The hardest part, so far, is getting past the horror of seeing your living dreams imprisoned in cold, hard type.


Well...that, and getting over 30 years of habitual procrastination, endless self-editing perfectionism, post-work exhaustion, and those pesky friends who suddenly come out of the woodwork with tempting social engagements THE MOMENT you actually have something you really should be working on.

The theory behind my escape to the mountains was that I would write. Well, it might have worked, if I locked myself in a room and ignored the outside world, which would more or less negate the advantages of being in the mountains in the first place. It would have worked better if I hadn’t spent some 2 hours sitting at a bar sort of vaguely hoping to talk to someone interesting, because I was away from home and feeling lonely. Vaguely. The only conversation I managed to strike up was with a pimply faced 18 year old kid who looked at me and my laptop with a sort of fresh-from-somewhere-small-in-northwestern-Ontario awe and asked, rather out of the blue, “Are you a writer?”

Yeah, Kid. I’m a writer. I gave myself a deadline two weeks ago and I have written exactly two and a half actual paragraphs in that time. I’m a Reeeeaaaal, live writer.

I said something immensely clever like “ sometimes” and pretended to be examining my beer for impurities. I suppose the “Leave me the hell alone” vibe isn’t terribly useful if you’re still sort of hoping to pick someone up, but It’s a vibe I happen to be quite good at emitting( quite often accidentally). In this case, sadly, I was unsuccessful. Either too young or too drunk to pick up that I was about as interested in chatting as having another one of those “Moose-antler” Stouts, he kept going. Somehow he got me to mention I had been in China ( a fact very difficult to wring out of me, I know) and his first thought on that was “ I hear the girls there are easy” which both tipped me off to the level of conversation I was likely to have here, and helped me make the transition from wanting him to go away to kind of wanting to hit him.

I had begun to feel plenty ridiculous well before this, but had a genuinely good beer in front of me that had to be finished. I downed the remains rather too quickly, paid Andre the depressingly handsome and charming bartender, and stumbled home in the dark to get back to that “writing stuff”. Well…another useful thing I’ve figured out is that I’m NOT actually a better writer after four beers. Damn Andre and his “Elk Run Red”.

The "Great Project" does not progress terribly well at the moment. But we're just getting started.