{"id":15732,"date":"2006-12-17T15:54:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-17T20:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2006\/12\/17\/the-hamsters-new-gloves\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:49:46","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:49:46","slug":"the-hamsters-new-gloves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2006\/12\/17\/the-hamsters-new-gloves\/","title":{"rendered":"The hamster\u2019s new gloves"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mentioning that I’d lost my gloves wasn’t a cry for help, by the way. I went to the Mountain Equipment Co-op yesterday to get my suitcase fixed and I picked up a new pair. So I just wanted to head off any last-minute Xmas gifts in case my family were on here with thoughts of circumventing my “no stuff” Xmas plan.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It’s been a busy weekend. Lots of visiting, heading back and forth across town. Yesterday I hung out with Cosgrove and Eric, then went to meet Kirsten and her family (drinking margaritas and drawing with her son, listening to her talk about plans for a bicycle trip to Peru and wondering if it was time to get back on a bike and do an adventure with them again). From there I went to our friend Tammy’s annual soup party, where I had some really engaging conversations with people whose lives and work are totally different from mine (I love that). Afterward, Cosgrove, Eric, and I went to a party with people who, in the social scheme of things, I should have had a lot in common with, but I found most of them loud, annoying, and pointless.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Today was brunch with my editor and some people I’d met through her this summer. I walked home through a freakishly warm afternoon (I bought an ice cream — in December?), and I hung out here at home with Alvaro. Shortly I’ll be off for dinner with someone else.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

So much eating. Somehow I’m still skinny. I guess it’s walking back and forth across the city. I expect to balloon once I hit Charlottetown.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

~<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In my walks, I’ve had lots of time to think. It’s staggering, this city. It’s so dense with different sorts of people, and it’s impossible to be in this confluence of humanity without bumping into lots of issues (the environment, homelessness, the point of it all, etc.).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I’m thinking lots about this next book, and am feeling really challenged with the scope of it: how do I make a huge topic like climate change approachable, so I’m telling one story and not getting preachy or being wildly wrong when talking about something that I couldn’t possibly research completely.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I’m also thinking (again) about the question of how mainstream I want to get. I’m completely free now that I have my own press to do exactly what I want. And I do feel charged to write about characters with same-sex feelings, since that’s what I know and because I want to put the kind of work out into the world that I want out there, rather than complaining that everything on offer is photocopied from the same frivolous gay template. I also love magical realism, and the room it gives my imagination. And I know that reading such un-everyday logic drives some people squirrelly.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But then there’s that horrible feeling of apology that comes up when, for instance, people like my mum’s cousin ask to read the last book and I know it has scenes<\/em> in it, and that it doesn’t make the conventional sense of a Maeve Binchy or Anne Tyler.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This, I know, is the sword of mediocrity, and I don’t want to fall on it. But I also don’t want to keep people out of the substance of my work by writing about characters that 95% of the population aren’t going to completely relate to. As Lisa said to me the other night about Idea in Stone<\/em>, “I loved<\/em> that book, but even as I was reading it I couldn’t help thinking ‘I don’t know how someone would go about selling this. Who would you market it to?’ It doesn’t fit into one category.”<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This is the stuff of Writer’s Block: thinking about outcome and effect instead of just doing my work, which is engaging with my imagination and telling a story honestly. What I really have to do is just go into the story and see what’s there. It’s a mammoth trapped in an iceberg, and this is a warm December.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

I’d like to hear people’s thoughts about this: What do you think? Would you rather see me write something more mainstream, or do you think it’s important to shore up the counter-culture?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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Mentioning that I’d lost my gloves wasn’t a cry for help, by the way. I went to the Mountain Equipment Co-op yesterday to get my suitcase fixed and I picked up a new pair. So I just wanted to head off any last-minute Xmas gifts in case my family were on here with thoughts of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}