I’ll spare you my Ted Baxter ‘It all started in a little 5,000-watt radio station in Fresno’ origin story about how I came to be writing fiction over the past six years except to say, mid-way through 2016, I was wholly dissatisfied with the state of the city and this blog I’d been operating since 2010. Toronto had been seized by status quo maintenance, a return to normal, normal being relentless lip service paid to growing problems of unaffordability, inequality, crumbling infrastructure, malignant, mis-policing, etc., etc., ad nauseum. Never mind all that, we were told. What about our low property tax rates and all those cranes in the sky!

And my little contribution to the ongoing discourse? An empty howling into the void of this misguided political smugness. Continue reading →