I intended to make a small self-promotion post on social media. I don't to them often because it feels pushy to me, but starting into my new journey on Threads, I figured I needed to introduce myself in some form. So I took this picture of my publications and started talking about them. And then my character count got very out of hand.
My paragraphs turned into pages, the lengths of which are far to much to ask anyone doom scrolling to endure. So why not stick it all here, in one safe place, and then? After all, I mostly use this space so that I can refer to my own history. What I wrote, when, and what happened to it -- my Dory brain just doesn't keep up. So this small part of my life story can live here too, parts that I don't want to forget.
My first short story won Honourable Mention in the Tall Tales and Short Stories contest and was included in the published anthology Tall Tales and Short Stories Vol 2 in 2004. My story is called “Brother of All Brothers”, a story I wrote for grade 8 English. I had struggled with school for a lot of my elementary years, “illiterate in two languages” I tell people, but there were many factors for that. I was with the same group of peers the whole time I lived in my hometown, and this story marked the first time that I felt I had finally lived up to people who were always smarter, prettier, and more popular. I was suddenly getting good at something; my story was one of 2 that were read aloud in class by my teacher, Mr. Botton, as the top of the class. That’s the only reason I was confident enough to submit it to the contest in the first place. The story itself isn’t particularly amazing, I had no sense of period, mostly just an abundance of British dramas and Titanic books. But it was an accomplishment that I held onto for the next 10 years: “I’m going to be a writer!”
I wrote A LOT. I wrote short stories. I wrote novels. I even wrote radio commercials, 3 of which were used and aired! I wrote the way most people write their first works: heavily influenced by the books and movies I was consuming, very loose plotlines, and motivation existing simply in the realm of “because!”. I thought my first full-length novel would have been literary gold as the new Tolkien (Hey, Lord of the Rings was VERY popular at the time!), and thank god a very nice publisher rejected me gently, “It still needs a bit more polishing, and I’m not sure that I’m capable of guiding you in the right direction with it at this time, but keep writing.” It didn’t smash my dreams, I just kept writing. Thanks Mr Van Bakel. That story was crap, we both know it, but parts of it lived on.
When I reached university, I had a plethora of fantasy stories under my belt, because I was going to be a fantasy author, of course! And yet I found myself with a vivid idea, stemming really from my own juggling of the art I wanted to make and the complex relationships I was starting to perceive differently. So I wrote about a movie director who just wanted things to be real. I wrote about a girl who was working really hard to get by, desperate to weigh what “was right” vs what felt right. And a former child actor who couldn’t live up to what was expected of him — until he could. I think this was the first novel I made where I wasn’t aiming to fit a genre or trope, I just about people. I had never written quite like that before, and it fit so well. I wasn’t forcing dragons and fancy-named new creatures, and medieval battles; it was just people. And so that was the one I felt was ready to publish. I spent years revising it. My development helpers and alpha readers were down to just giving me grammar notes instead of lists of questions. Self-publishing was the new craze, made so easy and partnered with the new novel writing challenge that doesn’t need to be named here. So I went that route, for better or for worse, who knows. And then I just kept writing.
The fantasy writing? It never stopped. I got more detailed. I dove into character development and suddenly the complicated lists of creatures got cut away, the dragons hardly appeared at all. But it wasn’t ready yet. I’d written it out in full 3 times up ‘til then. Other than my closest confidants as readers, I knew it wasn’t ready yet.
I finished my undergraduate degree, ran away to England for a spell, and came back to Canada to take my Education degree. Stories aplenty floating in my head; some written, some not, few finished. I distinctly remember sitting in one of my Diversity in Education classes, led by a remarkable retired principal who worked in some of the hardest hit socio-economic demographic schools in our area.
Sometimes things change slowly like ripples, and sometimes they change like tsunamis. The course was created to give acknowledgement to the stories of under-represented youths, as many of us pre-service teachers came from privilege, and certainly some more than others. I’m from a northern community, and it was mind-boggling to me that I was sitting in a room of post-degree adults who were learning about Residential Schools for the first time – before the topic entered curriculum by force. We were learning about supports for students with Autism before the “classroom integration” model was enforced. And we learned about gender normative narratives, and that, my friends, was a bit of ignorant bias I didn’t realize I had – but it made perfect sense. This was before the pronoun debate entered schools, and we were still trying to give voice to student-run Gay-Straight Alliance groups. It was a simple concept. Dr. Burgess just said, “can you imagine the books and movies you see not being heteronormative?”
I wasn’t planning on doing anything author-related with that information, but as a brain exercise I dug up one of my discarded ideas – The Hunger Games were very popular at the time, and I had a vague notion of a love-triangle story that took place in a dystopian prison-like-setting, but the characters weren’t people to me yet, they had no personalities, and no purpose. It was a low-risk opportunity to play around with an idea that I was still growing comfortable with (I’d like to think I’ve made some progress in this department!). I took my lack-of-personality young heroine and made her a boy. The moment I did that, the characters revealed themselves to me! They had names, they had faces, they had strong, passionate desires. Jos was fiercely protective of the younger, more naive Dotan, and Dotan passed that nurturing compassion onto his flat of roommates, earning him the nickname “Blanky” as he stayed up at night cradling Blue during his medical fits. It’s a full male cast, and I had no further agenda when writing it other than to tell their love story.
It was only afterwards, looking back, that I took any notice of the flip against what we now call “toxic masculinity” (it wasn’t a catch-phrase at the time). When I went on to write the sequel, it was one of my readers who’d bought my books at the local Expo, who came to praise me about flipping the narrative. “You never see boy characters deal with depression through cutting in books, it’s only ever girls. Thank you for showing that boys suffer in secret too.” It wasn’t a mission of mine, it’s just what Dotan had to do. Maybe because he started in the body of a girl he ended up with some form of twin-spiritness, or maybe that’s just how he is. He was always just Dotan to me. I never tried to make him more feminine or masculine. I just tried to make him real. And while there are things about that story I would probably write differently these days, those three characters and how they cared for each other, I’d never tamper with. That was who they needed to be, and how they are forever.
Sometimes things change slowly like ripples, and sometimes they change like tsunamis. The course was created to give acknowledgement to the stories of under-represented youths, as many of us pre-service teachers came from privilege, and certainly some more than others. I’m from a northern community, and it was mind-boggling to me that I was sitting in a room of post-degree adults who were learning about Residential Schools for the first time – before the topic entered curriculum by force. We were learning about supports for students with Autism before the “classroom integration” model was enforced. And we learned about gender normative narratives, and that, my friends, was a bit of ignorant bias I didn’t realize I had – but it made perfect sense. This was before the pronoun debate entered schools, and we were still trying to give voice to student-run Gay-Straight Alliance groups. It was a simple concept. Dr. Burgess just said, “can you imagine the books and movies you see not being heteronormative?”
I wasn’t planning on doing anything author-related with that information, but as a brain exercise I dug up one of my discarded ideas – The Hunger Games were very popular at the time, and I had a vague notion of a love-triangle story that took place in a dystopian prison-like-setting, but the characters weren’t people to me yet, they had no personalities, and no purpose. It was a low-risk opportunity to play around with an idea that I was still growing comfortable with (I’d like to think I’ve made some progress in this department!). I took my lack-of-personality young heroine and made her a boy. The moment I did that, the characters revealed themselves to me! They had names, they had faces, they had strong, passionate desires. Jos was fiercely protective of the younger, more naive Dotan, and Dotan passed that nurturing compassion onto his flat of roommates, earning him the nickname “Blanky” as he stayed up at night cradling Blue during his medical fits. It’s a full male cast, and I had no further agenda when writing it other than to tell their love story.
It was only afterwards, looking back, that I took any notice of the flip against what we now call “toxic masculinity” (it wasn’t a catch-phrase at the time). When I went on to write the sequel, it was one of my readers who’d bought my books at the local Expo, who came to praise me about flipping the narrative. “You never see boy characters deal with depression through cutting in books, it’s only ever girls. Thank you for showing that boys suffer in secret too.” It wasn’t a mission of mine, it’s just what Dotan had to do. Maybe because he started in the body of a girl he ended up with some form of twin-spiritness, or maybe that’s just how he is. He was always just Dotan to me. I never tried to make him more feminine or masculine. I just tried to make him real. And while there are things about that story I would probably write differently these days, those three characters and how they cared for each other, I’d never tamper with. That was who they needed to be, and how they are forever.
And this is where things come to a halt. Children. I did what I could. I participated in writing challenges after another. More re-writing of that epic fantasy story that I still couldn’t quite get right. Maybe write the prequel? Maybe that will help me figure out the missing pieces? It hasn’t gone well. And between 9 years of teaching and having 3 babies of my own, I admitted to myself that I wasn’t a novelist anymore. I just couldn’t do it.
Life sometimes makes you shift focus. It feels like failure in the moment, but these lessons have a way of coming back around when you don’t catch it the first time. As I recently said to a complete stranger facing their own writing hurdles: the magic isn’t gone forever, it just sprinkles itself around in the places it needs us to discover. I won’t go into the years of feeling like I’d lost myself; because in truth I’m not sure I’ve ever fully come out of that, but I did find some easier ways to get some of that magic back. Games.
Life sometimes makes you shift focus. It feels like failure in the moment, but these lessons have a way of coming back around when you don’t catch it the first time. As I recently said to a complete stranger facing their own writing hurdles: the magic isn’t gone forever, it just sprinkles itself around in the places it needs us to discover. I won’t go into the years of feeling like I’d lost myself; because in truth I’m not sure I’ve ever fully come out of that, but I did find some easier ways to get some of that magic back. Games.
I’d been designing games with my friends almost as long as I’d been making-up stories, but I didn’t really consider publishing one. Opportunity comes in strange places sometimes. My husband, also a teacher, wanted to make a game that could be used as an educational resource to help with math skills, but as an actual game, not a fancy flashcard set. As us being board gamers, we tested his design for the “fun”. It was a game first and foremost. And it worked wonders for math skills, too! He took the game seriously enough to pursue developing it professionally, but it’s a strange market to make an educational game, not a lot of people know what to do with such a thing and even fewer are looking to offer a publishing contract for one. So he made it himself. Hired a local artist and got himself a business license to make his own company. And that opened up a new outlet for me. I designed games. I have dozens of designs sitting in their paper forms in this house, and have consulted on all of his designs too.
Then he got a crazy idea. What if we could make a game based on something popular? And I LOVE a good challenge. Within 24 hours I had a game concept to propose to him, and within the week I had a playable prototype. He knew nothing about the show or the books, so he played the game, and loved it. And then we took it to other gamers who knew nothing about the books or the show, and they gave their stamp of approval for the game. So the next natural step was to find out if it was worthy of a license. We didn’t think they’d say yes. We’re a kitchen table company. But they said yes. The license is expired now, the games out of print, but for a brief moment in time, I felt like I was attached to something impossible. Little ol’ me, still chasing those stamps of approval, and somehow it worked.
That was the next confidence boost I needed. My tired and broken mom-brain, my piles and piles of unfinished and abandoned story projects, and yet, I made the magic work. So what else could I do?
That was the next confidence boost I needed. My tired and broken mom-brain, my piles and piles of unfinished and abandoned story projects, and yet, I made the magic work. So what else could I do?
I wrote small. Flash fiction pieces for contests and challenges. Just enough to keep me eager to solve another puzzle like with my board game design; how do I fit these unlikely themes into something cohesive? So when a submission came along for short story entries, I felt armed and ready. And that brings me to now. I’m still navigating what my heart wants to work on and what my brain feels ready for, but I think I’m riding smooth enough now that I’m not worried about my next stamp of approval. I just need to keep writing, or creating, or playing, or living. The magic knows where to find me. When it calls, I know I’ll answer.
Almost forgot one. I had to add it seperately because I've been bad and haven't ordered my author copies yet: "Days Beyond Ragnarok" published by Worldsmyths in the Written in the Wind anthology, 2024. 20 years exactly from my first short story publication to my most recent. Now that's some magic, isn't?
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