It was the day my dad betrayed all of my trust in him, and took the side of someone who cared more about his prize-winning gladiolas than the heart of a little girl whose best friend was a animal who had been with her since she was seven.

My cat’s only crime was being a cat. He wandered through our neighbour’s garden. He dug a few holes. He peed and pooped. He wasn’t the only cat who visited our neighbour’s back yard, but he was the one our neighbour focused on because he lived next door.

And even though I saw other cats there, and even though I pleaded my case to our neighbour, describing them in detail, he chose not to believe me, and told my father that if he didn’t get rid of my cat, he’d never book his Hawaiian holidays through my dad’s travel agency again.

Commerce prevailed. My cat was removed.

I wasn’t home when the SPCA came to take him. I was at school. And when I came back, he was gone, and there was a hole in my heart and I cried so hard, I thought I was going to die.

And then I went for a walk. I walked along the dirt banks of Wascana Creek, which was a muddy little river that meandered around the neighbourhood where I lived, not good for much except skating in the winter, when it froze over, and flooding in the summer, when all the ice melted at once and sent the creek’s contents into our basement.

There was a song on the radio that year, 1966. “I am a Rock”, by Simon and Garfunkel. I sang it to myself as I walked with my head down, swallowing my anger and sorrow, sealing it inside.

A winter’s day
In a deep and dark December;
I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I’ve built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

Don’t talk of love,
But I’ve heard the words before;
It’s sleeping in my memory.
I won’t disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

And a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries.

I sang it to myself, over and over, until I believed every word of it, until I was absolutely certain that I could do it. I would henceforth not feel anything for anyone, for anything. I would never have to deal with that kind of pain again.

And I stayed faithful to that promise. If I felt anything over the next 10 years, I deflected it, skillfully. Nobody looking at me would have been able to tell. But, I never cried. I existed in a kind of emotional void, safe from suffering, safe from anything that could lead to suffering – like love, because love could be skewered and trampled and betrayed.

I ended up, at the age of 21, with the emotions of an 11 year old – the emotions that I’d locked away, never allowing them to grow alongside me as I went from puberty to adulthood. The reason I discovered this was because I thawed. I allowed the ice block to melt. I met someone – a young man – who didn’t terrify me, who made me burst into laughter when he came out of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” – our first date movie – doing imitations of Jack Nicholson after his lobotomy. I met someone who, in spite of all of my struggling attempts at self-protection, I fell in love with.

I intended this blog to be about me being psychic, and instead I’ve written rather a lot about emotions. But one goes hand in hand with the other.

I’ve recently discovered I’m an empath. I’m also highly intuitive. When I was a child – before my cat was given away – I knew what people were feeling. And thinking. I thought everybody had that skill, and was actually extremely relieved when I discovered that they couldn’t look into my eyes and know what I thought about them. Because I certainly knew what they thought about me!

All that was blocked out for 10 years. And then, a few days after that Jack Nicholson imitation, I had a dream. A plane was crashing. It was a small plane – painted yellow – and it dropped out of the sky, plunging into a farmer’s field, exploding into a black plume of smoke that rose high into the deep blue Saskatchewan sky.

I didn’t think a lot about the dream. It didn’t affect me. I wasn’t on the plane – I was only watching it. And I didn’t know anybody who flew planes, nor anyone who, in the dream, had been aboard it.

But the oddest thing happened, two days later. My new boyfriend was gassing up his car at the service station down the road from us. I was with him. There was a dull, loud, resounding thud off to our left, and when we looked over, we saw a black plume of smoke, rising into the sky at the edge of the city.

A Snowbird trainer plane had crashed. The Snowbirds were – and are – the aviation demonstration team of the Canadian Armed Forces. They’re based in Moose Jaw, 75km to the west of Regina, where we lived at the time. One of their training aircraft hit a duck on its initial climb. The two pilots veered away from the city to avoid crashing into a schoolyard, but they used up crucial seconds and didn’t have enough time to eject. They saved the lives of many children, but lost their own.

You can read it about it here: http://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=56791

I don’t know what colour the plane was. I suspect it was silver and red. Although in looking up the crash story just now, I discovered, a little eerily, that they used to be painted gold.

I haven’t lived a life of constant predictions and premonitions. But I have grown, over the years, to be more and more aware of what I know. It’s been a slow kind of journey, punctuated by a deep two year depression in the early 1980s, from which I emerged a different person, literally and figuratively.

One of the things that happened just before I tumbled into the depression terrified me. I was with my husband, and we were at a concert. I think it was a concert – it was some kind of gig, a rock band, in a large arena kind of place. We waded in to a crowd of people, and I suddenly felt like I was suffocating. I’d never been bad in crowds before. And this was horrible. It was worse than suffocation – I was being assaulted. Not physically, but mentally. I was aware that I was drowning in an ocean of thoughts and emotions, and I had nothing to protect myself. It was as if I was reading hundreds of minds at the same time, it was the loudest noise in the world, it was static, it was daggers and blades and flowers and pins and needles and dirt and everything else you can imagine – coming at me at warp speed.

I ran outside. I couldn’t stay. My husband – the guy who’d made me laugh with his Jack Nicholson imitations five years earlier – was nonplussed, but understood.

And I learned that I could no longer function in crowds.

I’m still not much good in crowds, but at least I’ve learned how to “switch off”, how to close down my brain so that it doesn’t intercept everything coming its way.

I want to mention three things which stand out in my memory, from the many “psychic” experiences I’ve had over the years.

The first was a trip to the Czech Republic, in 1996, for a family reunion. My dad’s side of the family is Jewish, and many of them perished in the Holocaust. Our family was scattered all over the world as a result of World War 2, and in 1996, a cousin organized a get-together for us, so that we could all meet – some of us for the first time. We gathered in the Czech Republic, where the family had started, back in the 1700s. We visited ancestral homes, a synagogue my cousin had taken it upon herself to renovate, a concentration camp (Theresienstadt), and the Jewish ghetto in Prague.

We visited the Pinkas Synagogue, where the names and birth and death dates of all of the Czech victims of the Holocaust are painted on the walls in a silent, moving epitaph. My great-grandmother’s name is there, somewhere. I didn’t see it – and the reason why I didn’t see it is because I couldn’t go inside. I tried. It’s a beautiful building, light and bright, not at all oppressive.

I stepped inside, and found myself so immediately overwhelmed by a sense of sorrow and sadness, I could go no further. It wasn’t anger, and it wasn’t fury. It wasn’t a sense of retribution or outrage. It was sorrow, and it was so deep and so overpowering that I gasped. I had to leave. If I’d stayed, I’d have collapsed.

The second experience I had was a few years later. I was sitting at my computer, updating the website I was running for the British actor, Sean Bean. Into my email Inbox came a message. It was from a woman whose name I can’t even remember anymore. I think it was Debra. I’ll call her Debra. In her message, Debra told me she was psychic, and that she had no idea why she was drawn to me, except that she followed her instincts, and embarked on journeys, and that this particular journey had led her to Sean Bean – who she found interesting, though she certainly wasn’t a fan – and then, to me.

We chatted over the course of a few more messages, during which I told her that I’d written a novel, and I was trying to find an agent for it in London. The manuscript was with one particular agent at that moment – he’d had it for about a week. Debra said to me: “He’s going to sign you.”

I said to Debra: “You’re kidding.”

Debra said to me: “I call it as I see it. Don’t worry. He’s going to sign you.”

“OK,” I said to Debra, skeptically. Because although I was intuitive, and although I was “tuned in” to what I knew…I had never actually had someone predict something for me like that. And I wasn’t entirely convinced.

“Don’t celebrate too hard,” she advised me, before disappearing for three days, on the second of which, I was advised by the agent in London that he wanted to sign me.

But Debra wasn’t quite finished. When she reappeared, it was to tell me that something very bad was going to happen to my sister. She knew only that my sister worked on a cruise ship – because I’d told her.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked, now very very worried. “Is she going to die?”

“No, don’t worry, it’s not going to take her out,” Debra said. “But it’s going to be something really serious. It’s something…too much. I can’t define it. But it’s “too much” – too many people? I don’t know – too much something.”

I sent a frantic email to my sister, who was working as the Captain’s Secretary on board a ship that was sailing the Mexican Riviera. For three weeks, my sister watched her step on stairs, was extra careful when embarking and disembarking, did everything she possibly could to avoid a dreadful accident that could result in the end of her career at sea – though, thankfully, not her life (because she did believe what I was telling her).

And then, at the end of the three weeks, I got a phonecall at work. My sister had collapsed and was being medivac’d off the ship, and flown to a hospital in Los Angeles. Chronically suffering from fibroids and excessive bleeding each month, she had ignored doctor’s advice and warning signs, and her red blood count had finally dropped so low, along with her blood pressure, that she was near death.

Too much blood.

And she didn’t die, though she was in hospital for three weeks after an emergency hysterectomy, and my mother had to fly down for a further six weeks to help her recover in a hotel, all paid for (thankfully) by the cruise line.

Over the past five years or so, I have been exploring my own intuitiveness, and my own ability to “be psychic”, for want of a better term. The people I’ve met on this journey have mostly been by accident, but they’ve all tended to share the ability. We seem to be able to find one another in crowds – which doesn’t surprise me in the least.

What I’ve learned on this journey – is that I’m a psychic infant. I have nowhere near the powers, or skills, or whatever you want to call them, that my mentors have. I’m not sure I ever will develop them. I still have training wheels on, and I’m wrong as much as I’m right. But that also means – I’m right as much as I’m wrong.

But I did want to say that I recently experienced something so profound and so meaningful to me, that I’m still shaking. I helped someone.

All I did was ask a few simple questions, and listen to the answers, and offer some answers back – but as I listened, and responded, I found myself “feeling” what that person was feeling…sadness, frustration, anger, sorrow, shame, helplessness and finally, a little blossom of happiness that I hope – I really hope – is going turn into something much, much more.

The experience utterly drained me. I’m sure it had nothing like that kind of effect on the person I was talking to – though there may have been some degree of complete fright.

I’m told now, by those who know, that doing this sort of thing is exhausting, that it pulls the energy out of you and that I must now learn how to “shut myself down” – the same way I learned how to protect myself in crowds.

But in doing this, it was as if I was paying something forward – perhaps a gift Debra gave to me, dropping into my life for a few weeks and then disappearing, just as mysteriously.

It was as if I was finally acknowledging the feelings that I had locked away when I was 11, honouring something that I’d put on ice for so many many years. The love and benevolence I felt for this person, as we spoke, was overwhelming.

And if this person is reading this – and I do hope you are – I want you to know that you were my “first”. I’m fairly certain you won’t be my “last”… but because you were my first, this will always be incredibly special, and very very humbling, for me.

You gave me something wonderful.

Thank you.

I mean, I don’t really.

I used to. Really.

I have many tales to tell about my blind blotto face-in-the-toilet days, but most are best left not told, as I’m not proud of them, and I’ve always questioned how people could wake up from these things, sick from dehydration, head pounding and teeth aching, and proclaim they had the Best Time Ever Last Night.

The last time I got drunk – and I mean, really really passed out drunk, so drunk that I was insensible on the bathroom floor – was when my husband was fired from one of his radio gigs. It was Winnipeg and I was much younger, and not used to dealing with the insecurities inherent in the broadcasting world.

So I bought a bottle of Amaretto and drank half of it, took off all of my clothes and fell down on the bathroom floor. We had a friend over who was commiserating with us – being a friend – and when it came time for her to use the toilet, my husband thoughtfully draped a towel over me, the friend stepped over me, did her business, and then went back out into the living room to continue her visit with my husband.

I remember it because I was only half-passed out, drifting in and out of awareness – as one does.

What amazes me is that my husband and our friend just carried on as if it was the most natural thing in the world for me to be incapably drunk, and naked, on the bathroom floor.

I recall a few years before that, being at university, and turning my last two years there into a primer on How to Drink Myself Stupid.

I wasn’t happy. That was a given. I was bored. I was dealing with grief (see my earlier blog about fire and my best friend). And I was at that dangerous age where you do things, and you don’t know why. You just Do.

This fine Alcohol Spree also occurred at about the same time that I decided to Dare Death. If Death could take my best friend, he might also be interested in me. And so I embarked on a run of near suicidal activities. Which included standing on the main east west track belonging to the Canadian Pacific Railway, waiting for a train to come, and staring at it as it approached me.

I waited until the locomotive was about five seconds away, and then I would calmly step off the track and walk away.

I must have given the engineers heart failure. It’s impossible to stop a train composed of three diesel engines and a mile of boxcars, on a dime. They would have known that had I not stepped off the track, they would have hit me.

I read now about the trauma that train engineers go through when they collide with cars that are stuck on crossings, or when they run over people who either deliberately or accidentally, didn’t get out of the way.

And I’m so, so sorry for causing such pain to those good men of the CPR.

I wasn’t drunk when I stood on the tracks, and it’s a good thing too, or I probably wouldn’t be here now, writing this.

My other Death Dare was to drink myself blotto (cheap student wine being the poison of choice – Baby Duck, it was called) and then drive myself home.

Let me point out here that I lived in a small prairie city that was laid out on a grid. All of the avenues went East-West, and all of the streets ran North-South. There was only one hill, and I lived at the bottom of it. If you missed your corner, you could drive on to the next, and be reasonably certain that if you kept turning left, or right, you would eventually get home.

Let me also point out here that these binges invariably happened in the winter, when there was a lot of snow on the ground and the roads were mostly tracts of ice with wheel ruts worn into them. The city scruffed the ice up a bit with sand – it was too cold to use salt – so there was traction, but as a result, all winter long the ice and snow covered streets were the colour of chocolate milk.

And the third thing I want to point out is that my car was a 1962 Volkswagen Beetle, running on three cylinders, with nonexistent heat, a leak in the exhaust which required driving with the window open or dying of carbon monoxide poisoning, and no snow tires.

Let me explain. On the prairies, in winter, snow tires are mandatory. They have deep treads, and sometimes they’re embedded with studs, and they grip the snow and the ice and they give you traction. They allow you to stop. And go.

I had four bald summer tires on my VW and on side streets, which weren’t as ploughed out as the main roads, my usual method of stopping was to throw the thing into Neutral and slide nose first into a snowbank.

Now add one incoherent, close-to-blacking-out driver into this mix, and you’ll have my Death Dare.

As I said, I’m not proud of this. I shudder to think what could have happened if I’d skidded, lost control, lost consciousness… never mind what I would have done to myself – what could I have inflicted on other, innocent, people?

Anyway, I did drive myself home, on many occasions, and on some of them, I have no memory of the route I took. I remember getting into the car, starting the engine, rolling down the window, and slithering off into the night. The next memory I have is of being four or five blocks from home, ten or fifteen minutes had passed, and I was eyeing my favourite snowbank ahead of a Stop sign I knew was coming up.

Sometimes I just drove straight through it, my addled logic being that it was two o’clock in the morning and I was the only person on the road, so to Hell With It.

The last thing I want to mention about those years is that I was one party animal. Not from any sense of joy or fun. I drank because it was more or less expected, and I had nothing better to do. So I’d show up with my Baby Duck, plant myself on a couch, listen to music I hated, and talk to people about nothing. Having drained the bottle, I would then lock myself in what was usually the only bathroom, throw up into the toilet, and then lose consciousness.

Incessant knocking on the door would usually bring me round, and I’d stagger out to the living room past a lineup of desperate party-goers, and promptly pass out there too. Until it was time to go home. And then I’d go… still drunk, still unhappy, still wondering why everyone claimed they were having The Best Time Ever.

I made a decision to stop drinking so much after I’d woken up in the middle of an afternoon one too many times, and realized that I’d wasted what could have been precious writing hours, and that I was going to have to spend another half day recovering, and I could never get that time back.

I have, as my good friends who are in AA sometimes enviously tell me, a Functioning Off Switch.

Which is, apparently, what helps to define me as Not an Alcoholic. I wasn’t born with the gene. I was able to make the decision, it was easy, and once I’d Switched Off, I didn’t miss the booze. I could take it or leave it.

So I left it. And found other ways to deal with my unhappiness.

There is alcoholism in my family – my mother’s brother drank himself to death before cancer of the esophagus could claim him – so I may have dodged a bullet.

The novel I’m currently writing has two main characters. Both are alcoholics. One drinks. The other doesn’t. I’m at the point where I need to draw on my memories – distorted and drenched as they are – as well as the experiences and nightmares of my friends whose Off Switches are broken – to help me define what makes these two tick.

I’m not sure why I’m just a tiny bit reluctant.

Perhaps, after all these years, I still need to forgive myself.

Perhaps, after all these years, that forgiveness will come, finally, in the form of fiction.

Then there were the Beatles – discovered when I was about 10, and hitting puberty. I loved Paul. Straddling the chasm between childhood and teenagerhood, I wrote a story about a Fan Who Loved Paul, and whose greatest ambition was to meet him – and become his friend. And so it was… my heroine’s dreams came true… and as her great reward for becoming his friend, Paul invited my heroine over to his house (which he, of course, shared with the other three Beatles), and because they were, by now, close and special friends, my heroine was invited to share Paul’s bed.

It was all completely innocent. I was still a child, with no inkling whatosever about sex. I had the emotions, but none of the knowledge of the follow-through. I had no idea what sex was. My mother hadn’t had The Talk with me yet… and so when I showed her my story, she was aghast.

“You can’t write that!” she gasped (good Catholic Women’s League secretary that she was).

“Why not?” I asked, in complete and utter innocence. After all, my best friend and I had sleepovers all the time. If I spent the night in her double bed (her parents were very practical and had planned ahead for her eventual marriage), we giggled, we read books aloud together, we sneaked magazine articles under the covers about The Beatles (her father was a classical violinist and The Beatles were banned from their house)… in short, we shared our secret lives.

It was only natural that my heroine would be invited to Paul McCartney’s bed, for the most intimate of relationships, as seen through the eyes of a 10 year old who hadn’t yet discovered what else went on between the sheets.

My mother wouldn’t actually tell me the specifics of what was so morally wrong with my story. She made it quite clear, however, that young girls did not go to bed with pop stars, end of.

I crept away, deflated. I understood, but not really.

Some months later, we had The Talk, I hit puberty with all engines running, I finally understood what my mother had meant. This was the 1960s, you have to remember, and it was the middle of Saskatchewan, which reminds me of a joke:

Q: If it’s 12 noon in New York, what time is it in Saskatchewan?
A: 1956

OK now that everyone on the Canadian prairies hates me…

Back to puberty.
In late 1964, I discovered The Man from UNCLE, at about the same time. Outwardly, my first love was Robert Vaughn (Napoleon Solo), but that was only because my best friend (the one with the father who was the classical violinist) loved David McCallum (Illya Kuryakin). And being best friends, it was not a good idea to both adore the same secret agent. Inwardly, I secretly lusted after Illya, with his black crew-neck sweaters and his blond hair, cut in a weird style that nobody else on tv, in films, or in music, sported.

Every Thursday night, Illya would enter my house, in glorious black and white (my friend Jill had a colour tv but we were not very well off, so we didn’t). He would stay for an hour, playing second fiddle to Napoleon, cracking dry, witty jokes in a pseudo-Russian accent, never getting the girl (unless the girl was played by Jill Ireland, who was his then-real-life wife), getting captured, tortured (yes!), rescued, and returning to UNCLE HQ unruffled and unphased, ready for next week’s adventure.

Illya was my friend. So was the actor who played him – because when you’re ten, you don’t really differentiate between the two. Not really. Fantasy is reality. Of course David McCallum lived, breathed, and spoke Illya Kuryakin-ish, all day and all night, in his Los Angeles home, and the fact that he had a wife and three kids was just incidental.

My dad drove us to California in 1966, to see Disneyland. We stayed overnight in Malibu Beach. I’d heard Malibu Beach was where the movie stars lived. I looked for David McCallum. I didn’t see him.

When we drove through Los Angeles the next day on our way to Anaheim, I posted a large sign in the back window of the car. HELLO ILLYA! it said, in very large, almost-12-year-old handwriting.

My father made me take it down after an hour or so, because he couldn’t see the traffic on the freeway behind him.

Later on that year, I lost interest in Illya. I’d found The Monkees. They were on television. They played guitars (and drums, in the case of Mickey Dolenz). They sang. One of them was English. My heart melted.

I decided I would start a fan club. My friend Jill, and my other friend, Cathy, set it up. We made Jill the president, under a pseudonym, because her father was still a classical violinist and it wouldn’t have been very good for his daughter to have been known about town as the President of Saskatchewan’s Monkee Fan Club. Cathy was the treasurer, because she knew how to spend money wisely. And I was the secretary, because I wanted to do all the work.

I was good. I phoned up CJME and CKCK radio and got myself interviewed on the air by the evening DJ’s. We got invited down to answer the phones during one of the radio shows, but we had to politely decline, first of all because we were completely underage, and secondly because we didn’t think Jill would be able to explain it to her father. We had a mailing list, we sent out photos, club cards, bio sheets…

And then I discovered that Peter Tork’s family lived in Regina. It came as a complete shock. Nobody important lived in Regina. But Peter Tork’s family did – because his dad was a university professor, and he’d taken a temporary position at our university.

Peter Tork had a sister who was about my age. I found out where she lived (not difficult in a city of less than 100,000), and I sent her letters. I telephoned her. I kept her on the line for hours at a time, talking about her brother. Anne – if you’re out there – I apologise from the bottom of my heart. Your patience, for a 13 year old, was unparalleled. Never did she tell me to Eff Off and Get a Life. Never did she belittle me for considering her brother someone To Die For. Never did she complain about my calls.

I don’t know if she just naturally had a kind heart, or if she’d been told to be nice to her brother’s fans, or if she was intrigued by the idea of being younger sister to a very big star.

The relationship ended when our club was declared illegal by the TV network that carried the series. We couldn’t continue. We had to hand our files over to CTV, and we were Out of Business.

The experience, however, was one of those life-changing things that stays with you. I learned about fans. I was one, so that wasn’t a big deal. But I learned about seeing things from the other side. I got letters from young girls, who wanted me to pass their missives along to The Monkees. I got letters from girls who were in awe of ME, because of what I was doing. I got letters from girls who wanted to me to set up meetings for them, who would do ANYTHING to meet the objects of their attention.

ANYTHING?

I have to stop at this point and say that I was never the kind of fan who would do ANYTHING to meet their idol. My story about Paul McCartney had as its theme friendship, and that was how I always viewed my idols – as my friends. Because, after all, I knew them intimately, didn’t I? I read everything that was written about them in fan magazines… I listened to their music, I watched their TV shows, I saw them in films… they had entered my life, and so it was only natural that I believed – conversely – that I had entered their lives.

If we met on the street, I believed we would be instant and complete buddies.

Fast forward a few decades. After a number of years being married to a radio news broadcaster (see, I did actually fulfill one or two of my adolescent dreams of being associated in one way or another with fame), I rediscovered my childhood passions. I’m not sure why this was. Perhaps it was just time to re-visit. The moon and stars were in alignment.

I rediscovered Illya. David McCallum. There had been a movie on tv – The Return of the Man from UNCLE. I was transfixed. What had happened to him over the intervening years? What had he got up to? I found a fan club, and a fan magazine. I got in touch with the president of the fan club. Explained I was a writer, and a fan from the start. Got a gig writing for the fan magazine which lasted about 10 years.

I wrote a letter to David McCallum. I got an answer back. I was gob-smacked. It was fabulous. And I felt complete. I wanted nothing more. I had been Acknowledged.

I was in frequent touch with the magazine’s editor. She would relate stories to me about the letters she got from fans. They sounded hauntingly familiar. But they were not written by adoring 12 year olds. They were letters from women my age, and they would do ANYTHING to meet their idol. And they meant it.

Fast forward another few years. It’s now 1995, and I have just discovered Sean Bean. Yorkshireman. Odd accent. Appearing in something called “Sharpe” on PBS. Lightning flashed, thunder boomed, beacons flared in my consciousness. WHO IS THAT MAN? I said to myself – and I set myself on a quest to find out.

The adventure was a lovely journey. I felt like a teenager again. It was the dawn of the internet, and I set up a website. I contacted his publicist. The publicist knew nothing about the internet, but was willing to help. He dragged Sean down to an internet cafe in London one day, and together they spent hours going over my modest effort.

Acknowledgement.

And I got letters. Emails. Snail mail. Women who wanted me to set up meetings. Women who related their fantasies about what they would do to Sean, if they ever got their hands on him. Women who wanted to correspond with me, because I was like a link to Sean, and they felt like they were touching him, if they touched me. Even if it was only in cyberspace.

I travelled to England and met Sean on the set of one of his films. It was hilarious. He had no idea I’d be there – Sean’s publicist had set it up, but had decided not to tell him in advance.

I was standing in the background with my friend Julie, watching all morning while he filmed “Extremely Dangerous” beside a canal in Manchester. I finally approached one of the film’s producers and asked whether he’d introduce me, as I didn’t want to make an idiot of myself.

He was quite amused, and said, “Carpe Diem!”… and then disappeared for lunch.

Julie, who speaks Latin, helpfully translated it for me. “Seize the day,” she said, knowingly.

We went for lunch. And when we came back, we waited where we had been told to stand. But none of the other crew appeared.

The only other person standing in that area was, in fact, Sean Bean. He was lounging against a brick wall, looking for all the world as if he was waiting for a call on his mobile.

I don’t know what the producer had told him. But he was alone.

“Carpe diem!” Julie screamed, in my ear.

And so I did.

I introduced myself. I thought that I would be dismissed out of hand, that he wouldn’t know who I was. I blew my first line. I said, “I’m Nona, and I do the internet.” I’d meant to say, “I do your website”… and I was going to add, “on the internet”… but it all came out jumbled.

Sean looked at me, and I fled. I ran away.

Sean came running after me. This interchange has become legendary amongst the fans who’ve frequented my website. I go down in history as the woman who had Sean Bean chasing her through the canal-side streets of Manchester.

I did eventually stop running, got my courage back, and had a really nice – albeit short – conversation with him.

And it was all I wanted. I was complete, yet again. It felt like we were friends. I’d made the connection. I’d been Acknowledged.

Over the years I had three more meet-ups with Sean, the longest and best being an almost-two-hour interview in his trailer on the set of another film in Toronto.

I don’t kid myself. This would not have happened, if I hadn’t been running the website. I still felt like his friend, but I knew that it was a professional friendship, that Sean was doing it because it was a great opportunity to showcase himself online. By agreeing to be interviewed by me, he gave my website “street cred”. The published result was viewed by a LOT of people – including British journalists who, interestingly enough, suddenly changed the way they presented Sean in their stories, so that it was closer to the style I’d used in my writing and direct quotations.

It’s interesting what happened after that in another way. Suddenly, a lot of fans thought it would be nothing at all for Sean to agree to be interviewed by them. They emailed me to ask me to set it up. I forwarded their requests to his agent. I didn’t get involved.

But I realized what had happened. I was “ordinary”. I was a fan, just like they were. But I’d achieved something that they could only dream of. I’d spoken to Sean personally. I’d spent time with him. I’d shaken his hand. I’d drunk tea with him, eaten his chocolates, declined dinner and drinks – because I’d already eaten and if I drank I’d quickly have lost any semblance of coherence during the interview – and to top it all off, he’d given me a lift back to my hotel afterwards.

The reason why Sean had agreed to do the interview in the first place – and he told me this – was because I could be trusted. I wasn’t going to turn into a gooey mass of slobbering fandom. I wasn’t going to embarrass him. I was going to remain professional.

I’m not really involved with the website anymore, though it’s still online. I promised Sean’s fans that I would maintain it as an archive of his career, and I’ve kept that promise. It’s not that I’m no longer a fan – I still get Google alerts every time his name is in the news. It’s just that my life required more concentration in other areas. My focus is now on screenwriting – and because I also have a full time job, my free hours – Time for Me – is severely limited.

I have developed another fan interest, though. My obsessive personality doesn’t allow me to go for long without one. While researching and writing one of my feature scripts last year, I rediscovered a musical interest that I had, actually, grown up with. Their music was on the radio when I was a child, and it’s always been with me. For some reason, when I was writing this script, I allowed that interest to turn into something like what I felt for Illya, The Monkees, and Sean Bean.

It’s been interesting following the fan sites for this group, and actually being in touch with one of the webbos, and also with one or two of the musicians. (Acknowledgement – remember! I crave it!)

It’s also been interesting reading comments from some of the fans – because now we live in an age where people communicate instantly, share their thoughts, their gripes, their fears, their passions. Fandom is no longer a private obsession.

What’s really interesting is specifically reading how some of these fans think of the musicians as their friends. It reminds me of my little story about Paul McCartney. Reality and fantasy, the blurred boundaries, the disconnect that happens because of familiarity… we, as fans, know the objects of our attention so well – at least we THINK we do – and yet the objects of our attention often have no clue who we are at all.

There’s a conundrum on one of the fansites right now because some there feel that they should be given first hand information about what their favourite musicians are up to – rather than reading it second hand via News Alerts or associated friends who are in the know.

When I was running The Compleat Sean Bean, people thought I had an inside track on Sean’s career. I was always the one they turned to when there was a rumour, a new project, the mere mention of a new project. I didn’t really have an inside track. I had a working relationship with Sean’s agent, and I was allowed to email and ask whether a rumour was true or not, and also whether a project was confirmed or not. That was all. Sometimes I got answers. Sometimes I didn’t. I ran the Number One website for Sean Bean on the internet, and Sean never dropped in to let me know what was next on his acting CV.

I remember telling Sean during that famous interview in Toronto that he didn’t really owe his fans anything except a brilliant performance. I believed it then, and I believe it now. It’s the same for everyone who is in the spotlight. Musicians. Actors. Artists. Writers.

You have fans for a reason. It’s because something you have done – a performance, a publication, a recording, a painting – has captured someone’s heart. And has made an impression. Many many times over. And fans should know this. You are a fan for a reason. It’s because something someone has done, has captured your heart. Many many times over.

And you should never let the boundaries blur.

Re-reading it, what strikes me is the remoteness with which I viewed the tragedy that triggered the story. It’s written as a kind of numb removal.

Did I really achieve what I claimed in the last line…?

My screenplay, Found at Sea, is the story of Chris, a purser aboard a cruise ship, and Katy, a travel agent who becomes his love interest. Although I’ve made Chris the primary protagonist, at one point (prior to workshopping!), Katy was almost equally important.

In the story, Chris has literally run away to sea after the death of his wife in a fire. A burning cigarette was left in a sofa, and she died of smoke inhalation. Chris was blamed, even though there was no proof of any criminal intent. When Chris and Katy first meet aboard the ship, they talk about this tragedy, and Katy tells Chris her best friend died in a fire when she was nineteen. The shared tragedies allow them to connect.

When I was in first year university, my best friend, Bev, married her first boyfriend, Mike, in a quick ceremony.

I was the solitary bridesmaid. It was a quick ceremony because Bev had discovered she was pregnant, and in Regina in those days, being unmarried and pregnant was something shameful.

Bev was a drama student and she had just got the lead in a play called “Blood Wedding”. They postponed their honeymoon because of rehearsals.

Two days after the ceremony, a drunk man fell asleep with a lit cigarette in a basement suite in their apartment building.

There were no fire doors, because the safety code at that time hadn’t made them mandatory.

Bev and Mike lived on the third floor, but the smoke was intense and filled the entire building, trapping nine people who were eventually found dead of asphyxiation.

Bev and Mike’s bodies were among the nine located by the Fire Department.

Less than a week after their wedding, I was attending their funeral, in the same church, surrounded by the same people.

Bev was buried in her wedding dress – which she had borrowed from the wardrobe of her play. The total irony of the play’s title was completely overwhelming.

I was devastated. When you’re nineteen, you don’t think in terms of death. You’re fearless. Death is what happens to old people.

Bev’s death impacted me for years afterwards. I refused to go to weddings – the association was just too painful.

And I became keenly aware that human life is fragile, and can be taken away like that, in the snap of a finger.

I kept trying to write about it, but whatever I wrote was either too self-pitying or too unbelievable to be a good story.

In Found at Sea, although Katy has been relegated to a less-important character than Chris, the story of the fire in her youth acknowledges Bev and Mike’s fire, and because Katy talks about it, I’ve finally found a way to give words to my own grief.

Later on, when the ship catches fire, Chris leads Katy and eight entertainers through tortuous, smoke-filled corridors, to safety.

The act of saving them absolves Chris of the guilt he feels over his wife’s death…and, surprisingly, I’ve found it allows me to symbolically save Bev and Mike – which is perhaps what I needed to do, all along, in order to finally allow the memory to rest.

I don’t like to refer to what I write as “art”. I prefer to call it a “craft”. Art seems to me to be something aesthetic – something that encompasses philosophy, beauty, contemplation, taste, sensibility. That’s far too highbrow for me.

I used to write short stories and long fiction. Now I write tv and film scripts. All of them have one thing in common: a complete lack of higher meaning.

It’s not that I’m unaware of loftier goals in writing. I have a BA (Honours) in Literature and I completed all of the classes required for an MA before I realized I was going in completely the wrong direction. Degrees in Literature offer a forensic dissection of great writing. What I needed was a degree in Construction. And so, five years after I abandoned the idea of a thesis on Canadian writer Sinclair Ross, I pursued an MFA in Creative Writing. And graduated, much to my own great relief.

When I was doing my BA, my venerable professors had a bit of a problem with me. My creative soul was screaming for attention. And the essays I researched, argued and presented on a regular basis for four years just weren’t satisfying that yearning need. Consequently, I sought out other ways to stifle the frustration.

I recall once presenting a term paper entitled “e.e. cummings: The Enormous Poem”. It was, of course, a critique of the novel, The Enormous Room. I argued that because e.e. cummings was primarily known as a poet, his novel was actually a very long poem and not a piece of fiction at all. My instructor was unimpressed.

In a directed reading class on Joseph Conrad, I presented a paper on Seamanship, since a number of Conrad’s novels took place in whole or in part aboard seagoing vessels. I had three-masted schooners, flying jibbooms, mainsails, topsails, topgallant sails…I even documented the six different motions a ship makes while underway (surge, sway, heave, roll, pitch, yaw) – all of which can happen singly or in combination – which goes a long way to explain seasickness.

My research was acknowledged…. But I lost marks for not spending enough time relating that research back to Lord Jim, The Nigger of the Narcissus and Typhoon.

I do recall once receiving a perfect mark on an essay about the poetry of Leonard Cohen. It was a straightforward piece of writing, not difficult to do at all, and the research was easy. Leonard Cohen was a Bohemian, a songwriter, a mystic, a folksinger. His poetry was romantic and religious and dryly humorous. The instructor of that class was a huge fan of Leonard Cohen and I suppose that might have had something to do with my grade. I knew how to write to please my audience.

All of the graduating Honours Literature students at the University of Regina were required to hand in a “definitive” major essay which would stay permanently on file, a lasting record of scholarship and research. Mine was called “Prairie Literature and Mental Illness”. My advisor tried his best to talk me out of it. But I would not be dissuaded.

My thesis was simple. People who live on the Canadian prairies exhibit a higher than usual instance of mental illness. This is caused mostly by exposure to extreme weather, but also by isolation, culture shock (in the case of immigrants), peculiar neighbours, and sensory deprivation. Since literature mirrors society, prairie writers have, for some time, knowingly or unknowingly, been creating characters who suffer from a wide variety of psychological disorders.

It was, of course, completely tongue-in-cheek. And it was not appreciated – least of all by my advisor, who was himself a fairly well known prairie novelist, and whose characters I had included in my study as examples of flagrant erotomania.

I began this piece with a statement regarding my creative writing. I regard it as a craft rather than an art. My ongoing rebellion against scholarly study at university seems to have influenced my sense of definition.

“Craft”, to me, is closer to what I strive for – a skill, or a proficiency, or perhaps a skilled artistry. When I write, I don’t feel I’m imparting any kind of hidden, deeper meaning to my work. I write to tell a good tale, and that’s all. I craft the story. If I can coax you to keep reading or to keep watching, if I can cause you to cheer my heroes and hiss at my villains – then I have done my job, and I’m happy.

As one of the characters (coincidentally, a Literature major at university) in one of my novels once said…. “There are more important things in life than the mystical lyricism of water and the quest for prelapsarian bliss in a textual account of Huckleberry Finn.”

I would walk into the church – which was cavernous and cool, and smelled of frankincense and the dark red powder janitors used to sweep floors – and I would take the glittering glass cups that contained the flickering candles, and I would hide them in places that would burn. Under the wooden pews. Inside the confessionals. Beneath the altar, where the flames could lick at the starched white cloth and race up towards God, and the wooden crucifix that was hung with the agonized body of his son, to the hovering tabernacle that housed the Holy Ghost.

I decided I would do this, because God knew everything, and my nightly plea to him to stop the bullies from throwing dog shit at me on the way home – to stop them from cornering me in the schoolyard and stealing my mittens, my jacket, my notebook, my yo-yo and whatever else they could lay their hands on; to stop them from threatening to cut my throat with a penknife if I ever told on them – was evidently falling on deaf ears. God did not care that I had spent Thursday morning having my lower spine x-rayed because on Wednesday afternoon I’d been deliberately tripped on the ice.

God was as big a bully as the girls who attended Confession on Wednesdays, shoplifted lipstick and nail polish from Pinder’s Drugs on Thursdays, pursued me with the pointed ends of their compasses on Fridays, and sat in the front pews with their families during Mass on Sundays.

God deserved to be taught a lesson.

The day someone else set the Cathedral on fire, I was in school. From the classroom windows I could see the double silver spires and, between them, a terrible beauty – a soft, rolling cloud of red-grey, black-grey, brown-grey – plumes of dense, toxic fury, spewing out of shattered stained glass windows, competing with the steeples for God’s immediate attention.

I was glad.

The faithful were sent elsewhere to confess and pray. The doors and lower windows of the soot-blackened Cathedral were boarded over until money could be raised to rebuild what had burned inside. But if you knew where to look and how to do it, you could pull away a piece of the plywood, and you could crawl through the small gap. You could trespass.

Which I did, when I needed somewhere to hide, after Joan McIntyre warned me that Margaret McDonald and Mary O’Brien were going to wait for me after school and beat me with their brothers’ hockey sticks.

I pulled away the plank, and slipped myself in.

The Cathedral was built of brick and stone and concrete, and its shell was intact. The flames had stripped away the interior – the green carpet leading up to the altar – though the altar itself was marble, and still stood. The cloth at the altar rail, the doors to the confessionals, the first few rows of pews. The heat had shattered the glass cups that held the votive candles before the statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph. The statues themselves were streaked with grime, but their eyes still stared out into the semi-darkness. Their outstretched hands still coaxed the weak and the helpless to believe.

As I stood in the charred remains, waiting for my eyes to get used to the lack of sun, I heard a noise. I looked, and saw two others. They were sitting in the pews at the back, in a place the flames had not touched. One was Father Wasylenko, a young priest who heard our Confessions, and said Mass on days when Father Murray was indisposed. The other was Sister Mary Rose, who taught Grade Three.

Father Wasylenko’s white collar shone in the blackness as Sister Mary Rose removed her veil and wimple. Her blonde hair was cut short and raggedy, and her face made me think of a small, frightened child.

They spoke for a few moments more, earnestly and passionately. They kissed. Earnestly. Passionately.

I crept away.

Margaret McDonald and Mary O’Brien were waiting for me in the back lane a block away from my house. And they were indeed armed with their brothers’ hockey sticks, though one broke in half immediately and Mary O’Brien tripped over hers when Mrs. Houston, who was the President of the Catholic Women’s League, came out onto her porch and demanded to know what the hell was going on.

The next day at school, during recess, in the middle of the playground, I aimed my yo-yo at Margaret McDonald, and shot it out, spinning, on the end of its string. I whacked her smack in the jaw. The other children were transfixed.

Mary O’Brien ran to the Principal.

I was marched into Mr. Halter’s office and given the strap.

I went back last year. The school was closed, and there were plans to tear it down. The Cathedral was still there, though, and it looked the same – at least on the outside.

Inside, the lights were on, and the atmosphere was warm and golden. The dark walnut pews had been replaced with pale, bleached seats. The statues had vanished, as had the tormented crucifix. And the altar was a simple table, facing the congregation, surrounded by hanging fabric panels decorated in brilliant purple, crimson, teal, and jade.

A woman was sitting near the front, and although she was older, I recognized her elfin face and cropped blonde hair. She was wearing a simple grey dress.

“Sister Mary Rose,” I said.

She looked at me, startled, and then she, too, recognized me, reaching over the chasm of forty years.

She remembered I had attended the school, and she remembered I had been bullied.

“But I couldn’t do anything,” she said, “because we were encouraged not to get involved unless the parents complained.”

I told her I had fantasies about setting fire to the Cathedral.

She laughed. “I did, too.”

“And then it really happened.”

Sister Mary Rose looked at me, and smiled.

I asked if she was still a nun.

She shook her head. “In a way, I think it was you who made up my mind for me. I was desperate in those days. I didn’t have the courage to leave the convent and renounce my vows. I was afraid of what God would think. And then I saw you in the playground that day. You finally hit back. I thought that showed such immense courage….”

I sat down next to Sister Mary Rose – her real first name was Jackie, though she never told me her last name – and we talked for a while. Neither of us believed anymore in the things we had been taught. But we had both been drawn to the Cathedral at that moment, on that day.

Perhaps God had decided to listen, after all.
————
The above was a writing assignment for one of my classes at Vancouver Film School in 2003.
Some of it is true.

Queue the assembled, in unison: “Hi, Winona!”

If it sounds like an Alcoholics Anonymous intro, there’s a reason. Writing is an addiction. If I don’t write, I get miserable. I get depressed. I start to imagine conspiracies. I feel sorry for myself, and then I get frustrated.

Enough of that. My name is Winona, and I’m a writer, and I’ve been writing since I was about five.

I didn’t have a written language when I was five, though, so I opted for the caveman process, and drew pictures on walls. Mostly of little boy fairies. I’m not sure why my idea of fairies was male, as opposed to the more commonly held childhood belief that they were beautiful females with gossamer wings and floaty frocks… but male they were, and usually naked. Which was interesting, because I’d never actually seen a naked boy, and all I knew was that there was “something” different Down There. I had no idea what it looked like. Possibly a sausage.

So our basement wall (behind the portable blackboard that my mother had set up) was covered with cavorting naked boy fairies, with sausages in front, and wings to the rear. I can’t really remember what adventures they got up to. Perhaps they existed only to frighten my mother, who read a lot of books about child-rearing, and who no doubt thought that her first-born daughter had some sort of repressed phallic-envy disorder.

Sometime before I actually started going to school full-time (as opposed to Kindergarten, in the mornings), I graduated to paper and crayon, and I began to develop a real story sense.  I drew a series of individual panels, each telling the fascinating tale of princesses (or other noble characters) who lived in idle luxury, surrounded by jewels and velvet, the riches of the land, smiling faces, perfect hair… only to be cast out, fortunes ruined, hair matted, clothing ragged, smiles reduced to scowls, the jewels and the velvet snatched away, luxury lost.

My school was probably the worst in the city, a Roman Catholic institution in a low-income neighbourhood filled with immigrants (as we were). The nuns were well-intentioned but suffered from their own inadequacies and fears. Creative thinking was not encouraged. I wanted to colour poppies blue and pink on Remembrance Day, but they were to be Red, and I didn’t get any gold stars for arguing with them about it. I wanted to use my thumb and first finger in the scissors as they taught us to cut things out, but that was Wrong.

We didn’t get much story-telling practice in those straight rows of desks. We did prescribed schoolwork, and we did it in silence. We were told that daydreaming was sinful, that non-Catholics were doomed, and that our lives should be dedicated to having pure minds and even purer souls, lest we miss out on the Day of Judgement when God would selectively cull everyone who had displeased him, and carry on into Eternity surrounded by a kind of mindless clique of Yes Men and Yes Women who were fond of kissing his feet, splashing themselves with Holy Water, and endlessly confessing their sins, perceived and real, then performing a prescribed penance, usually on their knees in front of a benevolent-looking statue.

I suppose I’ve included all of these details in order to explain why I continued to be a writer. I think I was probably born that way, though I can’t find anyone else in my family – on either side – who has written fiction or screenplays. I’ve got a first cousin who was a film director in England until she went back to university to get her Masters Degree, focusing on human rights. I’ve got some other first cousins who have written nonfiction articles, and their mother, my aunt, wrote nonfiction books. I’ve got a great uncle who was a West End actor in London in the 1940s  (his stage name was Felix Knupfer, though his real name was Felix Knopfmacher). Creative people all… but not writers of fiction.

I continued to be a writer, because I had no choice.

And so, in Grade 8, I wrote my first novel. It was about a young man named Lawrence Jenkins-Hennesey who was kidnapped and transported in the hold of a cargo ship to England, where he became involved in subterfuge and adventure. I had taught myself to type by that point, and I would take my chapters to school and hand them out to everyone at recess. I had five or six chapters on the go at once, with kids lining up for the next installment. It was an eye-opening experience, because these same kids had, several years earlier, bullied me to the point where I would make up an illness, rather than have to face going to school to deal with them.

I learned what it was like to have fans. I learned what it was like to feel important. I learned about acknowledgement. And it was lovely.

I wrote five or six more novels before I finally got one published. One was autobiographical, based on my years at that hateful school, including the bullies who were the descendants of the city’s founding fathers, the important families in the church; the nuns who had a somewhat unhealthy obsession with the suffering of Jesus Christ before he was crucified (one of them was very fond of detailing in excrutiating detail what would be involved in a scourging); the principal with the stomach ulcer who administered The Strap to me – not because I hadn’t done my math homework, but because I’d lied about it when asked in the first instance whether it was completed or not; my fantasies about burning down the Cathedral next door to the school; my adventures in the Convent next door to the Cathedral, where I went for piano lessons and where it was rumoured the nuns kept young women captive, their heads shaved, their clothing removed, in attic cells….

My third novel was called My Teacher The Swinger and it was written about my Grade 10 history teacher, who I fell in love with at the age of 14. He wasn’t, alas, impressed.

My fourth novel was called Underground, and it was a masterpiece. My high school (unlike my elementary school) was progressive and non-denominational (I refused to go to the Convent school to complete my education). Our Grade 12 teacher told us to do whatever we wanted for our Lit class final project, so I wrote Underground, about two teenaged boys and a teenaged girl who decide to walk from Morden to Golders Green, along London’s Northern Line tunnel (17 miles), overnight when the electricity was switched off.

Roundabout Tooting Broadway, one of the boys (named Lucifer in the first instance but later re-named Christopher in rewrites) decides to kill the other boy – something about jealousy over the girl – and you know what happens in the end, because the only thing that can happen in a story about the London Underground is that someone is trapped when the electricity is switched back on and invariably gets run over by a train.

I enjoyed writing that. And I got a 100% grade for it.  Acknowledgement.

In the years following high school I got a few more works of fiction out. One concerned a young man with Multiple Personality Disorder – goes to England as the pianist accompanying a high school choir, wakes up a year later with no memory of what’s gone on, discovers he’s been travelling the world as someone else and getting into Rather a Lot of Trouble…

At university, working on my BA in Lit., I worked for a Canadian writer named Ken Mitchell. Ken taught me a number of things, not the least of which was humility, which is an admirable trait, but it’s a bugger if you’re trying to pitch your works in an environment which requires supreme confidence!

Ken also taught me about dialogue, and about active verbs – never use a passive verb when an active one is begging to be used instead – and about structure… characters… storylines… I actually owe Ken a lot.

After university, I had to find a job, and I decided very early on that it would not be a job that involved writing. I believed then – as I still believe now – that if you earn a living writing for other people, you exponentially reduce the creative brain time left for yourself,  with the result that you will either spend your entire working life promising to write That First Novel… or you will become frustrated beyond measure, because you have ideas, and no outlet, because you owe your soul to The Company.

So I worked… and I continued to write… though not at the same rate, because the better part of my day was taken up planning peoples’ holidays. Which is, in fact, a very creative activity.

But that’s another blog

Five or six years after becoming a travel agent, I went back to university, this time to get my Masters in Creative Writing. It was the most glorious time of my life – I was with fellow writers, I was doing it full-time, I was wallowing in creativity… and I was getting that all important Acknowledgement again.

My thesis was a historical novel, set in 1882 Saskatchewan, the first year in the life of the little town of Pile of Bones, which would eventually become the city where I grew up, Regina. It was an epic – two women meet on a train going west. One is a well-bred Londoner who has married the rogue son of a rich man. Rogue son has been sent to Saskatchewan to cool his heels. Wife is now joining him, with no idea about the fate awaiting her – a sod hut on the bald prairie, husband a cruel philanderer, an unwanted pregnancy, a near-death experience in a blizzard…. the other woman is the wife of a shopkeeper from Winnipeg, joining her husband and sons in Pile of Bones – husband has set up shop in a tent, sons are on the verge of puberty… one runs away with a young girl and ends up in a house of ill-repute…

I re-read parts of this charming story recently and was astounded at just how dreadful my writing was. The storylines were fabulous. The execution of said storylines… not so wonderful.

I was disappointed when this novel didn’t get published – but a couple of years later, my next effort, Skywatcher, did break through for me… and after that, The Cilla Rose Affair. Both are about the same characters – spies. Skywatcher takes place in Vancouver… Cilla Rose takes place back in London…and has a lot to do with the Underground…

A few years ago I went back to school again, in order to learn how to write screenplays. I’ve now written or co-written six or seven… three optioned… two others on the permanent verge of being produced – the saga of trying to interest actors, agents and producers in my scripts is worth at least another three blogs

But now, I’ve decided to go back to my novelists’ roots… and my next effort will be long fiction, written in tandem with a new screenplay.

“Cold Fingers”.

Two musicians. Four hands. Fifteen fingers.

I’ll leave the rest to you to imagine, until it’s finished.

My name is Winona, and I’m a writer.