Several Milestones

Fiction published; the Amateur's 100th post

For most of my life I’ve attempted to write fiction, on and off (see some ruminating here), and after a pause of nearly a decade, I started to apply myself to it seriously in 2020 as a lot of people did during the pandemic. I wrote some short stories and started sending them out, I attempted and discarded a novel and then began another one, I took various courses, and I also started this newsletter.

It took a few years, but those efforts are starting to bear fruit, and I’m excited to announce that I have two short stories out this spring and summer.

The first is “The Good Sport” in the Summer 2023 issue of the Kenyon Review. You can read it online, order a print copy of the magazine, or listen to a recording of me reading it aloud if that appeals. The theme of the story collection was “women’s health,” and the connection is perhaps a bit tenuous — it’s about a group of women on vacation together being aggravating and passive-aggressive towards each other. For this one, I tried to lean into a tone that was haughty and venomous while still being vulnerable, with a narrator who places a high value on her imagined easy-goingness, and believes that she’s in with the group perhaps more than she actually is.

The second is “In Which a Dog Remains a Dog” in the Spring 2023 issue of the Blue Earth Review. This one is print-only, so you’ll have to order a copy if you want to read it. It’s very short and more lighthearted, dramatizing a standoff between a man and his dog Marcus Aurelius. Blue Earth Review is very charmingly printed in a compact square format, and the copies were a delight to receive.

This is also the 100th post for The Amateur. It took a long time — more than two years — to get my first one hundred subscribers, but now I’ve been gaining them at a much steadier clip. In the beginning, and for a long time afterward, the bulk of my readers were people who knew me personally. Now, the balance is tipping, and readers who don’t know me personally outnumber the ones who do.

I thought about including a list of links to my favorite Amateur posts from the past, but if the newsletter statistics tell me anything, they tell me that virtually none of you click on links. Instead, I thought I’d write a bit of an introduction to myself as a person, with the links thrown in incidentally. These are most of the basic facts about me:

1. For the past 9 years, I’ve lived in Seattle, a city about which I’m pretty ambivalent. But life is good here — I have an apartment with a piano and an expansive view of the Cascade mountains. I’d probably like Seattle a lot more if I were an outdoorsy person, which I’m decidedly not.

2. I moved to Seattle in 2014 from Toronto to take a job working on Google Maps. For 7.5 years I wrote code for driving directions, traffic alerts, and turn-by-turn navigation. For the most part, I’m very proud of that: it’s an app almost everyone has used at some point in their lives, and being able to point to various features and say “I made that!” continues to give me a bit of a thrill. I could probably talk for hours about how it all works — things like the directions engine and the traffic server were genuinely interesting systems. After a while I wanted to expand my horizons and left for Grammarly, which helps me catch errors and typos in this newsletter (although not all of them). (relevant post)

3. Generationally, I’m an “old millennial.” I remember AOL chatrooms, floppy discs, and SimAnt. Pierre Trudeau was in his final stretch as Prime Minister of Canada when I was born, and I got my first email address in high school (a hotmail.com address, of course).

4. I was born in a small mountain town called Rossland, in British Columbia, Canada, where I lived until I was eight. After that, my family moved to Calgary for a few years, and then to Edmonton, where I went to a performing arts high school and then University. All three places were cold, but Edmonton was especially so.

5. I grew up playing classical piano in the RCM system and continued taking lessons and exams up until I received my ARCT. I was never all that good, but it shaped my tastes in a profound way. I still prefer classical music to most other kinds. The requirements for ARCT included courses in music history, counterpoint, and theory, and through the history courses I became completely obsessed with opera as a teenager. For a few years, I stopped wanting to listen to anything else. I still rank classical music theory as one of the most challenging subjects I’ve ever studied. My memories of learning about music mostly involve taking my Discman on long, cold bus rides. (relevant post, another post)

6. For a couple of years I worked for the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. I was their social media person, which meant I posted regularly to their Twitter/Facebook accounts and wrote a blog. I had no idea what I was doing, but back then no one did, so it was okay (relevant post).

7. I also co-founded and ran a feminist organization called Dames Making Games, back in Toronto in 2012. We ran workshops and social events teaching women how to use game-making tools to build their own video games and other interactive digital experiences. The organization still exists and still runs (under the name DMGToronto), which I’m proud of, although I’m no longer involved. It was a very intense time of my life, in good ways and bad. The work was deeply important to me and I made many close friends, but it was …let’s say, a high-conflict environment, which is part of why I never write about it.

8. I have had exactly one experience of going viral, for an article about learning to code. It was mostly a positive one. (relevant post)

9. My educational training is in Computer Science, but I have been in and out of tech a bit (as perhaps you can tell from the above). One year I saved up some money, took a year off, and took a bunch of English Literature courses at the University of Toronto as a non-degree student. That was fun.

10. I have a dog named Walter, a five-year-old Golden Retriever. Sometimes he is a good dog and sometimes a not-so-good dog. He is very large and very cute. (relevant post)

11. This is what I look like:

    

    Occasionally people ask about my ethnicity. The answer is very boring: I am white and Anglo. My ancestors are predominantly from the UK.

12. I didn’t learn how to drive until my mid-30’s. (relevant post)

13. My routine for this newsletter is not very elaborate. On Sunday evenings, I walk the dog, cook dinner while listening to Met Opera Radio, eat in front of the TV, then sit down to write the newsletter. Usually I have some idea of what I want to say and have composed part of it in my head, but I don’t write anything before Sunday night. I write it all in one sitting, and it typically takes a few hours. By the time it’s written, I’m usually pretty tired and don’t have a lot of energy to edit or fix mistakes, and in the past I’ve made some embarrassing ones.

14. I have other writing projects on the go, mostly fiction. I think a lot about writing an essay collection about the top 50 operas in the American standard repertoire, one essay per opera. What audience exists for this I have no idea, but I’d like to write it all the same.

15. I’m not good at Twitter. I scroll through it constantly but don’t like to post and I kind of hate the memey, cutesy idioms that proliferate on there.

    I should probably try to promote this newsletter a little harder, but I also like just letting people find it. I’m very glad all of you found it! Thanks for being around for my 100th post.