Writing

Not Today, Satan; Things My Mother Left Behind Release!

This week, I had to get blood taken. I absolutely hate having that done, but my new family doctor wanted to do benchmark bloodwork before Christmas and it showed that my cholesterol was slightly elevated:

Me: What would cause that?
Doc: Mostly diet.
Me: Ahem…does drinking wine cause high cholesterol?
Doc: No, not really.
Me (internally VERY relieved): I’m prepared to cut any food out of my diet that I need to.

Turns out that the foods she identified were potatoes, salmon, steak, rice, and pasta (even the gluten-free kind). So yes, literally ALL the things I like to eat. She recommended the Mediterranean diet, and I’ve been trying to follow it, but there’s only so much chicken and quinoa a girl can eat. Otherwise, I eat pretty healthy foods and thinking more about it, that’s a complete lie and I should be surprised that my cholesterol isn’t worse. So anyway, on Thursday, I went to the lab to get blood taken.

Lab Tech: When was the last time you ate?
Me: About 45 minutes ago. I had fries from McDonald’s and a Pepsi. Considering this is a cholesterol test, that wasn’t a great idea…
Lab Tech: Haha. NO.

I rolled up my sleeve and turned my head, and when the needle went in it really hurt. I looked back and the tech had a perturbed look on his face, and then I remembered that he was taking blood from my right forearm, you know, the one with the words THE SEVENTH DEVIL splashed across it underneath devil eyes.

Me: I should probably explain—it’s the title of a book…I mean a book that I wrote…it’s not about Satan worship or anything…well, there are demons in it…anyway, I have one on my other arm too!

I showed him my left forearm and The Dome tattoo which graces it but he still didn’t seem convinced. He just muttered, “Okay,” and then handed me a cotton ball to stop the bleeding. In retrospect, perhaps the bulk of my lower arm wasn’t the best place to get a large devil tattoo as I’ve had to explain it on more than one occasion to a medical professional holding a large needle. And to add insult to injury, I got my lab results back yesterday and my cholesterol is STILL high–not quite as high as before, but still slightly higher than it should be. Screw you, quinoa. (Although I actually like quinoa, so maybe I just need to cut out the Mickey D’s).

In other news, Baxter House Editions has just released its second publication: the gorgeous poetry collection Things My Mother Left Behind by Susan Richardson. Susan writes the blog Stories from the Edge of Blindness and hosts a phenomenal weekly podcast called A Thousand Shades of Green. Things My Mother Left Behind is about the undeniable connections between love and grief, joy and pain. It is an exploration of one woman’s journey through the loss of loved ones, loss of sight, loss of control and innocence. It is about escaping into darkness and discovering light.

You can buy it here!

Battle of the Build; Cover Reveal for Charybdis

As you may remember, last week I completed a miniature book nook, and I enjoyed it so much that I ordered another. It was a gothic-style library, and I was super-excited when it arrived. That excitement quickly faded to perplexity when I realized it was from a different company with VERY different expectations. Instead of stickers, it was just paper that I was supposed to glue to the little pieces of wood. Okay, I thought. I can buy some glue. Because the kit didn’t COME with glue. I went out the next day and bought white glue and a glue stick, just to be on the safe side. After I got home, I took everything else out of the box, and looked at the instructions more closely, and they were very weird. It was like if you asked a Roman General to create directions for assembly based on his life experience. Here’s the first example, on the cover page:

“The actual object will PREVAIL”? Am I in a battle to the death with this thing?!

The next set of instructions on the inside page was equally ominous:

 Bad enough that this thing might STAB me, if I fight back, I lose my rights and interests? Do I need a lawyer watching me put it together, just in case? My brother, who has a PhD., is a lawyer—perhaps I should invite him over for wine and a quick skirmish

I finally started to assemble everything, beginning with several stacks of tiny books. It was starting to get minorly enjoyable, because they DID look like tiny books even if the covers were photocopies of bizarre books that made no sense in the context; for example, a cover with an electric guitar on it. But just as my stacks were almost complete, I was forced to get violent as per this instruction:

“Make it open”? You’re god*amn right Imma make it OPEN! I was really getting into the spirit of things now. The build progressed and things got infinitely more difficult as I had to glue tiny pieces of wood onto other tiny pieces of wood and then let them dry. And I’m not the most patient person in the world so I learned about letting things DRY COMPLETELY the hard way. But letting things dry completely was a double-edged sword, as I discovered:

Ken: *snickers*
Me: What are you laughing at?
Ken: Nothing. *snickers again*
Me: Seriously, what’s so funny?!
Ken: No, really…haha!
Me: WHAT?!!
Ken: See the world map that you glued to the wall?
Me: So?
Ken: You glued it on upside down.
Me: WHAT? Oh no! And it’s completely dry! Why did you have to tell me, dammit?
Ken: YOU MADE ME.

Okay, so we all know that geography isn’t my strong suit and you have to look REALLY hard to see the map. Finally though, I was nearing the end, covered in glue, clamps and elastic bands everywhere, and all I had to do was attach the lights to the ceiling and close it all up. Except that the instructions were wrong and it took me two tries, getting the light attached twice and realizing twice that they were the wrong way. And then:

I DID, you aggressive Praetorian. See, this is why the Roman Empire fell. Terrible instructions.

In other news, my new novel Charybdis will be coming out soon, thanks to my wonderful publisher Jane Cornwell and JC Studio Press. Here’s the cover reveal, and it’s amazing!

Synopsis: When Greta Randall stumbles across a rare volume of Victorian poetry in a local antique market, she could never have imagined that it would take her on a  journey through time. The secrets she discovers along the way may shed light on the book’s mysterious young author, Louisa Duberger, but at what peril?

Ring A Ding Ding

Last Monday, I was getting ready for work. The last step is usually to put on all my rings before I head out the door. I love rings—I wear them on five different fingers and both thumbs (great for drumming along to songs on my steering wheel) and I’d like to wear them on all my fingers but I think we all agree that would be overkill. Most of them are sterling silver bands of different types, and over the years, Ken has treated me to a couple of Tiffany’s sterling bands, which are my pride and joy. So I was putting on my rings, and I fumbled the last one. It fell, hit the edge of the cupboard, landed on the floor and rolled towards the kitchen island. “Ah damn!” I muttered as I dropped to my knees, just as the ring disappeared under the edge of the island. But the island has skirting board surrounding it, so I wasn’t too concerned—just scoop it back up and put it on, right? But when I peered under the edge of the island, it was nowhere to be seen. I was perplexed—had it careened off the skirting board and ended up somewhere else? Time was getting tight—I never leave for work a second before I have to, and any delay will make me very late. So I did what any normal person would do—I yelled for Ken:

Me: I need help!
Ken (loping down from upstairs): What’s wrong?
Me: My ring—the one that looks like a laurel wreath—rolled under the island and now it’s gone. Can you help me look?

He looked under the island and couldn’t see it either. Then he scoured the kitchen with me, shaking out rugs, moving aside furniture—no ring. He pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight to look under the island again.

Ken: There’s a hole under here from when we moved the sink to the other end.
Me: THAT hole? No way it’s big enough for a ring to fall down. I mean what are the chances that a ring could roll across the floor in a perfect line towards that hole and then manage to fall down it without getting stuck? (Puts finger in hole) See, my finger barely fits and I’m doing it on purpose. A ghost took it. That’s the only explanation. I have to go to work—can you stand in the middle of the kitchen and yell “Give it back!” for me?
Ken: The hole goes down into the basement. I’ll take a look and call you if I see it.

On the drive to work, I was pretty distraught. It was one of my favourite rings and fairly expensive, and after about ten minutes, I pre-emptively called Ken.

Me: Did you find it?
Ken: Maybe…
Me: Where are you?
Ken: The basement. You know the old cistern down there? I think I see something glinting in the far corner of it.
Me: Oh no! How can we get it out?
Ken: The only thing I can do is climb up over the wall and crawl into the cistern.
Me: What?! Wait until I get home.
Ken: No, it’s okay. Give me a minute—I need a broom to sweep away all the cobwebs and then I’ll get the ladder. I’ll call you back.
Me: I’m not hanging up until you’re out of the cistern!

And then he put the phone in his pocket. I could hear the muffled sounds of him moving around, the ladder being brought into the house, and then a lot of clanging and grunting. Then “I got it!”

Me: It WAS my ring?! OMG. Wait, are you out of the cistern yet?
Ken: No, I put my phone on the ledge. I must have been in here before because there’s a milk crate by the wall that I can stand on to get out. Give me a sec…sh*t, I’m stuck!
Me: What?!! Hang on honey, I’m turning around and coming home!
Ken (laughing): Just kidding. I’m out. And I have your ring. I can’t believe it fell through that tiny hole and ended up in the cistern. Good job it was dry.

Good job, indeed. And now, I can never get mad at him again. I mean, he CRAWLED INTO A COBWEBBY BASEMENT CISTERN for me.

In other news, since Ken and I both got so invested in the miniatures show I told you about last week, for Valentine’s Day, Ken got me one of those Book Nook kits and let me tell you—it’s the best thing ever. This one is a little bookstore, and we just finished building it. It’s quite addictive–in fact, I’ve already ordered another one, and if things go well, I might be auditioning for Best In Miniature Season 4.

It’s The Little Things; A Baxter House Announcement

I had the coolest experience last week. A woman came into the antique market with a guy, and as they went around the corner past the showcases, I had an epiphany. “I know her!” I said to my co-worker. “I’m almost positive that she was on Season 2 of this TV show that Ken and I love to watch!”

And what show would that be? It’s called ‘Best In Miniature’. It’s a competition show where miniaturists (that’s people who make miniature things, not tiny people) compete for $15 000 Canadian, which is a lot of Bordens (that’s the Canuck equivalent of Benjamins) even once you factor in the exchange rate. Also, in Canada, you don’t have to pay income tax on prize winnings, so you get to keep it ALL. And the show is awesome—they start with the contestants each building a tiny house in whatever style they want, and then each week, they have to create the stuff for each of the different rooms in their house. In Season 1, there was a guy who created an entire tiny Edwardian mansion complete with a miniature floor-to-ceiling library, and you can imagine how I reacted to THAT. Anyway, I was sure this woman was from Season 2 of the show, but I didn’t want to just come out and ASK her—I mean, what if she wasn’t, and then she would think I was some nutbar with a dollhouse obsession? So I broached it like this:

Me: Hi there, how are you today?
Woman: Great, how are you?
Me: Good, good. So are you looking for anything specific today? Perhaps…miniatures?
Woman (smiles): Miniatures…interesting that you should say THAT.
Me: Are you…?
Woman (smile gets bigger): Possibly…
Me: YOU ARE! YOU’RE FROM THAT SHOW!!

And she was LOVELY. She let me ramble on about how much I loved the show, and told me all kinds of interesting details about where and how it was shot (4 days for each episode), how they had to have any supplies approved by the producers, how they all had to go out after the first episode and buy their own utility knives because the ones provided by the show weren’t sharp enough—I was in 7th heaven.

And having her in the store was SO much better than Gangrene Man, who made not one, not two, but three appearances last week, still on the hunt for rings for his ‘lady’. He was no longer wearing any kind of protective wrap over his stump, and it—and he—was looking even more unhealthy than before. At a certain point, we all decided that there was no ‘lady’—that he was buying all those rings and reselling them or something. Then on Thursday, I wasn’t working, but I got a text from my co-worker:

CW: G-man is back. And he brought ‘his lady’ with him!
Me: OMG, she’s real! What’s she like?
CW: She’s just walking around and pointing at stuff, and he’s buying it all for her!
Me: At least one of them can point omg I’m going to hell for that.

There ought to be a show about this too—hit me up with some good names.

In other news, the first book from Baxter House Editions has just been released: The Places We Haunt by Cecilia Kennedy. Here’s the synopsis of this very cool book:

“When a pastry-obsessed ghost follows Audrey M. K. Summons back to her apartment, Audrey feels compelled to write the story—along with a few others she has collected. The resulting manuscript becomes The Places We Haunt, which a literary scholar discovers when Audrey dies. To the scholar’s surprise, the pages magically fill with more stories from beyond the grave, so she publishes the book in order to put Audrey’s spirit to rest. This collection of 13 eclectic dark tales takes place in museums, swimming pools, houses, restaurants, the cemetery, and outdoors in nature. The stories told are sometimes humorous, absurd, pensive, or cautionary. Those who tell them, don’t even realize they’re dead.“

And you can by it here!



Giving Everyone The Finger

A couple of weeks ago, something really weird happened at the antique market where I work. And that’s saying a lot, because weird sh*t happens there all the time, as I’m sure you’ve realized based on my previous stories about it, like the guy who did a LOT of cocaine. For another example, see last month:

Me: So that’s six magazines at $4 each, plus tax. Your total is $27.12
Woman (volunteering this with no prompting): The Playboys are for my son. He’s 17.
Me: How would you like to pay?
Woman: He’ll be so excited.
Me: I can only imagine. Have a great day.

So, yes, the clientele can be a little—quirky. But a week ago Monday, this one really took the cake. A man came in, short, twitchy, with a shock of bright orange hair under his ball cap. He smelled REALLY bad. He was interested in jewelry and one of the owners took a tray of rings out of the showcase and brought it to the counter so he could look at them all. My co-worker and I were behind the counter, and we also made a beeline for the rings because the vendor had just come in and restocked. The man kept going on about “his lady” and how great ‘his lady’ was, and how ‘his lady’ deserved only the best, ad nauseum, until he’d finally picked out several rings. Then he went to look around on the other floors, at which point, my co-worker said, “Oh my god, that was disgusting.”

And she wasn’t talking about ‘his lady’. Nope, she was talking about the horrifyingly swollen, cracked open, bloody, and black index finger that the guy kept pointing around with. I’d never seen anything like it before—I’d describe it even further but some of you may have weak stomachs.

Me: What the hell happened to him?! That’s unreal!
Co-Worker: I know! I’m burning with curiosity!
Boss: I’ll find out.

So when the guy came down to pay for his rings, the young boss asked him about it.

“Oh, that,” he said. “I was doing some carpentry, and I was about to hammer a nail into the floor when someone knocked on the door. It scared the crap out of me and I jumped and hammered my finger instead. But it’s okay—it doesn’t hurt. They gave me some antibiotics at the doctor’s but then we got into an argument, so I haven’t been back.” Then he left.

Co-worker: I can’t believe that doesn’t hurt—it looks insanely painful.
Me: There’s a reason why it doesn’t hurt.
Boss: Why?
Me: It’s dead. He has gangrene. The next time we see him, he’ll be missing a finger. If he survives it.
Boss: Gangrene? Seriously? How do you know?

How do I know?! Because I’m Gen X, obviously. When we were growing up, there were very few rules:

1) Look both ways before you cross the street.
2) Don’t talk to strangers.
3) Come in when the streetlights turn on.
4) Watch out for quicksand.
5) If you cut it, clean it. Otherwise, you’ll get gangrene and it’ll fall off.

Even as a late-middle-aged adult (because I plan to live past 100), I still abide by these rules. Except for number 2—because of my job, I’m literally forced to do this, and now, thanks to number 2, I’ve seen the physical evidence for number 5. Number 3 is, of course, my favourite, because I have no desire to be anywhere other than my bed with a glass of wine once the streetlights turn on.

So then I had to explain gangrene to some of my younger colleagues, whose collective reaction was “EWWW!!! No wonder he smelled so bad!”

And sure enough, guess who was back this past Tuesday? He was looking for more rings for ‘his lady’. My co-worker leaned forward over the counter a little and whispered, “He’s got it wrapped up…but it looks shorter…”

Yep. Sure enough, the finger was gone. When he came to pay, I’d been nominated to ask him about it:

Me: I remember you from last week. What happened with the…?
Gangrene Man (waves hand with only four digits angrily): I went to the hospital, and they cut it off!
Me: Uh, sorry to hear that.
Gangrene Man: Stupid hospital. And then they were like, “You should have taken all the antibiotics.” Anyway, my lady is gonna love these rings. Nothing too good for her.

And then he was gone. Like that gangrenous finger.

In other news, I’ve just launched Baxter House Editions, the reprint division of DarkWinter Press. Here’s a little bit about how it came about, you can read the story here!

Boob Job; I Love My Dog

This week, I had to do something that I’d been dreading for a while—get a mammogram. My original appointment had been in July, then I had to change it and the earliest I could get was December. But then, in a surprising turn of good luck, we were going to be away on a cruise in December and I had to change the appointment once again. The earliest new date I could get was in July—again. It seemed like a good thing but then I started thinking—is it? What if there was something wrong with one of the “girls” and I wouldn’t even know until next summer, by which time it might be too late? But there was nothing, seemingly, that I could do, given that the clinic where my requisition was sent was notorious for never having any appointments. Then two weeks ago, I was getting an ultrasound on my shoulder at a new place in the same building as my physiotherapist and they had a big sign that said they’d just become partners in the government screening program. I enquired—they could give me an appointment almost right away. I would have rejoiced but if you’ve ever had one of these done, you’ll know it’s nothing to get excited about. And for those of you who’ve never had the pleasure—imagine taking a rubber ball and compressing it in a machine like this:

You get the idea? And guys, we all know if the test for testicular cancer involved smashing your scrotum in this torture device, some science dude would have figured out a different method YEARS ago, involving no contact, soothing music, and ice cream at the end. Not to say that men don’t go through very painful and invasive routine medical tests…cough cough. At any rate, I approached the day with a sense of doom and found myself subconsciously crossing my arms over my chest at random moments. Then the morning of the mammogram (sounds like a horror movie doesn’t it—The Morning of the Mammogram From Hell) arrived and I drove to the clinic, heart pounding. See the last time I’d had one of these done, it was two years ago, and you may remember I wrote about it then, more specifically how the technician told me, after I was securely and excruciatingly clamped, “Make sure you don’t pass out.” I mean, what the hell does THAT mean? How exactly am I to prevent myself from passing out? And then the nightmarish thought—What if I DID? Would I just dangle there from my boob until…it didn’t even bear thinking about.

So with much trepidation, I entered the clinic and was called in almost right away by the same woman who had done an X-ray for me not too long ago, which didn’t bode well. But then we started chatting:

Me: Hey, I remember you from that X-ray a while back.
Tech: Yes, I do X-rays too but mammograms are really my specialty. I’m a jack-of-all-trades, I guess.
Me: And master of all of them, right?
Tech: *laughs* Don’t worry. Did your last one hurt?
Me: A little.
Tech: Well, we’ll make sure it doesn’t this time.

And true to her word, it was easy peasy and relatively painless. I even let her do a couple of extra shots “just to be on the safe side”. So fingers crossed that the “girls” are all right, and I don’t have to do this again for two more years.

In other news, Atlas is coming up on 4 years old now, and I have to say that he’s become the BEST dog. He was a holy terror as a puppy, as a 1 year-old and a 2 year-old, but over the last year, he’s just really settled into his role as a good boi. He has such an endearing personality, and you always know what he’s thinking about, which is mostly food. In fact, that’s when he’s most human—when it’s time for a meal. A while back, I started giving him a teaspoon of soft food with his kibble at every meal—we call it his “special”—and he goes nuts for it, jumping into the air like a baby goat when he sees me get the spoon, which I like to hold aloft like a beacon as I proclaim “The special spoon!!” It’s become such a thing that the last time we went away, my parents took care of him and my mom called, concerned:

Me: Hey, what’s up?
Mom: Atlas won’t eat. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.
Me: He won’t eat?
Mom: He’s just standing in front of the refrigerator. He keeps looking at it, and then looking at me. Very pointedly.
Me (laughing): That’s because his special is in there. He wants a dollop on his kibble.

A while later, she messaged to say that he gobbled everything up just like a good boi would. I love him so much.

And I’m glad I have him because he’s a real comfort when things are sh*tty, like last week when I got an email telling me that the company who published both my short story collections was dissolving. And not only are they not publishing anything new, they’re “unpublishing” all their other books, as in they will no longer exist in the public realm, and it was like a gut punch, or worse than a mammogram in terms of pain. So if you know anyone who publishes reprints of well-reviewed spooky stories that did as well financially as one could hope, let me know. In the meantime, I’ll just be over here, hugging my chest and cuddling my dog.

A Colourful Little Number

You may remember me telling you that in December, I submitted my humour book What Any Normal Person Would Do to a fairly prestigious competition, The Leacock Medal for Humour. I was worried that my books wouldn’t be received by the deadline, since I’d decided so late in the year to submit, but I got notified that they’d made it safely into the hands of the judges. As part of the competition, every entrant gets put on the website along with the title of their submission, a headshot, and a biography. My headshot was really cute, featuring me wearing a black leather vest just to give me a little bit of a bad-ass vibe. I know I probably don’t stand a chance because Rick Mercer published ANOTHER book last year, and there are quite a few other famous Canadian humourists from huge publishing houses on the list. But still, I was excited to see myself on the website. I went there last week and called up the list. I scanned. I scanned. I continued scanning, but I wasn’t worried because I assumed that since it wasn’t in any kind of alphabetical order that I could discern, then it must be in the order that submissions were received. And then finally, I found myself:

Me: OMG. You won’t guess where I am on the list!
Ken: At the very top.
Me: I love how supportive you are, but no!
Ken: Where are you then?
Me: Number 69!!

And it just seemed so damned appropriate that a weirdo like me with the most absurd sense of humour would be NUMBER 69. I laughed my ass off and then I did what any normal person would do—I posted it on Facebook. And it’s a credit to my friends that only ONE person even remarked upon it. I had 88 likes and 39 comments and NONE of them aside from the first person mentioned it at all! I mean, the congratulations were wonderful, but I hadn’t posted it to brag or anything—I just thought it was outrageously funny, and then I felt dumb because no one else did, and then I was worried that I might have offended people and they were too nice to say anything about it. But then I went to get a tattoo and I was telling my tattoo artist about the whole thing:

Me: And I’m on the list…at number 69.
Tattoo Guy: WHAT? Bwah haha! That’s hilarious! Of all the numbers to get, you had to get the dirtiest one!
Me (relieved): I know, right?!
Tattoo Guy: Well, now you’ve got to win.

So yeah. That’s me. Number 69. I feel like I’ve already won.

In other news, Ken and I are still hard at work on transforming one of our bedrooms into a secret library room with the idea of turning the whole back part of the house (bedroom, secret library, and private bathroom) into a Writer’s Retreat that we can rent out. We’ve been doing it on a dime, getting furniture and accessories second-hand and so far haven’t been scammed like we were initially. We got a gorgeous leather loveseat from a lady for fifty bucks on the condition that we also took the sofa, which was badly damaged. But the dump was on our way home, and if you know anything about me, you know I LOVE the dump. But sadly, this was the kind of dump where they watch you ALL THE TIME to make sure you don’t take anything that other people have dumped. How fair is that? Then we finally got the loveseat home only to discover, after Ken and our neighbour made several attempts, that it was too big to go up the stairs. So now, I have a gorgeous leather loveseat in my office on the main floor and my green leather couch is in the new secret library. I hope people appreciate my sacrifice.

Looking Back to New Year

Today’s topic is actually about New Year’s Resolutions, which I do not make, mostly because if I want to change something about my life, I do it when I think of it, not on some arbitrary and imaginary date line. But still, the moving forward of time does give one pause, and by “pause” I mean “let’s stop and think about what the f*ck we’re doing and do we want to keep on doing that?” So here are a couple of things I decided I would or would not be doing in the year 2019. It’s up to you to determine now, 5 years later, which resolution(s) I actually kept:

2019

1) I will no longer be distracted by things when I’m having a serious conversation with someone. For example, once I was speaking with a colleague in my office when I realized that there was something in my boot, like a small piece of gravel or a large piece of lint. Mid-sentence, I reached down, took off my boot, shook the gravel out, looked inside the boot, put it back on my foot, and continued with the conversation. I’m extremely fortunate that I worked with people who didn’t seem to care about things like that, but still, it must be disconcerting to find yourself in the middle of a performance of Waiting for Godot. Or maybe my colleague was impressed by my multi-tasking skills. Another time, I was in a meeting, and someone said, “It’s like an icebox in here” and I started thinking about what if we were actually holding the meeting IN an icebox, and would there be sides of beef just hanging there, and could we see our breath and whatnot instead of focusing on performance measures. I didn’t say anything out loud–I’m not that weird (or maybe I am–don’t judge me). Either way, I feel like it’s a slippery slope from boot examination to toenail clipping. Ken said he had a similar situation once when he was talking to a woman who, during the conversation, reached up under her skirt and hoiked up her pantyhose. I asked what he thought, and he said, “I guess it was really bothering her. I mean, you do what you have to do, right?”

2) I will continue inventing words. You may have noticed that, in the previous paragraph, I used the word “hoik”. I use this word all the time. It means “hoist and yank”. I thought it was a real word until I used it once when I was telling the very nice gentleman I worked with about my roommate and how she had broken my toilet:

Me: She must have really hoiked on that handle!
Very Nice Gentleman: Did you say ‘hoik’? What does that mean?
Me: Hoik? You know, like this! (*mimes hoisting and yanking and makes the appropriate hoisting and yanking sound, which is ‘hoyk’*)
VNG: I’ve never heard of that word.
Me: Well, I didn’t just make it up.

Turns out that I did. I googled it and there’s no such word. But it’s a damn good word, useful for many occasions, and since I am very good at the made-up words, I will continue to invent them. Another one is “stabscara”, which is when you poke yourself in the eye with a mascara wand, as in “Oh my god! I just stabscara-d myself!!”.

Friend: I love your new eyepatch.
Me: Yes, I happened to stabscara myself but it all worked out in the end. Arrr, where’s the rum?

3) I will stop being so bad at potlucks. We used to have potlucks at work all the time, and now that I’m retired, I still attend them occasionally. When I was living in Toronto, I didn’t have a lot of fancy cooking equipment and whatnot, so whenever there was a sign-up, I just put “Drinks”. And while you might think that would make me popular, I learned my lesson after the liquor-filled chocolate meeting snack fiasco of 2017, and when I say drinks, I now mean 2 cases of Perrier, which is terribly boring and probably a let-down for everyone who saw HOW I had signed up for this particular workplace potluck in what appeared to be a very boozy way:

Go home, Suzanne, you’re drunk again.

I arrived at this potluck and people were bringing in crockpots and crystal trays and poinsettias and wreaths, and I was like, “Here. Stow these babies in the mini-fridge”. Well, they all got drunk—the cans, not my colleagues. In the future, I will try to be a little more creative, like putting bows on the Perrier boxes or something. Also, I would love to have the confidence of the person who simply wrote “Something Special”:

Me: So what did you bring to the potluck, Cathy?
Cathy: Something special.
Me: Processed cheese on Ritz Crackers?
Cathy: It’s special.
Me: But it’s just–
Cathy: SO SPECIAL.

4) I will continue to write. My only purpose in writing this blog is to make people happy, so I will keep on trying to do that. I am nothing if not resolved.

If you guessed 3 and 4, you win a Fandangly Award to do with what you will. Because it’s almost 2024, and I THINK I’m better at potlucks now (you’ll have to ask the neighbours) and I’ve definitely kept writing.

And now, just like 5 years ago, here are three questions for any of my friends to answer:

1) What is the most wonderful thing that happened to you this year?
2) Star Trek or Star Wars?
3) What would you bring to a potluck?

Happy New Year to all of you and yours!

Falling For It

Well, it’s almost Christmas and you can tell because the ads on my social media are getting more and more weird. Case in point:

Is it me, or does that dude look a little too excited for his bath time, like maybe it’s also his “special man time”? And he looks almost too large for the bathtub—based on my knowledge of human proportions, where the hell are his legs?! At any rate, a one-person spa is absolutely perfect for me—I already take my own pillow whenever I travel, so now I could take my own bathtub with me. I looked up the translation of the company name and in English it means something like “glamorous water” and isn’t that what bathing is all about—being glamorous in the water? That guy in the ad sure thinks so. And the best part is the ad next to it, which is cut off, but that’s the beautiful irony of it–I looked up “glark” and it literally means “to figure something out from context”. So here’s the challenge: can you glark the glarks?

But I’ve had my ups and downs lately because I keep getting scammed online. First it was a purse company that seemed legitimate until I paid for it and immediately got a message telling me that my item wouldn’t ship until I sent a SCREENSHOT OF MY CREDIT CARD. After a lot of back and forth, they finally agreed to ship the item without the photographs and then sent me a fake invoice with a tracking number button that did nothing. So I contacted my bank and the rep in the Disputes department that I spoke to was very nice and he made me feel better about being so dumb:

Me: I can’t believe I fell for this.
Rep: It happens all the time. If something’s too good to be true, it probably is. What was it that you bought?
Me: A Louis Vuitton purse. I mean, I figured it was fake, but I should have known it was also a rip-off—it was way too cheap.
Rep: No kidding. Those things cost a fortune. And the reason I know that brand is because just last week, I had to deal with a woman who got taken for over $1500 for a pair of Louis Vuitton shoes.
Me: …They make shoes?

But I don’t need their shoes. I just want my fifty bucks back. And then, Ken and I decided that instead of moving, we’d turn one of our bedrooms into a secret library room and doesn’t every secret library room need a tufted leather loveseat? I found a perfect one on Facebook Marketplace and I contacted the seller. He told me it was available and when I asked if we could pick it up on the weekend, he said sure, but that he’d need a deposit to hold it, since he had “so many people interested in it”. And that kind of thing isn’t unusual, and he seemed legit, so I sent a small deposit. And that was the last I heard from him. (I even had a friend contact him pretending to want to buy the couch, and he pulled the same sh*t with her—he refused to give her an address for pick-up until she gave him money up front and when she wouldn’t, he ghosted her.) Again, I contacted the bank, but this time, because my e-transfer was auto-deposited, I couldn’t get it back. We actually called the police and filed a report, and the cop said the same thing, after lecturing me for a while about “overseas scams” and “fake IP addresses”. But the best part was that I (and my friend) reported him to Facebook, and they said they wouldn’t do anything because he hadn’t “violated their terms of service”. You learn your lessons the hard way, I guess. This was my face when I learned that I would be receiving neither a very cute handbag or a very stylish couch:

But never mind all of that. Christmas is almost here, and I have a lot to celebrate, including the fact that my publisher, DarkWinter Press, has submitted my humour book What Any Normal Person Would Do to the Stephen Leacock Medal for Literary Humour. My publisher can be a real pain in the ass and falls for a lot of scams but she’s very thoughtful so I forgive her. (It’s me. I’m the publisher.) Wish me luck! And if you want your own copy (which I just updated and filled with even more funny stuff) it’s available here:

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, and all that great stuff to you and yours!

The Bees’ Knees

Currently, Ken and I are on a cruise. It hasn’t been quite the experience we’d hoped for, due to sh*tty weather. The first sign of trouble was the night before we were supposed to leave and I got an email telling us that we were no longer going to Key West and Nassau because of “inclement weather—now we were going to Key West and Cozumel. When we arrived in Florida, it was pouring and windy but we were only there overnight. Once we got on the ship, the seas were super-rocky and by that night, our snorkelling excursion in Key West had been cancelled. But it was okay—we decided to just do the hop on/hop off trolley and see the town. The next morning , I woke up and turned on the ship’s navigation channel. It showed our ship going into Key West, doing a circle, then heading back out. Now, I’m not very good with maps but it seemed to me that a loop and a “high tail it out of there” wasn’t a great sign. And sure enough, about half an hour later, there was an announcement that it was too dangerous to try and dock in Key West so we were heading straight for Cozumel. But the announcement was only in the halls, and when we went for breakfast, it was amazing how many people were coming in with backpacks and whatnot, as if they were going ashore. The family next to us kept saying, “When do you think we’ll get to Key West?” and “How much longer will it be?” until I put them out of their misery and told them, “Never.”

But Ken and I were not deterred. After a full sea day of playing trivia and winning champagne and jewellery at the art auction raffle, we went to sleep excited about our excursion the next day to the Mayan ruins and the beach. Then things got even better when we got on the bus and our guide told us that we were also stopping at an extra destination—a tequila factory. And that was awesome because we had booked a trip to a rum factory in Nassau and I was very sad about missing it because if you know me at all you know I adore factories where alcohol is made.

Once we’d finished at the Mayan ruins, where we saw the cutest iguanas and a random anteater, we got back on the bus. We started chitchatting with the guide, Payo, and I said, “I’m excited about the next stop” and he replied, “Oh yes, the something something” and I said “Pardon?” and he said “The Bee Sanctuary” and I said, “…Pardon?!” because the way he said it, it still sounded kind of like Tequila Factory because of his very thick accent so I got my hopes up, but he said it again and there was no doubt that IT WAS BEES. Then he went back to the front of the bus.

Me: We’re going to a bee sanctuary?

Ken: Apparently.

Me: Do I have to touch the bees?

Ken: Probably not.

Me: Okay then.

Ken: You’re being surprisingly calm about this.

Me: I should have had the free tequila shot at the Mayan ruins when that dude offered it. Are these rescue bees or something? Do you think they’ll be aggressive?

But I needn’t have worried. They were tiny stingless bees and we never saw any of them. And there were market stands at the bee sanctuary that sold tequila so it all worked out in the end.

In other news, I’m absolutely thrilled to tell you that my new novel, Charybdis, is going to be published by UK publisher JC Studio Press, run by the amazing Jane Cornwell. Here’s a synopsis:

Charybdis takes place in two different time periods. In the present, Greta Randall, a graduate student in Waterloo, Ontario about to embark on a PhD., is determined to continue her research into an obscure Canadian poet and recluse, Louisa Duberger, hoping that she will uncover the mystery of Duberger’s life and work. In the second time period, beginning in the year 1891, Louisa Duberger herself chronicles the tragic events of her life in a secret diary that she keeps from her eighteenth birthday until her death at the age of 25. The two timelines converge in a suspenseful way when Greta meets Matthew Shepherd, who claims to be Louisa’s great-great-nephew, and who has secrets of his own that he would kill to protect, including the last entry of Louisa’s diary.

Look for it in late spring 2024!