The Bizarre Tale of How I Started Writing

I live in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), a stunningly beautiful location on the west coast of Canada. I live in Vancouver, but 30-something kilometers off the coast is the place where I was born – Vancouver Island, one of the largest islands in Canada and, according to Wikipedia, the largest Pacific Island east of New Zealand. Victoria, the largest city on the island and the capital city BC, is where I grew up, and where my aging mother lived her entire life.

Being a dutiful son, I would periodically sail across the Strait of Juan De Fuca, which separates Vancouver Island from the mainland, to see her. Since there are hundreds of islands in the area, BC has one of the largest and most sophisticated ferry systems in the world, and it’s on one of those giant ships, almost the size of a mini cruise ship, that I would travel to the island.

The trip itself takes almost two hours, and in order to ensure that I got a place onboard I would typically get there an hour early. Counting both directions (ie. to the island, and back to the mainland), I had something like six hours to kill on each trip, and I almost always travelled alone.

For years I used to read the paper, or take a book, or buy a magazine. At that time I wasn’t writing at all. One day it occurred to me that I could make better use of my time writing, and that was how I started writing my first novel, ELDORADO. Once I got started, I expanded my writing time to other venues, but even so, I’d say that at least two-thirds of that novel was written on one of the ferries to or from the island.

I continued the process, using the time waiting in the parking lot to get on, and on the ferry itself (only if the weather was bad. I refused to ignore the breathtaking scenery on the trip when it was a beautiful day), to work on my second and third novels. I continued this process until my mother’s death a few years ago.

Would I have gotten into writing if I hadn’t had to take the ferry? Probably, it’s something I love to do. But it’s interesting how a chance set of circumstances acted as a catalyst for a new direction for me.