Frosty

2011 moves along.

Two weekends ago, I was kept busy with some re-writes and editing that will hopefully bear some fruit worth mentioning in the near future.

Currently I am working on Gerry - my children's story about an orphaned giant.  It's not moving along as well as I'd like.  I think it's just a question of drowning out distractions and doing the work.

Speaking of distractions, it was the boy's birthday yesterday.  To celebrate, I took him aside Sunday morning.
"Hey," I said, "tomorrow's your birthday, right?"
"You know it is," he said.
"What would you say if I told you we might just skip school tomorrow and do something fun on your birthday?"
"Like what?"
I told him and the answer was an enthusiastic YES!

Here's what we did:

Ice Fishing at nearby Shades Mills Conservation Area.

It was a frosty day on the lake, -18 degrees Celsius to begin and that doesn't factor in the numbing wind chill.

Fortunately, we rented one of these:

Although it was beautifully sunny, the hike out to the shed was brutal.  The wind froze cheeks and noses in no time.  Once inside, however, we were positively cozy.

We didn't catch a thing.  It didn't matter.  We joked and chatted and drank hot chocolate from the thermos.  It was one of those great days that I'll remember forever.  I rediscovered just how interesting my eight year old boy is and, I think, he rediscovered that his old man can be pretty cool, too.

Time to crank it up to 11

'cause it's one louder, right?

That's been the theme around here anyway.  2011 - the year to crank it up.

I look back at the last post and realize it has been a while since I threw something new up here.  Well, Christmas has come and gone.  The Old Year ticked away and the New Year crept in the door.  My daughter had her birthday (but not her party, that happens this weekend).  The family braved the 6 1/2 hour journey (each way) in the car to visit with relatives up north.

December is typically a busy time of year for the Beynon family, made especially so this year because I was writing a novel straight through the holiday season.  There was a hard deadline - Dec 31st  - to enter the novel in The Pratchett Prize.  I took the framework of a novella I've had kicking around for a few years and expanded it into what I think is a really good novel.  I was literally writing down to the wire.

Leading up to the holidays I was   plugging away at a respectable pace.  The week leading to Christmas was spent putting in full days at the keyboard while my wife kept a pair of excited children busy.   I did, of course, take some time for tobaggon rides and snowman building, but mostly I was in the basement trying to get the story out.

I wrote on Christmas eve.  I wrote a bit on Christmas Day and a lot on Boxing Day.  I even wrote in the car the whole way up north while my wife drove.   Over the 29th and 30th I disappeared into my father-in-law's office each morning, came out for meals and to say goodnight to the kids and kept writing until the wee small hours.  I finished the actual writing around 4:00 pm on the 29th.  Then editing.  Usually I'll spend weeks on editing.   There was no time.  With the help of my wife, who went through a paper copy of the manuscript as I was writing, I was able to get a very fast edit done by 2:00pm on the 31st - just in time to e-mail the manuscript off before the deadline.

It has been a recovery week here.  The kids have gone back to school and I and my Golden Retriever companion have been edging into something like a routine.  I am currently musing over what major project to tackle next.   Before that, I have some more editing to do.  A short story I submitted for an anthology has come back with suggested edits and a request for a revised manuscript before the 15th.  I am putting the finishing touches on the edit and will probably get the story out over the weekend.

That's it for now.  All the best in 2011 - truly a year to crank it up.

Winter...

Well, it finally feels like winter around here.

We've flirted with winter over the past few weeks.  We even had enough snow on the ground for a mini-snowman a few weeks ago  (he was doomed to puddledom the very next day).  Until the last few days it hasn't really felt like Winter.

It does now.


We now have enough snow for TWO persons of snow!

I'm not sure if I've kept this a secret but here goes...

I am not at all fond of wintertime.  I might even go so far as to say that I hate winter (though, with children this view has mellowed in recent years).

I think I can trace my dislike of winter back to my childhood.  We grew up in the snowbelt and lived through some serious amounts of snow.  There are photographs of my family standing on top of a drift (with the dog) that went over our drive shed.  Although we often had a kindly neighbour who used his tractor to blow out our driveway, there were enough times that I was out there with a shovel clearing six, eight, ten or twelve inches, only to have another such accumulation within hours.

But as a kid growing up I did build the occasional snow fort, though mine were most hollowed out of huge drifts behind the barn.  And I do seem to remember my share of snowmen as well.

Part of my unfriendliness toward this time of year has to be attributed to my father.  He had a tradition, which I have continued for my children, that I got a kick out of as a kid.  After the first significant snowfall of each season, my dad would walk to the front door, fling it open and declare in a loud, defiant voice:

"I HATE YOU. WINTER!"

It's pure gold.  I encourage everyone to try it.  I actually have a theory that if absolutely everyone did fling open their door after the first snowfall and scream their hate of winter that the combined escaping heat from all of those open doors would halt Winter in its tracks.

My own, personal battle with Winter started, I think, when I began to drive.  It is so much easier to blame the personification of the season for ending up in the ditch than to seriously consider if you were really driving appropriately for the conditions.  I have kissed a few ditches and once rolled my car, only ever in the winter and the car roll thing was NOT my fault.  (Honestly, some asshole blew his driveway's snow right across the road, just beyond the crest of a hill where it frozen overnight into a six inch high diagonal wall of doom.)

I really got to hate winter when I began commuting great distances each and every day.  It's funny.  For a dozen years I was driving more that 100 thousand km (a third of that winter driving) and the worst thing that happened was I got rear ended on an icy on ramp.  But it was always white knuckle driving and it's driving I do not miss in the least.

And I've mellowed.  I think it's the kids.  They see the snow through different eyes.  They see potential snowmen, snow forts,
snowball fights (I get a constant barrage from behind as I walk the boy to school each day) and trips to the toboggan hill in nearby Salem.  I still see the potential for car accidents when the flakes are drifting down from the sky, but you know what - I'm starting to see snowmen, too.




And even I have to admit, it's really very pretty outside.