miscellany

Note: I seriously started writing The Fifth Man (Book 2 in the Kenora & Jake series) while I was in Ajijic, Mexico in 2019. This post was written in April 2020, when we were still in the thick of pandemic restrictions. I’ve read many articles about how we, as writers, should approach stories where Covid-19 is part of the setting. To include or not to include the pandemic in my novels, that’s the question? Twelve months ago, who could have predicted (and been believed) that life around the globe would sputter to a slowdown such as we’ve never seen. Investment portfolios are in ruins, travel is done for now, holidays and special celebrations are being held via video link and grocery shopping is an exercise in managing personal safety. Thousands of sewists around the world are making cloth pandemic masks and surgical caps because local supplies have run short. Of course, if you write dystopian, fantasy or sci-fi genres, then our current situation may make your world-building easier. For me, not so much. Kenora Tedesco, the female protagonist in my novels, is a private investigator. The house she bought after her divorce is on a small lake north of Toronto. That means she either drives south or takes the commuter train to get to work. She works for a company located in mid-town Toronto – Barclay, Benford & Friday. The firm specializes in industrial risk mitigation. Her love interest, Jake, a retired Metro Police Superintendent, is CEO of the company. The people he employs include lawyers, former police officers, accountants and forensics specialists. Because she’s still considered a rookie, her mentor Bosco Poon, who worked with Jake at Metro and is his business partner, sends Kenora out and about various locations in Toronto to hone her skills at going undercover, interviewing informants or collecting information. Learning to interpret body language and determine deception requires face-to-face interactions. Private investigation is not a desk job. Kenora’s in constant contact with her co-workers, folks on the street, clients, etc. She hangs out at courthouses, restaurants and malls where people she needs to track, investigate or talk to might congregate. There are social events she attends with Jake to schmooze existing and potential clients. She works out, goes to the market and the public library. And she has friends and family, too. I considered whether to have Kenora and Jake isolated due to the virus. Separately, not together. In fact, I started writing a piece where they conducted business from a distance. But it just didn’t work. It felt fake. They have to be out and about to carry on their budding romance. BB&F staff have to investigate people, places and things. Bad stuff has to happen so that she can get herself out of scrapes. Wearing a mask and social distancing as plot devices or sources of conflict? No. I unearthed an old draft where I had her racing home due to a family emergency. Old, as in August 2010. Can you believe it – that’s how long it has taken for me to get to this point! But that was before I realized I’d crammed two books into one. To get one book into a manageable, marketable size, I had to spend a few years surgically separating Book 1 and Book 2. Originally, the plot device/tension-builder was the interruption of her travels by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. I would have had to set the story in 2010, which would have required too much research and rewriting. I abandoned that idea. After months of cogitation and false starts, I’m back to my original story line that takes place starting in 2018. There was enough going on in the world to keep things interesting, plot-wise. But freedom to meet and travel are important enough that volcanoes and pandemics just won’t work for me. Kenora doesn’t need a pandemic. She can generate enough action on her own while she tries to be the best PI she can be! So it’s back to the keyboard – not excuses.

The old man thrills to read the dirty bits where they’re most unexpected. Book shop displays, pale pages splayed wanton behind glass for all to see those slight sweet smuts; words that sound like what they mean - the awe of throb; the thrust of pearly breast, an itch to ‘b’, the hush of saucy whispers simply nothing – not even sweet unless she’s fifteen and fresh, her ink unsmudged. Cookbooks are better than prose, he finds, exposed riots of flushed cooks and rosier fruits – tumbling cherries burst with scarlet sap, the candied apples ooze, caramel toffee drapes a spoon; apricots slump over-ripe on a steamy counter in a drizzled honey bun kitchen - salacious orgies of what ifs, could be. A lap of pooled untempered chocolate, gauchely dark in its shadowy bowl; culturing yogurt teased from tepid milk, turned swollen and bulbous in bellied jars like the softened shape of virgins. After the slather of soft veiny cheese, the smack of cocktails and the seep of fruit juice on diner’s chin, then tussles at the table. Seduced by sweat peas bathed in butter, with lobster tails and a melt of cheddar spuds, the climax a shameless tart of passionfruit and mangoes, An errant breeze - the pages whorl meaty invitations to eat, slurp, stroke berry nipples stemmed by fingers, nails dirty from the dumpster. The words keep coming. A breathy stain of ‘O’ on the window, a blotch of forehead grease - the old man hitches up the cord that holds his pants and turns away, packing an appetite uncontained by empty pockets.

There’s something about the longer days warming the last snows of winter…poring over seed catalogues and getting ready for spring…considering stowing away the heavier sweaters and testing out some cotton shirts again. All of these mundane activities remind me of how, after 13 years, I still miss my mother so much. This is part one of a letter I’d written to a woman I used to know, who’d told me that when a parent dies, it frees you to become a more complete adult. I’d loathed her with a passion for a long time, but like the intensity of sorrow you feel when someone you love leaves this earth, rage passes too. Hello, Leslie. I’m at home for a couple of days, trying to get my bearings. I sent off the revised copy to the Lazy Writer some time ago but have not heard anything back. I guess that ‘Lazy’ was well chosen. We’ll have to wait and see, I guess. You know, life is very odd. I have been wallowing in misery for years and more recently, obsessing about the decay of my decades-old marriage. I had just got past the stage where I was boringly woeful and had reached the point of feeling some measure of control (isn’t that what the playwrights call hubris?) or at least a state of acceptance about what has been happening. Until last Friday, that is. I received the dreaded middle of the night telephone call from my cousin, who said that my mother had collapsed in her bathroom and had been taken to hospital. I was lying in bed in the dark, trying to absorb the news and praying like a mad fiend that, above all, she would not have any pain, when my cousin phoned back to say that Mom had died. It was like… I was frozen – minimal body functions, slow thought processes, general . Then the emergency room nurse called. He described for me what had happened – they thought it was a massive coronary. She was probably gone by the time the paramedics reached her little house (only 3 or 4 minutes elapsed) and although they tried for 45 minutes to resuscitate her, they were unsuccessful. My aunt (her sister) was with her at home and in the hospital, too, and Mom was surrounded by close friends to the end. They say she looked very peaceful and that her body stayed warm for a long time after her heart finally stopped and they pronounced her. She did not struggle to stay. I’d hoped she’d never leave us, but she was always a strong-willed woman. When my brothers and I arrived on Sunday afternoon (the day after), her place settings for breakfast and lunch were on the dining room table, beside her prayer book. Her address books were sitting there as well, where we could see them right away. The house was neat and there was no sign that this was unexpected, which made us feel abysmally sad but somehow comforted. She was incredibly organized in terms of her will and lists of who was to do what and get what. There was a bit of a kerfuffle because the medical examiner was concerned there may have been some malpractice. Mom had been to her family physician on the Tuesday. He’d found a heart murmur and ordered an emergency EKG but because it was Canada Day and the Stampede was on (hold your horses, folks – everything grinds to a halt for the ‘chucks’!) the test results did not get read. Ok, we said, so what’s the point now anyway – she can’t be helped. Her instructions were specific – no autopsy, no embalming. But the ME was making noises about ‘going in’ to find out what really happened. Uh, no. Now picture this – three adult Type AAs with the suspicion that there definitely was some miscue because of health care funding cuts and a damned cowboy festival. We tracked down the doctor – at a christening, ironically – who was understandably anxious: we spoke at length with the hospital, the medical examiner’s investigator. We were on the edge of a revolt because they did not want to release her body and the thought of her lying in the cold (her arthritis – I know, not rational) was too awful to contemplate (before they took her to the morgue, one of her friends asked if she could put socks on Mom, but was told no, no one else but the ME could authorize anything to be done with/to the body). And of course, we are grieving but unrelenting and articulate, as only Torontonians bent on doing what Mom wanted could be, and on the edge of outrage that we were being stymied, can be. Once we mentioned the L word (litigation) and indicated that we would sue if her wishes were not complied with, the assembled bureaucratic multitudes had the insight to sign off very quickly (with user fees, of course!!!). Thank goodness for the diversion, though. Just cleaning up her house and organizing her possessions was so very very difficult – she had little sticky tags on stuff and had left lots of lists. But it was the ordinary things that we all remembered – a cast iron fry pan from the farm, cutlery, my baby clothes from 52 years ago, clothing. And the pictures – dating back to when she was a child in 1926. Her maternal grandparents’ marriage certificate from 1892. She kept every card, drawing and letter we ever sent her. And I mean every one! The only thing we didn’t locate were the letters that she and my father must have written when he was away during WWII, because we’d found out by accident that she’d known him for four years before they’d married, and they were both scribblers extraordinaire. She also left some journals and notebooks recording her daily activities, so I’ll go through them when I am up to it. I guess the point of this long introduction, is that once again, Mom showed me that just when you think you have reached a stage of being able to bear it all, when you feel, in your arrogance, that you know what pain really is, and you ask how could God burden you with anything worse, there is, in fact, something worse. I loved my mother with all my heart. She was the focal point of my life. Whatever I and my brothers and our children are, we owe to her. My father, who was a lovely man somewhere deep in his chilly poetic soul, left her with four small children in the early 60s, in a small, very Caucasian Ontario farming town, far from her family and friends in Quebec. She didn’t drive and had no skills (farmer’s wife, mother and penny-pincher didn’t count for much), she was black and she was alone without the cachet of being a widow. I remember as a teenager thinking that at least he could have done that for her – died, so that she would have the dignity of being pitied because of something more noble than him having too much emotional sensibility and being too weak to be a proper husband and father, through better and worse. For my Mom, there was never any ‘richer’ back then but there certainly was ‘poorer’, for a long time. She went back to school to become a certified nursing assistant. This woman, whom I remember him calling stupid when his own inadequacy was in full flight, came first in her class and was valedictorian. She won all sorts of awards. Ah, Mom. But what good did that do her? She worked nights for many years so that she could still be home with us during the day, when we needed her. The toll that took on her was tremendous…. to be continued.

Sound: The misshapen amber ooze inside the stained tissue paper crackles to the counter top in a spray of needles and dried gum. It’s as if the clock has struck three and it’s July 1998 again. The crusty shoulders of Canmore’s hulking Three Sisters mountains are cloaked in rustling pine scrub, alive with the rude exuberance of birdsong. The slow footfalls of our procession are muffled to sad silence by thick leaf-mold on the winding down-sloped path. Brilliant sunshine clatters hot and wrong through creaking pines. Our eyes are buffeted by reflecting heavy shards of copper from the urn. The Bow River – merely a singing stream here – chuckles through mossy gaps in whispering shadows, absorbing the murmurs tumbling from our stiffly praying lips. The last handfuls of my mother’s ashes eddy past a clot of torn red rose petals, swirling over the chattering pebbles and away. Far away. The world will never resonate for me, the way it did before. Taste: The gritty brew frothing in the worn clay cup smelled confusing. At first, the lukewarm liquid tasted of stale root beer with a poke of powdered ginger. Then, for a second, the ‘ow!’ of pulverized hot pepper seeds clawed at the back of the throat, preceding the solace of bitter chocolate coating smoldering taste buds with sensually dark first aid. Competing with the biting oily tang of Seville orange peel, the musty sweetness of ground cinnamon teased the edges of the tongue and disappeared in a salty flourish. Smell: My love is always with me. The steaming iron planes wrinkles from the grey-striped work shirt. Fresh fumes of detergent, fabric softener and baked cloth gust from the ironing board with each hot pass over sleeves, then collar and yoke. Ah! There it is again! Beneath the fragrant tangle of clothes-scents hides the layered secret smell from my beloved’s body. Another swipe of the iron, this time with a shot of steam. The fragrant billowing haze transports that faint exquisite whiff of pheromones to my nose. They stealthily signal-trigger receptors deep inside my prehistoric brain. The fuse ignites, then sizzles through bone from head to groin and back again, in a shock of fiery recollection. Touch: The pads of his thick fingers burnish the knobs of my spine, imprinting heated ovals from nape of neck to swelling curve of waist. A heated slide of palms hovers over shoulders, feather light blows teasing a rush of pulse to the surface of trembling flesh. The vibrato of insistent stroking erases the contours of collar bones. He grounds the prongs of his electric fingers in the fold between my ribs and breast and sparks a breathy hymn from parted lips. His probing humid tongue maps moist paths across my earlobes, then trails from cheeks to cleft of chin downwards, ever downwards. Finally, finally, he captures my melting lips in the taut tasteful prison of a kiss. Sight: Ten days ago, the Christmas pine glowed in the living room window. Pretty parcels tumbled in precious disarray under branches cosseted with garlands, heavy with lights and baubles. Now tossed into the sulk of a January afternoon, half buried with green garbage bags of wrapping paper, the stripped brittle branches poke out of the soiled plowed mounds at the end of the driveway. A spill of spiky twisted needles fills the paper boy’s boot prints on a couple of crushed cones. Random tags of forgotten silver flutter in the sharp breeze. Sap congeals where the bark of the trunk was broken by the teeth of the tree stand. Only a muddle of rabbit tracks circles the forest flotsam.

I’ve been using the reference texts produced by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglise for longer than I can remember. Once they introduced One Stop for Writers , there was no going back to gazing out the window searching for inspiration. I may have the ‘writing gene’, like other members in my family, but inspiration does not always come easily. Or it’s stale and unimaginative. This double whammy of writer resources has solved almost all of my technical/craft-type problems. Unfortunately, they can’t get me into my seat with my fingers pressed to the keyboard, laying down pages of attention-grabbing words. Instead, I sneak a chunk of time here and there and frantically try to capture a new scene, plot point or character study in between other things. But here’s where it gets even more interesting. Tools, tools and more tools!

Edited article, originally published in Crime Scene Magazine, A Sisters in Crime Toronto Chapter Publication I’ve read many series featuring female sleuths like Kinsey Milhone, Mary Russell, Stephanie Plum, Precious Ramotswe and Frankie Drake. None of them resembled the character who’d been inhabiting my creative brain. Wrong age, race, background, values, locale, timeframe. Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” For me, that ‘it’ was Kenora Reinvented. The adage says, “Write what you know”. Hence, Kenora Tedesco is mixed race, black-identifying and middle-aged. Why? Simple. I didn’t have the knowledge or motivation to convincingly write her as a white woman. And despite the urging of an agent who read several early drafts, I couldn’t create an angsty female under thirty who preferred takeout to a well-cooked meal she made herself (or had someone handsome and sexy to cook for her). I’ve been writing Kenora stories since 2008. We’ve grown older together. At forty-two, Kenora Tedesco is the kind of woman you’d notice at an event. Attractive, tall, tastefully dressed, she’s standing off to one side holding a glass of wine, attentive to the ebb and flow of people around her. To all appearances, she’s got it together. Turn back the clock two years, when her tidy suburban existence imploded. Her mother died, her husband dumped her for someone he’d met while Kenora was playing recreational hockey, she got fired and became houseless. Challenged? You bet. Her score on the Life Stress Inventory was off the charts. While some of the details of Kenora’s heroine’s journey into investigations, mystery and second-chance romance may be unique, the major mid-life events she experienced were not. People are exposed to change all the time. They make choices: some are easier, others are gut-wrenching. I wanted her to struggle through setbacks and ‘fish out of water’ scenarios so readers could resonate with her personal and professional growth. Because I’ve worked in the Canadian policing sector for decades, I’m familiar with the frameworks officers operate in. I needed Kenora to have leeway to get into and out of scrapes using her unique talents. Her former job as a middle manager at a Toronto university was boring but paid well. What better career-swerve for a bookish former soccer-mom than starting over in an unfamiliar field, taking on cases law enforcement wouldn’t necessarily investigate? Free-wheeling action, escapades, learning new stuff, glamour! Yes and no. Private investigators must abide by a Code of Conduct and follow procedures. Craft detailed plans. Remain unobtrusive. Take copious notes. All that rule following chafed. Kenora’s mentor Ingraham (Bosco) Poon and her new boss (Francis Xavier (Jake) Barclay) are former senior police officers. They had high expectations. ‘Winging it’—one of her go-to strategies—was no longer an option. When rookie mistakes put her safety, job and a second-chance romance at risk, did she cave? No. A problem-solver, she’s smart, competent and resourceful. She’s also stubborn, skittish and insecure. We all know women like that. Good at what they do. Imperfect but determined. That’s why writing about her was so satisfying. Kenora Reinvented features a feisty, ‘seasoned’ protagonist with scars and plenty of life skills. She starts out thinking she can go it alone, but after several potentially disastrous missteps, she learns to trust her colleagues. With their help and her own creativity and competence, she saves herself. A true heroine in her own sphere, she earns the nickname, Ms. Intrepid.  That’s the book I wanted to read and ended up writing.