Sometimes Ya Just Gotta Feel The Feels

I’m not writing these days —

And I miss it.

For the first time in what seems like forever, summer passed without hours of frantic typing and a constant glance at the clock to see how many hours I had left each day to pound out a new book or screenplay.

Why?

I started the summer with Covid, which wasn’t a huge surprise since I took a chance and travelled to the Banff World Media Festival in June. A few thousand delegates hollering in each other’s ears in close quarters did the trick. I hope it was worth it — the jury’s still out. A lot of delegates went home with Covid, then got busy with projects and vacations, so I have yet to sign any new contracts. I pitched five projects and will continue to seek production partners and financing to get some made.

I spent my summer nurturing those projects and relationships and trying to find ways to create some stable income in the meantime. Film is feast or famine, in case you thought it was glamourous. And it ain’t easy to make your books visible on Amazon when yours are just a few of the seven or so million out there.

There are days

I wish I could just write. What I would give to go back to scrawling out the Drifters books. Unequalled joy and bliss, disappearing into another world with friends ‘from another town.’ These days, mired in the pandemic headspace as countries wage a war that feels not-so-distant, and friends suffer with loss, it can be hard to find joy.

I try

to keep things in perspective. Will I ever be one of my country’s best authors? Will I become a renowned and remembered figure in Canadian literature? Am I a known Prince Edward Island writer and filmmaker? Do those things matter? Nope. I’m healthy. My man is well and kind and good. My son loves spending his days studying design and practising his skills with his business, Humble Hound. My parents are doing fabulous.

But something’s amiss. I can’t find my mojo.

It went wherever the writing went. It’s hidden between the faded, discoloured keys of my old MacBook Pro. It got buried at my summer camper, where I used to write with reckless abandon, a Twin Shores Campground cinnamon roll and a grocery-store Starbucks cold brew coffee sweetened with maple latte creamer at my side. Neighbours mowing lawns nearby, cats cuddled up on chairs, their adorable fur alight with the morning sun. A bumpy bike ride to Sacred Beach to watch the fishing boats before settling down to write. Twinkling stars at night — and sometimes a falling star , a wishing star — to stir up fantasies of dreams that should come true. Campfires, sunsets, friends. A view that never quite feels real — picturesque and lovely, the sparkling water of the Darnley Basin, fishing boats dotting the waves, red sandstone cliffs and emerald green fields, a quaint white church steeple poking up in the distance. The kind of beauty that reminds me that I am but a pffft of dust in the great scheme that is the universe.

I sank a little further

into the abyss after my beloved camper flooded. It was the last straw. I was struggling to find an editor for the proof of concept I shot in May, Steve got Covid, family visited, life got derailed. Then the flood came. At first a glistening puddle on the kitchen floor, seemingly unattached to anything obvious, like a leaky fridge. A camper friend and Steve put their heads together and identified a deteriorated fitting on the hot water heater. The entire underbelly of the camper, insulation and all, was flooded. About twenty feet of it.

It didn’t take long

for the heated summer days to swell the moisture into a soaking wet mass of smelly chipboard. My lungs protested. After three weeks, a month early, I gave up and abandoned ship. We cleared out the camper and it was hauled yesterday to be poked and prodded and investigated. We’ve been told black mold will set in, that the camper should be written off.

That camper is a dream.

Its best feature was the panoramic windows I stared out of every day as I wrote, my head bent over ‘my spot’ at the kitchen table. We looked for years to find the right camper. There is no other like it. It was old (2009) but it was good.

So now

I am back home, away from our plot in the community garden that is abundant with the fresh vegetables we planted and weeded, away from dipping my toes in the warm water at the beach, away from lazy weekends of reading with my toes buried in the sand and a cool beverage at my side. My view of the outdoors is now relegated to leafy trees. That’s not so bad, I adore trees and am grateful to breathe in their healthy goodness. But I need water, and it was a shock to suddenly be forced FROM water BY water. The sun is still shining and the air outside is fresh but I am indoors. The cozy lawnmowers have been replaced by sirens and trucks and construction saws and a motorcycle a neighbour seems to run for an hour straight every morning. Noise. SO. MUCH. NOISE. I stare at a screen and have never felt so trapped.

So enclosed. So utterly, entirely enclosed.

All along I have been saying, “It’s okay, my problems are nothing. Others are TRULY suffering.” And they are, and their suffering hurts my soul because I am unable to help. I AM HELPLESS. I feel like the water that destroyed my oasis is all the unshed tears I have yet to cry while I scream to the heavens. I want to ask WHY WHY WHY — WHY the pandemic, WHY the pain my friends are going through, WHY the war, WHY the suffocation of being forced indoors when there is so much light and open sky and freshness left outside?

And WHY can’t I disappear into another story, because that was always my safe place, my place to hide, my place to disappear from the things that hurt?

But mostly — WHY am I glossing over the truth and pretending everything is okay when it isn’t?

How many of us continue along on our journeys with our truths buried — how many of us are afraid to let go? How many of us allow ourselves to truly ‘feel the feels?’

A favourite line from an old fave film, The Horse Whisperer, came to mind the other day — “I know where he goes.” Look it up. I always thought how lucky I was to go there while I was writing. But now I know the truth.

I need to be strong — no more hiding. No more asking Jessie and the other characters in my stories to feel the feels for me. I gotta feel them myself. Not bury them. Not let the trailer’s flood be my tears.

I gotta shed my own tears.

And maybe then I’ll be able to sit down and write.

Hey Y'all, It's Been A While, Huh?

Oh Lordy, I miss these sunsets...

Darnley, Prince Edward Island, you have my heart. Drifters readers know this because more than one book in the series is set in this beautiful oasis. I'm very blessed - I live in Darnley in the summertime, in a small camper that overlooks the gorgeous, mystical Darnley Basin.

If you've been wondering what I've been up to lately, here's a clue - it's a new project partly set in the Darnley area. For the first time in a number of years, I'm not writing Drifters books this fall and winter. Although I'm excited to be moving onto something exciting and new, I have to say that I really miss Josh and Jessie and the colourful folks who live in their world. I have known no greater joy than writing the Drifters books. I was happy all the time - a false happiness in some ways, I suppose, since my moods were tied into a fictional world, yet it was a good happy. That kind of joy permeated to every area of my life. This year is different - I'm grounded in the real world, which is making me adjust to a whole new life, including going to work at an office for a change, and learning to manage the personalities of others as I learn to work in a team environment as opposed to one that was mostly solitary.

SO, what am I working on? Most of you likely already know, but here it is - a feature film. I'm a Vancouver Film School grad who started writing books about people acting in a fictional TV series because I was having a hard time trying to finance filmed entertainment of my own. Strangely, and perhaps weirdly (but definitely coolly!), the books led me to interested players who share the dream of making a feature film with me.

The film is called Still The Water - it's not one of my Drifters books yet it revolves, as do the Drifters books, around a troubled guy whose name starts with J. It's set almost entirely in my home province of Prince Edward Island.

Still The Water is about quieting the chaos in our hearts. The story revolves around brothers who are trying to reconnect after a sustained absence from each other. As children, the fellas - hockey players - spent time on the ice, their sanctuary. Now they are forced to work together in confined spaces, sometimes on a fishing boat like the ones above. It doesn't always go well. After all, it's not always easy to forgive and forget.

So most of my time these days is being spent pulling the production together. I'm not alone - I've got some terrific help. We're in a holding pattern at the present time, waiting on a final OK for funding, which we hope comes real soon as we need to shoot in April / May 2018 in order to properly tell the story. We have locations booked, music chosen, and cast chosen. And a super cozy little production office!

It's all good, as they say.

I'm adapting to the changes in my working life this year, and I love my comfy office and the amazing people on the Still The Water team. I've been mulling over more Drifters stories (actually, book two in the Dallas White series, which will feature some of the Drifters folks) and I'm gonna be excited when the day comes to get back into that world. But for now I'm trusting the universe and my angels to see me through the filming of my first feature, and I can't wait to see where that takes me!

My camper angel from Darnley! She sits on my desk at home during the winter :)