Rather than nit-pick it to death, adding another comma here, rephrasing a couple more sentences there, I decided to sign a piece of paper declaring I was done with revisions and let NATALIE’S FIRST NOEL go into design and production.

Barely two days later, while cold-reading a passage out loud to provide a sample for a proposed audiobook, I stumbled on a phrase. ‘Should I have written this differently?’ I asked myself. ‘It read well inside my head. The editor didn’t flag anything. Neither did ten Beta readers, Grammarly, Hemingway, or Word.’ My anxiety reflex began to twitch. ‘Did I mess up? Will people hate it? Is this whole project a huge mistake? Is it getting warm in my office, or is it me? Will my head fall off? Will aliens burst from my chest? The sky… is it falling?’

Jack, my Springer Spaniel, must have sensed the rising tension. He got up from his bed and approached me with this look:

It was time to get lunch. It was time to walk away from the computer, let it go to sleep after I closed the manuscript file, and get on with the day.

I signed off on the editing. What’s done is done. Enjoy the weather. Take Jack for a walk and celebrate Father’s Day with my 99-year-old Dad in his long-term care home.

Let NATALIE’S FIRST NOEL go on its adventure in the design studio at ATTICUS in San Francisco. Accept that, after over 5,000 corrections, there will still be a few errors that escaped our collective attention. I hope they will not take the book’s readers out of the story. I really hope that whoever gets to present the novel as an audiobook does not stumble as I did and, over time, come to hate the experience of telling this story.

I wish my mind would stop guessing what might go wrong, fearing the worst about the novel and its fate in the world, and let me become as ‘excited’ about the publication as everyone- and I mean EVERYONE- says I should be?

When hearing the comment for the umpteenth time from someone sweet and well-meaning in my life, I responded weakly with the following response: “I know I should be excited, and it is exciting. But I only recall becoming excited about it once recently. The feeling passed quickly, and I got back to work.”

I think she thought I was being funny.

I was often like this while working on big projects, such as studio paintings and multimedia projects for school, and even while on holiday. While on the creative journey, I was like the helmsman on a ship, avoiding underwater hazards and bad weather, steering through narrow channels, and watching out for pirates. (Aaaarrrr!) Once the journey was over, I always looked back with pleasure on the experience and, outside the moment, reflected with excitement on how much fun I had.

It would be wonderful to live through this experience with excitement in every moment. Truthfully, while the manuscript, soon to be novel and audiobook, is away from me in production, I don’t know how.

If anyone reading this can share their thoughts or suggest ideas on embracing the moment, please let me know in the comments.

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Without doing research, this picture would not exist.

The first time I knew about the Battle of the Falaise Gap in 1944 was in a painting by Frank Wootton on the subject, published in a Ballantine retrospective of his aviation art from the 1970s. I revisited the story of how German troops and their equipment were blown to bits on the retreat from Normandy by Typhoon fighter bombers and other aircraft of the Allied air forces in THE BIG SHOW, by Pierre Clostermann. When creating a series of mixed-media artworks for shows in Brampton over ten years ago, I took the time to read up on the aircraft, pilot, and survivor accounts to create the image you see here. I knew by then that elements of Clostermann’s account had been called into question by fellow veterans, and that the availability of new works on the subject made it possible to enrich the power of the image. I wanted to place the viewer among the tanks and explosions, rather than step back to present a more panoramic view, as Wootton did in his remarkable work. The result, above, was finally inspired by the sight of a full-size Typhoon replica hanging from the ceiling of the atrium in Caen’s Museum of Peace. It was angled so the cannons would meet your eyeline, creating, as one museum team member put it, their perception of what it was like to be a German soldier on the ground during the Normandy campaign- the last thing they would see…

Honestly, it was easy to do this compared to what I faced when researching a series of stories about the Netherlands in the Second World War, and, after that project fell apart, not only my first completed novel but also two books that will follow on from it. All through the process of reading hundreds of books and essays, I was reminded of a saying from a teacher I had the pleasure of working with for a year at a school where ‘pleasure’, ‘work’, and that institution would never share space in a sentence I wrote. Dr. Baisley, on exchange from Florida near Cape Canaveral, used to say to her students when writing expository essays, “That’s why we call it RESEARCH. Because you search, and then you re-search.”

Find your evidence. Check your evidence. Find more evidence to support or contradict what you found in the first place. Document all the sources. Organize your ideas. Write your essay or tell your story. If you’ve done your due diligence, the work will show in what you write, draw, or create.

Of course, while I embraced this thinking then as I do now, I recall the students in our classes had a different take on the idea.

Students in the 1990s were no more receptive to the hard slog of tracking down resources than they had been when I retired in 2020. Sloppy, superficial analysis and reasoning, driven by emotion and opinion rather than documented, factual analysis, dominated many of the papers I evaluated. Trying to tease out proof for points made in academic arguments became harder as the years passed. The generations of students who had so much to say on so many things largely clammed up when called upon to provide shape and form to the line of their assertion. I even had a few ask me what I wanted them to say to support their argument, rather than venture an original idea of their own. The following gives, in brief, a conversation I had too many times to count over thirty years.

“Why do you like this piece? What stands out to you or resonates with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it something about (insert learning criteria here)?”

“Yeah,” after a pause where the student studied my expression for twitches or hopeful smiles that suggested this was what I was looking for. If my poker face was working in top gear that day, this would sometimes be the follow-up comment.

“What do you want me to tell you so I can get an A?”

Seriously. I heard this more than once at my last school.

At this point, my knowledge of each student, their strengths, areas for improvement and personal circumstances guided the conversation to help them achieve success without spoonfeeding it to them. I hated to see them squirm. But I hated the indifference or learned helplessness, even some of my best ones exhibited at times, even more. How were they going to function in an environment where they had to stand up and be accountable?

Some have developed the skills. Others haven’t. But even those with advanced critical-thinking skills struggle to survive in a world where information and its analysis have become more important than ever. It’s not surprising that when confronted with an overwhelming amount of information at work, on our devices, and around us, many look for quick, easy answers to the questions they face. As A.I. becomes more effective at sourcing and presenting information, the temptation to accept at face value what it presents has proven too strong for some who should know better. Mediocrity in critical thinking skills garnishes mediocre test scores and project evaluations in school. The only one impacted by not taking care of business in their research or analysis is the student. But when the student refuses to take stock and ends up in a position of responsibility, such as defending a client in a courtroom or flying a jumbo jet, their unwillingness to do the work puts lives and livelihoods at risk.

It’s easy to say A.I. is the problem. Still, the truth is more complicated and uncomfortable for those banking blindly on faulty A.I.-generated research, and those who run companies featuring A.I. tools as for-profit investments. For both, there is plenty of blame to go around. But for all of us, there is a responsibility to treat the work we do, and the A.I. and other research tools we use to do it, with respect and a healthy dose of caution. If public utility companies demand that we call before we dig, should we not demand of ourselves and our research to call out and examine what we find after the digging is complete?

I will finish here with the following:

If you want, watch a video from House of El on YouTube for more on this—El’s in great form here. Take the time to watch the whole thing. Much of what she says reflects my own attitude about the value of checking sources; of, as Angela Baisley discussed, doing the search and the re-search in anything we draw, write, or otherwise create.

Thank you, enjoy, and please subscribe to follow me if you found any of my posts interesting. Please also leave a like or a comment if you wish to add to these thoughts of mine.

The story of this world began long, long ago. We were born into it at some point in the narrative and will likely- hopefully- leave before it ends.

Our birth is our entrance upon the stage. Our death is an exit. Perhaps our part is silent, and we are furniture in the scene, following our marks and departing without a word. Maybe we speak a few lines in our moment, capturing the attention of others around us. Or we could steal the scene and dominate the story for a while. In the end, we will end.

But the saga will go on, and remembrances of our part in it will endure in either the stories we told or the stories told about us; echoed, distorted, diminished through time. Interpreters of our stories will add their own touches in the retelling, filtering the experience through lenses shaped and polished by their own reality.

What stories have I told? Many.

Would I share some with you? Yes.

NATALIE’S FIRST NOEL, soon to be published by Atticus in San Francisco, is one such story I wish to share. It grew from a Christmas-time tragedy in my family as a counterpoint to the grief we experienced, inspired by a tiny event in a famous warrior’s personal diary, and adapted into the novel. I hope you’ll enjoy it, featuring characters I created in their imagined settings and historical timelines. Along the way in its creation, I researched the period in which it was set and read more stories of people who lived then. Almost all are gone now. They’ve played their parts and left the stage. But from the time I spent with them, I now have many more stories to tell.

I hope that you’ll join me as I shape them into new stories of my own and enjoy the tales I tell of how they came to be.

I will finish this introduction with another quote. I hope we’ll meet again in the future.

“Stories tell us of what we already knew and forgot and remind us of what we haven’t yet imagined.” – Anne L. Watson.

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