Always worth the trip. Not easy to get to, in more ways than one.
First, there's the trick to get in the registration window and actually succeed in getting a spot. Get the full three-day package that includes 3 lunches and 2 dinners--most with speakers well-worth hearing.
Next, for me, there's the transportation. Greyhound, my old stand-by, deserted all of western Canada about a year ago, and so since I don't drive, the only way to the Lower Mainland from the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia is to fly. Book early, because flights to Vancouver sell out fast. Not to mention getting a hotel reservation. Sheraton Guildford, where the conference is held, is sold out fast, too. Better chance getting in the Sandman Suites Guildford, around the corner from the Sheraton, but about $7 per taxi ride.
Then there's the nightmare of finding help for my elderly and disabled husband. (See another post for that rant.)
But, as I said, the conference is work the trip. Highlights for me (aside from having the opportunity to reconnect with my pal Christine David) were the workshops:
In no special order, I attended two workshops by Hallie Ephron. The first was about "wounds and burdens" and the second was "suspense." I love the fact that she has excellent handouts I can put my notes on. I also attended a workshop by the famous mystery writer, Anne Perry. (Hallie is also a famous mystery writer.) Anne's workshops are another feature of the conference that I wouldn't miss for the world. I actually got to sit next to Anne one evening at dinner and we had a nice chat. Another dinner, I sat next to Diana Gabaldon, of Outlander fame, and showed her some notes I'd found just before I left home: they were notes from a workshop of hers that I'd attended in 1994. Christine, also at the table with Diana and me, had also been at that same workshop. We've been at this a very long time!
Other workshops were by Carleigh Baker, Cathy Ace, Nicole Blades, Elizabeth Boyle, Eileen Cook (author of two of my favourite young adult novels: With Malice and You Owe Me a Murder), CC (Chris) Humphreys, Mary Robinette Kowal, Owen Laukkanen, Donald Maass (New York Agent! always at SiWC). And some others in workshops, some of them solo presenters and others were on panels.
Sat "with" Dana Murphy at lunch where she was supposed to be the "hostess" and was, along with everyone at the table except two talkative women, totally ignored by her. Too big for her baby booties, if you ask me.
Friday, November 1, 2019
What happened to October 2019?
It came and it went. Even my autobiography got shoved aside. Monday, September 30th, I started teaching a new ESL student, referred to me by my previous ESL student. Luz comes twice a week, Wednesdays 10 to 11, and Fridays 4 to 5. Today, somehow, she didn't show up. Could have been because of the changes from October 24th to 31st. I had to cancel the Friday and Wednesday of that week. More about that in a few minutes. So, the ESL tutorials account for a "loss" of two hours a week writing time.
Much of my time was taken with preparing to go to the Surrey International Writers' Conference, October 24th to 27th. Not the writing I'd hoped to take with me, or to prepare to do there, just preparing to leave my husband alone for seven days. I wanted to have some "me-time" after the conference, stay with friends until the end of the month. Not doing that again. I was leaving on Thursday, October 24th and coming back on October 31st, flying home on my broomstick.
But first I had to arrange for someone to check in on my 86-year-old crippled husband once a day, help him get his shoes on if he wanted to go out, make sure he had his medicines, and at least make a sandwich for him for his lunch. Interior Health (the regional health service for this part of the province of British Columbia) assured me that a visiting nurse would come every morning between 9am and 11am. They pledged to do "dress assist" and "medicine assist" and "meal assist". We would pay $31 (and change) per hour or $72 per day whichever was less. I'm just waiting to see what the bill will say when it comes. Because: over 7 days, 6 "nurses" came (one came twice) but none of them were nurses. They were "care support workers". So--Frank attempted to be up every morning with at least most of his clothes on. Not once did any of these "workers" offer to put on his shoes. When he asked them to give him his morning pills, one of them (the one who came twice) didn't know how to open a blister pack, and when she checked with her supervisor, she was told not to give him any of his medicines. The second time she came, she had mastered the mysteries of the blister pack but would not set the Victoza pen to the correct dosage. Frank managed to get her to let him know when he had clicked to the correct dosage, so that was okay. (He's legally blind, so he can't see the numbers on the pen.) All six women objected to giving him Tylenol-for-arthritis. Only one actually did give it to him because she reasoned that it was an over-the-counter medicine. But he had to promise not to tell on her as she wasn't supposed to. Because she wasn't a nurse. WE WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE NURSES. He's also supposed to have hydromorphone, but there was no use asking for that. As a result, he spent the week in pain because we didn't have nurses. Meal assist? One woman made him a peanut butter sandwich, but that was while I was still there and I told her to. One peanut butter sandwich was supposed to last him for seven days? Too much to ask that he be given one peanut butter sandwich every day for seven days? There were also half a dozen dinners from "meals on wheels" that the surveillance nurse said could be heated up for him. I still have all those dinners in the freezer in exactly the same spots that the MOW volunteer put them the day after I left. So, $31 an hour? Not one of these women stayed even 15 minutes, let alone the hour we were promised. What do you bet they try to charge us $31 X 7 days of "service"? Seven hours of nothing. But they're the government. However, when I mentioned to someone that I planned to write a letter of complaint, my friend suggested I send the letter to the newspaper. I think I will. As soon as I get that bill.
He did cope pretty well. Our son, Steve, came over several times, and helped him. They had meals at restaurants. They even went shopping and Frank cooked a big pack of sausages and had sausage sandwiches every day for supper. One night he added fried eggs. When I got home I was amazed that he hadn't created a bigger mess than the one that greeted me on my arrival. Next time I leave him alone, he's going into a respite centre whether he wants to or not.
Much of my time was taken with preparing to go to the Surrey International Writers' Conference, October 24th to 27th. Not the writing I'd hoped to take with me, or to prepare to do there, just preparing to leave my husband alone for seven days. I wanted to have some "me-time" after the conference, stay with friends until the end of the month. Not doing that again. I was leaving on Thursday, October 24th and coming back on October 31st, flying home on my broomstick.
But first I had to arrange for someone to check in on my 86-year-old crippled husband once a day, help him get his shoes on if he wanted to go out, make sure he had his medicines, and at least make a sandwich for him for his lunch. Interior Health (the regional health service for this part of the province of British Columbia) assured me that a visiting nurse would come every morning between 9am and 11am. They pledged to do "dress assist" and "medicine assist" and "meal assist". We would pay $31 (and change) per hour or $72 per day whichever was less. I'm just waiting to see what the bill will say when it comes. Because: over 7 days, 6 "nurses" came (one came twice) but none of them were nurses. They were "care support workers". So--Frank attempted to be up every morning with at least most of his clothes on. Not once did any of these "workers" offer to put on his shoes. When he asked them to give him his morning pills, one of them (the one who came twice) didn't know how to open a blister pack, and when she checked with her supervisor, she was told not to give him any of his medicines. The second time she came, she had mastered the mysteries of the blister pack but would not set the Victoza pen to the correct dosage. Frank managed to get her to let him know when he had clicked to the correct dosage, so that was okay. (He's legally blind, so he can't see the numbers on the pen.) All six women objected to giving him Tylenol-for-arthritis. Only one actually did give it to him because she reasoned that it was an over-the-counter medicine. But he had to promise not to tell on her as she wasn't supposed to. Because she wasn't a nurse. WE WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE NURSES. He's also supposed to have hydromorphone, but there was no use asking for that. As a result, he spent the week in pain because we didn't have nurses. Meal assist? One woman made him a peanut butter sandwich, but that was while I was still there and I told her to. One peanut butter sandwich was supposed to last him for seven days? Too much to ask that he be given one peanut butter sandwich every day for seven days? There were also half a dozen dinners from "meals on wheels" that the surveillance nurse said could be heated up for him. I still have all those dinners in the freezer in exactly the same spots that the MOW volunteer put them the day after I left. So, $31 an hour? Not one of these women stayed even 15 minutes, let alone the hour we were promised. What do you bet they try to charge us $31 X 7 days of "service"? Seven hours of nothing. But they're the government. However, when I mentioned to someone that I planned to write a letter of complaint, my friend suggested I send the letter to the newspaper. I think I will. As soon as I get that bill.
He did cope pretty well. Our son, Steve, came over several times, and helped him. They had meals at restaurants. They even went shopping and Frank cooked a big pack of sausages and had sausage sandwiches every day for supper. One night he added fried eggs. When I got home I was amazed that he hadn't created a bigger mess than the one that greeted me on my arrival. Next time I leave him alone, he's going into a respite centre whether he wants to or not.
Monday, September 9, 2019
clutter
I don't have a cluttered desk at Cowork, because I have to clear it off every evening when I leave--nothing on the desk, nothing on the shelf above the desk (except for the official notice that it is reserved for me on Mondays and Fridays), and nothing in the three drawers that I used to have full to over-flowing when I rented this desk "permanently." I have a small suitcase that I use to bring to Cowork anything that I need to use at the hot desk.
At home I have a small desk in my bedroom. It's handy for me to use when I make a phone call or need to make a quick note to myself. Too small to allow it to get cluttered. It's a roll-top desk, borrowed from my son Steve, and it has a shelf-like top above the roller. I have pictures made by my son Ken, and a box of his with his brother's pumice stone inside. I keep the pumice stone because there's some dried blood on it, from Frank's forehead when he rubbed a wart he should have left alone. I also have some pictures of St. Francis of Assisi, a couple of crosses, a small statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and some printed out prayers. I guess it's a shrine of sorts, devoted to the memory of my eldest son Frank (1957-2005) and my second son Ken (1959-2012), both victims of the demon Cancer. I don't consider this shelf to be cluttered.
My bedroom itself is cluttered with boxes and bags of things that have yet to be sorted since we moved to Penticton in April 2016. I'm working on it. I've made more progress than you might imagine, given that I still haven't finished in three years. Everything that didn't have an obvious place to reside, got put in my bedroom. Now, most of it is getting tossed in the garbage anyway. I just have to look at it first, and decide.
It's my head that's cluttered. I come to Cowork to write. Sometimes, I print out documents sent to me by the church where I serve on the Church Council, or documents from various doctors that I have to read to my husband and are illegible on my little iPhone. But mostly, I want to write here. I've been working very hard on my autobiography, If Anyone Should Ask, now on Decade 7 of my life. Finish this decade and Decade 8 and I'm done. It's rough. Not much editing. But it's not for publication. If you aren't a member of my family, there's no chance you'll get to see it. I mentioned it at the writing critique group I belong to, and the "leader" said she "had concerns about it." No she doesn't. It's absolutely none of her "concern" at all. She was "concerned" about my using anecdotes. She writes non-fiction books about submarines, so I guess she doesn't have any anecdotes. It was her husband's profession, and her knowledge is second-hand at best. So, autobiography aside, what else do I write here?
Today, I've taken refuge in this blog. I'm writing about writing, or not writing. Being at this desk only twice a week, I feel a bit nervous when I'm not making good use of the time. Blogging is good, but creative writing is better. At home, I've been reading about short stories, and reading short stories from all different sources--classics like Guy de Maupassant and Hemingway, for example, and contest winners from 2019 Short Story Contest at the CBC. I think I could write short stories long-hand in notebooks at home, between Cowork session. Maybe submit something for the 2020 contest. Sounds like a good plan. So far, no progress.
So what should I be doing at my hot desk at Cowork? Besides my autobiography and blog? It's the novels that are cluttering my mind: First there's the trilogy that was sabotaged when my thumb-drive went crazy and turned the whole thing into a mess of upside-down question marks, and I lost my first book, House of Secrets. And about half of the second book, Baby's Breath. And notes for the third book of the trilogy, Flowers and Flames. I'm sure I have most of the above printed out, but I haven't the courage to look.
Then there's the book I started when I was taking Creative Writing courses at UBC. I guess I started it long before that, but it was in one of these courses that I got pushed to go outside of my comfort zone--try a fantasy. Really? I always say I don't like fantasy, but that's not true. I loved Lord of the Rings, The Narnia Chronicles and Harry Potter. Fantasies, all of them. So, I drew a deep breath and re-started my story which doesn't have a title yet. It's a historical ghost story. Historical because the main part of the story is circa 1950, in London, England. Then the protagonists (two girls) meet a couple of ghosts and, in the Bloody Tower of the Tower of London, they meet the ghosts of the two princes allegedly murdered by their favourite uncle. But the boys don't believe it was their uncle, and command the girls to travel back in time to their murder and find out whodunit. (They were smothered in their sleep, so they didn't see it coming.) I'm having a ball researching and scribbling. I can't find the scenes I've actually written, but that book might get done before the trilogy! Maybe!
At home I have a small desk in my bedroom. It's handy for me to use when I make a phone call or need to make a quick note to myself. Too small to allow it to get cluttered. It's a roll-top desk, borrowed from my son Steve, and it has a shelf-like top above the roller. I have pictures made by my son Ken, and a box of his with his brother's pumice stone inside. I keep the pumice stone because there's some dried blood on it, from Frank's forehead when he rubbed a wart he should have left alone. I also have some pictures of St. Francis of Assisi, a couple of crosses, a small statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and some printed out prayers. I guess it's a shrine of sorts, devoted to the memory of my eldest son Frank (1957-2005) and my second son Ken (1959-2012), both victims of the demon Cancer. I don't consider this shelf to be cluttered.
My bedroom itself is cluttered with boxes and bags of things that have yet to be sorted since we moved to Penticton in April 2016. I'm working on it. I've made more progress than you might imagine, given that I still haven't finished in three years. Everything that didn't have an obvious place to reside, got put in my bedroom. Now, most of it is getting tossed in the garbage anyway. I just have to look at it first, and decide.
It's my head that's cluttered. I come to Cowork to write. Sometimes, I print out documents sent to me by the church where I serve on the Church Council, or documents from various doctors that I have to read to my husband and are illegible on my little iPhone. But mostly, I want to write here. I've been working very hard on my autobiography, If Anyone Should Ask, now on Decade 7 of my life. Finish this decade and Decade 8 and I'm done. It's rough. Not much editing. But it's not for publication. If you aren't a member of my family, there's no chance you'll get to see it. I mentioned it at the writing critique group I belong to, and the "leader" said she "had concerns about it." No she doesn't. It's absolutely none of her "concern" at all. She was "concerned" about my using anecdotes. She writes non-fiction books about submarines, so I guess she doesn't have any anecdotes. It was her husband's profession, and her knowledge is second-hand at best. So, autobiography aside, what else do I write here?
Today, I've taken refuge in this blog. I'm writing about writing, or not writing. Being at this desk only twice a week, I feel a bit nervous when I'm not making good use of the time. Blogging is good, but creative writing is better. At home, I've been reading about short stories, and reading short stories from all different sources--classics like Guy de Maupassant and Hemingway, for example, and contest winners from 2019 Short Story Contest at the CBC. I think I could write short stories long-hand in notebooks at home, between Cowork session. Maybe submit something for the 2020 contest. Sounds like a good plan. So far, no progress.
So what should I be doing at my hot desk at Cowork? Besides my autobiography and blog? It's the novels that are cluttering my mind: First there's the trilogy that was sabotaged when my thumb-drive went crazy and turned the whole thing into a mess of upside-down question marks, and I lost my first book, House of Secrets. And about half of the second book, Baby's Breath. And notes for the third book of the trilogy, Flowers and Flames. I'm sure I have most of the above printed out, but I haven't the courage to look.
Then there's the book I started when I was taking Creative Writing courses at UBC. I guess I started it long before that, but it was in one of these courses that I got pushed to go outside of my comfort zone--try a fantasy. Really? I always say I don't like fantasy, but that's not true. I loved Lord of the Rings, The Narnia Chronicles and Harry Potter. Fantasies, all of them. So, I drew a deep breath and re-started my story which doesn't have a title yet. It's a historical ghost story. Historical because the main part of the story is circa 1950, in London, England. Then the protagonists (two girls) meet a couple of ghosts and, in the Bloody Tower of the Tower of London, they meet the ghosts of the two princes allegedly murdered by their favourite uncle. But the boys don't believe it was their uncle, and command the girls to travel back in time to their murder and find out whodunit. (They were smothered in their sleep, so they didn't see it coming.) I'm having a ball researching and scribbling. I can't find the scenes I've actually written, but that book might get done before the trilogy! Maybe!
Friday, September 6, 2019
Reading 1
The drafts of the two attempts to write this post somehow turned up on my list. They weren't there last time I looked, but I've now posted one of them--my second attempt. That's why this one is titled "Reading 1."
I'm sure I didn't leave any labels on the one I published. I was just in a hurry to get it up before it vanished again. Did I call it "Reading 2"? I intended to.
I'm sure I didn't leave any labels on the one I published. I was just in a hurry to get it up before it vanished again. Did I call it "Reading 2"? I intended to.
Reading
Over the past three years, 2016-2019, the length of time Frank and I have been living in Penticton, we've read about twenty or thirty books. I say "we" because I've been reading to him almost every evening since he lost his sight on November 25, 2014 (Giant Cell Arteritis).
Unfortunately, I haven't kept track of which books we've read or when we actually read them. Most of them I've given away, but one or two are harder to part with. I did mention in an earlier blog about a book I actually tossed in the garbage. I expected to enjoy it because it was a murder mystery, and my favourite books usually kill someone off early on and spend the rest of the chapters helping me work out the puzzle. The one I tossed out might have done that, but I couldn't stand reading aloud the terrible "Appalachian" dialect. Otherwise known as just plain ignorance, in my not so humble opinion.
Right now, we're reading The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. Before that, we read two books by Captain Marryat, The Children of the New Forest and The Settlers in Canada. Earlier this summer, we read Michelle Obama's Becoming, and thoroughly enjoyed that. When we first came to Penticton, the reading plan was to read everything Sue Grafton ever wrote. We did that, and then we both wept when her daughter announced that "the alphabet ends with Y." Sue Grafton died before she could write "Z" to her alphabet mystery series. Other books we've read since coming to the Okanagan Valley, include some kids' books about World War I, all of Stuart MacLean's books, Swiss Family Robinson (which Captain Marryat didn't like because the author, Johann David Wyss, romanticized the ship wreck and had animals that wouldn't have been found at the location where the family was supposed to be. Marryat wrote his own version, and maybe one day we'll read that one). We've also read a book on opera librettos, I don't remember who wrote that. One of the books I enjoyed most was A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, one of my favourite authors.
In this list of favourite books I'm not including The Holy Bible. We've been reading that together since long before Frank lost his sight. We used to take turns reading it--he'd read a chapter from one version, maybe The New Revised Standard, for example. And the next night, I'd read a chapter from a different version, probably The Catholic Study Bible. I liked to use that one because we could remember when to go to the Apocrypha for the books that are left out of the Protestant canon. We started this tradition somewhere around 1998, if not earlier, and have continued to this day. We usually read one chapter a night, so the Protestant Bible takes three years. (Read 3 chapters a night to complete the whole Bible in one year.) Once during this time, we took some months out to read the Koran aloud to each other, using two different translations. I recommend it, no matter what your views are on Islam. It's only fair to know what you're talking about. So, I think that we've read the Bible from cover to cover six times. The odd thing is that we often find that we could swear we'd never heard some of it before when we know for a fact we've read it repeatedly.
I'm going to stop here, before this post goes missing for the second time. I'd like to give links for the versions on the Bible that I've listed, but I'll leave that for you to Google. This site is too unreliable.
Unfortunately, I haven't kept track of which books we've read or when we actually read them. Most of them I've given away, but one or two are harder to part with. I did mention in an earlier blog about a book I actually tossed in the garbage. I expected to enjoy it because it was a murder mystery, and my favourite books usually kill someone off early on and spend the rest of the chapters helping me work out the puzzle. The one I tossed out might have done that, but I couldn't stand reading aloud the terrible "Appalachian" dialect. Otherwise known as just plain ignorance, in my not so humble opinion.
Right now, we're reading The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. Before that, we read two books by Captain Marryat, The Children of the New Forest and The Settlers in Canada. Earlier this summer, we read Michelle Obama's Becoming, and thoroughly enjoyed that. When we first came to Penticton, the reading plan was to read everything Sue Grafton ever wrote. We did that, and then we both wept when her daughter announced that "the alphabet ends with Y." Sue Grafton died before she could write "Z" to her alphabet mystery series. Other books we've read since coming to the Okanagan Valley, include some kids' books about World War I, all of Stuart MacLean's books, Swiss Family Robinson (which Captain Marryat didn't like because the author, Johann David Wyss, romanticized the ship wreck and had animals that wouldn't have been found at the location where the family was supposed to be. Marryat wrote his own version, and maybe one day we'll read that one). We've also read a book on opera librettos, I don't remember who wrote that. One of the books I enjoyed most was A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, one of my favourite authors.
In this list of favourite books I'm not including The Holy Bible. We've been reading that together since long before Frank lost his sight. We used to take turns reading it--he'd read a chapter from one version, maybe The New Revised Standard, for example. And the next night, I'd read a chapter from a different version, probably The Catholic Study Bible. I liked to use that one because we could remember when to go to the Apocrypha for the books that are left out of the Protestant canon. We started this tradition somewhere around 1998, if not earlier, and have continued to this day. We usually read one chapter a night, so the Protestant Bible takes three years. (Read 3 chapters a night to complete the whole Bible in one year.) Once during this time, we took some months out to read the Koran aloud to each other, using two different translations. I recommend it, no matter what your views are on Islam. It's only fair to know what you're talking about. So, I think that we've read the Bible from cover to cover six times. The odd thing is that we often find that we could swear we'd never heard some of it before when we know for a fact we've read it repeatedly.
I'm going to stop here, before this post goes missing for the second time. I'd like to give links for the versions on the Bible that I've listed, but I'll leave that for you to Google. This site is too unreliable.
Lost posts: Reading????
This is very discouraging! I've been trying to list books that I've read over the past few years, and twice now the post has vanished before I was able to finish. To make matters worse, each time I've been careful about how to go about inserting links. At least half a dozen links. Obviously, my posts are too long. Grrrrr! Well, not this one!
first week of September
This time of year I get very nostalgic. I loved the first few weeks of school--new books, new notebooks, new friends. And from there on, it usually just got better. Oh yes, I had my share of grumpy teachers and mean classmates, but they were in the minority. Some courses I really disliked (math and science, usually) and some I enjoyed even if I didn't excel (history and geography). I generally did well in English, but that's to be expected of someone who is (or wants to be) a writer. And languages! I love languages. All languages. One of my favourite anecdotes I like to tell people--sometimes repeating it to the same people--so I apologize if you've heard it before, is about when I took German in high school.
It was right after the Christmas holidays, and my German teacher, Herr von Wittgenstein, met me in the hall.
"Diane!" he called out. "I would like to shake your hand." I stopped and stared. He was speaking to me?
"Yes?" I said. We shook hands.
He continued, "I have been teaching German in this school for twenty years. You are the first student to take my course, write my exam, and get 100% wrong."
I quit German that day, and switched to Latin. Much easier!
School days! How I miss them!
It was right after the Christmas holidays, and my German teacher, Herr von Wittgenstein, met me in the hall.
"Diane!" he called out. "I would like to shake your hand." I stopped and stared. He was speaking to me?
"Yes?" I said. We shook hands.
He continued, "I have been teaching German in this school for twenty years. You are the first student to take my course, write my exam, and get 100% wrong."
I quit German that day, and switched to Latin. Much easier!
School days! How I miss them!
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