Reading this very interesting article and learning just how many words I think of as universal are actually Canadianisms. It’s a real eye-opener.

Here’s my thoughts :

1. Parkade. This one really surprised me. What the heck else do you call… one of those? Parking structures? Automobile storage? Places-you-park?

2. Garuburator. I didn’t know that was Canadian, but I am not surprised. I think of it as something only older people call it anyhow, even though I personally love the word.

3. Pencil crayons. What de FUG? I am gobsmacked by this one. It’s such a commonplace school supply that I had no idea there was any other name for it. As a kid, I always liked these more than crayons because they didn’t melt in my hot little hand.

4. Bachelor Apartment. Not a huge surprise because it’s a fairly idiosyncratic term for it. I like it tho. When someone says that, I know exactly what they mean.

5. Donair. I have strongly suspected that donairs were a Canadian invention for a long time, seeing as people outside of the Maritimes don’t seem to have heard of them. And they are so similar to a gyro that it’s hard to explain how they are different. It’s like two different kinds of barbecue.

6. Icing sugar. Not a huge surprise to me because a lot of the recipes in my mother’s cookbooks called for powdered sugar or confectioner’s sugar. Still, did not know for sure.

7. Whitener. A little disappointed that this one is almost entirely Canadian, seeing as it so eloquently evokes the complete disgustingness of non-dairy creamer.

8. Keener. A lot of Canadians don’t know this one either, judging by the number of people who stare at me blankly when I talk about “keeners” and “coasters”.

9. Mickey. Another thing we have a simple name for that nobody else uses. I am beginning to think Canadian English should be praised for its efficiency and thoroughness.

10. Pablum. Another gobsmacker. To me, “pablum” and “baby formula” or just “formula” are all interchangeable. I am sure I have heard the word pablum used in America media, but I can’t think of any examples.

11. Kangaroo jacket. Suspected this one. As the article says, only old people call them that any more, although I don’t know of another term for that exact garment. A “hoodie” may or may not have the kind of single pocket you can put both hands in that marks the ‘kangaroo’ part of it. They were super popular when I was a preschooler in the 1970’s. My brother had one along with his afro.

12. Turfed out. Not surprised by this one… it has that sorta-British sound. Where I come from, “turf” by itself is used as a verb on its own, to mean “throw” but with the implication of “not gently”.

13. Pogey. Also not surprised. And take it from me, boy does it sound weird to someone unfamiliar with it. They invariable ask “Why do you call it pogey?” and of course, I have no idea.

14. Thongs. Oh, so that’s why nobody gets my jokes about thong bikinis being made of shoes.

15. College. I have often wondered if the college versus university distinction was a Canadian thing, and now I know it is. I would say Canadians mostly use the terms interchangably too, though. When I went to the University of Prince Edward Island (second worst school in Canada!), nobody blinked an eye when I said it was where I was going to college.

16. Lineup. Another example of Canadian verbal efficiency. What do Americans call a group of people standing in line for something? I suppose if they know the word at all, they associate with cop shows showing a victim of crime a group of people and asking if one of them is their assailant.

17. Brown bread. This one is confusing because to Americans, all brown bread is whole wheat bread, whereas to us Canadians, there is brown bread AND whole wheat. Brown bread is basically halfway between brown and whole wheat.

Well, those are all the ones that struck my fancy. (Ow. Now my fancy hurts. )

In other news, I am around 2/3 of the way through my second edit of my November novel, and the process had undergone a transformation. Just in the last few days, I have started editing far more slowly and thoroughly. It seems like I am going to end up naturally at the “one chapter a day” rate I was planning on imposing on myself artificially. Instead of just going through line per line changing whatever struck me as wrong without really considering the whole, I am now going through the same chapter over and over.

I am not quite to the point of going through a chapter over and over again until I can’t find anything wrong with it… not yet. But I hope to get there.

Right now, I am still very scared of that idea. It really sounds like it could only lead to a torturous infinite loop where the point where I can’t think of anything to fix just plain never comes. My inner chaos and neurosis is just too strong and I lack the ability to be truly objective about my work.

Instead, I fear I will remain a slave to the echoes in my head and my poor novel will be subject to the shifting sand inside me and end up carved to pieces to no good effect.

At which point, of course, I will see that it’s now a tattered piece of shit and decide that I am completely untalented and off goes a shame and self-loathing spiral on steroids.

That is the fear that has held me back and made me never really take my own work seriously or subject it to any real professional scrutiny : the fear that Iam too unstable to make it good enough.

I am hoping to evolve past that now, or at least try the total editing thing before I declare myself incapable of it.

It just has to be good enough to submit to an editor without shame. It just has to look to them like something they can work with.

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

Perfection is impossible.

I hate editing SO DAMNED MUCH.

When I was writing every day in November, I felt great. The book progressed steadily, I was packing the book with ideas and interesting details about the future I had constructed, the plot was solid and progressed well, and I was sure I was making something really worth reading.

So while each day was not exactly unalloyed bliss, creatively speaking, I was happier than I have ever been before.

But now that I am editing (finished first pass on Saturday), my confidence in the work erodes every day and it becomes harder and harder to resist the voice in my head that says it sucks, it’s terrible, you’re terrible, you can’t write worth shit, you’re shit, and so forth and so on.

Part of that, I am sure, is the change in creative output. I went from a nice vigorous routine of writing 1667 or so words per day to writing effectively nothing at all, and I think that was a bad idea. It made sense at the time and it felt like the right decision. I really didn’t feel like going back to writing blog entries or making hastily made little videos any more. Those were great while they were needed but now I had my novel to focus on. Right?

Turns out, though, that editing two or three (or four) chapters a day is nowhere near being the creative output I need in order to maintain my slender grip on sanity, and in fact it feels like the exact opposite of what I was getting when I was writing every day.

It’s just so hard for me to maintain emotional stability when focusing that hard on my work. I’m as neurotic as any intellectual and I know damned well that if I focus on something, my mind will begin picking it apart, destroying it in the process. If I was a different kind of person, somebody with different strengths, I would be able to stick with something I have written until I made it as good as I knew how to make it.

But I am not that kind of person. Sure, in theory, I want whatever I write to be as good as I can possibly make it. Any decent artist does. We all want to do our best.

But I fear that I may not be emotionally stable enough to pull it off. I just do not have the emotional stability to be a perfectionist. The very idea of pursuing perfection scares the bejesus out of me. I can’t view it as anything other than a bottomless void eager to devour anything good I might create and destroy it with doubt, indecision, and self-loathing.

I suppose every artist of every stripe has to face the fact that he might not be capable of work that is good enough by his own standards. The question then becomes, is it possible to go on after that?

It is if you lower your standards. That’s not as dire and dream-killing as it sounds. What is needed is to lower your standards to the point where they are achievable. Often that inner critic is really just our self-doubt abd self-loathing in a cheap disguise and the standard it sets is unachievable by design. The goal moves away from you at the exact same speed that you advance towards and so you never get closer. The low self-worth is maintained at the cost of anything else. It’s a demon wrapped in a nightmare dipped in poison, but it happens. The soul of an artist can be a very dark place.

The key is to set sensible and achievable goals, with some sort of way to quantify or at least verify that you have achieved them.

What a wonderfully sensible and wise and reasonable idea!

Fat lot of good it does me though, because it’s just plain not that easy.

Still, if I manage to keep a grip on myself, and I go back to writing blog entries like this one semi-regularly in order to vent what desperately needs to be vented, I will hopefully be able to calm the fuck down and learn to do this editing thing without having a total fucking meltdown.

Again, I come to the place where I realize that I just have to arbitrarily decide it’s good enough after a certain point and push it out the door so I can go on to write the next thing, which will be better.

I have no idea if my prose is actually good enough for anyone to read. But I know that the more of it I write, the better I get at it, and that is really my own path forward at this juncture.

I know my ideas are good and the substance of the narrative is good. That’s the part of writing I am good at. Story, ideas, emotions, scenes, images… all the stuff of the imagination.

And I know I have mad verbal skills, and that I can create likable characters (and loathable villains) and heartwarming tales and all.

So really, I have nothing to worry about. The substantive stuff is all good, it’s just a matter of developing the nitty gritty skills involved in executing all that potential.

Story of my life, really. Loads of potential but vastly incompetent. It sucks to be talent sometimes. I would sell my soul for someone who was my complementary opposite, someone who is very good at the technique but lack imagination. I could partner with that person in the writing biz and we’d be damned near unstoppable. I would write the first draft and send it to them, and they could take it from there, with final approval resting in both our hands on a veto type basis.

Someone who can provide the support and stability that my fragile psyche cannot. Someone to take my raw ore and make it into brilliant diamonds.

But I guess I will just have to learn to be the editor I’d hoped to marry.

Or something like that.

(Meant to do this yesterday and forgot. Sorry.)

Well folks, the good news is that I completed my book and I am now editing it.

The bad news is, I don’t see myself coming back to vlogging or blogging any time soon.

The last month has changed me a lot and I just do not feel like doing either any more. They served their purpose as creative outlets and as exercise for my writing muscles.

But I have moved on now.

I won’t say I will never come back to this. But my focus is elsewhere now.

Thank you for reading me. When my book is available as an eBook, I will post the link here.

I love you all!