A big thank you to everybody who turned up at our open house to celebrate the official launch of Plain Kate. We hosted a large gathering, including Seanan Forbes who visited from New York, to my parents, to Erin’s Hopeful Writers friends, to Rebecca, who dropped everything and came in from Stratford. Wellwishes were received from Erin’s family long distance (Rosemarie tells me that the book is in the wild in the Midwest).

We had loads of food, and we weren’t able to eat more than a fraction of it. I know what we’re having for dinner tonight. But the highlight among highlights was the cake that Nan Forler put together, which featured the cover of Plain Kate, rendered in icing.

We spent most of today recovering, not doing much, and tomorrow will be spent cleaning, so you know a good time was had by all.

I’ll have more to write about later, but for now, here’s a picture of my two daughters colouring…

In October 2008, I was commissioned by a contractor working for Crabtree Press on a children’s non-fiction book that’s come to be titled Earth’s Secrets. The book is about the aspects of the Earth which we can’t easily see, like the winds that blow the weather, heat pockets, or the pressures in the fault lines deep beneath the Earth. It was part of a string of work-for-hires I was commissioned to do back in 2008 and, for whatever reason, the title was pushed back until now.

By comparison, it is already possible to pre-order Lamborghini, part of Crabtree’s upcoming Supercars Series, that I just handed over to the editor exactly one month ago.

But that’s how these work for hires go, sometimes. They are written on a completely different schedule, and a completely different creative pull than your standard novel. When I was given two months to write Lamborghini from scratch, including designing an outline, that was the most time I’d been given for such a book. I was assigned a subject, and had to research it, quickly.

And, in spite of that, I had to wait two years before publication. Still, I’m quite pleased by this release. It’s another title under my belt, and it was a book I enjoyed putting together. I look forward to seeing what the book actually looks like, once I get it in my hands (for some reason, Amazon hasn’t seen fit to post a cover of Earth’s Secrets).

Tomorrow is going to be a big party at home for the arrival of Plain Kate, and like Erin, I am looking forward to seeing how the book does in the wild. Still, as big as Plain Kate is, it’s interesting how it’s still possible to be proud of a much smaller, lower-profile book, simply because it has my name on it. And the reason for that is because an author’s name is written in blood.

The photo on my left is entitled Blanik Glider, by Frank Kehren. It is used in accordance with his Creative Commons license.

I think most writers — the lucky ones, at least — have a loved one who is a natural editor, be it parent or child or sibling or spouse who isn’t afraid to say exactly what he or she thinks about what the writer has written. That person has a sense of what works and what doesn’t, and is a wealth of ideas on how certain things can be improved. Only the most arrogant writers think that they don’t need to be edited. Those people who can give you advice and still manage to speak to you the next day are a vital asset that must be cherished. Indeed, it’s critical. Your material has a much stronger chance of being accepted by editors if it comes pre-edited.

I’m lucky enough that I don’t have one such individual, I have two: my mother, and my wife. Both are published authors (we are eagerly counting down to the official release date of Erin’s Plain Kate). Both are talented. And both aren’t afraid to tell me when something isn’t working in one of my stories and when something needs to be changed. My mother has long proofread my material, going back from my fan-fiction days, and her advise has always been helpful. My first draft of Icarus Down was no different.

Some of you will recall this bit of advice, which forced me to reconsider a critical aspect of Simon’s character:

The big weakness in the book is Simon (who ought to be your greatest strength)… …You have cast Simon very much as a beta male — he is passive, does not try very hard to hold his own against Isaac, tends to follow Rachel’s lead, chooses a risk-free career, insists on not questioning authority, and does very little thinking for himself. In conversation, his responses often make him seem startled, abashed, or confused. This does not make him a character who engages the reader’s interest or sympathy.

You’ll also remember her suggestion: make Simon a pilot, as he was when I first started the story, instead of a postal clerk.

But Erin had some advice of her own to add. Simply changing Simon back into a pilot wasn’t enough. The first scene didn’t quite snap. And part of it, she thought, may have been due to the ambiguous relationship between Isaac and Simon. They clearly have a long history together, but they’re not related. As a result, Isaac comes off as a bully, and Simon comes off as a wimp by simply accepting his presence. There have been friendships between golden boys and quiet keeners before, but if Isaac irritates Simon, why doesn’t Simon just walk away?

But what if Isaac and Simon were brothers?

You can see the difference in my mother and my wife’s creative styles, here. My mother came up with her suggestion after an extensive review of my full manuscript, considering the character of Simon as a whole and identifying the change that could improve the structure of his character throughout the story. Erin’s idea came more spontaneously, one evening as we were getting ready for bed. Her view was, the difference in Simon and Isaac’s characters was not one that would naturally bring them into conflict with each other, unless they tied closer together by familial bonds.

This meshed several dangling elements in the early part of the novel together. The mystery of Isaac showing up on Simon’s maiden flight deepens, from an attempt by Isaac to recruit Simon to a cause, to a discussion about something that is now a pressing concern for the both of them: their mother’s mysterious death.

Erin went further, and took a stab at revising the first scene. After a bit of back and forth between her and me, we have a completely new opener for Icarus Down, which I’d like to share with you, after the break:

My name is Simon Daud, and I was never the special one.

My brother Isaac, now: he was a golden boy. He was older than me — two and a half years — and one of those people to whom everything comes easily. He entered the room and people smiled. He turned in his perfect schoolwork and his teachers smiled. He turned his bright eyes — they were a peculiar shade of amber — toward some girl, and she smiled. He went to the flight academy a year early, became the youngest full-fledged pilot in our colony’s short history, and the mayor himself smiled, and gave him a medal. In short, the universe smiled on Isaac. Right up to the morning he died.

#

It was, I thought for a long time, my fault. If you’ve read deep enough into the history to bother with this annotation, you already know it wasn’t; you understand what really happened. That puts you ahead of me, because when I remember it — and I remember it like it was yesterday; nothing textbooky about it — it still feels like my fault.

He shouldn’t have been there at all, of course. God knows what strings he pulled. (It’s in some other annotation, I expect. You can check) The senior pilot that accompanies a junior pilot on his maiden flap is chosen at random, but obviously older golden-boy brothers shouldn’t be called on to supervise younger, unremarkable ones. But Isaac could always bend the rules.

“What are you doing here?” I said to him, when he turned up that morning on the cable gantries outside Daedalon’s flight bay. Actually, I shouted it to him: the hot wind rushing across the underside of the city was loud, and the cables that held the city suspended hummed like cello strings, so I had to shout to be heard. They could put all the vibration dampeners they wanted, and maybe inside the city you wouldn’t know it, but any pilot or gantry spider would tell you: our cities sang. Daedalon, the capital of our colony and our largest city, had a bass thrum you could feel in your femur. All around me, ornithopters hung like dragonflies caught in a spiderweb. Even folded, their fabric wings surged and rattled.

I’d already been waiting on the gantries for an hour, and I was just about roasted and nearly deaf. It was getting hard not to pace. It was, after all, my first flight as lead pilot. Today, I was going to earn my badge or wash out. Useless adrenaline was knocking around my system, and the delay wasn’t helping. I’d thought it was a problem with the batteries. But when they finally turned up — the pneumatic capsule whoosh-thunking into the tube end — I took them out, turned around and, ta-da, there he was: in his white uniform, the arrowhead of Iapyx above his heart identifying our city; the winged man, falling, on his shoulder: in memory of our colony ship, the emblem of Icarus Down. “Seven senior pilots on shift and I drew you?” I said. “Honestly, Isaac, it just isn’t fair!”

He came close, taking the tube of batteries from me and raising his voice over the oven wind. Our hair blew and tangled together, golden and unremarkably brown. “Fair won’t keep your flight level, cadet,” he answered. “Fair’s got nothing to do with it.”

There was never any point in arguing with Isaac. Holding on to one of the plastic-sheathed cables, I inched to the two-man ornithopter. Beneath my feet — far beneath my feet, a kilometre down — clouds rolled and billowed over the floor of the chasm, a sheet of white backing the black web of Daedalon’s suspension cables.

Behind my left shoulder was the only solid thing from down below: the stem of the city. Its wall curved behind me and swept downward, narrowing like a funnel and finally vanishing into a black point in all that white cloud. Further off were the cliff faces — Daedalon, like all our cities was, you’ll remember, suspended halfway down a clicks-deep chasm. The cliffs stretched upward, bathing us in shadow. Far above, I could see the sunlight blazing off fused silica, too bright to look at directly. Up there over the diamond lands, exposed to our too-bright sun, an ornithopter’s cloth wings would catch fire in under five minutes. A human being would sustain fatal burns in far less time. I didn’t know it, but I had about another hour before I was going to become intimately acquainted with that fact.

My first hour as a pilot, and my last. My brother’s last hour in the world.

Isaac was all business as he climbed into the rear seat and did up the buckles of his harness. He stowed the bag of lead he carried — the one that would perfectly balance his weight in level flight. I did the same. “Ballast in,” he reported, formally. “Cadet, what’s our weight?”

Between the pilot’s seat and the rear seat, the ornithopter engineers had squeezed a small bank of gauges. I checked one of them, tucking my head down to avoid my brother’s eyes. They were bright that morning. I was sure he was planning something. “Two hundred kilos, even.” I paused just long enough before adding, “sir.”

“Good. Battery levels?”

I had just put the batteries in, myself, a second ago. I did — I know I did — look at the gauge anyway, just to be sure. “Full power.”

“Wings?”

“Lateral control reads true,” I said. “Vertical control reads true. Rudder true. Green board.” It wasn’t green, or a board; it was a series of wooden switches. But two generations beforehand, we’d been a star-faring civilization. Old words die hard.

“Tailhook reads true,” Isaac said. I’d missed that one, but he didn’t comment. He looked at me with his sunshine eyes and grinned dangerously. “Crank over.”

Finally. I turned the winch, cranking my chair around to face the windshield. My back left the seat; my chest pressed hard against the harness. Now there was nothing in front of me but the hand and foot levers of the flight mechanisms and, beyond that, a mile-long drop. And now I was in charge. The lead pilot. Isaac was just the navigator. Well, just the navigator who could wash me out of flight school with one report. I heard him tapping the Morse lever. “Requesting permission to drop, pilot,” he said.

We waited. At last, I heard the creak and boom as the giant arms of the Daedalon semaphore, standing atop the vast dome of the city, clanked and turned, aligning to send our flight plan. Poking above into the sunlight, the semaphore mirrors were a beacon that could be seen across the kilometres by watchers in my own city. Huddled in their roof bunker on Iapyx, wearing smoked goggles and watching through filtered mirrors, the semaphore operators risked blindness as they wrote each letter down. They’d put the pencilled slip in a pneumatic, send it down to Iapyx’s flight bay, who would reply, and then…

We waited some more. Hanging from its tailhook, the ornithopter swayed like a pendulum, waiting with us. Finally, the Morse lever clicked to life. Isaac read it out, though he didn’t have to: I knew the code well enough to translate by ear. “Iapyx is expecting us, pilot,” said Isaac. “We are clear to drop.”

I took a deep breath; I couldn’t help it. “Drop,” I said. And we did.

We fell. We needed to be well clear of the cabling before deploying wings, but I lost track of time when I was falling and it was always tempting to unfold too early. I tried to keep the count in my head. I’m sure Isaac never had to count out loud. My mind said the name of my city — one eye-a-pix, two eye-a-pix — and when I got to ten, I heaved back on both hand levers. They fought. Even with the gears, it’s no small thing to push wings out against that kind of speed. The wood handles shuddered; my arms shook. And then levers jerked as the wind caught the wings and snapped them back and into their locks. They seated with a stomach-lurching shchunk, and the ornithopter swung around to level as if it had hit a tightly curved rail. It wanted to keep swinging, and head up, but I fought it. “Wings set,” I reported, unnecessarily. “Navigator, start engine.”

Isaac hit the electric button — the only one on board — and the engine came up with a hum. The ornithopter’s dragonfly wings started to buzz. We were away, flying level, pretty as a picture. I’d done it perfectly. Isaac said not a word.

As we came out from under the cable umbrella of Daedalon, I settled back in my seat, keeping the ornithopter straight and level. Iapyx was an hour away and past several turns in the chasm. I ran over in my mind all the procedures of flying, and the advice of our instructors. I pictured our ornithopter in the centre of the canyon, like a tiny moth flying the routes of a maze: left cliff face half a kilometre to port, right cliff face half a kilometre to starboard. Ahead, five clicks off, the right cliff face angled in front of us: the first turn. I gripped the rudder controls and counted down the minutes. Finally, the black rise of rock on my port side fell away, and a carpet of cloud stretched to my left. I turned the rudder, felt the ornithopter bank, and held on until the chasm opened up in our front wind screen. This length was angled more to the south, meaning that the sun cut lower on the cliffs, here, and I dropped us a hundred metres to compensate. On my left, the cliff face blocked the city of Daedalon from sight.

“Very good,” said Isaac.

I blinked.

“Let me be the first to congratulate you, Pilot Daud.”

“You’re supposed to file a report,” I protested. “It has to be evaluated.”

“Formality. You were never going to wash out, Si. You’re the best cadet the flight school’s had since… well, me. Didn’t you know?”

“Uh… no?” My brother always provoked me to brilliant conversation.

“Trust me. Your wings will be waiting for you when we hit Iapyx. I ordered them myself.”

“Oh,” I said.

“In the meantime, here were are in the middle of nowhere, sky to ourselves, an hour’s easy flying from any prying ears.”

“Prying ears?” I echoed. See what I mean? Brilliant.

“You’d be surprised,” he said. “We need to talk, Simon. It’s important. It’s — it’s about Mom.”

#

Mom. Is she even a footnote to a footnote, now? I don’t suppose she’s important enough even for that. Funny how things turn out, that you’re reading about me. Simon Daud, age (at the time) 16. Older brother: Isaac, 19. Father: Abram, a gantry spider by profession — one of the men who tended to and expanded the webs of cables that held up our cities. Fell to his death in the colony’s 53rd year, age 30. I was five. Mother: Hagar, map-maker, an aide to the mayor of Iapyx’s planning committee. Died in the colony’s 57th year. A suicide.

I was nine. That’s old enough to be shocked, old enough to be angry. Young enough — maybe — to forget, or pretend that you’ve forgotten. Isaac and I, far from the only orphans in that dangerous place, were raised together in resident school, without parents but with cheerful and competent teachers and hall mothers. We did well enough. We hadn’t spoken about Mom in years.

#

We spoke about Mom, now, out by ourselves in an ornithopter, halfway between Daedalon and Iapyx, in some canyon so narrow, it hardly had a name. Isaac didn’t ease into it either. He said, “I don’t think she jumped.”

“Well, I don’t think she flew.” The bitterness in my voice surprised me; I thought I was past that. “They found — parts of her, Isaac. There was an ID.” Though, as I said it, it sounded weirdly vague. Found what? ID’d how? I hadn’t been asked to make an ID. Had Isaac? What if he’d been wrong? My heart lurched like an ornithopter levelling out.

“I don’t mean she’s not dead, Si,” he said. “I mean she didn’t kill herself. Maybe.” All of a sudden, he sounded preoccupied. I heard him tap a dial. How could he lose focus in the middle of telling me this? Isaac, the golden, flying away. He went on. “I’ve been… working with some people. I think… I think maybe she was…”

“Spit it out, Iz!” I said. The ornithopter had nosed up while I was distracted. I pushed the tail flap pedal down to compensate. “You think what?”

“I think she was murdered,” he said. And then: “Did we check these batteries?”

“What?!” And the batteries were fresh. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“We’ve got half a bank, and sinking,” he said. “Nine volts. Eight point seven five.”

“Is this a test?” I barked at him. “Emergency sim? Pilots under emotional stress?”

“No,” he said. “It’s dropping. Look—”

I tried to crane my head around, but I couldn’t see the indicators.

“What does this have to do about Mom?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I think, but… Eight point six. Point five five.”

I gaped at him. “We can’t make it to Iapyx on eight and a half volts.”

“I know.”

There was a sudden and very vast pause. The wings buzzed. They hadn’t changed pitch. We weren’t slowing down. Not yet.

“We’ll ditch,” I said. “Put up flares. They’ll come looking for us when we’re over-time.”

A paper rustle: Isaac pulled the chart down from the roll above his head. Another very long pause. I tried not to ask him. Pilots didn’t ask navigators, and navigators spoke out as soon as they had a fix. Simon Daud, playing by the rules.

“No.” Isaac gave his clipboard a final tap with his pencil. “We’re too far out. The rescue flight will be two or three hours, at least. The tick-tocks will get us by then.” We both looked down as he said it. Beneath the veil of white, I saw dark shapes, the limbs of trees, shiftless as a shipwreck. The fog forest. The bottom of the world.

‘Take us down,” said Isaac. “Get us as low as you can.”

I was pushing on the elevator pedals with both feet before it occurred to me that I was obeying without question, and I had no idea what the plan was. If we weren’t going to ditch, why were we going down?”

“Eight point four,” said Isaac. Those batteries were dropping fast.

“A leak,” I said. “An intermittent short, somewhere.”

“Maybe.” There was a racket as he winched his chair around, and a moment’s rustle poking. “The bank’s got a good seat.”

Funny how good news can be bad news. The connection between the battery bank and the cable that led out to the engine mounted at the front of the tail stem was the only thing that we could check on without landing. And there was no place to land.

“I’m going out,” said Isaac.

“Out where?” Brilliant, again.

“Out on the roof. Gonna check the engine connections.”

Check the engine connections. In flight. It was a wild idea but, knowing Isaac, it would probably work. The engine itself was from interstellar days; it was a black box to us, but nothing short of a supernova could make it go wrong. There were four cables connected to it, two for each wing pair. If here was a short, it was going to be there. It was probably just a matter of wiping some gunk off a plug.

“Keep going down,” he said. “We’ll need the room”

I saw what he meant, now: with him on the roof, the ornithopter would be tail-heavy, and would nose up, no matter what I did to keep her level. Up, toward the sunlight. I heard the click of buckles as Isaac undid his harness. And then the cuff of the door seal, and a deafening rush of wind.

“Take your parachute!” I shouted.

“Like I’d leave you!” he shouted back. But there was a pause and, out of the corner of my eye, I could see the chute pack pull free from the rack above. “Right back, Si!”

And then he went out.

I didn’t have time to worry; it was all I could do to control the flight. The ornithopter lurched to port as Isaac swung out, and I swear it almost went sideways for a moment. I stomped on the starboard elevator pedal and trimmed back the portside wing pair. The next few minutes were a wildly swinging ride as Isaac climbed over the fabric roof. The fragile plane lurched and dipped and I moved hands and feet fast, trying not to drop my only brother into the clouds below.

“Hang on, hang on,” I muttered to myself. Ornithopters were maintained while hanging from their tailhooks a kilometre in the sky. There were handholds sewn everywhere. They were designed for climbing on. I thought things like that, but I kept saying “hang on, hang on,” as if it were a prayer to the Creator.

Finally, the lurching stopped and the ornithopter nosed up hard. Isaac must be on the tail. I floored the pedals, but we kept climbing. It was steep, maybe twenty or twenty-five degrees, but not impossibly so. The waiting was awkward; the bird wobbled every time I touched a control. Up, up. I could hear Isaac shifting on the roof. He must have checked one side and was ready to check the other. But I had got the feel of the weighted ornithopter, now: I compensated and we kept our glide true, right down the centre of the canyon, but going up.

Up. I looked ahead, and my heart thudded. We were running out of shadow.

Less than a kilometre’s flight off, the cliff face ahead glowed in the sun’s radiance. The very air glittered as the sun shone through the cap of fused silica.

“Iz!” I yelled. “Isaac!”

There was no answer. No way he could hear me above the wind of the flight and the buzz of the wings.

“Isaac! We’re going into sunlight!” I banged on the roof. I could suddenly see every wire and strut thorugh the fabric of the ornithopter, as if I were flying an x-ray. I could see Isaac’s dark bulk. He was moving toward the door hatch, thank the Creator.

The plane lurched again, but still headed up. I squinted, watching the cliff face through my eyelashes, unable to let go of the controls long enough to grab the smoked goggles that swung near my ear. Isaac’s shadow fell across me. But at that moment, the cabin glowed brilliant in the blue-white light. The temperature jumped as if poked by a stick. And, worst of all, the controls went slack — dead in my hands. We’d run out of time. Something vital had burned, and broken.

I wrenched around, looking over my shoulder. Isaac was in the doorway. His clothes were smoking. Behind him, the wing was smoking. “Isaac, get back in!” I grabbed at the winch by the seat, trying to turn around, to reach him, to help him. Or just to hold on to him as we both died. “Isaac!”

He struggled to the cab door. He gripped the edge. From here, I could see the skin of his hands blackening. I remember the smell of cooking meat. I remember the way he turned his hand over, peering at it as if curious. He didn’t look as though he was in pain.

The canvas by the door frame caught fire.

Then the wing.

The whole plane was on fire.

I had the seat around; I fumbled with the buckles of the safety harness, trying to get out of the chair, to reach my brother.

The wing fell apart, then, and the wind ripped Isaac away.

I grabbed up my chute and leapt, trying to pull it on as I fell. The ornithopter fell apart around me. I saw Isaac’s parachute balloon out below me. I pulled the cord on mine; it deployed and jerked me upward viciously. The harness, half-on, cut into my armpits. I grabbed the chest strap, buckling it over my breastbone. The backs of my hands were already blistering. Then, below me, Isaac’s chute caught fire. It ripped open from the centre like petals falling off a flower. And then Isaac fell, his body alight. He hit shadow like a shooting star.

The air was so hot that my lungs refused it, making me choke and gasp. I could smell my hair singeing away. I looked down, where Isaac had gone. The veil of shadow was closer, now, but I wasn’t falling quickly enough. I had forgotten to count. I had pulled the chute too soon. And now I was going to roast to death.

The shadow was dark and too far down. Of my brother, there was no sign.

Isaac. He had always led the way. I curled up, burning under the smouldering chute, and hoped I would follow him soon.

I didn’t.

Comments welcome.

You probably don’t know me from Adam and, strictly speaking, I can’t vote for you, even if I wanted to. So what is a man from Kitchener doing writing this letter to a candidate in the race to be mayor of Toronto? Why do I care about your policies for my old home town?

Though I left Toronto back in 1991, I remain firmly attached to my city. One doesn’t forget the place where one grows up. Also, it is a simple fact that, given the economic weight of Toronto, and given the city’s media presence, I know far more about Toronto city council meetings, much less the Toronto mayoralty race, than I do about local politics here in Waterloo Region. And as prosperous as Waterloo Region is, our economic wellbeing is hampered if the City of Toronto underperforms. It is in my own interest, both in terms about how I feel about the city I grew up in, and how I live in the city I live in now, that the next mayor of Toronto knows how to address the challenges facing Canada’s largest city.

I have complained bitterly about the quality of the candidates as a whole in this mayoralty race. I fear that Smitherman is resting on his laurels as a front runner, has no clear ideas on where to take the city into the future, and has an ascorbic personality that will deepen the dysfunctional nature of Toronto’s city council. I believe many of the candidates in this race have embarked on foolish negative policies simply on the basis that incumbent mayor David Miller used to support them, thus throwing the baby out of the bathwater. And the less said of Rob Ford, the better.

But I have been intrigued by your candidacy. You have interesting ideas about where to take this city, and in spite of your negative take on Transit City, your overall campaign hasn’t been as negative as the others. I appreciate your sentiment that Torontonians shouldn’t wait for the province to fund needed transit improvements, and the idea of selling Toronto Hydro, using the funds to clear out the city’s debt, and using the interest savings from that to fund slow and steady subway development, is workable in theory (though I have my doubts about it in practise). Your performance in the recent mayoralty debate, where you spoke sensibly and pragmatically against Rob Ford’s tirade against Tamil immigration shows me that you think well on your feet, and you try to accommodate and negotiate rather than harangue and confront. Toronto city council could use more of what you offer.

And I can’t help but notice that you’ve attracted a number of people who supported John Tory’s campaign for mayor — my second choice in the 2003 election. While I believe that Mayor Miller has done much good for the city, I’m not confident that Pantalone has the charisma to win this election or to carry Miller’s policies forward. Besides, maybe it’s time for a change? Maybe it’s time for a new way of doing things? So, in this open letter, I’d like to share the concerns I have, and offer suggestions on how to improve your platform.

I am particularly concerned about your public transit policy, and cannot in good conscience support your candidacy until those concerns are addressed. I have long had a strong interest in improved public transportation, both in Toronto and elsewhere. With a group of other Torontonians, I help run the web site Transit Toronto (http://transit.toronto.on.ca/). For the past fourteen years, we have diligently recorded the history of public transportation throughout the Greater Toronto Area. We love the TTC. It was an important part of growing up in the City of Toronto, offering us teenagers the mobility other teenagers could not experience until the purchase or gift of their first automobile.

And while we grew up, we watched the Toronto Transit Commission transform from an envy of North American cities to a beleaguered institution, strapped for cash and embarrassing the city with decrepit vehicles and stations. We saw ridership drop by 25%, and we saw buses and streetcars come less frequently and grow ever more crowded.

And we’ve seen things turn around. We’ve seen vehicles, stations and riders come back. The Toronto Transit Commission now carries more passengers per year than it has ever done in its history. We are all well aware that daunting challenges remain, but we’re very interested in ensuring the agency doesn’t slide back to the state it was in during the mid 1990s.

As a candidate from (apparently) the centre-right, you are campaigning towards a sentiment that the city needs to control its costs, possibly by cutting services, possibly by taking a hard line against the unions backing Toronto’s city workers. Your plan to re-launch slow and steady subway construction aside, I fear that a Rossi mayoralty would reduce transit service throughout the City of Toronto, increasing crowds on buses and streetcars and possibly forcing riders to pay more for that privilege.

But my greatest complaint about your transit platform has been your negative approach to the previous council’s Transit City initiative. This strikes me as both disruptive and fiscally unsound. You have suggested cancelling construction on the Eglinton and Finch West LRTs when both projects have been fully committed to by the province of Ontario, absolving the City of Toronto of its construction costs, here.

You have likened these LRT projects to slow streetcars, but that’s simply not true. With Eglinton proceeding through a tunnel from Black Creek to east of Laird, and on grade-separated right-of-way all the way to Don Mills, the Eglinton LRT here is functionally no different from a full-fledged subway line. Travel times on Eglinton between Laird and Keele drop from 48 minutes to 19 under this plan. At the same time, the LRTs offer the flexibility of coming to the surface, west of Jane and east of Laird, bringing higher order transit service to these parts of the city for a fraction of the cost of new subway construction. This is particularly worthwhile considering that the projected ridership levels of these segments, while more than what a bus could handle, is still low enough that subway stations built on this part of the route could be as deserted as those seen on the woefully underused Sheppard subway line.

It seems ludicrous to me that you would be opposed to these transit improvements, particularly when the province has committed to them, and particularly when they would make the lot of transit riders through these parts of the cities much better. Besides, with the money freed up, in theory, by your sale of Toronto Hydro, you could spend it on transit improvements elsewhere in the city, spreading the improvements wider (such as a Downtown Relief subway line) rather than re-inventing the wheel and redoing something that has already been started (such as an Eglinton subway).

Another concern I have is your platform’s proposals on privatization. I see this as potentially and needlessly antagonizing the people who already work very hard at keeping this city functioning. However, I must point out that I am not outright opposed to privatization; I am just sceptical about it. I am aware that examples exist of privatization producing improvements to certain public services, but I’m also aware of many other examples where the promised savings never materialized, and the public ended up with services that were less responsive or available than before. Privatization is not a panacea. However, I remain open to the possibilities privatization offers.

For instance, take the TTC’s washrooms, please. The TTC maintains washrooms at ten stations. (Kennedy, Warden, Bloor-Yonge, Kipling, Finch, Sheppard, Eglinton, Wilson, Downsview, and Don Mills). All of these stations are within the top twenty list of busiest subway stations on the network, and the washrooms themselves have been a notorious source of complaints (although the situation is improving).

Given the high level of foot traffic of these stations (collectively, at least a half million riders per weekday), then one could think that a franchise such as Tim Hortons, Second Cup or Starbucks might jump at a chance to open up outlets at each of these stations. So why not make a deal with them? Renovate and expand the spaces currently occupied by the washrooms and offer that to these franchises as a place to build one of their shops at a modest rent, on the condition that the businesses keep their washrooms accessible to the public and, most importantly, clean?

Given the high level of foot traffic in the other stations of the top ten that don’t have washrooms (St. George, Union, Dundas, King, Queen) and in the one station that used to offer washroom facilities but no longer does (Islington), one could conceive of this as a way of opening more washrooms on the subway network, increasing the comfort of subway patrons without a significant investment from taxpayers. Then, if you reassign the janitorial staff charged with maintaining current washrooms to other duties elsewhere in the system, you improve the cleanliness of the network, again without increasing costs. It’s a suggestion.

But my greatest concern about the transit policies on your platform is that I don’t know much about them. Beyond slow and steady subway expansion and dissing Transit City, what does your campaign propose to do about crowded buses and streetcars already in operation?

For all the faults of the previous administration, much good was done to public transportation in this city. Most of Toronto is now within 300 metres of a bus, streetcar or subway stop that operates at intervals of thirty minutes or better from 6 in the morning to 1 in the morning next day. This opens up so much of the city to people who cannot easily drive and is an important feature to an accessible, pedestrian friendly city.

If your platform calls for constraining the costs of transit, how does it propose to do it? The Toronto Transit Commission is one of the two most cost-efficient transit agencies in North America. Making back 75% of its operating costs from fares, it receives less government subsidy per capita than even New York City. I cannot see how cutting the TTC’s subsidy means anything less than forcing riders onto progressively more crowded vehicles that arrive less often, if at all, and paying more for the privilege. Unless you intend to campaign hard on getting the province to supply more of the operating costs, or try to find some way of reducing costs internally (I have doubts you will be successful there), I cannot see that a Rossi mayoralty will mean anything but worse transit service for all Torontonians.

So, please address this: can you promise here and now that TTC services won’t be cut? Not a bus, not a streetcar and not a subway car? You are encouraged to explain how you’d do this, but for me, I’d rather pay higher fares for better service than current or lower fares for worse service.

Address this, and I believe you will have filled a gap in your campaign platform, and you will have made yourself a well-rounded candidate, and an excellent prospect to be mayor of a dynamic City of Toronto.

P.S.

If you want another suggestion for an interesting campaign platform that improves on rather than simply destroys the Transit City proposal, consider this: while deriding the Eglinton and Finch West LRTs, you have said that there is nothing you can do about the Sheppard East LRT, now that construction has started. This isn’t exactly true, and an opportunity might exist for you to step in and improve the Transit City plan rather than just destroy it. Although construction has started on the Sheppard East LRT project, it has started on work centred around a railway crossing in Agincourt. The money being spent here benefits not only the Sheppard East LRT, but also GO Transit riders on the Stouffville line. More importantly, given the proposal that exists to extend the Sheppard subway to the Scarborough Town Centre, this is not an area where the subway will go.

Early construction of the Sheppard East LRT heads east from the Agincourt crossing, since Metrolinx is still planning out how to connect the LRT to the Sheppard subway stub line in the west. So, theoretically, there may be time to intervene. Offer Metrolinx Toronto’s debt-freed money towards finishing the Sheppard subway, and let the Sheppard East LRT (paid for by the Ontario government) connect to the line at Kennedy rather than Don Mills.

Then let Metrolinx proceed as planned with the Eglinton LRT, the retrofitting of the Scarborough LRT and the Finch West LRT. These are important services that will improve public transit throughout the city in cost-effective ways. Once the money freed up by the sale of Toronto Hydro pays for the completion of the Sheppard subway, tackle another priority that is currently low on Metrolinx’s list, but high on the minds of Torontonians: the Downtown Relief subway line.

(Update: August 26 at 4:53 p.m.) I’d like to note that Mr. Rossi gave me a classy reply, which I greatly appreciated. Rossi wrote:

@jamesbow Thank you for your thoughtful letter. Your passion for transit is evident and I appreciated reading your views and insight. My campaign appreciates all ideas, and takes them into consideration, on how to improve our great city.

We shall see what we shall see.

Please note that this book review contains spoilers, so if you don’t want to be spoiled, look away, now.

Charlie Fletcher’s middle-grade fantasy Stoneheart is a promising but ultimately frustrating read. There is a lot to like about this book, but it can be a challenge to read, and certain flaws detracted from my enjoyment at the end.

The story starts with a 12 year old boy named George, who’s had a really bad day. He’s one of those kids who are easily picked upon by casual bullies, and his teachers are, at best, complacent. On a trip to the Natural History Museum in London, George gets into trouble for something he didn’t do, and he rebels against his life by storming out of the museum, on his own, and then punching the head of a stone dragon.

But rather than break his hand, George ends up breaking the solid stone instead. And that’s not the weirdest thing that happens. In retaliation for this affront, a stone pterodactyl peels itself off of the wall of the Natural History Museum and stalks George through the busy streets of London, among Londoners who take no notice of a boy running for his life from a vicious statue. It’s only when George desperately takes refuge at the base of a war memorial that his life is saved, when the bronze Gunner steps off his pedestal and dispatches the pterodactyl with three shots of his bronze gun.

George’s troubles have only just started, however. The Gunner explains that George has fallen into an “unLondon”, a parallel version of London overlaid atop of the “real” London where the statues move, and are divided between the spits (statues that retain a definite human form — particularly soldiers on war memorials) and taints (statues of animals or creatures of the imagination, which are jealous of the spits for their resemblance to their human makers). George’s act of rebellion has upset the fragile truce between the taints and the spits and has riled the taints into a murderous rage. George has less than twenty-four hours to find the Stone Heart — possibly a stone at the heart of London — to make amends for what he has done, and return himself to his old world. Fortunately the spits, who have no love for the taints, will help him.

The Gunner and George are also helped by a girl named Edie who, unlike the normal residents of London, can see the statues move and, when seeing George walking with one of them, eagerly rushes forward, thinking that she’ll be alone no longer. But Edie is not like George. She is a ‘glint’, who has a special ability (or possibly a curse) of seeing images of the past (and forcibly broadcasting them to anybody in the area) just from touching particular objects. Despite early friction, George and Edie manage to work together and become friends — which is good, because the array of fearsome statues against them are terrifying to behold. Worse than the taints is a mysterious, cursed man known as the Walker — who wants to take the broken dragon’s head to the Stone Heart for his own benefit — and his mysterious raven companion, which may be a denizen of hell and is impossible to kill. And time is running out.

There is a lot to like about Charlie Fletcher’s Stone Heart. The London he establishes is lovingly crafted and richly detailed, and his depiction of George’s very bad day makes for great reading. The characterizations of all of the principles — particularly Edie — is compelling, and he imbues each and every spit with rich and fascinating personalities. The taints that they face are deeply scary, and the action scenes where the two children face the metal and stone monsters will keep you turning pages (“Grid Man” in particular is a highlight). You will believe that the statues of London will come down off their pedestals and talk to you. All in all, the book makes a good companion for a trip to London of your own, making me want to walk the streets George and Edie ran through, seeing the spits and taints for myself.

There are frustrating elements in Fletcher’s writing style, however. The point of view shifts between the main characters with little warning, and often within scenes, distracting the reader from the story. At points, it’s difficult to understand who is saying what line of dialogue until after the line of dialogue gets spoken. A stronger editorial hand, here, could have greatly improved things.

But it is George’s choice at the end of the novel that I had the greatest problem with, and here spoilers follow. At a superficial level, I can understand why Fletcher decided to have George refuse to put the broken dragon head on the heart stone, and essentially decide to reside permanently in unLondon. Not only does it set up a sequel (Iron Hand and Silvertongue complete the trilogy), but it does keep George and Edie’s friendship going, which is the best thing about the novel. However, I did not feel that enough preparation had been made for George to want to abandon his life in ‘real’ London. Yes, he experienced considerable personal growth in unLondon, and won a friendship from Edie, both of which he’d hate to lose by returning home with no memory of his experience here. But although he has no father and an absent mother, he still has a mother who, despite being self-centred and distracted, is still likely to be alarmed when she discovers her son missing. It struck me as surprisingly callous that he would just abandon her.

Moreover, it’s hinted that George’s actions at the beginning of the book have sparked a war between the spits and the taints, and that the casualties from that war could be quite severe. I’m uncertain whether George placing the broken dragon’s head on the Stoneheart and making amends would stop this war, but if it would, then it is highly irresponsible for George not to do this. Indeed, a good explanation for George’s decision to stay in unLondon would have been if George learnt that, even if he made amends, the war between the spits and the taints would begin regardless. Then George’s choice becomes escaping back to his old life, or staying to finish something that he inadvertently started, taking greater responsibility for his actions rather than the easy way out. Unfortunately, this was an opportunity lost.

Despite all this, I’m still swept along by the world Fletcher has built and the characters he has populated them with. I care strongly about George and Edie’s struggle, and will be cracking the spine on Iron Hand shortly. If you want an imaginative and rollicking good adventure, you could do much worse than taking out Stoneheart for a spin.

Further Reading

• Video: meet the author
• A review from Literature Young Adult Fiction

So, what are you guys doing, this Saturday afternoon, around 4? How about we gather at the Heuther Hotel in uptown Waterloo for some good conversation, good food and good drink?

I’ve posted the formal invitation here. It’s that time of year again when bloggers in Waterloo Region and Wellington County gather to see the faces of the strange, strange people who populate the blogs around them. We’ve run this each year for the past few years, and each time a good time was had by all. This is a multi-partisan gathering that has united Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, Greens and people who don’t give a flying fig about politics around a table, bringing the startling revelation that not much separate us beyond the pixels.

So, once again, if you find yourself near the Heuther Hotel up in Uptown Waterloo this Saturday (the 21st) around 4 p.m., please think about stopping by and sharing a beer. I’ll be there, and I look forward to seeing each and every one of you.

Dr. Dawg brings this story to my attention. The parents of Peter Jaworski were recently slapped with a summons for a bylaw infringement by the municipality of Clarington at the east end of the Greater Toronto Area.

I vaguely know Mr. Jaworski as part of the political blogosphere, though we travel in different circles. An ardent libertarian, he had successfully organized the Liberty Summer Seminar at his parents’ bread and breakfast. This was the ninth time libertarian leaning bloggers and politicians attended the gathering, but the first time somebody complained about it.

Over the weekend of July 25, the LSS celebrated its tenth anniversary with a two-day event on the Orono property. On Sunday afternoon, as the event was wrapping up, a municipal law enforcement official arrived without notice in the car parking area. He quizzed a passing LSS participant about the event, asking him what had been served for lunch, as well as the cost of the registration fee, and the number of port-a-potties available. After a few minutes, the official left without attempting to speak to the Jaworski family.

On August 12th, Marta and Lech Jaworski were each served with a summons to appear in court on the grounds that they had “allowed the use of land in an agricultural zone for a use other than a permitted residential use; namely for a commercial conference centre,” which is contrary to Clarington by-laws.* A first offence carries a maximum penalty of $25,000 upon conviction.

Now, Mr. Jaworski and I may not often agree on matters political, but I can see a bit of a dangerous precedent here. The seminar is a non-profit event, so while attendance was in the dozens, not much separates it from a family reunion, or a gathering of friends and colleagues that I myself might arrange among the Blogging Alliance of Non-Partisan Canadians or the Waterloo-Wellington Bloggers Association. If I asked attendees to chip in to cover the costs of the gathering, would I end up with bylaw enforcement officers coming down on my head? The Jaworskis weren’t brought down by any noise complaints and, according to the story, maintain good relations with their neighbours, and have successfully and without rancour hosted this event for the past nine years. But now the municipality of Clarington is essentially charging the Jaworskis for not hiring space at an approved conference space elsewhere in the city.

Try turning the tables on the Progressive Bloggers annual gathering, and it would be just as wrong. The application of the law here appears either malicious, or thoughtless. Either way, it’s an outrage. Dawg calls it an infringement on the Charter-guaranteed right to freedom of assembly, and I am inclined to agree. And given the traction this story is getting, many others across the political spectrum appear to agree.

The mayor and councillors of Clarington need to take a lighter hand with their residents, if for no other reason than to refrain from handing Peter Jaworski a perfect soapbox on which to speak.

(Update: 9:29 p.m.): Thanks to some digging by Big City Liberal, and an e-mail conversation between him and Peter himself, there may be more to this story than meets the eye. It looks as though there may be a dispute with some unfriendly neighbours happening, here, with some bogus complaints having been phoned into the city in the past. Stay tuned.

For the past few years, now, I’ve been struggling to keep my weight down. As hard as I have to work in order to keep after two toddlers, I still lead a pretty sedentary lifestyle. My attempts to go down to the gym haven’t worked out as well as I’d hoped.

But earlier this week, we happened to be in Canadian Tire when Erin suggested I try out some bikes. Earlier this year, she’d gone down to Ziggy Cycle to get herself fitted for a proper bicycle (replacing a found model that was built for a young teenager), and she’s used it a number of times on her morning commute to do her writing.

I could certainly see the merit of owning a bike of my own. I was tired of hopping into my car and burning gasoline just to pick up a few litres of milk. I wouldn’t have to go very far in order to improve my health and reduce my household costs. So, after looking around and testing a few models, I settled on one that felt comfortable, and bought it on the spot.

It has been eighteen years since I’ve last ridden a bike. They say you never forget how to ride, but what they really mean is that you don’t automatically fall over when you get on a bike for the first time in almost two decades. You still have to re-learn your sense of timing and balance, and you spend far too much time wobbling around, trying to keep control over the thing. So, for the first week, I’ve stuck to the private roads of our townhouse complex.

This is also the first bike I’ve owned with gears: 21 in fact. And they do make a difference. After some practise, I’ve gotten used to changing gears while pedalling, and I haven’t dropped a chain yet (fingers crossed). I still have to learn which are the right gears, however. Downshifting while climbing a hill takes me from pushing a gigantic stone up an incline to something I’d call “imaginary gear”. My legs are pumping, and it’s not very hard at all, but forward progress is so minimal, it’s a struggle to stay upright.

Yesterday, I ventured out of the townhouse complex for the first time, making a run to my local Sobeys to pick up groceries — a run I would usually have made by car, before. It went well. Despite some white knuckle moments resulting from my inexperience, I got to the store okay, and managed to haul back buns, english muffins, cole slaw and a six-pack of soda up the hill to our house. I was quite out of breath at the end, but it was still an eminently achievable run. i expect that as I do this run more often, before the snows come, the ride will come easier, and I’ll be healthier and richer as a result.

Other Images

This was why I was heading to the store. I needed buns and cole-slaw for pulled pork, and here’s the pork. It’s a perfectly slow-roasted tenderloin, smoked with apple-wood on our outdoor cooker. The rub consists of maple syrup, salt, pepper, paprika, chile, rosemary and cinnamon.

And Now For Something Completely Different

I give you: Nora removing raisins from their box:

I was reading Twitter when I saw the following tweet:

steve_rennie: Green party’s top job not up for grabs (longer version) http://bit.ly/9CedyY #greens #cdnpoli

(link)

My initial reaction was one of disappointment. I had thought that the Green Party executive had made a mistake that would damage the party over the long term.

Four years ago, when Jim Harris was still leader of the party, the Greens had a clause in their constitution that required a full leadership convention to take place every two years or so, forcing incumbent party leaders to run for their jobs again, rather than just face a leadership review.

The Greens marketed this as an example of how the party was different from the mainstream. It was an example of bottom-up democracy, where the so-called elite weren’t protected from the grassroots. It was something I didn’t much think of, but it was something I respected — clearly so, given how disappointed I was to see this go.

When Elizabeth May campaigned for and won the leadership of the Green Party, there were some concerns out there. She had brought with her considerable organizational experience and possibly people from her work with the Sierra Club. She had a far more media savvy personality than the Green Party leaders before her. Her detractors suggested that she was an outside influence taking over the Green Party.

In my opinion, Elizabeth May has proven to be an effective leader for the Greens. Under her tutelage the party has participated in the leadership debates, received more media attention, and posted some of its best results in our previous two elections. However, my first reaction upon reading the tweet was that she was cementing her hold on the party. I would have advised against that. To deflect against the criticism that May was bigger than the party, she should have continued to work with the Green Party constitution as it was when she took over as leader. Possibly entrenching Elizabeth May as Green Party leader would reinforce the notion that the party was all about her. Moreover, it could prevent potential successors from building up their own credibility, making initial bids for the leadership before May’s eventual departure.

But reading this, it goes to show that you shouldn’t take tweets at face value. With only 140 characters available per post, context is often left out. The decision to protect Elizabeth May from a leadership challenge came not from the Green Party executive, but the Green Party membership:

Green party members overwhelmingly approved a motion delaying a leadership review until after the next federal election.

A leadership race must be held every four years under the party’s constitution.

Party leader Elizabeth May’s term ends Aug. 31 and at least one challenger — retired army Lt.-Col. Sylvie Lemieux — had stepped forward.

But 74 per cent of Greens voted for a motion to put off a leadership review until after the next federal election. Any motion that gets more than 60 per cent support before the convention is considered passed.

(link)

I assume that the 74 percent of Greens who voted here represented a substantial chunk of the Green Party membership in total (including those who didn’t vote). If this is the case, the scenario is far less that of a clique moving to protect an elite from the grassroots. Instead, the grassroots appear to have voted to postpone a pretty laborious process until such time when parliament in Ottawa isn’t one sneeze away from falling.

I still think the decision was a mistake in the long term, if only because it prevents potential successors from testing the waters and building their cred ahead of May’s eventual departure, but if it is a mistake, it’s one that the grassroots of the Greens have chosen to make, as is their democratic right. The accountability is theirs, and only time will tell if the decision they took was the right one or not. I can still respect it, and move on.

Finally, I’d like to mention quickly that, thanks to a recommendation from Rebecca, we’ve managed to get our hands on a copy of Steven Moffat’s other television project: an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes called just Sherlock). An adaptation, I hear you say: aren’t these a dime a dozen? Isn’t Robert Downey Jr. now the current definitive Holmes (bzzt! Nope. That record stays with Jeremy Brett, thankyouverymuch). But this one’s different.

Imagine a Sherlock Holmes story that stays as close as humanly possible to the plotline of one of the iconic books (in this case, A Study in Scarlett), but which moves the setting from Victorian London to the present day. Dr. Watson is a retired army doctor who was shot in Afghanistan. Detective Inspector Lestrade calls in Holmes whenever a case gets beyond the abilities of the police to solve. And in modern London, Holmes has to drop the pipe for the nicotine patch, thus forced to contemplate “three patch problems”.

It all lives and dies, of course, on the performance of the stars, and here Moffat has cast well. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a very young Holmes (he and Watson could practically be college buddies) to perfection, putting in all the manic mannerisms and making him mesmerizing. Martin Freeman plays a pretty young Dr. Watson. Hardly a bumbler, he’s an interesting character in his own right, and is the audience’s anchor, sharing our bewilderment as Holmes’ mind leaves his and everyone else’s in the dust. But I was particularly impressed by Rupert Graves’ Lestrade who, if the first episode is anything to go by, may turn out to be an even better friend to Holmes than Watson. Watson spends most of his ninety minutes being bewildered and amazed by Holmes’ intellect. Lestrade has known Holmes for five years, and the novelty has worn off. In its place, there is a yearning there for Holmes to get a hold of himself. Lestrade clearly admires who Holmes is, but fears for the man, which possibly makes him the most human character of the production.

Erin and I just loved the first episode, and finished the ninety minute production well buzzed. Where the heck does Moffat find the time to do this sort of thing? Writing and producing Doctor Who and Sherlock at the same time?

Who fans will find much to like here. Not only is it written and produced by Moffat, Mark Gatiss is a co-creator and stars as someone very familiar to the canon (I won’t spoil it here, as it’s left deliciously ambiguous until the end). There are some moments when I felt a connection between Holmes and Who, and there are moments where Benedict Cumberbatch shares some of the mannerisms of Matt Smith’s Doctor.

This series has just debuted in the United Kingdom (episode three appears tomorrow) and will soon be making it into the United States under Masterpiece’s Mystery, so I highly recommend that you check it out when it comes round. Whether you’re a longtime Holmes aficionado or someone new to the genre, you’ll find much to love, here.