go to page 28.

If you jump into the laundry chute, go to page 40.

Here in modern times we can get rid of the "print-based" bit and make these games so people can play them on their phones or other devices. All the sound effects and most of the glitzy colors happen in your head, of course--just like when you're reading a novel or a poem. But it sure is faster to create than trying to make a game with satisfactory graphics and a user interface that pleases (collision detection, anyone?).

Fortunately, Choice of Games has put together a simple coding language called ChoiceScript that lets you concentrate on building the story without spending a soul-killing amount of time constructing if-statements and tracking variables. Choice of Games publishes a ton of games through the various app stores, and also hosts games civilians like me create.

One of the two games I'm writing takes place in modern times, in the world of software startups. There's deadlines, duplicity, dodgy behavior, and lots of other things that don't start with "d".

The second game takes place around 1800 with the British Army in Nova Scotia. I wrote the first draft of this game for a contest last year (write a game in a month), and finished second in a field that had more than two entrants. This game is sprouting all sorts of new story lines as I try to enrich it and make it more fun for the reader/player.

I'll write more about these games in future posts. To end for now, I wanted to show a bit of how you write a scene, and how the reader sees it.

You write using a text editor (I use EditPad Pro). ChoiceScript has strict rules for how you write commands, and indenting is very important, so your scene starts to look like this:

What the player sees is more like this:

Curious to find out what happens between you and the Prince? So am I!

Tiny tenterhooks

At the end of the summer I had the chance to take the ferry across the Bay of Fundy to Saint John, New Brunswick, for a weekend playwriting workshop called "Script Happens". The Saint John Theatre Company put on the event, and a gentler, more welcoming bunch of theatre folks I have not met.

The theatre had Stephen Massicotte, the author of Mary's Wedding and many other plays, as dramaturg for the weekend. He got to work with five nervous playwrights on short plays they had submitted. Each of us had time with Stephen, and then hours and hours (but far too few hours) through the rest of the Saturday to try to rewrite our scripts in light of Stephen's wise questions. Then, on Sunday, we got to enjoy table readings of the scripts by some of the theatre's regular actors.

The tenterhooks part is this: any day now we should hear which three plays will get full productions in 2015, and which will get staged readings. I would love to see my little script stood up. I can see it pretty clearly in my mind's eye, and there it is both funny and touching. But I am afire to know the affect it would have on an audience who is made up of people who are not me.

You send out scripts and short stories, and over and over again nothing happens. Nothing. But something nice happens just often enough that it adds Christmas-ornament glitter to the workaday hues of the writer's life. I would write even if nobody ever read what I wrote, you know. But having the chance to share what I write with others is really too good to miss.

Pull up your shorts!

King's Theatre in Annapolis Royal is looking for scripts for its annual King's Shorts festival of one-act plays. This is a great example of a really successful event that grew out of a let's-try-it-once bit of risk-taking.

When we lived on St. George Street in Annapolis Royal in the mid-1970's, the theatre was the sort of abandoned structure that looks like it must be on the list to be torn down very soon. Dedicated people and programs put the resources together to save and revitalize the theatre, and it now adorns not just the town but the whole region. People come from far and wide for plays, musical performances, simulcasts of opera, and all sorts of wild stuff. And, when the Farmers' Market is in its normal place during the season on Saturday mornings, the theatre bathrooms are where we all line up and say hi to each other.

I'm walking down to the post office to mail my first entry into the current competition (every playwright can submit two plays). If one of my plays gets chosen, members of the local theatre community will stage it. And the world will turn out to see it. Who could ask for anything more?

Getting there in one piece

One of the reasons we wanted to return to Canada was to be as politically active as I think every citizen ought to be. We haven't cornered the market on morals or ideas, but our ideas and our sense of what is just and right should be part of the political conversation. When we live in the United States we have to be pretty mute since we are not citizens.

The political party we align with, the New Democrats, was the government here in Nova Scotia when we got back to the province last year. And of course it promptly got walloped in an election about a year ago. The premier, who was also leader of the NDP, was defeated in his riding and resigned hi leadership.

Now we are starting to move toward a campaign to select a new party leader. The actual electoral convention won't happen until 2016, but folks interested in offering for the job are already starting to position themselves. This is right and proper: it's a big challenge and should not--cannot--be taken up on a whim.

So what I've been thinking about is how potential candidates should position themselves. The temptation must be to find the most inclusive and least offensive descriptors ("renewed leadership", "put the province on the right track", "end inefficiencies") so that people can gather under your banner even if they might not agree with every single thing you have ever said or thought.

The problem is, this seems to be what the NDP government did as it crashed and burned after only one term. There are some core principles of the NDP, and the government seemed unable either to articulate them or show how their actions harmonized with those principles; and so a lot of folks who might otherwise be assumed to support or at least be open to the NDP sat on their hands or voted elsewhere. (There were other factors at play, of course, including an incessant megaphone of negativity by the corporate media against the "socialist" government.)

It's a standard trope: you have to make compromises to get ahead in the world, and you can end up getting to, or near to, where you wanted to go having abandoned as ballast all the things you once stood for and worked for. And then you have to wonder, was the trip worth it?

Tomorrow night I go to hear one potential candidate, and then I meet with another on Sunday. There is a third who is testing the waters, and I bet there will be a couple more candidates who appear once the rules of the campaign are sorted out. I hope every single one of them stands up loudly and proudly for the party's core principles:

I'll revisit the campaign in future posts, to let y'all know what I'm seeing.