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.