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The new development

Posted on by Patrick

I went for a bike ride last night. I did about 17km in just under an hour and a half. I don’t know if that’s a slow pace or a mid­dlin’ one; I was­n’t com­plete­ly spent at the end of it, but I was sweat­ing throughout.

At about the mid­point of the ride, I came across an area of new development:
New development in the south end

Which is all well and good, but I found the choice of loca­tion rather inter­est­ing. Here’s the view across the bike path:
The view

Here I though that lux­u­ry con­dos with a view of the Super­store park­ing lot would be a tough sell.

Flood

Posted on by Patrick

Deep Water

For those of you that aren’t in Man­i­to­ba, or in Cana­da: my city is flood­ed. (Well, my city would be flood­ed if it weren’t for a cun­ning sys­tem of per­ma­nent dikes, tem­po­rary dikes, sand­bags, super sand­bags, and good for­tune. The pow­ers-that-be are appar­ent­ly refer­ring to this as a high water event, since the word flood is dou­ble-plus-ungood.) We are cur­rent­ly under a state of emer­gency, ini­tial­ly declared for the city by the may­or and then extend­ed to include pret­ty much the Assini­boine Riv­er flood­plain by the province. Con­tin­ue read­ing “Flood” →

Another sale!

Posted on by Patrick

I’ve just received an email telling me that one of my short sto­ries, “Exit Inter­view”, has been accept­ed for pub­li­ca­tion. I’m just wait­ing now on the contract.

Woo hoo!

Well that’s convenient

Posted on by Patrick

So I’ve been tak­ing a course on “The Art of Man­ag­ing Your Career”. It’s a look at the busi­ness side of an arts career, and since I’d love, some­day, to make a liv­ing (or at least part of my liv­ing) as a writer, it’s right up my alley.

Today we were dis­cussing web­sites, among oth­er things. So I said, “Hey, since you’re look­ing for sites to review, here’s mine.”

I thought it rather con­ve­nient that the ran­dom pic­ture choos­er script I’ve got on my home­page select­ed this pho­to to show to the group:

Contract

Ah, ran­dom num­bers. How I love thee.

My weekend

Posted on by Patrick

I trav­eled to Edmon­ton for a judo tour­na­ment, I got to see some rel­a­tives, and I drove all the way back in a five-speed car with arm­strong steer­ing and no radio. It was a good time, but I’m glad to be home now.

More details lat­er. For now, enjoy the video of me get­ting thrown around.

Starting a new story

Posted on by Patrick

This start­ed out as a short sto­ry, but I have a feel­ing it’s part of a much larg­er work. At any rate, here’s what I wrote tonight (re-wrote, actu­al­ly, since the orig­i­nal sto­ry has a quite dif­fer­ent beginning):

Glo­ria woke in the blood-warm water, feel­ing like clawed hands had rent her heart. She sur­faced, drew a breath, and asked the time. The house oblig­ed, pro­ject­ing blue numer­als onto the inner sur­face of the dome. Beyond the num­bers she saw the pale sweep of what her peo­ple called the Snake, or per­haps the Sky Riv­er. Her hus­band Man­drake’s peo­ple knew it as the Milky Way.

By the fad­ing num­bers pro­ject­ed by the house, there were hours yet till dawn. She should return to the bot­tom, try to sleep. She knew there would be no more sleep for her today.

Some­thing had gone deeply wrong. She felt it in her heart, her bones, in her liq­uid soul: a rift in the uni­verse, a wob­bling of the Earth on its axis that she alone in all the world could feel. She stared at the great and eter­nal Snake in the sky. A part of her won­dered how it could be that the stars had­n’t yet fall­en loose from their places in the fir­ma­ment, to rain down on the fens and the sacred marsh­lands like frag­ile sil­ver balls drop­ping from a shak­en Christ­mas tree. Each star, she felt sure, should shat­ter with a sat­is­fy­ing musi­cal sound. In their dying moments they would score a dirge, an end­less mourn­ful cho­rus for her late husband.

For Man­drake, she knew, had just died.

With­out giv­ing too much away, Glo­ria is an undine, Man­drake is was in the mil­i­tary, and there’s a war on.