April 22: spinning

At long last it's spring. This year, more than before, I had to draw on deep reserves of energy and some sort of faith just to keep going through the last long weeks of winter—I can't be the only person who went into survival mode. Early nights, candle light, comfort food and comfort knitting kept me going for the longest time. But now the world is greening once again and my mind is turning to other things. Things like spinning.

I have always loved the idea of alchemy. Dross to gold, words to stories, fibre to yarn: this is my kind of magic. But like any alchemy, spinning involves its fair share of hard labour, of trial and error and stops and starts. 

When I took my first spinning class I was dumbfounded to realize that the mental image I'd had of spinning with a spindle—based on something I'd seen in a Disney cartoon 30 years before—was totally wrong. It took a while to recover from that. A while, a few more spinning classes, and a stroke of luck that brought me a beautiful spindle.

I brought that spindle home and put it somewhere safe. I bought some brilliant fibre from Sweet Georgia. But I didn't spin. I'd think about it once in a while and then I'd go back to my knitting. Socks, sweaters, baby clothes: there were other things to make.

In fact, I resisted using the spindle for a long time. I wanted to wait until I had it down—until I knew that I'd be able to set my hands to spinning something that would come out perfectly. It was the curse of the blank notebook, writ in silk and wool and wood and bone. 

Of course, I don't subscribe to the curse of the blank notebook any more—I buy them and I use them, and I tell myself that it doesn't matter whether they collect notes for articles, grocery lists or lists of cheese puns. Books aren't made to sit on shelves; boats aren't made to sit in harbour; spindles aren't made to languish in jam jars. 

So a few weeks ago I pulled out my spindle and I drafted some fibre and I got to spinning.

The yarn I've made isn't perfect by any stretch. It's thick and thin; wound tightly in some places and probably too loosely in others. (It's possible that I identify a little too strongly with this yarn. Ahem.) But who cares if it's not perfect: it's yarn. I did it. 

Alchemy. Dross to gold. Snow to rain, mud to grass, grey skies to blue, the great re-awakening. Yes.

On reading cookbooks

Today I had the pleasure of being a guest contributor over at my friend Shari's blog, The Art of Seeing Things. If you're interested, I'd love it if you headed on over there to read about my favourite book of 2013. Thanks!

December 3

Up early again this morning. It's black, black, black out there at 6 a.m., black enough to make me wonder what all the fuss about changing the clocks was about. I sit with my back to the window and work through the early morning hours, the first of many cups of tea by my side, and I know the sun has started to rise when I see the shadows gradually appear on the wall in front of me. As the morning wears on, they begin to slide across the wall in slow motion. Finally, when the sun begins to warm my shoulders, I get up and put the kettle back on and think about going for a walk, but the stack of reading almost always calls me back.

And oh, there is so much to read right now. School's over for the semester, so there is marking to attend to and I've got some editing work on the go. It's good to be busy but I am eagerly anticipating the quiet season. After the holidays, another series of transitions lies in wait – moving from one year to the next, from one school to the next, from one project to the next – but before that I'll have a bit of breathing space. I'm looking forward, as I always do, to the days between Christmas and the New Year; time to rest, reflect and gather my forces for the year ahead.

But first, Christmas. This year I'm thinking about replacing my tiny silver tinsel tree with a vase of pine boughs, hung with knitted ornaments. I've missed the scent of pine. This will be the year I finally make a house or two for the Christmas village I'm so inexplicably fixated on. (I'll need a miracle in balsa wood.) 

Gifts this year need to be handmade and heartfelt, too: tiny, intricate knitted things; homemade cookies and candy and fruitcake; handwritten cards and letters, with photos – stories from the year just past and hopes for the year to come. I'm giving the gifts I hope to receive.

But all that is three weeks away. Until then, I'll keep trying to find the bright spots and quiet moments in these dark winter days, and to celebrate them whenever and however I can: lighting a candle at dusk, sitting in the gloaming with a cup of tea, silently counting the stitches as I knit, savouring dinner with a friend. I'll make sticky cranberry gingerbread and spend an evening addressing cards by the light of the twinkle lights, and I'll keep the faith until the days start lengthening again. 

November 30

This morning, a common occurrence: the arrival of a mother and her seven-year-old daughter on a learn-to-knit mission. I used to dread this – I worried about giving the wrong answer and sending them in the wrong direction, somehow ruining knitting for two generations with one careless word. But three months in, I've come to love it. There's something exhilarating about all that potential waiting to be realized.

Now, I ask questions first, talk later. What do you want to make? What is your favourite colour? Which of these yarns is softer? Do you like to learn from a book? From a person? From a video? Every knitter is different, even the knitters who don't know how to knit yet.

*

The first time I learned to knit was on a Monday night in a Sunday school classroom; I was in Brownies. My teacher was older, Dutch, no-nonsense; the yarn was brown, acrylic, scratchy. The classroom was dimly lit – it was a winter evening, dark and cold. I was eight and I had a head cold. I struggled to concentrate; I wanted to learn but my nose was running and I couldn't hold the knitting needles and a kleenex at the same time. It was a conundrum.

The second time I learned to knit was from a book – an old book with black-and-white photos and a crackly plastic dust cover, with that musty sweet smell that old library books seem to have, the combination of dust and fingerprints. The yarn was from my mum's stash, in a range of colours that do a good job of dating my childhood: brown and rust and orange, with some cream and a bit of avocado thrown into the mix. The needles were yellow plastic, with the size – 5 – stamped into the grooved brown buttons on the ends. They lived in a marmalade jar, high on a shelf in the laundry room.

*

Today, I walked the mother and daughter through choosing yarn and helped them pick needles. The choices are overwhelming: five choices of purple, just for example. It's a big responsibility for a seven year old, requiring serious deliberation. Needles were easier: laminated birch, 4.5 mm, grey. Three sets the same, one each for mum and two daughters. Identical, so easy (and undetectable) to mix and match: handy if there's more than one kid involved.

*

Important lesson for daughter: what to do when you're finished knitting for the day. In the last month, I've seen four different boyfriends come in to replace broken knitting needles. "Someone sat on them," they say, sheepishly, holding up the unbroken tool as an offering. "Do you have a replacement?" So, lesson number one: knitting needles and chairs don't mix. She nodded, wide-eyed. Can she even imagine having a boyfriend to send for replacement knitting needles? Probably not.

Important refresher course for mum: how to make a slip knot and cast on. When is the last time you tried to explain a set of actions that are completely automatic? Now I remember my own mum showing me this, again and again, patiently tying and untying, casting on again and again, as I struggle to put words to unconscious action. A slip knot – that basic foundation for so much of knitting – turns out to involve half a dozen steps and innumerable subtle hand movements. We muddled through.

*

My first projects: endless rectangles. I made doll blankets, too-short scarves, lopsided teddy bears. Eventually, a garter stitch vest, in peach acrylic (two big rectangles, sewn together). None of it amazing, and yet all of it amazing: amazing because it was one thing and I made it into something else. It was amazing enough to keep me trying.

Their first projects: scarves. It doesn't get much more basic, or more satisfying, than that.

*

I've been knitting now for more than 25 years, through school and jobs and more school and more jobs and cross-country moves and innumerable trips. That I've been doing anything for more than 25 years still shocks me. The list is fairly short: knitting and writing and baking, the things I was interested in first, that I continue to come back to year after year. The three pursuits that give me the most satisfaction: equal parts challenging and comforting, all of them delivering on the promise that if you put the right components together with enough care, you'll end up with something greater than the sum of its parts.

But it's challenging to explain alchemy to a seven year old. Instead: simple tools, an old rhyme, and a little encouragement. It's OK to be frustrated; keep trying. Nothing worth knowing how to do can be mastered in 10 minutes. Stick with it, and you'll give yourself a gift you can enjoy for the rest of your life. It's a little bit like magic.

November 27 and 28

Up early this morning before the sun rose, the streets dark and quiet and covered in ice; you could have told me it was January and I'd have believed you. It's cold again, crisp and dry, and the snow is staying where it falls, icing over in places where people haven't taken care of their sidewalks. I have about as much regard for people who don't shovel and salt as I do for people who see a word they don't recognize and tell you that you've made a mistake without checking the dictionary, which is to say, not much regard at all. In sidewalks, writing and life, a bit of due diligence goes a long way.

I like being up early in the winter; it's often the best part of the day. This morning, watching the sky lighten, I caught a glimpse of bright red clouds in the southeast and chanted the old rhyme to myself. Sailors take warning, indeed; the news was full of accounts of the devastating storm that hit Nova Scotia last night and left 40,000 people with power. I thought of my friends there, with their emergency kits and bottled water and flashlights, and wished them wood stoves and extended-life batteries. Then I put the kettle on again.

Much later, I taught my last class of the semester. A bit of review, face-to-face check-ins, and closing remarks: I meant to talk about writing, but I ended up talking about people. After all, that's what stories are about, who they're for, why they exist – if not for people, those ideal readers and fascinating subjects, why write at all? I'm afraid that I got a bit sappy, but sometimes it's good to remember that good writing means more than just proper spelling and syntax; that sometimes, if we're doing really well, we manage to create something with resonance, something that goes beyond due diligence.

And then the cold walk home through the gathering dusk, the interminable wait in line at the grocery store, the dinner of leftover chicken pot pie and the evening of knitting, the wool the colour of an overcast sky. The hunkering down.

November 17

Halfway into a month of daily blogging and every day has been different. Some days it's easy: a topic is ready and waiting as soon as I wake up, and it takes shape during the day, words coagulating into sentences, sentences into paragraphs that I write and re-write in my mind as I make my way around the city. Then again, some days I wake up without an idea, when I sit down to write at nine-thirty at night I stare at the screen for twenty minutes to no avail. 

Today I'm somewhere in between. I've got plenty of ideas but nothing to tie them together – I've been writing (and re-writing) for more than an hour as the ideas come and go, flashy as goldfish and just as quick to disappear. I'm tired, and the wind just picked up; I can hear the rain lashing down outside and the inevitable sirens that seem to accompany every spate of bad weather. Somewhere behind the clouds the full moon is exerting its power. 

There's always tomorrow. I'll get a net.

November 14

By the time I got home from class it was early evening, which these days is very early indeed: dusk is sneaking up well before five. I turned on some lights and made a cup of tea and sat down to finish my marking. It's not my favourite thing to do, but it is engrossing, and at some point (an hour later?) I looked up to realize my tea was cold and the sky was on the verge of nighttime's navy blue.

I got up to close the blinds. The maple tree in front of my window acts as an awning from late April to October, shielding me from the sun at midday and my neighbours at midnight, but it lost the last of its leaves earlier this week, and I knew that my yellow windows would be shining like a beacon through its bare branches. I am fascinated by the slices of life I catch through my neighbours' windows – the flicker of the late-night TV, the crowded living room and steamy windows of a holiday party – but am reluctant to share the same slices of my life with them. I miss the tree's reassuring green canopy during the winter months.

But last night, a surprise: hanging there in the space between the two apartment buildings across the street was the moon. Low in the eastern sky, almost full, it glowed chalky white. The sky was dark blue, banded with cotton-candy clouds; the west-facing balconies across from me reflected an vibrant pink sunset.

Standing at the window, I watched the moon's barely perceptible progress for a little while; contemplated taking a photo then decided not to. Sometimes it's better to rely on the mind's eye. I watched and waited. It didn't take long. There it was, and then it was gone: within five minutes the moon had disappeared behind a building. An urban eclipse.

I closed the blinds and went back to my desk and picked up my pen. I carried on.

November 11

I've walked past this alley twice a week for twelve weeks now; not sure why I felt the urge to stop and take a photo today. I stood there in the driving rain, balancing the umbrella in the crook of my neck and getting wet anyway, poking away at the screen of my phone, keenly aware of how much I was discomfiting the group of teenagers who'd loped around the corner behind me to light up contraband cigarettes. Looking at the photo now, I can almost catch a whiff of cigarette smoke.

Getting to know this part of the city has been an unexpected bonus of my teaching gig – I haven't spent much time in the east end before now, but these days I take the long way home from campus, exploring the residential streets and enjoying the echoes of all the places where I've lived before. I've met the friendly local Doberman, discovered my favourite front gardens and waded through the after-school rush of kids clutching art projects and soccer balls. One of the houses boasts a collection of topiaries; the one closest to the sidewalk seems to be a curious amalgam of Coyote and a jackalope.

This part of town has a nice "main street" shopping area, including a disproportionate number of bridal shops and a really good health food store, so big and bright and clean that it puts the one in my neighbourhood to shame. Once I'd finished taking pictures in the rain, I pushed thoughts of take-out pizza into the furthest corner of my mind and went to stock up on grains and greens instead. Brown rice and bok choy and tofu; the perfect foils for magic sauce.

Finally, I headed home through the lengthening shadows. I don't love the rain, but I do love the way the wet streets reflect the streetlights. Who can argue with puddles full of rubies and emeralds?

November 9

I love crafting for babies, even though I always end up tackling something at the last minute and sewing or knitting right down to the wire. For example, this hippo:

I've known for five years that my friend wanted me to make one for her first-born, but there I was last night, with 15 hours to go before the baby shower, getting out my scissors and setting up the sewing machine. I snipped the last thread at 2 a.m.

He's a variation on the elephant pattern in Joelle Hoverson's Last-Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts, designed by Hillary Lang of Wee Wonderfuls fame. I'm pleased with how he turned out – my sewing skills are a bit rusty but I don't think anyone could tell. It took just two fat quarters (you could get away with one and scraps) and the most time-consuming thing was the painstaking pinning. But seeing the look on my friend's face when she pulled it out of the gift bag was worth all the effort.

There were more than 20 people at the shower and mine was the only handmade gift. I spend so much time around crafty, creative, talented people that it hadn't occurred to me that might happen; that mine would be the only non-primary coloured, non-plastic, non-covered-in-baseballs-or-tiny-cars thing she received. Ah, my sheltered life.

November 8

It was cold this morning: -1ºC. The air smelled like winter and the weather report called for snow, but the sky was absent that tell-tale touch of red. I made spiced apple oatmeal, and drank tea, and watched the day begin.

Spiced Apple Oatmeal
1/4 cup large-flake rolled oats
1/2 apple, cored and cut in chunks
1 tbsp raisins
Pinch each cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger
Dash of salt
3/4 cup boiling water

Combine dry ingredients in small saucepan. Pour boiling water over top and stir. Simmer over low heat 15 to 20 minutes, or until oats are plump, apple is soft and most of the water has disappeared. Serve with maple syrup and milk (or cream, if it's the weekend and you're feeling fancy). Serves one but is easily multiplied to feed a crowd.

November 7

The sun was gone by lunchtime, but it was nice while it lasted. We walked up the rickety metal stairs from the train station and skirted the plywood hoarding, caught up in the push and rush of people to-ing and fro-ing. Sometimes it feels like the construction at Union Station will never end. Those new platforms, that promised atrium, the refurbished girders and rebar and concrete that the train station so obviously needs: the idea that it will ever all be in place just seems impossible most days.

We carried on along Front Street. Many of the restaurant patios are still set up, although it's been too cold to sit outside for weeks now. We saw chairs and tables stacked in corners; limp greenery hanging desolately from window boxes that have been fertilized with cigarette butts. A collection of trailers occupied a side street – someone shooting a movie. We carried on.

 A couple blocks south hulks the Gardiner Expressway, the elevated highway that ferries cars across the bottom of the city and which occasionally calves chunks of cement onto the cars below. People scurry underneath, dodging cars and other pedestrians in an effort to get back under clear skies as quickly as possible. Even a deluge of cold, sleety rain is better than the thought of a concrete block landing on your head.

Heading north, we almost missed the light because the couple in front of us didn't understand the walk signal. The hand flashed red and counted down: 15...14...13... . We brushed by, hungry, in a hurry to get to the restaurant. "But can we go?" they asked. "It flashes red!" "Hurry, hurry," I said, but as we gained the opposite side they were still on the corner, deliberating.

Even further north lies City Hall, which has its own clouds hanging over it these days. If you've been anywhere near a newspaper or a late-night talk show this week you'll have heard about our mayor, a man in crisis who could give a reality TV show a run for its money right now. Unfortunately, unlike on a reality show, his troubles are real, unscripted, and there's no help waiting in the wings and no prize at the end. We can't vote him off the island; the interventions have all failed. Our laughter, which always had a self-aware "isn't this awful?" hollowness to it, is dying out completely.

But life carries on. Inside the Belgian restaurant, with its tiny booths covered in sparkly green vinyl and its dual specialties of waffles and beer, the air smelled of breakfast, yeast and hops. No matter the news, there's still the pleasure of good company and good food; the joy of laughing with a friend about nothing in particular. Outside, the wind swirls tiny dust devils, picking up twigs and gum wrappers, plastering wet leaves to the crackled paint on the door. Inside, it's the talk that swirls, twisting and turning and doubling back.

It's all temporary, but I know which one I'd rather pay attention to.

November 6

Today: A red sky in the morning, then heavy grey clouds stretching out to every horizon. Stop-and-start rain, a walk with two hound dogs, one of whom nabbed a truly impressive stick. Endless cups of tea, endless stacks of papers to mark. Three dead ballpoint pens. A little girl in a red macintosh and matching rubber boots, skipping down the sidewalk in the rain, singing a made-up song. Macaroni and cheese; a pumpkin spice doughnut. I bought my first Christmas present, and a birthday present for my favourite three-year-old. I looked at Christmas cards and tiny gilded Christmas tree ornaments. The sun set at 5:02 p.m.

It's tempting to say that I've hit the late-autumn doldrums, but I'm anything but becalmed. I'm refusing to acknowledge the early sunsets, with varying degrees of success, and my body still hasn't caught on to the time change: every day this week I've been ready for lunch by 11 a.m. The body wants what it wants when it wants it (which, this week, is meatball sandwiches at 11, although it gets carrots at noon instead).

My craft projects orbit my work space like moons, challenging my grasp of time and space. It's a small apartment, so they never get to occupy one surface for very long; instead, they get shuffled from couch to ottoman to desk to table and back again. The next pair of Christmas socks is proceeding well, though typically slowly; the tilting Tardis cowl gets a halting three rows before breakfast and another three before dinner. This stack of fabric is destined to become a stuffed hippo sometime before Saturday afternoon, although my current strategy of leaving everything piled next to the sewing machine doesn't seem to be working.

Everything, suddenly, has a deadline; but I'll get there. As with anything, it's just a matter of taking it one thing at a time: one word after another, one stitch after another, one day after another. It will all get done, and soon enough the days will begin to lengthen once more.

November 4

I was beset by writer's block this morning and so instead of working I sat at my desk and watched the shadows of leaves chase each other across the wall. The maple tree outside my window has held on admirably, but today its leaves were falling in flurries; giant yellow snowflakes, catching in drifts and banks on the lawn below. The temperature dropped dramatically a couple nights ago, and suddenly it's not difficult to imagine snow in place of the leaves.

The enormous oak tree next door has leaves the colour of old, burnished copper saucepans. In the morning, if I time it right, there's a short time when I can catch the sun as the light slants down and illuminates the leaves from behind. I stand at the window with a cup of tea in hand and I watch the leaves glow just like a stained-glass window: yellow and green, crimson and burnt-orange, black branches instead of lead solder. The layers shift in the breeze. Five minutes later, the spectacle is over for another day. Another week, and it will be over for another year, and the only stained glass I'll have to admire will be the windows in the hundred year–old church down the street. It suffices.

Meanwhile, the cool days with their early evenings have their small consolations – crisp air,  woodsmoke and beeswax candles; rice pudding, jewel-like pomegranate seeds and tiny, juicy oranges; woollen hats, handknit socks and cozy afghans. Spiced tea and spiced rum. The fall-coloured leaf and the stained-glass window.

November 3

A couple weeks ago I had dinner with an old friend of mine who was in the city on business.

The last time we saw each other was over a year ago, and I was visiting her. I turned off the Trans-Canada and into town just in time to sit down with her family for dinner – pork tenderloin, corn and green beans, noodles. There was ice cream for dessert. Her sons, who were just a toddler and a newborn when first we met, are now young men, pushing six feet. I tried not to stare; tried not to repeat too many variations of "You used to be so small..." I wasn't particularly successful on either count, I don't think.

When we finished eating, we headed out again; out across the highway and into the countryside, to the dairy farm where her younger son boards his 4-H calf. It started to rain. I was wearing just a t-shirt, a denim skirt, slip-on Keds; I was completely unprepared. They managed not to laugh out loud at me as I tip-toed across the barnyard, slipping and sliding through the cow manure, or when I recoiled from the attentions of the dozens of curious barn cats. When the thunder and lightning started, I bolted for the car, secretly happy for a legitimate excuse to seek refuge from all that mess, all that life.

Home again, she and I stayed up late, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea from the old Pyrex tea pot and talking. The house was dark. The only illumination was from the fixture over the sink; the light spilled onto the floor in a golden pool. The streetlight out the window glowed sodium orange. We talked past midnight. We had a lot of catching up to do.

We had a lot of catching up to do this time, too. As I rode the rush-hour train downtown to meet her at her hotel, I thought about our last visit: how the town where I'd once lived had felt simultaneously so familiar and so strange to me. How I'd driven past my old apartments, peered into the window of my old office, walked the old familiar campus paths. How I'd watched that teenage boy work with his calf, and how confident and self-assured he'd been, and how somehow his calf had looked better, more special, than all the rest. How later, retelling the story of my farm visit to my friends at work, I'd watched them lift their feet off the floor in sympathetic dismay, imagining the mud and the manure, and how then I'd laughed, recognizing myself in them; recognizing the city-mouse caricature that I'd become.

We walked up Yonge Street to my favourite local pub. I'd estimated it would only take us twenty minutes, but it was more than half an hour. I'd forgotten how much there is to look at when you're seeing it for the first time. How bright the lights are; how many people there are; how close and loud and crazy they all seem. She pointed out businesses I'd forgotten existed. She asked questions about things I'd never wondered about, and questions I wasn't sure I had the answer to.

"How do you do it?" she asked. And "Do you like it here?" I hesitated too long before answering.

Once again we talked for hours. We had salads in order to justify the giant plate of fries. No dessert. The light was dim, but the space heater behind us was hard at work, so the pub was warm and cozy. The other tables filled and emptied, but we stayed on, until the fries were almost all gone and it was finally time to go. We caught the subway back downtown; it was full of the usual late-night characters, and there were empty paper cups and plastic bottles and discarded newspapers on the floor. In the darkened windows I caught a glimpse of my city-mouse self, operating in her element, navigating a different kind of mess, a different kind of life.

We hugged in the hotel lobby and went our separate ways. It will probably be a year before we see each other again, even though a year is too long. In the days since then, I keep hearing her voice asking me, "How do you do it? Do you like it here?" And then I hear the echo of my hesitation.

But this morning I rode the streetcar to work and I had my answer. Queen Street is quiet first thing on a Sunday morning, and the air was crisp and the sky was blue and there was time enough to walk to the coffee shop to buy a muffin from the guy with the wire-rimmed glasses who knows all the neighbourhood kids by name. I tucked the muffin into my bag and headed east, walking past the park, into the sun. Something about the light made me look up, and I saw those trees, and that lamp post, and the blue blue sky, and I smiled. I do like it, most of the time. It's like anything. You just have to know where to look.

November 1

A year ago today, I stood on the beach in Napier, New Zealand, and watched the waves roll in. It was early afternoon, and the sun was high overhead. The sky and the water seemed endlessly blue.

I had woken up that morning on the other side of the island and driven cross-country for almost four hours. I crossed from lush forest, thick with ferns, to meadowed valleys, where gorse crowded the roadside. I wound my way up and down mountainsides, my cautious Canadian nature balking at the 120 km/hour speed limit on the precipitous two-lane mountain roads. Whenever I could, I pulled over to let people pass, although I pretended that I was getting out of the car to look at the sheep.

The fact that I can't find any pictures of sheep is probably revealing.

I got to Napier and checked into my hotel. That day I was supposed to join my tour group, half a dozen other writers, but I found myself wanting to prolong my solitude. I begged off lunch and headed into town, where I bought an apple and a homemade granola bar from a health-food store and a latte from the coffee shop next door. I'd been travelling on my own for five days and my head was swimming from too much time alone and an incipient head cold, but I found some comfort in the fact that the health-food store smelled familiar: sandalwood and nutritional yeast and paper bags. Some things don't change, whatever the hemisphere. The smell of the health-food store, the shape of the lid on my takeaway cup, the taste of the hot, frothy milk – each carried their own brand of familiar reassurance.

The walk down to the water took less than five minutes. I crossed the promenade, skirted the band shell and hopped a low tide wall onto the shingled beach. The gravel crunched beneath my boots and the sun glared down; there were girls in bikinis, hopeful, watching the surfers, but the breeze was cool enough that I was moved to wrap myself more tightly in my scarf. I sat on a driftwood log to eat my snack, and I watched the waves, and I thought about "my" ocean, the Atlantic, and wondered if I'd ever seen it so blue.

After a while, I pushed the apple core into the empty paper cup and stood up to walk back. On the way, I looked for rocks – striped pebbles, my favourite – and tried to fix those moments in my mind.

(More about Napier, the Art Deco capital of the world.)

Above all, write.

I started writing my third novel on the first of July. I needed a challenge; something to take my mind off an increasingly stressful work situation, to fill those early morning hours on days when the sun woke me up hours before I had to be out of the house, to fill the void my fingers felt because the hot weather meant I wasn't knitting as much.

I didn't know if I could finish it – after all, it was my third, and I hadn't finished the first two. But I'd approached those projects casually, without a plan. This time, conditioned by years of planning magazines with spreadsheets and work-backs, primed by a year in which I'd decided to knit a sweater a month, working methodically and with great focus and many checklists...this time, I was serious.

So I consulted books and websites. I looked at calendars. I drew up meal plans. I re-read Bird by Bird. I cut activities out of my social calendar and set the alarm to go off even earlier. I wrote an outline.

Soon my desk was overtaken by piles of index cards and stacks of computer print-outs. I jotted key plot points on fluorescent post-it notes, then stuck them to the wall over my desk. I stayed up late. I got up early. I bored my friends, talking about "my book." They were very gracious.

Like many of the writers I know, I am best motivated by deadlines, so when I found out about the CWA Debut Dagger contest, with its hard-and-fast submission date, I was pleased. I set my sights on February 2nd and kept writing. I passed ten thousand words, then twenty-five thousand. I kept going. At some point, I stopped using quotation marks when I talked about my book. Fifty thousand words and the summer was waning, the days getting shorter and the evenings cooler. Soon I was wearing a cardigan as I typed. Fifty-five thousand words and Labour Day was a distant memory.

I had hoped that the more I wrote, the easier it would be, but that isn't the case. It doesn't seem to matter how many thousand words you've already committed to paper; the next thousand are just as much work. But the momentum builds, and it becomes more difficult to stop. I was tired by the time I got to sixty thousand, and slowing down at sixty-two thousand, but I pushed on. Fall arrived, and with it, added uncertainty about my work situation. Leaves were falling. Would there be layoffs when the new boss arrived? I kept typing. I wasn't going to waste all that work. I told anyone who would listen that if I was let go, I'd take the time to write.

I finished my book – all 73,000 words of it – at the end of October, and the next day I flew to New Zealand. I came home. The layoffs began; two of my friends there in the morning, gone by lunch. I gritted my teeth, turned up my music, took Advil for the headache that had become my constant companion, and worked. Each night after dinner, I worked on fine-tuning my contest entry – all they needed was the first chapter, so following the advice of my generous friends, my gentle first readers, I trimmed and tucked and trimmed some more until 6,000 words had become 3,000. The new boss arrived. Christmas came and went, then New Year's. The week-long vacation was too short. I went back to work.

On January 15th, I lost my job.

The next two weeks were a flurry of emails and phone calls, lunch dates and drinks nights. I knitted. I watched a lot of Doctor Who. The weather was good, and then bad, and then terrible. I cleaned out my desk. I signed papers. I mourned the loss of my daily routine and a job I'd once loved. I was sustained by my family and my office mates – many of whom I'm proud to call my friends. I read books – entire books – for the first time in ages. I knitted more. I baked. But I didn't write.

This Tuesday I woke up with the heaviness of an impending deadline sitting on my chest. February 2nd was days away and I hadn't looked at my contest entry in weeks. I remembered the brave, fool-hardy declarations I'd been making all summer, the promises that I'd take the time my severance package bought me and use it as time to write. I finally sat back down at my desk, and looked once more at the index card I taped to my wall so many months ago.

I uploaded my file and clicked "submit" a few hours ago. I won't know the result for weeks; just one more uncertainty to add to the list of mysteries about what 2013 holds for me. But I know that tomorrow I'll get up, and make a cup of tea, and sit down at the computer once again. I'm only a couple thousand words into the sequel, and the next two thousand will be just as much work as the first, but I'm not going to waste the effort I've put in. I'm not going to waste the time I've been given.