Friday Pot Pourris

The new Minister of Heritage, who is responsible for the cultural portfolio, has said since the election that she intends to honour her party’s commitment to increased funding for the Canada Council, Telefilm Canada and the CBC. Yay, yay, yay!

Increased funding to Telefilm Canada is timely given that Convergent, who hold the rights to my screenplay, is currently seeking to partner with Télé Cinq, another national pay TV broadcaster, because Télé Cinq has a strong relationship with Telefilm and its money.

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Dear Diary: Have you noticed that I am not complaining about being bored or how hard it is to get through a day with no project?

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I used to manage a blog that dealt with issues of concern to Canadian visual artists. It was an extension of my books but since my books sold out and I have lost interest in the whole field. I chose to neither re-write my book, re-print it nor to maintain the blog. I stopped posting in 2014. Still, the blog is getting 50 hits a day and has been visited 195,465 times since I began it in November 2010.

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Today I was conscious of not having to write a monthly column any more. For twenty-seven years, I wrote a monthly editorial for a corporate publication called The Artist Resource Newsletter. I was its founding editor; it had a circulation of 60,000 visual artists across Canada but mostly in BC.

Its success filled me with pride but it upped the challenge of the 1,000-word editorial I had to write for each issue. And my audience kept me on my toes. Perhaps a dozen times during all those years, I would open a new empty document in MS Word and just sit there.

I had a rule never to revisit a topic unless I had enough material to warrant it; on these dozen occasions I had no passion to exploit. I would just sit and stare at the empty page, hoping and worrying. Eventually something always came, but I never have to do that any more.

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I am actually enjoying a book. It isn't often the case since I have moved to fiction from exclusively non-fiction for decades. But Rule of Civility by Amor Towles is like eating a delicious patisserie. It is not concerned with anything deep. Rather, it evokes an era and it does so very successfully in my opinion. Mr. Towles can really turn a phrase. He is a writer of "desserts," and I have the sweetest of teeth.