Category Archives: Writing

Full circle

I’ve been living in a small college town in southern Ontario for almost a decade. It has everything I need, and then some. I sold the bagger, knowing I was content and happily ensconced. From a successful career in aviation, and another lifetime of riding, I’ve garnered enough material to keep me happily clacking away on that typewriter thing forever and a day. Anonymous fiction, of course.

Because reasons.

My aviation life was spent in the deserts of Africa. I have flown in the Canadian bush as a fire pilot. I’ve been a mountain and an arctic pilot. I managed to stay away from the jungle. Because more reasons.

As a biker, I was  an Independent. I traveled highway and byway and the old blue highways from Canada to Mexico and places in between. I loved every precious minute of it all, even when, well, that’s for me to know and others to read about.

As to my writing, on average, I get around 12,000 downloads a year, every year. My biggest kick was seeing 60 down in Kazakhstan last year. Normally, it’s only ten or so in that bleak wilderness. I do POD sales as well, courtesy of Ingram Spark and Amazon.

Switching gears, my last bicycle was a red and white CCM 3-speed from Simpsons-Sears. I think I might have been 12, or thereabouts.I remember my old man putting that thing together, not fast enough for my liking. Finally, off I went. The bike wasn’t anything too fancy –  as best I can recall. Hitting the binders required one to stand on the aft pedal and push down hard.

So what’s next, I asked myself, because with me, there is always a next.Answered, I replied, to no one in particular. I like it that way.

The bagger has been replaced!

COSTCO came up with a sweet deal on a CC50 e-bike. No surprise that I couldn’t resist or refuse. Of course, I needed a helmet. Chain lube. A pump. A sizeable hard bag to sit on top of that rack. Some sweet panniers, too. And an alarm. I dug out my leather gloves and a couple of old Slippy Brim helmet liners. Some faded bandanas.

That CCM bicycle was my first taste of freedom. As I got older, I tasted more, and more. And now, I have come full circle. I am still tasting, though. I will never give that up.

 

Breathe. Live. Write.

I began prepping for this total shitshow on March 2, and I’m not even a prepper. The first thing I did was buy a thermometer and establish a median for yours truly before beginning to take my temperature several times a day. At the same time I stocked up on Tylenol-branded pain killers.

Next I headed for COSTCO to buy gloves and Lysol wipes. I didn’t see any fistfights, but the lineup for good old bumwad wasn’t short, either. I managed to get out of the place using self-checkout, where there was no lineup. I guess the olds were a little reluctant to try something new at their fave place, although I hear that’s no longer true at my own favorite bulk warehouse.

Very early on I noticed the occasional shortage of many grocery products on store shelves. That is unheard of in this country, although I have seen it in others over my lifetime. Grocery stores were sending out emails telling all and sundry who would believe them that there was no shortage of supply. That it was upstream supply chain problems. Can I get an uh-huh on that? Don’t bother. I don’t care, grocery store magnates.

Weeks later, those same stores are still sending out the same newsletters, worded differently but spouting the same bullshit. Another uh-huh, por favor.

Six days ago, on one fine morning at 0800 I drove some supplies up to relatives in a tiny town 200 kilometers (120 miles) north on Lake Huron. The route happened to take me past a COSTCO. People were lining up already – at eight in the morning! – practicing their social distancing so they could be let in, 50 at a time. Good luck with that, although there’s nothing else to do since everything has been shut down except for essential businesses. While the interpretation of “essential” is broad, it’s what was needed.

Want to know what the biggest pain in the ass about our modern world’s unprecedented times? (Welp, besides the death and destruction of the entire world’s health care systems and its users, that is.)

It’s wiping down every single thing I bring into my household so the stupid shits sneezing and coughing and breathing and the ones still alive don’t infect me!

Okay, now that that weight is off my chest (pun intended, even if you don’t get it), what am I doing with all my leisure time? You want to know, I’m certain. And even if you don’t care, here it is:

I’m watching virus movies! Thank you tubitv.

Oh, and one more thing. My writing productivity is way up. And so are downloads.

Life is good. Write on. Breathe on.

Just don’t breathe on me.

Think you’re a writer?

“Let me introduce you to one of them. His name was Frank Gruber. He was a successful pulp writer, then came out to Hollywood to write for the studios. In the 1950s he hit it big as a TV writer for Westerns. In1967 Gruber published The Pulp Jungle, a memoir of his time trying to break into that market. He moved to New York in July of 1934 with a plan to get published within six months.” – James Scott Bell, So your self-published novel is just sitting there