These two, since they were two. Her mom and me sitting with mugs of tea, thumbing through cookbooks. We didn't finish more than three sentences in one stretch for a good five years or more. Someone was always, suddenly, too high up in a tree.

Chefs curse and yell in a pressure cooker, squishing organic matter into mathematically-shaped molds. Organic matter always objects, yet we continue to squish, and this is art. Presentation is at least three of five stars. That's what makes you gasp.

I come to oil country with a book about radicals who wish for the end of pipelines. But that's not what it's about. It's the friction of prosperity and concern, ability and disability, well-placed outrage and courage. It's banjo song and smoke in your eye.

I fly into Edmonton and on from there to schools in Lethbridge and Stand Off—passing through with gifts for them and soaking it up, reading, stocking their library with Missy and airborne resistance.

I don't know if it's fair to feel like the luckiest person in the world when there are people in the world who fall from a third-story window and get caught by a street vendor. But I do, god, I do. The book launch is tomorrow.

It’s just how things are, we shrug. Rasmus Krook is the Captain of the Griffons. He doesn't shrug. Here I get pronunciation and grammar lessons from a Swedish speaker to take on his voice!

Whenever I'm down Penelope, my editor, sends me pictures of a gulper eel and says THIS IS YOU. She's brutal and brilliant. She tells me to quit thinking I'm special by being afraid to open the box that's on its way from the printer in Quebec.

Every night there were spoons, a fiddle, a snare drum, guitars, everyone piled and sprawled and feeling fat and thrilled and rich, looking at each other bleary-eyed and spinning, all of us teetering on the edge of sickness. Keep going.

I come home to here via planes that took off from Robson Street, the Distillery District, the Outer Banks. Now, Makkovik. Flight is still a miracle. That this house feels like it's got a wagging tail when I walk through the door is another. 

I am the barest minimum, clean clothes picked out of a clean-enough pile, supper at 9, bedtime when the sun comes up. When it was time to finish, I wrote from 10 AM until 4:30 AM. 60,000 words edited in 18 hours without a blink.

The doctors put me to sleep and went into my belly quick-quick and lifted you out! And you were so little. The littlest! They put you in the incubator and baked you like a cookie until you were big enough to come home and eat toasted marshmallows.

Some writers keep them to have a Wall of Publishers Who Passed And Will Someday Regret It. I don't. Each one is, really and truly, a gift. The boys and I talk about creativity, karma, romance. Nothing works out until something does.

I don't know why it's always old music, but it is. Me and Billie Holiday and a coyote on pitch black sand. Me and Ben and Louis Prima in the kitchen. The sailmaker's chest, the captain's trunk, the patchwork of black and grey and pinstriped suit.

Adult fiction? More pirates, a book three? Poetry? That plus editing, photographing, teaching. The year is stacking up. Somebody burst in and threw all the windows open and it was fresh and bracing and I think, maybe, it was all of them doing it all at once.

I spoke at the TEDxHalifax event in March of this year. Seeing it all summed up like that—my worst and my best and all the threads that connect the two—is a teary-eyed, wonderful thing for me.

“The book became itself, and the people in it became real to me. I didn't know if it would end up getting published, but I felt like I owed the characters a chance to exist by finishing it. Otherwise, they just stagger off like untethered spirits…”

For the next month or longer, I'm banned. No edits, no additions, no tweaks. The story is in my editor's hands and from there, we'll figure out what to do with this heavyweight, set a deadline, and look forward to line editing and production.

I wrote a book, a little one, and I want to exist beyond all hope. I want it so badly. I need it to be set to paper and illustrated and bound. I've submitted it to the loveliest publisher. Now I'm trying to forget I ever wrote it.

I wrote about a pirate ship and a secret clubhouse for spies, but I look grown-up. Except the babyface that got me kicked out of restricted movies until I was 26 now has the effect, a decade later, of people thinking sometimes I'm 26.

Roald Dahl says you're a fool to become a writer, your only compensation being absolute freedom. He had more in the way of compensation than absolute freedom. He's got a point, though, even if his own point no longer applied to him.