These days in retirement, I have idle talks with myself, and sometimes with famous literary personalities I wish I had met. This particular conversation was with a colonial and a futurist, someone I would love to have spoken to given our common backgrounds, except that he died six years before I was born: George Orwell. […]
Talking to Orwell about Book Reviewing Read More »
There’s an app for everything these days. For searching, shopping, information, books, car maintenance, home decoration, clothing, cooking, domestic help, medical care, even sex – you name it, there is one. So, what are we left to do, but say, “Alexa, get me…” It started with someone saying, “If a process can be diagrammed in
There’s an App for That – even for Fiction Read More »
Everyone is writing a pandemic journal, it seems. We all want to capture this lost time that will soon disappear (we hope) when the vaccine makes its way into our arms, when we forget face masks, and how to socially distance, and the acronyms PPE, PCR and RNA. We want to document all those mindless
The Seven Rs of Pandemic Writing Read More »
I have been wrestling with why, with all the resources available to us, this pandemic still rages, and now in Wave 2 (or is it Wave 3 – never mind, I’ve stopped counting) it is at its peak in terms of infections and deaths, even while a vaccine is making its way into our arms,
I wrote a novel twenty years ago in which the continent of North America was overrun by a giant flood, fragmenting it into smaller pockets of land. Upon these new “islands” lived people who had self-selected according to political ideology; they were either laissez-faire capitalists or holier-than-thou socialists. Today, I wonder whether I have walked
The Forces of Good and Evil Walk the Land Read More »
I remember wrestling with that age old conundrum called the Generation Gap when I was a teenager: we complained that our parents never understood us. I also recalled growing up in a developing country where we looked upon visitors from western countries with awe, unable to figure out how easy it was for them to
“So, if you quit writing fiction, why are you releasing another novel?” my rational self asks me. “For God’s Sake, man!” this know-it-all-self erupts in more self-righteousness, “the world is in lockdown, people have no money for food, they are too scared to go out to GET food, let alone attend a book launch or
Releasing a Book During a Pandemic Read More »
I dug up my collection of writing since the end of February 2020 and it amounts to one short story, a sketch for a novel that will probably never get written, a few blog articles like this one, and half a dozen book reviews. Pathetic. Was I stuck in the dreaded “writer’s block,” or had
Why I Stopped Writing Fiction Read More »
From my cozy writing perch at the cottage window overlooking the deck, I look out upon the gently rolling waters of Lake Kashagawigamog, protected by its robust treeline comprised of maples, birch, pine, cedar, hemlock and spruce , and I wonder, “Wasn’t this the same as when I came here last October? The air is
Something is rotten in the state of … Read More »
I’m trying to chronicle how a typical day in these Covid Times goes by. Let’s see, I wake up late, which is around 7.30 a.m., and play with Facebook. Amuse myself with jokes, memes, insults and the spreading gloom. Finally I rise around 9.00 a.m. when my body is starting to stiffen as exercise has
A Day in Our Pandemic Life Read More »