May holds Mother’s Day of course, and we had two awesome Mother’s Day celebrations. My original plan was to get both mothers together and go to the Tulip Festival, but that didn’t work with schedules. So, on Mother’s Day proper we went with my MIL to Art in the Neighbourhood’s Spring Art Show. (I wouldn’t have even known this was happening had it not been for the flyer at Black Squirrel!)
It turns out my MIL (an artist in her own right) had a few friends (Cynthia O’Brien who works with clay and porcelain & Jackie Kavanaugh who works with fibres) in the show and was super excited when we mentioned it as an option. She also didn’t know it was happening! (People think Ottawa is boring simply because they don’t know where to find events; admittedly, neither do I!)
The location was an odd one but was so nice. The art show took place in a covered outdoor rink. I was expecting it to be indoors and that we’d miss the beautiful weather, but that wasn’t the case at all! There were booths surrounding the edges and stands in the centre showcasing larger pieces of art.
Art in the Neighbourhood is a very cool group which focuses on having a variety of art forms. They had many different fine arts like different paint mediums and canvases but also a lot of metal, stone, and fabric arts!
I didn’t take any pictures as I was so enthralled with the work, but a few that stood out to me were the paintings which used old window frames as picture frames, a painting which encaptured reflection on a metal teapot with such mind-bending accuracy, raku-fired pottery, and jewelry that was “nature in copper.” That’s just to name a few. (I’m sorry I don’t have links for all of them, I’m the worst!)
Mother’s Day didn’t end there. We tried out a new cafe, Three Sisters, which of course has gluten free options. It’s celiac freindly with all gluten items separated to the top shelf of the case or distanced on their own platter. The coffee was great as was my cookie. They had the option of gluten free paninis, but I wasn’t ready for a full meal, so I will have to go back and try them. The seating area was filled with local art and the “for here” mugs were quite ecclectic. A very fun place to enjoy lunch.
Skip forward to the last weekend of the month and it was Mother’s Day Take Two with my mom. Her partner and my sister also joined us as we gallivanted through the ornamental gardens and arboretum at the central experimental farm.
My mom is big on plants and had a blast telling us all the ones that lacked labels. The lilacs were in full bloom and their scent filled the air. Many of the peonies are still waiting to pop but smelling the ones that have bloomed was an interesting adventure. I didn’t expect such different scents to come from the “same” flower. (We’re thinking this might be a new place to bring our laptops for writing!)
Walking through the arboretum seemed far more about seeing wildlife than the trees! Chipmunks, squirrels, chickadees, cardinals, woodpeckers, and another small perching bird that I wasn’t quite sure about. The birds were in a mood though and flew right at my mom’s face. Not exactly a dive bomb, it felt far more like, “I want to fly here and here exactly, you will have to deal with that.”
After about 2 hours of walking, this Mother’s Day also culminated in a meal; we picnicked on the grass with hummus, veggies, grapes, cheese, kielbasa, and crackers. There was supposed to be watermelon but I forgot to cut it up.
Jumping back to the beginning of the month, it was also the Ottawa Writer’s Festival. We attended one panel on the Saturday evening: Fear Itself. I said in an Instagram post that the experience this year was very different to last year’s. The atmosphere of the crowd was so much more energetic. Last year we went to a panel about short stories and while we waited the audience was so quiet, library-like even. Before Fear Itself though, the crowd was chatting and upbeat. I wonder if it had to do with the topic or the time of day.
As a horror lover, I was interested to hear how these horror authors engaged with horror, and what drew them to horror, and I was happy to hear some similarities. I often feel like I’m on the outside of groups; that I’m too blob-shaped for the box. But horror people? They might just be my people. I think my favourite thing said was by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia which went something like: I’m scared of everything except monsters. You can stab a vampire with a wooden stake, cut off a zombie’s head with a machete, shoot a werewolf with a silver bullet, but real world problems have no simple solution. Monsters are easy.
I too love the idea of simple, rule following solutions in folklore and magic. I wish I could smoke cleanse away my debt and wish upon a star to end systemic discrimination, but for now I’ll have to settle with monster stand-ins for problems and live vicariously through people exorcising demons while I do the work in therapy.
And here I am almost forgetting about Writing Battle! The winners have been announced and everything! (When they’re available for public reading they’ll be here.) I think I will do a whole other post for this since we’re getting a little long in the tooth here. And since the winners have been announced, and I read only one of them during my judging, I think I should read some of the winners and talk about them a bit in contrast to what I saw while judging.
Writing was pretty good this month even without a cafe romp! I hit 4158 making the current total word count 15 648. This short story is very clearly actually a novella. I will easily hit that 20 000 and I can see a few places that I can flesh things out to solidify it in the novella category. My goal is to have this very rough draft finished by June 30th because I plan on doing a Writing Challenge™ in July, and I’d like to have it completed before that. More on that later this month.
How did my writing actually go? I missed the final writing session (May 30) but hit or made up for all the others. I’ve been feeling a little extra stress recently because work picked up (it was Writing Battle month and I received my first UGC project) and I set myself a goal to do a bit of an upgrade on my website AND revamp my social media schedule a bit. Plus, I’m getting ahead of myself thinking about the time I don’t have in June because of a camping trip. It’s all self-inflicted overthinking stress, but it definitely affected my mental toward sitting down for fiction writing.
The reading was good this month. Of course you’ll get a full picture in the reading recap but I finished The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Monstrilio by Gerardo Samano Cordova, and Brebeuf’s Ghost by Daniel David Moses, plus a few short stories from The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One.
The two novels and graphic novel? Five stars all around.
Brebeuf’s Ghost was an odd read for me since it isn’t a novel but a play. I have never read a play outside of school. I’m not sure reading plays is for me. I did like the story that was told, I just felt it lacked the visuals and voice of live theatre or the description and interiority of a novel. I would love to see it performed.
Of the short stories one was a banger (“That Only a Mother” by Judith Merril) and the other (“Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester) I have very mixed feelings about.
Okay Fine I’ll Read ACOTAR - Video
The first in a new series where I read popular novels that I simply haven’t read yet. Some I’ve been avoiding and others I just haven’t gotten around to. I’ll be honest, A Court of Thorns and Roses was sitting somewhere between the two; my interest in reading it had far more to do with the explosion of romantasy than a true interest in the novel. You’ll have to watch to find out what my final thoughts were.
Seven Point Story Structure Explained - Blog Post
Another in the story structure series, this one took me for a loop while researching and writing. The seven point structure sets itself apart in that it was created as a tool for planning where the other two we’ve discussed are equally useful for planning and analyzing. It comes with a set of instructions that I think are very useful for understanding the story but were also difficult for my particular brain to follow. I’d love to know your experiences with this structure!
Devils of many kinds. April was a slow reading month but I loved what I read. The Devils by Joe Abercrombie was a fun read and I started The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo so you get a quick look at my thoughts on that one too. More to come since I have now finished it.
How to Edit: Sentence Level - Blog Post
We’ve discussed editing your first draft and how that should focus on the big picture, now it’s time to look at the smaller things for your later drafts. We discuss the difference between stylistic editing and copyediting and some tips for both as you work through your edits.
That’s it for now!
P.S. I know I wrote a note about a piece I was working on and basically finished but I’m having second thoughts about posting it… someone tell me they want to read it :P
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.