About the Blog
About Me
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A native son of Small Town, Ontario, I grew up cycling around town and country, playing more video games than was deemed healthy at the time, and reading or writing in every other spare moment. I wrote stories, I wrote how-to guides for video games, I wrote journals, and I relished every chance I got to write something for school. Except for a mystery story in grade four. The assignment baffled me and lead to a hackneyed story with a shoe-horned mystery twist to fulfill what I thought, at the time, to be a necessary part of the mystery genre.
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After high school, I trekked to Guelph to study English and History at the University of Guelph with no real direction in mind. I had earned 100% on my final essay in Grade 12 English (about what the Odyssey and the Iliad had to say about the Ancient Greek zeitgeist) and enjoyed English, so I had decided to major in that. Besides, I was going to be a writer, and writers need to know their English.
But, having absolutely no idea how to go about becoming a writer at the time, I found myself growing interested in becoming a professor. Why? Because I enjoyed scholarly work, was under the impression that I was cut out for the academic life and nothing else, and figured that it would make a great day job while I wrote during the night.
Plus, I had discovered a nascent love of teaching in my final years at the U o' Guelph, and while teaching English abroad in South Korea. So, my dream in tow, I attended graduate school after being accepted in my second round of applications. I was in South Korea at the time, and the promise of discussing literature was sweeter than the steady pay I earned teaching English as a Second Language.
A generous grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), also helped me to make the decision to return to academia.
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After two years of study, re-adjusting to Canadian culture, and re-adjusting to an academic environment, I earned my master’s degree in English from the University of Victoria.
British Columbia is as beautiful as everyone back in central Canada said it was, but, just as when I was finishing off high school and when I was finishing off my undergraduate studies, I had no plan.
My fiancée and I had been living together for a year at this point, and as we struggled to find work for the summer (mostly because of being uncertain about whether we were staying in British Columbia or returning to Ontario) we slowly ran out of money, wound up flying back to Ontario, and parting ways. Yes, this meant that ultimately, as the cliché goes, we would be living with our respective parents.
Yet, having two degrees, experience abroad, and an ambiguous ambition to be a writer of words and creator of worlds, haven’t sat well with the locals. And I’m not one for playing games that don’t involve a controller or a set of dice, so my job situation has changed little from what it was in Victoria. The biggest difference is that now I’m actually freelance writing with quite a bit more success.
So, what’s next for me? My interest in writing has overcome my interest in teaching, but I’m still open to teaching at a college/university. Only to fund my writing habit, of course.
For the full range of ways to contact me, please visit the Contact page.
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About the Blog
What you find on this blog might not always be timely (I'm in miscellaneous Small Town, Ontario, after all), but I do hope that it proves serendipitous. Or that, at the least, it will start a chain reaction of thoughts leading to something you perhaps have never considered before, or just haven't thought about for a long time.
To give this blog some regularity, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday posts will be themed. Being the nerd that I am, these themes are based on these days' namesakes.
So, posts on Monday (Moon-dæg [moon-day]) will feature some of my creative writing (since the moon, like creative writing, can have a magical effect on people), posts on Wednesday (Wōdnes-dæg [woad-nez-day]) will be about a current event/news item that's caught my eye (Wodin, or Odin, had an insatiable thirst for knowledge), and posts on Friday (Freya-dæg [fray-a-day]) will be about the good that I can find in movies that people think are pretty terrible (Freya being a major Valkyrie, the Norse warrior maidens who took fallen soldiers off to Valhalla).
I use Rotten Tomatoes (RT) as my guide to movies that audiences and critics deem terrible. Unless it's by special request, the movies that I review are rated 50% or less by audiences and critics alike on RT.
For the full range of ways to contact me, please visit the Contact page.
If you want to read more of what I've written, you can check out my dead language translation blog, Tongues in Jars, or my video game (mostly Nintendo-related) blog over at examiner.com.
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