Some shots from a hike I took last week, when we got our first peek at sunny spring weather here in Victoria, BC:

Looking west from Wharf St, just south of the Johnson St bridge.

And here’s the view looking south, at the Parliament Building.

This one’s from along the coast, looking out at the distant mountains, near the breakwater at Ogden Point.

And a shot along Dallas Road, heading east and south, with the Olympic Mountains in the distance.

Now on the coastal walkway along Dallas, peeking over a grassy hillock at the mountains and sea.

Little cove along the coast, looking back west and south from the walkway.

Coming up on Clover Point now — a popular spot for kites in the spring — with driftwood lining the beach below.

Heading back home, spotted some cherry blossoms lining the streets in Fairfield, announcing Spring is here!

Seeing a lot of fear-mongering on Canada’s Bill C-18, which will require companies like Google and Facebook to actually pay newspapers for copying their articles into their services. People are calling it a link tax, saying it will lead to the End of the Open Web. How could such a “bad bill” make it so far?

Simply put: Because it doesn’t actually do any of the things these panicked people claim it will.

Here, go read the executive summary of the bill yourself. Far from being a “link tax,” it’s a — belated — intervention of the Canadian government into a market in the public interest.

Basically, Google and Facebook don’t just link to work produced by others anymore; they’ll copy it and present it on their own websites. They defend this as something done for the benefit of users, a convenience, but really it’s so users — you and I — won’t leave their sites. The longer we stay on their pages, the more ads we’ll see, and the more money they collect.

What’s wrong with that? Well, those ads used to be sold on the websites of the people writing those articles — newspapers, magazines, blogs — and so the revenue used to flow directly to those people. The creators. Now that money flows to Google and Facebook, who are getting rewarded for what is basically theft. And that’s one reason — among many, sure, but an important one — why so many news orgs across North America have gone belly up in the last decade and a half.

So Bill C-18 is an attempt to redress that theft, by requiring large search engine companies to enter into a contract with news orgs — or groups of individual news generators — to compensate them for the work they would otherwise take for free.

It’s not even that innovative a bill! It’s based on one Australia passed in 2021. Prior to that bill passing, I saw the same fear-mongering and breathless doom and gloom announcements about the “end” of the Open Web. Facebook and Google also pulled the same childish stunts, cutting off news access for Australians prior to the bill’s passing.

So it passed, and did Australia suddenly become a barren internet wasteland? Ha, no. Facebook and Google obeyed the law, cut deals with 30 different media companies, who raked in millions of additional revenue — revenue that will be used to pay journalists — as a result. Meanwhile, the doom-and-gloom gang have moved on, to beating the same tired drums about Canada’s bill.

They were wrong about Australia’s law. They’re wrong about Canada’s.

For a bit more background on the Australian law, and Facebook’s history of bad behaviour, check out this piece by anti-monopolist Matt Stoller.

Happy St Patrick’s Day! To celebrate, here’s a shot I took while on a walk yesterday, of a tree that has decided, equinox or no equinox, it is Spring, dammit:

Also worth celebrating: I’m almost done with the first round of novel edits ✍️🎉

Only two chapters left to go! I’m aiming to get those wrapped up this weekend. Then plan out the next batch of changes. The book’s grown to 86,000 words now; I’m thinking it might top out at 90k when all these edits are done.

So what’s left to do? In no particular order:

• Add three more scenes, one that I completely forgot to write (but wrote like I’d already written it) and two that came up in feedback as needed to explain an antagonist’s actions
• Completely revise the MacGuffin subplot to make it more believable and explained in greater detail
• Rip out one of the twists, because there’s only so much far-flung tech you can shove in an otherwise “grounded” story before it breaks
• Deepen the characterization for another one of the antagonists
• Patch a couple plot holes
• Fill out character physical descriptions, add more details to their thought processes, etc

…ok, seeing it all typed out like that is a little intimidating 😅 Thank goodness I’m not working to any external deadline!

Still, I intend to get through these edits by the summer, and be down to final line edits and getting feedback from beta readers. With a bit of luck 🍀, I’ll be ready to submit it to agents (well, to query agents about it) by the end of the year.

How about you? As we head into Spring, how are your own writing goals coming along?

Happy Friday! It’s the end of my first full week at the new job. It’s also the first week where I’ve been able to work on the novel every day after work.

Those first few weeks were like resuming an exercise routine in January after taking the holidays off. In a word: rough 😅 Each day was good , mind you — the team I’ve joined is a great one, and the work’s interesting — but being slightly out of practice meant I finished each one ready to sink into my comfy chair and turn my brain off for a good while.

This week I turned the corner. I’ve been finishing out the day with more energy, enough so that I can carve out an hour (or two) after dinner to work on the novel edits. After dinner being the very important thing there; having dinner first (and watching/reading something) gives me some mental space from work, and a physical boost to let me focus on the words without rushing.

As a result, I’m now two-thirds of the way through these edits. The novel’s grown from 79K words to 85K and counting 😳 At this rate, I might end up with less of a 60s-style short novel and more of a regular 21st century tome. Which is great! It’s like I’ve discovered a whole section of my book that was missing, and am gradually adding it back in.

All thanks to the critique group, of course. They’ve been simply incredible with their patience and their feedback, pushing on to keep reading even in the face of missing physical descriptions, missing setting info, even missing scenes!

I hope wherever you are, you’ve found a group of writers to help and support you in your work (and that you support them in turn). It’s a lonely art we practice; fellow travellers are a must 😊

Happy Family Day! Hope you’re getting to spend it with your loved ones.

Now that the dust has settled, so to speak, from getting my permanent residence, I wanted to talk about the timing of the very last step: getting confirmation of my PR status. Which I found out, to my confusion and — I’ll confess — frustration, is not the same as approval.

You see, I got an email from IRCC on the 22nd of December saying my PR application had been approved, and that because I was already in Canada, I’d be allowed to use the online portal to confirm my permanent residence. It asked me to reply with some basic information about my wife and I (another form!) and then they’d create an account for me in the portal, where I could upload a recent photo (yet another form!) and then they’d send me my PR card.

At first I was ecstatic. Here I was, barely four weeks into waiting for my PR to be processed, and they’d already approved it?! And right before the Christmas holidays as well. What a present!

I dutifully sent off the requested info that very day, and settled in to watch my inbox, waiting for the account creation email.

And waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting.

Weeks went by. I started to wonder if I’d replied to the wrong address. When I’d reassured myself that I’d replied correctly, with the right info, to the right address, my mind next turned to fraud. Maybe I’d been too hasty to reply, and had accidentally sent my info to some kind of identity thief? All sorts of scenarios went through my head.

Because throughout this time, when I logged into the ExpressEntry site, and checked my application status, it still said they were reviewing my information. Not “approved” or “waiting for confirmation.” It was basically in the same state it’d been in since I first applied.

Finally, on 10 January, I got the email from IRCC with account credentials (username, temporary password) for logging into the account they’d created for my in the PR confirmation portal. Again, a celebration on my part; this was the last step! I logged into the portal — using Firefox, because IRCC does not support Safari — filled out the deceptively simple web form (“just a checkbox, an address field, and a passport-style photo? easy!”), and sat back, expecting to hear something within the week.

…yeah, that didn’t work out. Over the next four weeks (!), I got in the habit of logging into the portal every day to check its status, because I encountered a bug (though I didn’t know it was a bug at the time) in the web portal: periodically, when I logged in, my photo would vanish.

I mean really gone, like I’d log in, go to my status page, and it would just have a blank entry where my uploaded photo was, and it’d be asking me to upload one. But when I did try to upload a new photo (I had three separate sets of photos taken, because at one point I thought this was IRCC’s subtle way of rejecting my photo as unacceptable), I got an error: “File Did Not Upload”. And then I’d refresh the page, and there my photo would be, as if nothing was wrong!

This bug drove me absolutely batty. Because there was no way to get feedback on the status of my confirmation. Calling into IRCC got me automated responses. Checking my ExpressEntry profile showed it as still under review, as if the confirmation process hadn’t started. Emailing IRCC meant a response might come in three weeks, if ever.

And this whole time, I was in a legal limbo. You see, I had a new job lined up after getting laid off, but because my work permit was tied to Elastic, I couldn’t start the new job without some proof of the legal right to work in Canada.

Originally they were just going to get a new work permit for me, so I could start on 17 January. But as a theoretically approved permanent resident, I wasn’t eligible for a work permit anymore. Meaning I had to wait for the entire PR process to complete, so I could get my confirmation of PR status, and then give that to my new employer as proof of the legal right to work.

Which meant every week in January I had to call the (incredibly patient) onboarding person at Cisco at tell them that no, I hadn’t heard anything from IRCC yet, so can we push back my start date another week?

Every week.

I got so worked up I paid for a phone chat with an immigration consultant, to get some advice on what to do here. He’s the one that told me what I was experiencing was a bug. He also said I wasn’t the only one to have these kinds of frustrations, but that however long it took, once I was in the confirmation stage, I was almost certain to get my eCOPR (electronic confirmation of permanent residence). I just needed to be patient.

He also explained a very important distinction that I’d missed: that I wasn’t yet a permanent resident, even though I’d gotten notice of approval. Until very recently, what would happen is a PR applicant would get notice of approval, while outside of Canada. Then they’d have to let IRCC know when they were coming across the border, and at the border they’d have to talk to an IRCC agent and get their official PR papers there. That date would be the date that they became a PR.

Since I was doing everything electronically, I wasn’t technically “landed” even though I was already in the country. So my PR wouldn’t officially start until I had my confirmation in hand; the date they issued that would be my equivalent “landed” date.

Once he’d explained things to me, I calmed down. I stopped trying to contact IRCC. I still checked my status every day, and re-uploaded a photo when it vanished, but I stopped worrying about whether it might affect the process.

Still, the day (3 February) I got the email that my permanent residence was confirmed was a huge, huge relief 😅 I was finally done!

Now, I'm not writing this to complain about IRCC, who have been put under a lot of pressure to admit more immigrants while dealing with a massive shift in how they operate due to the pandemic. I’m writing all this down in the hopes that it helps someone else keep their cool when going through this last bit of the process. For basically two months I had no feedback on what my PR application’s status really was, or how long each step would take, or what to expect. If I’d known on 22 December that I was looking at six weeks or more of waiting, I would have been a lot less frustrated.

So if you fall into the same legal limbo that I did, just hang in there! You’ll get through it, eventually.

Started the new job this week! Which means I’m suddenly wondering how in the world I ever had time to write while working full-time 😅

I’ve made it about halfway through the first editing pass on the novel. Well, I made it halfway as of Monday, but the rest of the week I’ve wrapped work feeling simultaneously too drained to be creative and too stuffed full of facts and process (from the company onboarding) to get anything done.

It doesn’t help that said onboarding consists of four hours of back-to-back meetings, which is hard on this introvert. I’ve not had the Zoomies in a while, and this is definitely it 😬

I’m telling myself to be patient, though, rather than beating myself up about not making daily progress. The onboarding will finish, the meetings will drop away, and I’ll eventually work those extrovert muscles enough to handle a 9-to-5 again (and be able to write after the work day is done). Plus, there’s always the weekend. And there’s a long one coming up, so I can carve out some time (and spoons) to play catch-up.

Wish me luck!

The title of this post is going to crack up anyone that lives somewhere with a “real winter,” like Yellowknife or Winnipeg or, really, any other major city in Canada (and large swathes of the northern US).

But for me, having grown up in West Texas (where the high today is a balmy 18C) and then lived in Southern California for over a decade (today’s high: 15C), I had some concerns about being able to make it through the winter up here (currently 0C with the wind chill) 🥶

Would I ever go outside? Would I get worn down by dark, dreary days? Would I be forced to walk around inside the apartment with every article of clothing I had in my closet (like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man brought to you by LL Bean), just to stay warm enough to type?

I’m happy to report, then, that the answers turned out to be: Yes, No, and Not At All 😊

We’re halfway through February — a month so terrible they knew we could only stand twenty-eight days of it — and so far, with the exception of a couple of cold snaps (one the week of Christmas and the other checks forecast right now), winter’s been kind of great, actually. A little rainy, often cloudy, and yes, colder than I’m used to, but not bad. I still go out for my daily walks along the harbour, or down to Beacon Hill Park. I go out for my groceries and errand runs like always, though with one extra eye on the forecast to avoid the most blustery periods. And yes, I’ve got my heat set to 21C inside, but that’s, um, totally because the radiators are inefficient 😅

Granted, it helps that I arrived with some cold weather gear. Regular trips to the East Coast in November and December over the years had already pushed me to get a decent coat. And during a pre-move shopping trip I grabbed a wool tuque that has proved to be indispensable. Ditto my camping boots, which I originally got for trips to Joshua Tree and Anza-Borrego, but turned out to be waterproof, and have been wonderful to have in the cold and rain.

And I’ve had to supplement since then. Blankets and a small room heater for indoors, when the outside temp drops to freezing or below. Along with a handful of flannels and a wool pullover, so I can layer up when needed. Finally, new gloves, because the thin things I brought up from California were not even close to cutting it.

Looking over that list, I guess the saying is true: No bad weather, just bad clothes. I’m lucky that I came with a lot of what I needed, and could buy the rest. And that I’m not anywhere much further north, where — for example — you have to both bundle up and beware of sweating, because your sweat can freeze!

All that said, I’m looking forward to spring next month. It’ll be nice to see things in bloom again 😀

As you can imagine from my last post (and lack of posting through Nov, Dec, or Jan), absolutely nothing went as planned, writing-wise, over the last three months.

NaNoWriMo? Sure, I got 16,000 words into it before crashing and burning. Now I have two incomplete novels sitting on my laptop, waiting for me to pick them back up 😬

The TCF? Dropped it. Okay, I delayed it first, then dropped it. There was simply too much else going on, between racing to get to the PR finish line and interviewing for a new job. And the holidays. I’m still studying French, mind, but I’ve had to let go of the idea of getting tested on it, for now.

Ditto the Clarion West classes. I attended a few sessions of the mystery-writing one, but the homework (a new story every week) overwhelmed me, and the lectures + feedback turned out to be less valuable than I thought. So I backed out of the other classes, too, freeing up time in my schedule to deal with everything else that was happening.

I did get two new stories out of the class, though. True, one of them I didn’t finish until January, and then only by ignoring the parameters of the original assignment. But still. One of them I think might be a trunk story, but the other (the January one) I’m really rather fond of, and plan to polish up for submission…later 😅

On the good news front, I did keep up with my critique group (bless them for putting up with me), and we’re almost to the end of the prison-break-in-space novel I wrote a few years ago (fourth novel completed, second sci-fi book, prior to the two unfinished novels were started). So I’ve gone back through their feedback up to this point, distilled it to a set of edits to make, and have started in on actually making those edits.

I know, this is what you’re supposed to do with novels, yes? Write a first draft for yourself, do a second draft for others to read, and then edit, edit, edit based on feedback and your own reads before sending it out to agents.

Well, I’ve got the first part down — four novels in first draft stage — and I’ve done the second (for this book, anyway), but I’ve never gone past that point. Always started a new book rather than revise the last one.

But not this time! I’m going through the thing, chapter by chapter, editing as I go. Most of the feedback I received concerned physical descriptions and layout, so that’s what I’m working on first. Which means, oddly enough, adding material instead of chipping things away. So the book’s getting longer, not shorter, as I work on this revision.

If all goes well 🤞I think I’ll have the edits wrapped by May. Which is not that far away, all things considered! Then it’ll be time to compile a list of possible agents, and start shipping out query letters.

What about you? If you did NaNoWriMo, how did it go? If you didn’t, have you made any writing goals for 2023, and how are they coming along so far?

Hey, there! Wait, pardon me one second…

blows dust off the blog

coughs

That’s better.

clears throat

Bonjour, hello! Apologies for the radio silence since November. Things have been…a bit chaotic and uncertain these past few months. It’s all worked out in the end, but getting here has meant many weeks of stressful limbo.

I’m not even sure where to start, tbh. Since November 2022, I’ve:

• been laid off
• filled out a ton of additional paperwork for IRCC as part of the ExpressEntry PR process
• interviewed with half a dozen companies, one of which was interrupted when my wife called to get troubleshooting help with our EV so she could make a medical exam appointment 200km from our house as part of the PR application
• got a new job
• was told my PR application was accepted but not confirmed so I couldn’t start said new job
• flew home for the holidays
• came back to Canada to fight with the web-based PR confirmation portal over my uploaded passport-style photograph
• pushed back my start date by one week every Thursday for four weeks while waiting on my PR confirmation

I’m leaving out…so much. But that should give you some sense of everything that’s gone down in the last few months.

In the end, it’s all worked out, thank goodness. As of last Friday, I’m officially a Canadian permanent resident!

I have my eCOPR (electronic confirmation of permanent residence) in hand, which I’ve passed on to my new employer (Cisco) as proof of my ability to legally work in Canada. That means I can go back to work, and finally end the weird forced sabbatical I’ve been on since getting laid off by Elastic (they cut 12% of their workforce, so it wasn’t just me, those tech layoffs really are going around).

I’m still processing everything that’s gone on, tbh. Been so focused on immigration issues that I’ve neglected other things, like my writing (NaNoWriMo did not go well), my friends (I kind of dropped off the grid there for a bit), and projects for back in SD (there’s a mountain of paperwork my wife needs help with in regards to her mother and younger brother). I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

But at least now I have the mental head space in which to do it. With the PR behind me, I can focus on settling into my new job, helping my wife, and actually planning for the future (I’ve been unable to see past “get my PR” for so long).

So, happy (belated) new year! May your 2023 be more stable than my 2022, and give you the space to breathe and work to accomplish your goals, whatever they are.