Deep Breath

Well, we just discovered the wonderful gentleman who usually handles our taxes has passed away, so I’ve sent out a query to someone MLG recommended, and have another query (possibly two) lined up if that comes to naught. But my fingers are crossed.

I have been working overtime for the past six weeks. I booked last week off from the publisher because I was burning out… only to have work sent to me from the local contract. This was not a terrible thing; I really enjoy the work I’m doing on that local contract. I was looking forward to time off work, that’s all. In retrospect, it’s a good thing I did book that time off, because otherwise I’d have been in the exact same position, working overtime to get things done. Yesterday I finally got to prep all the tax stuff. Today Sparky has a ped day, so we’re going to go see Cinderella at the theatre.

But yes, overtime, what with two different companies sending me stuff. Journalling has fallen to the bottom of the pile of stuff to do. There are three (!!!) Owlet posts in the queue, plus one on pens and inks, I haven’t posted fibre arts stuff in months, and I really want to write down something about the baroque bow workshop class I did last weekend with Elinor Frey.

I’ll start with the most recent Owlet post; that’s almost complete. I just need to resize pictures and such….

Behind the Scenes

Apart from the thrill of working on something tremendously cool and with someone whose work I admire, I’m really appreciating being a part of the writing team on this video game project. Put that way, as my contract does, it makes me sound much more involved than I actually am, doesn’t it? (My contract also stipulates that I must be available for promotion, interviews, conferences, and anything else they deem necessary for marketing purposes… at which point I snickered a lot, because who is going to want the copy editor’s point of view around game launch time? “Tell us, how does the insertion of a comma here or the use of a proper em dash instead of a double hyphen subtly affect gameplay? How is that experience deepened and made more impactful for the player?”)

What I particularly appreciate about this, however, is reading the story.

I suck at video games. My brain doesn’t seem to work the way games expect a player’s brain to work, and it makes for a very frustrating experience. So all this time I’ve been perceiving video games as these horrendous blocks of weird puzzle-solving or monster-slaying, of fighting with the controller to try to get it to do with what I think it wants me to do, and ending up just walking away. I have several friends who are writers within the video game industry and who talk about the storylines and dialogue, and while I have known that logically, this is what makes a player care enough to move on to the next challenge and advance the story, I have not experienced it personally.

So working on this script, even peripherally, has given me a wonderful opportunity I otherwise wouldn’t have had. I’m following a story, an actual narrative, with none of the gameplay that makes me crash and burn. In fact, the gameplay is often noted by a single sentence between square brackets in the script. (That’s right; the thing that takes you three hours to play through can be a single sentence in the script, because it’s not handled by the scriptwriting team. Different people entirely take care of that.)

I get to read a story involving certain characters, protagonists and antagonists, and it amazes me that the scriptwriting team can demonstrate so much about individual characters within so many constraints. The story of this particular game has to unfold and advance, but on a more focused level, the story of these specific characters also develops and advances. And on a broader level, the story of the overall franchise has to further develop and advance, as well. It absolutely fascinates me that all this can be done through dialogue. And spare dialogue, at that; spare in the sense of being brief, not the sense of being extra. There’s nothing extra here: character-building moments have to do double duty, advancing the story or delivering key information to the player at the same time. It’s incredibly interesting to observe, especially if I have the chance to follow a scene or set of scenes that undergoes a major rewrite.

And in unrelated work news, I’ve been handling some other projects in my off hours. I just finished working on a STEM book, which needed heavy, heavy editing, and I kind of burnt myself out on it. My current project is a homeschooling book, which is a peach of a manuscript; it’s so very tidy and perfect, so perfect that my attention wanders away while I read it, because there are no errors to trip me up. I have to keep bringing myself back and refocusing!

Goodbye, Gran

Last night, my grandmother passed away.

It was a quiet passing; my dad says that she’d slipped into a comatose state, and died about twenty-four hours later. She was exactly one month short of her ninety-ninth birthday.

We started losing her a while ago, though. Her memory became less and less sharp until she lost most of her short-term memory, and the most recent of the long-term stuff began to disintegrate as well. She ceased recognising people. She had to ask over and over who my dad was when he flew out to visit her.

When I was little, she kept two very special things in her handbag for me to play with if we had to wait somewhere. One was tiny crocheted blue doll with a silky printed Asian-style face, and the other was a tape measure. Oh, that tape measure. I don’t recall the colour, but it was one of the cased ones that would lock when you stopped pulling the tape, and had a button to press when you wanted to retract the tape again. It fascinated me, and scared me a little too, because the tape would snap back pretty sharply. My mother had regular cotton tape measures, so this one was extra-special. When I bought my first retractable tape measure last year, I was pretty excited to own one of my very own. I think of her every time I use it.

I can’t find the box with all my photo albums in it. When my parents went out to Vancouver to help her downsize in preparation for eventually moving into the care home, my dad couriered me a box full of photo albums and keepsakes. She’d kept a series of albums with pictures of me from birth onward. I found one to include below in a box of my own photos, so that will have to do for now.

She worked at the Valois library for a time (possibly when it was first opened?), right around the corner from where I now have my orchestra rehearsals, and around the corner from where friends now live. One of the houses my dad’s family lived in was right around the corner from the apartment blocks where I lived for several years in Dorval, too. She was always tickled to know I was living steps away from where she’d lived, decades and decades before.

She lived in West Vancouver for most of my life, though, with my granddad until he passed away when I was a teenager. We visited them about once a year, though. They lived in an apartment building that had an elevator and a pool, both very exciting to a small child. When we visited, I used to love paging through her huge hardcover Royal Doulton figurine collectible book, sitting next to her tea cart. You could look right out over the water from the windows of their apartment, and walk along the seawalk to the little beaches, where we’d sort through rocks and driftwood. Some days we’d go to Ambleside Park and feed the ducks, which was always terrific fun. Right at the base of the apartment building we could sit and wave at the Royal Hudson as it steamed by in the morning, and the engineers would wave back. (When I was older I finally got to ride the Royal Hudson on its excursion up to Squamish.) My first trip alone as an unaccompanied minor was flying out to see them when I was in high school.

My gran was always there for my graduations (and probably most of the plays I was in, too, although I don’t remember), right at the front, snapping photos with her camera. While I smile at it now, it was mortifying at the time. (Notably, she left the lens cap on at my high school grad ceremony, so it was all for naught.) She followed me around the dance floor at my high school grad dance and snapped photos, too. There’s a hilarious one of me with my head twisted away and my poor date caught looking open-mouthed at the camera. She thought it was just wonderful that I danced a box waltz for a while with one of my friends, too; fortunately that escaped photographic immortalization, because we were both staring at our feet and counting. This is Gran and I at my graduation from John Abbott College in the spring of 1990.

For my high school graduation, she took me on a cruise to Mexico. Somewhere (probably with that box of photo albums) is the souvenir album we put together, full of formal shipboard photos, maps, tour flyers, and various other memorabilia. The cruise experience was probably mostly wasted on a painfully shy and socially terrified barely-sixteen-year-old like myself, but it was my first time outside of Canada or the United States, and I did love the sun and the sea, and seeing the historic sites the tours took us to.

When I turned… sixteen? eighteen? Anyway, one of those, she gave me the ruby ring she’d had made after I was born (the ruby is my birthstone). I wore it for years and years, although now it lives in my jewellery box. A couple of years after Sparky was born, she sent me her sapphire ring, as well, which lives in my jewellery box because it’s absolutely enormous (the stones, not the band) and again, where would I wear it? (I’m rather minimalist when it comes to jewellery, in case you hadn’t figured it out.) When I graduated from university (the first time, so after my BA), she gave me her pearl necklace. I love their shade of aged ivory; I’ve never worn them, though, because I’m terrified I’d lose them. (Besides, where would I wear all these; the grocery store?)

Also in that box of albums and memorabilia were stacks of programmes from my various theatre performances. I can’t remember which she saw and which she didn’t — Dad used to send her copies of the ones she couldn’t fly down to see — but she kept absolutely everything. She had a slightly crazy-making habit of underlining our names in printed materials. I have her copy of a privately printed large family history book called The Book of Menzies (also known as the “Red and White Book of Menzies,” written in 1894 by D.P. Menzie, the original printing limited to 100 copies; it belonged to her grandfather, one of the original subscribers who funded the book) in which she’s underlined several names. (She also used awful, cheap, sticky tape to helpfully mend part of the spine. My antiquarian book-lover side cringes at both.) I sent a signed and inscribed copy of each of my books to her as they were published; I wonder if she underlined my name on those title pages? Gran passed her copies of Emily Carr’s series of books on to me when I was an early teenager, which introduced me to a very different idea of Canada and Canadian art (yes, before I discovered the Group of Seven).

About ten years ago, I tried to record a couple of orchestra concerts for her, but my poor minidisc recorder was just too overwhelmed by the amount of noise and it never worked properly. But on one trip out to see her, my parents took her to the local library and set her up at a computer terminal. She fussed, because she had no idea why they were doing it. But then Dad brought up the link to one of the videos someone had made of one of our concerts, and gave her the headphones. When he told her who it was and pointed me out on the screen, she beamed.

The last time I saw her in person was in the summer of 2007, when Sparky was two years old and we all went to visit my parents so she could meet him. When Dad last showed her a picture of us, some time after Owlet had been born, she said, “Oh, what lovely children!”, but she didn’t understand that they were her great-grandchildren. Whenever I’d suggest sending her a current photo, my parents would quietly say, “Don’t bother. She doesn’t know. She can’t remember.” Telling her who everyone in the photograph was would entail an awful lots of explaining and backstory, and it was challenging enough to explain who my mum and dad were when they went to see her.

The saying I will forever associate with her in various forms is “You can take your education everywhere; no one can take your education away from you.” She repeated this frequently, with various wordings. She thought it was just great that I kept on going to school and collecting diplomas. It alternately amused me and made me want to roll my eyes. I loved my gran, but she exasperated me a lot, too. The generational gap was just so large, and the way she saw the world was not the way I saw it. She also gushed a lot, and I am very bad at handling gushing, particularly when it is directed at me.

I know that she was very frustrated and angry with life when her memory started to erode, and who can blame her? I remember feeling relieved when my mother told me Gran had reached a point where she was living almost entirely in the moment, just admiring the same flowers in the park over and over as they encountered them while they walked around the park. This post has been hard, not because I’ve lost someone dear to me, but because I no longer know that person. Or rather, the person who I knew and loved was gone long ago, and I’ve been able to mourn that loss bit by bit as my parents return from visits and update me on her decline. I’m grateful for the time we were able to spend together throughout her life, and for the opportunities she enabled me to have.

I am so very glad that she is at peace now.

Spring Concert This Saturday!

Ignore the snow and the five-foot snowbanks. Pretend everything is green and blooming, and celebrate with the spring concert presented this Saturday evening by the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra!

The concert takes place at 7:30 PM on Saturday 21 March 2015, at our home base of Valois United Church (70 Belmont Ave. Pointe-Claire, between King and Queen). Here’s the programme:

Mozart: ‘Der Schauspieldirektor’ Overture
Schubert: ‘Rosamunde’ incidental music (selections)
JS Bach: Violin Concerto in A minor (guest soloist: Celia Morin)
Beethoven: Symphony no. 7

Admission is $10, free for children 18 and under. The concerts usually last just about two hours, including the refreshment break. The address and map are on the church website. Children of all ages are very welcome.

I hope we’ll see you there!

Oh, Sparky…

While doing groceries this morning, I got a voicemail from Sparky’s school. He had called to say that he’d forgotten his lunch at home.

Except he hadn’t. There was nothing left on the floor of the entryway when we went out the door. And he had the lunchbox in his hand when I dropped him off at school.

When I got home, I double-checked the fridge, the entryway, and the back seat of the car. Nothing. So I threw together another lunch and took it to school, along with a note that said yes, he had remembered his lunch; he’d had it with him when he got to school, so it was probably in the schoolyard somewhere.

I certainly hope he finds his lunchbox, because I bought him a new drink bottle-thing yesterday, and it was not cheap. (Well, it was, actually; that particular single bottle was on clearance, but it was the last one, and the only reason I’d bought it was because it was marked down, because new the prices are stupidly high.) Also, I’m not a fan of the idea of having to buy a new lunchbox two-thirds of the way through the year, or replacing all the terrific nearly-new containers in it.

Apart from his lunchbox mysteriously vanishing between the schoolyard gate and his classroom, things are mostly okay. He got his second-term report card a couple of weeks ago and it was quite decent in most areas except math, and his French had dropped a bit. He got a plaque at a recent assembly, an award for being a risk-taker — which, if you know him, is both puzzling and great. He doesn’t trust himself to try new things or go out on a limb very often, so if a teacher recognized that particular value in him, then that means they’re doing a great job making him feel safe and able to be more daring in various areas of his life. (Risk-taking isn’t something out of the blue; it’s one of the values stressed in the International Baccalaureate programme’s philosophy. The IB programme embodies ten values: it aims to develop learners who are inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-takers, balanced, and reflective. These ten values are underlined and revisited again and again in various modules and units, as well as activities, educational approaches, and teaching styles. It’s awesome; basically, they’re educating upright citizens of the world, the educational environment suits Sparky very well, and I am all for it.)

He has run into a roadblock with long division, with which I completely and utterly sympathize, since I did in grade four, too. (Mine stemmed from a sudden switch into doing math in French, and the French way of doing long division is different, which created a lot of stress and confusion at home when my dad tried to coach me through my math homework.) He is not a fan of having to do extra work to understand how something is done, so a few bonus long division problems every couple of days on top of drilling a multiplication table or two nightly is moaned and whined about regularly. There is much dragging of feet when I remind him to study his French vocabulary, too. Basically, anything that was not directly assigned by a teacher that needs to be handed in or checked in class is seen as the Worst Thing Ever, because we’re obviously manufacturing extra work as some kind of punishment or just to make his life miserable. Sorry, kid; what’s actually happening is we’re teaching you how to study and how to break tasks down into smaller components so you learn them thoroughly instead of just zipping through them and barely passing a test. He tends to rush through things and not question the answer he arrives at, something I’ve been trying to teach him to do when he finishes a problem. If you’re dividing 348 by 4, for example, the answer cannot be bigger than 348, and if you use simple logic, it can’t be bigger than half or a third of it, either; if it is, it means you went off track during your process and either multiplied two things together incorrectly or multiplied the wrong two things (something that happens with great frequency in his division). He loves to learn; he does not love to work. (As an aside… we were so right to switch schools. He probably wouldn’t have hit this until high school if he’d stayed in the other one.)

He’s on March Break next week. There’s at least a hot chocolate date, a bookstore trip, and hopefully a movie planned. But he’s not going to be happy when I remind him to keep up with his math practice.

Oh Look, It’s the End of February

And really, March 1 cannot come too soon.

I don’t have the energy for full paragraphs. Let’s do a point-form post.

My first two weeks on the video game project are done. So far I am enjoying it.

In my off time I handled my first project of the new year for the publisher. It was a Star Wars book. Yet again my geeky hoard of trivia proves useful! (Here’s a tip for you: The term ‘Jedi’ is a singular plural. One Jedi, two Jedi, many Jedi. Never Jedis. Never. LOOK, I CAN BE GEEKY ON MULTIPLE LEVELS HERE! AND PEOPLE PAY ME FOR IT!)

I started my free month-long trial of subscribing to Scribd for e-books and audiobooks. All things Agatha Christie have been converging in my life, and I decided to subscribe to an audiobook service so I could listen to her books while I spin or knit, but I find Audible very expensive for what it is. Scribd is $8.99 a month and offers unlimited access to a tonne of audiobooks, and e-books, too, so I went that route. (Bonus, I discovered: comics and graphic novels. Awesome.)

I am knitting a hat for a swap, and I am arguing with it. I have already ripped it back twice, and I suspect I will do it again. I just don’t know if I will try the pattern a third time, or give up on the decorative stitch part and simply knit it straight, then add a little something to it afterward. That kind of feels like cheating or giving up, but it may save my sanity. Ceri pointed out that the pattern isn’t hard but it’s tricky, which can be just as frustrating in a different way, and she has a point. Add that to the fact that I can’t knit anything more complicated than basic stockinette or garter in a room where there are other people, and there is a problem. It doesn’t help that the deadline for mailing is in one week. I could have been done by now if I hadn’t decided I really wanted to spin the yarn for this project. (But I did, and it’s terribly nice to knit with, I must say.)

I’ve started spinning more yarn for Mum’s beautiful silk/cashmere/Merino wrap. She’s getting close to the end of the stuff I made for her in 2013, and it’s not long enough, even taking into account the length blocking will add. I am so glad I took good notes about how I made the initial yarn.

One month till the chamber orchestra’s spring concert. That’s… soon. (Saturday 21 March, 7:30 PM at Valois United church. Mark your calendars. It’s a lovely programme.)

Yeah, Owlet’s post is late. That’s par for the course these days.

We had a lovely little Valentine’s Day tea party for our goddaughters, and it was so much fun. We finally got to use the half-size china teacups I bought Owlet for her first birthday for the kids. There were several courses of delicious tea-type foodstuffs, excellent company, and it was just a lovely day all around.

I got a new fountain pen; a Noodler’s Ahab in the colour Ahab’s Pearl. It’s a flex nib, and I’ve been really wanting to try a flex nib. It’s got a thick barrel, like my Waterman Kultur. I would have preferred a Konrad or a Nib Creaper, both of which are slimmer, but WonderPens.ca didn’t have them in stock at the time and I had really promised myself a new pen when the big cheque for the math book came in. I inked it with J Herbin’s Vert Empire, and I am smitten. I am also wholly smitten by the converter it came with, and the converters I ordered for my Waterman and Parker pens. I put some Diamine Damson in my extra-fine Sheaffer pen, and it writes so much more smoothly than it did when inked with the Noodler’s #41 Brown. I think the Diamines may be lubricated; I’m not entirely certain.

Okay, that’s enough. Back to work.

Back to Work

It’s been an awful week and a half here. Everyone except Sparky was very ill with the flu. Today is the first day everyone is where they’re supposed to be. We’re all tired and drained, most of us haven’t eaten properly all week, and I’m still mystified as to how Sparky managed to escape all of this. (HRH thinks it was sheer force of will, because we had a Lego party for five of his friends slated to happen here yesterday, and we warned him that if he got sick we’d have to reschedule it. He stayed well, and the party went off brilliantly. Six ten-year-olds, a tonne of Lego, pizza, and a movie; it was a good day.)

This is good, everyone being where they’re supposed to be, because I am starting a new project today, according to the contracts that were countersigned last week. I signed an NDA in early January, heard nothing for a while, and then was in negotiations with Paris office at the end of January. (Full confession: I enjoyed saying “I’m in negotiations with Paris” way too much.) This week is devoted to getting to know the project, the team, and talking about guidelines and standards. It’s an exciting project and one I’m very interested in working on. It’s an experiment of sorts for the employer who signed me, because they’ve never had a devoted copyeditor oversee all the written content for a project like this before. The team’s writers are said to be happy, too, because a pair of outside eyes is going to be going through it all for consistency and stylistic tweaks before release. It’s difficult to do that for your own writing, especially when there’s no clear stylesheet and several writers contributing. I like to think that if it goes well and there’s a measurable positive impact, then this may become a repeat gig. (And I’m not just saying that because I get to work with a very good friend. Observing inconsistencies or errors as a consumer drives me nuts; I like to think it’s good business sense to have a copyeditor manage the vast amount of text produced in a project like this.) It’s full time for a month and a half, then a possible week after that, followed by two (possibly three) more weeks at different times between April and June as various parts of the project come due.

On Friday I also accepted my first new project of the year from the publisher, which I can work on in evenings and on weekends if necessary. It’s short and a lot of the work I’d normally do is already done, as tends to be the case when I handle a manuscript for this particular editor. While the exciting new contract is theoretically full time for these six weeks, turning something down from the publisher felt like a dangerous move, especially if I’ll have to do it in a couple of weeks once I’m actually buried in actual deadline work for the new project. Every time a freelancer has to pass on an offered project, it’s a bit less likely that they’ll be assigned something the next time a manuscript comes up for editing. It’s good to stay on top of things and keep one’s availability fresh in the coordinator’s mind.

It’s been a quiet year work-wise so far. It’s nice to sit down and be able to work again. I certainly needed the break, and I am endlessly grateful that I didn’t have work that had to be done last week when I was out with the flu, or the week that Owlet’s daycare was closed in mid-January… but it’s good to get back to my desk. Just cleaning out the mess my work and personal e-mail inboxes had become over the last three weeks felt great today. Now… to work!