Hey! Back home to Tumilik after being away from home for about a month, although I did come back for two days last week.

Still no trucking although things might pick up soon. And no words from the army yet. Things are really, really slow.

Got Tumilik busy digging around.

She could dig deep enough to get what she was looking for.

Last week me and my girlfriend Mélanie went to Saint-John, New Brunswick. It's only a four hours drive from her place, easy. She had to visit someone at the hospital, and we also went downtown to try this place.

She wasn't used to such place so I had to help her a bit.

It was really good.

I got her to try some takoyaki..and she didn't like it. She said it tasted good, but she couldn't do with the texture.

More for me..!

It's a really nice place and we'll definitely come back.

Hah!

Nice..!

Cunt.

Awww.

I filled my taxes. It's actually really easy for me to do that as I've been doing them myself every year. It took me maybe fifteen minutes to fill, and I sent the files immediately. I should get my refund within a few days. Woohoo!

Pepper the cat.

Garfield. He's cute but not friendly all the time. One must be very cautious around him. I learned that the hard way and I've got a scratch on my chin to show for, hah.

I got back home Monday. From Mélanie's to my place is around 830km. An easy drive that I did in 8 hours and 45 minutes. I only stopped once for like four minutes to fill up.

Tumilik was very happy to have me back home.

Politely asking me to go outside.

We got some of our seedlings going.

My friend here sent me a video Monday evening. Showing some sort of Korean recipe. I understood the message and got busy cooking the next day.

It's a fairly simple recipe using simple ingredients. Cabbage, onions, green onions, garlic, gochujang, soy sauce, brown sugar, roasted sesame oil, rice vinegar, gochugaru, chicken, noodles, and spinach.

The proper name is, I believe, Gochujang Dak-Guksu (고추장 닭국). That's what the recipe said anyway.

Cute Tumilik, feeling eepy.

Walking the WinterDog.

Coriander. I got 15 plants going. We use a lot of that here. I usually buy a fresh bunch every week for my weekly cooking needs.

Mélanie didn't know if she liked coriander or not. At the grocery store I found some and gave her a few pieces, telling her she'll either find it ok or hate it. There's no in-between with coriander. You love it, or you hate it. And if you hate it, you hate it a lot.

She thought it tasted ok.

Good..!

I've been writing quite a lot lately. It really began after I came across a Facebook post about a 100-word microfiction contest. Something in me stirred, and I simply started writing. In ten days I had come up with twenty-two stories. From there, the pieces grew longer. One reached a little over four thousand words, and another, currently underway, may very well stretch past fifteen thousand. Perhaps more.

The truth is, I’ve been writing stories for as long as I can remember. Back in high school, during French class, I often found myself more interested in filling my notebooks with bits of fiction than paying attention to the lesson.

I kept writing through my teenage years, and even after graduating. Once I began a story that reached perhaps one hundred and fifty pages before I abandoned it. It felt wrong. The plot was forced, the narrative stiff, as though I were trying to bend the story to match an idea I had decided upon beforehand.

I cannot write that way. It simply isn’t my method.

I prefer letting the characters lead. They tell the story; I merely follow along and write down what they do. I sometimes have a vague notion of where things might go, but every so often a character takes an unexpected turn and the whole tale follows them somewhere new. The stories become exactly as long as they need to be, no more, no less.

Over the years I must have written three or four dozen stories. Sadly, most of them were lost somewhere between moves from one place to another. Only the ones I’ve written this past month still remain.

But one thing has never changed... I love writing. And with time I seem to have found my own way of telling a story. Those who have read my longer pieces have always said they enjoy the style.

I got my 28 pages story printed, for fun, at home. This is the draft version. I've modified it a bit since.

A cousin of mine read it the other day and absolutely loved it. She read a few of my other stories in the past. She even wrote a little something explaining what she felt about my style of writing. She wrote it in French, and here's the translation..

He writes like someone who has seen something he shouldn't have and made peace with it. His stories are soaked in the kind of mundane Maritime detail that lulls you into thinking you're reading a fond memory, the smell of a wharf, the route to the burger shop, an old dragger rotting in a boatyard. And then someone dies. Horribly, usually. And the next sentence is about soft serve ice cream.

That's the thing that gets you. Not the horror itself, but the way life shrugs and carries on around it, indifferent as a seagull. He's got this gift for dropping something genuinely disturbing into a paragraph and walking away from it without so much as a backwards glance, leaving you sitting there alone with it.

His humour is the darkest kind... the kind that makes you laugh and then feel a bit bad about it. The violence is never theatrical. It's just there, the way bad weather is just there. And his endings don't conclude so much as they stop, right at the moment you least want them to.

Like a light going out.

I’ve also registered with this platform and set up my profile completely, even the tax information and all the rest.

Once I’ve written enough material to make a proper book, I plan to publish it there in three formats: eBook, paperback, and hardcover.

The idea is to put together a compilation of my short horror microfictions, along with the two longer stories I’ve written. Although I believe I might already have the beginnings of a third one forming.

Hopefully it will all come together soon enough.

That's the one I'm working on right now. Still a few thousand words to go!

The last microfiction I wrote.

This one came together in about three minutes. The whole thing unfolded as I was writing it.

I wrote it sitting in the car, parked outside the hospital in Saint John, while my girlfriend was visiting one of her relatives. Visits were limited to one person at a time, and immediate family only.

So I stayed in the car. Listening to Pink Floyd while writing this.

And that's it for now I guess. Cheers!