Writing is very encompassing. I could be sitting in a room full of people, and they're yapping away at a party or at a bar or something, and I'll just move into that space because nobody's talking to me, which is perfectly fine. They're busy getting drunk, and I'm sitting there, sober, thinking about story, thinking about characters and all that stuff. This book that's going to come out, the characters came at me. I was working with another set of characters before, so it's like-- well, let's say there's a sandbox in the playground. So I'm working with these guys, and I'm kind of watching them to see what they do. Next thing I know, these two fucking clowns bust in like, a couple of bats out of hell. They go flying into the sandbox. Everything goes flying. All the sand goes flying, and then these set of character give them the stink-eye. It's like, okay. So these two-- the two main character—they just took over. And I've been living with them for the last two and a half years. My process is I let them run around in my head. I'm not too worried about them like, "Put me down on paper and all that stuff." I'm not worried about that because they're pretty cool about it. I let them run around because I'm not one of those people that's like, "Oh, I've got to write it down." I like them to sort of get comfortable and-- for a lack of a better word improvise and say anything, do anything, give me an image, while I think about them. But they've always sat in the background even when I'm doing other stuff. So they only get bitchy when they realize I'm spending too much time with the rest of my life because the rest of my life has demanded something of me. But then I get ornery too.

I know for some writers, it’s like, ”I get up at 5:00 and I write until 7:00 or 8:00 when the rest of the household wakes up." That's not me. I write whenever I get a chance. Some people think that's undisciplined but that's me taking advantage of a moment, if it's 15 minutes or 20 minutes. Even if I don't write or type anything out on the keyboard it just means that it's still formulating. Then when I have a scene figured out then I go into it. I'm not one of those people that needs to barf out or vomit out a whole bunch of words because it's like, "Well, I got to write 2,000 words today." Why? Because when you edit it down, maybe out of the 2,000 words there's only 200 words that you really need for the book. For me, I don't want to waste all that. I don't want to just puke out stuff and not have any of it be useful. I think about it then maybe I'll barf. A lot of the writing is in my head in terms of figuring out; okay, if I get so and so to do this what's the next logical step for that character to get to where I want them to be. Because for this book, I knew how I wanted it to end. However long it takes to get there, it gets there. The ending was the only thing that was immovable, everything else is up for grabs as far as I'm concerned. I would write scenes that I'd want on file cards and then I would line them up. Then because they're file cards, then I can switch them around if I wanted to. I've probably X’ed half a dozen to a dozen cards. It's nice to see that I'm more than halfway and I've got five cards left. It’s great to see it visually so I can say "Okay, I'm getting close. I'm getting close." For my birthday it was basically staying quiet and spending time with my characters and I guess maybe I was figuring out the third act at that point. I’d finished writing the first draft in June because I was thinking late spring early summer, to complete it. I'm never quite sure if I am on schedule , but I’m never early. I might be a little late, but when I looked and I realized I was on schedule that sort of surprised me, and it's like, "Holy shit [laughter]. I'm almost done!”

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A Tedx Winnipeg talk

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