I’ll probably end up writing a more cohesive post on this tomorrow, but even if I don’t get around to it, I simply couldn’t resist depriving you guys of this cheeky image. It’s just one of those cases where the picture tells the entire story, all the way from Assange to Zuckerberg

But seriously. With the latest Facebook changes that enforce Timeline and further losses of privacy, I am stepping back from Facebook. If I don’t know you personally, please don’t feel offended if I don’t accept your friend invite. However, you can follow my Author Page instead, and I’ll do the same for you if you have a page, etc. But I am otherwise done with Zuckerberg trying to improve his stock options on my information. There will be no more photos and information uploaded to my account(s) other than absolutely critical stuff that I need to share asap.

It’s time to rejoin the real world again.

Two days ago I came back from my first-ever – and only – cruise on a Carnival cruiseship, a sister ship in fact to the now-infamous Costa Concordia. Looking at news photos of the staterooms and general surroundings of the now belly-up cruise liner, I was uncomfortably reminded of the identical view on my own trip — obviously Carnival contracts out their architectural plans and ship furnishings to the same gaudy, Las Vegas-wannabe people.

And let me tell you — in terms of unique experiences, few can beat that of being adrift in the open ocean and hearing your captain come on the airways with the sad news that a sister ship has sunk and we should have a moment of silence. I’d already turned on CNN from our stateroom and observed the horrific images we all have seen by now — of a maritime disaster that was caused by the indefensable actions of a small number of people who brought the ship close to land (and strayed from the course of navigation by more than 5 miles) because they frivolously wanted to wave to family members residing on a small lagoon island.

But I’m not surprised to hear survivors tell of the utter chaos, and the every-man-for-himself mentality that broke out near the lifeboats. Anybody who’s ever been on a cruiseship this large, as I unfortunately had the experience of embarking, knows that the other half of the whole eat-and-drink-till-you-puke-funship-experience is being herded like cattle onto lines….and more lines.

When you debark on a shore excursion. When you return on board. When you wait for tenders. When you wait to embark and disembark again. All you see are elbows and assholes cutting ahead in line. Assholes who cough and sneeze all over the place without consideration of infecting their fellow passengers with all sorts of nasty viruses. In fact, the thing I have come to deduct from this one and ONLY cruise experience I will ever have, is that cruise ships are made up of huge lines crammed with inconsiderate people, and form one huge cesspool of bacterial infection. In more than ten years of travelling all over the world, I’ve never become this sick on vacation. Until now.

If you don’t know it already, cruise lines create those charming little villages that form their ports and the fake beaches that line neatly a hundred meters from where the ship is docked, and work out deals with the corporations who own the luxury goods lines that saturate the shops which dot every single bloody corner of their fake “islands” – stores like Diamond International, or Effy, or a shitload of other tanzanite and crappy interchangeable ugly jewelry lines that do their darndest – even by hounding you on ship by slipping envelopes through your stateroom door inviting you to “special buying opportunities” – to part you from your money.

Everything is always about the bottom line — Carnival’s policy, as I heard it on board, is to never sail until the ship is full. 3500 guests plus another, I don’t know, 1500 staff? It’s a disaster waiting to happen. Yeah, of course the likelyhood of Titanic-proportion disasters is exceedingly low, and lower than even air crash disaspers, but when it happens, you can count on the fact that it WILL be every man and woman for themselves. Without exceptions. And you’d better be prepared to fight – and have luck on your side.

I cannot imagine what would have happened on our own ship if something were to go wrong. Among the sweaty fratboys, bikini-clad drunken bimbos, the austere-looking Germans towering over everyone else with their ethnically-cleansed Aryan genes, the cranky geriatric patients who feel entitled to push ahead solely on account of their advanced age, and yeah, even the white trash bitch who almost ran me over with her wheelchair who felt similarly entitled to cut ahead of a one-hour-long line, who would survive? Certainly not civility, and certainly not the humanity in people.

I wish all of you peace and much happiness in the new year, despite the Mayan calendar and New Age predictions of destruction, polar shifts, switching equators, alien landings and other such craziness. The world is changing at such a fast speed that who knows what the year ahead has in store for us? Whether we end up evaporated, digitalized or turned into higher-frequency beings, or stay much as we are, reality is, change will take place whether we like it or not. So, in the words of now-deceased Jack Layton, let’s be kind to one another, and we can change the world.

2011 for me was a year of changes, and not necessarily all for the positive. There were a lot of ups and downs and formed one of the biggest rollercoaster moments of recent years. In 2011 I finished my first novel, Race Traitor, and submitted it to my agent, who in turn submitted it to editors. That painful process – the part from the time when I completed the manuscript onwards – was permeated with countless frustrations with my agent (whom I’ve fired since then),  as well as negative experiences piling one atop another.

Two months into submissions, my agent decided – against my permission -  to withdraw the manuscript from editorial desks, despite the fact that half of the editors still had not gotten back to us.  This ugly incident, along with various other unprofessional behaviours, led me to fire him, but not before I was left with an ugly taste in my mouth about agenting in general, and the publishing industry in particular. More on this later.

Finally, dejection led to depression, which led me to feel hopeless about the entire industry. So – like everybody else these days – I self-published Race Traitor. I’ll never regret going this route, because of the freedom I’ve gained in the last few months. But it wasn’t easy. Getting people to buy it was like pulling teeth. So more dejection and depression set in. And then I understood that in the world of Amazon, where circa 45,000 people publish monthly, you have a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming noticed.

And then, gradually, things started to happen. I started selling books. I climbed the ranks. I finally earned enough to receive my first-ever royalty cheque for $500! I could enjoy my success and not give an unprofessional, self-described ”rock star” agent 15% of my income. And I was happy, finally, because even though nobody believed in me – nobody, least of all my ex-agent - that I had done it all with my own hands. Myself, alone. And incidentally, while my “ex” still hasn’t sold anything since I fired him, I’ve done mainstream interviews and had my book stocked in a couple of bookstores already.

Even though I still have a long way to go, I’m determined never to let other people’s lack of faith in me determine how I percieve my own value, and that of my work. And I urge you to not do so either. Whether some jaded asshole believes he can sell your book or not does not matter. YOU know yourself and your work better than anybody else. If you can’t get an agent, or you’re forced to fire an agent, remember — they are NOBODY without you. Whether you can get an editor to take a look at your manuscript is not intrinsically tied in with your value as an artist.

This whole fucking industry is built on the backs of writers — who are for the most part, ripped off in terms of lowball advances and crappy royalty rates. You think I’m joking? I walked away from a potential deal with Penguin last year because it wasn’t going to give me enough money to cover my security concerns over publishing the non-fiction version of Race Traitor. So…yeah. Not even a name like Penguin is worth selling my hard work for nothing. I know it’s hard to understand, even for my writer friends, who were part of the entire heartwrenching process, but I had to walk away from Penguin, and I will walk away from future publisher offers, unless they’re willing to meet me at least half-way. You’ve got to earn respect to get respect.

Sadly, when it comes to how they treat writers, the publishing industry has forgotten all that. But you’ve got to stay strong, and not let them get to you. Don’t ever let yourself be at their mercy. Stay firm in your resolutions, and soon you will find that depression can turn to empowerment, and then to freedom. Remember the wise words of Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

YOU are the talent. YOU are the commodity. If you’re to take anything with you from this post into the new year ahead, remember that.

If you really believe in the value of what you are creating, you will succeed. It’s only a matter of time.

I’ve just recently been informed of a 2010 scandal involving ex-CSIS superstar Grant Bristow, who everyone these days knows better as Nathan Black. The story is convoluted and pathetic, and involves Grant Nathan, pretending to be a phony reporter in order to conduct some mock and aggressive interviews with Edmonton mayor Stephen Mendel. In other words, a déjà vu throwback to Bristow’s good old times – a dirty tricks campaign (in this case, against a Jewish person). Of course, the prank went terribly wrong since nobody quite “got” Bristow’s sense of humour and he was subsequently hit with a libel charge. Anyway, you can read more of the tawdry affair here. 

Reflecting back on my own personal encounters with Grant Bristow, it now dawns on me how wrong I was about him. How that poor man must have suffered. After I provided information on the Heritage Front, my life in hiding was absolutely nothing in comparison to the suffering Grant must have endured: the abrupt cessation of those few things that gave his life such joy and meaning – telephoning people under the guise of interviewing them, donning alternate personas only to mock and scare those on the other line. Breaking into answering machines to lift information that he would pass out to Heritage Front skinheads. Oh, how he’d miss his perennial favourites – putting skinheads up to crank call individuals on his target list, individuals who would end up being followed, harassed and terrorized 24 hours a day.

Today’s media have only half the story right: yes, Grant Bristow undoubtedly did his duty as agent provocateur extraordinaire to build up a racist empire in Canada. The part where the Bristow myth falls apart is in the fact that, no matter which way you spin things, Grant Bristow did NOT take down the Heritage Front.

That task befell a number of tireless activists, a sleuthing journalist for the Toronto Sun, Bill Dunphy, and as a result of the brave actions of a House of Commons staff member, Brian McInnis, who leaked an internal report to the Attorney General which warned of possible problems involving the activities of a CSIS agent in the field.

In the several years in which Bristow moulded and partially-funded the Heritage Front and their subsequent criminal activities, NOT ONE CRIMINAL CHARGE was laid against any white supremacist as a result of his actions. But it gets even better — Bristow was even busted by Metro Police with a trunk full of smuggled guns – but the police were promptly told “from above” to let him go and not pursue the matter.

Following Bill Dunphy’s front page exposé of Bristow in the Toronto Sun, our boy was promptly plucked out of the Toronto area by his handlers and placed into the Witness Protection Program. He was given a large home in Edmonton equipped with a three-car garage and an allowance of several thousand dollars per month. I have to ask myself, For what, exactly?

Let’s first start with the definition of hero: according to Oxford Dictionary, this is “a person, especially a man, who is admired by many people for doing something brave or good.” (Uh, as in instigate terror campaigns against people because of their differing political beliefs and sexual orientation? Because that’s what Bristow did. But I’m getting ahead of myself here).

How is Bristow a hero of the people? Well, let’s go down the list:

1. Did any criminal charges get laid against any white supremacists as a direct result of his information? No.
2. Did he testify in any proceedings against any Heritage Front members? Nope.
3. Did he ever supplant police with any affidavits that were ultimately used to prosecute anybody? I mean, given the hundreds of thousands (likely millions) of taxpayer dollars that went into this operation, did anything concrete come out of Grant Bristow? Or are we only left with a bunch of hate speeches on YouTube and a bad taste in our mouths? Nada. Ugh, I’m starting to see a pattern here.
4. Were either himself or his handlers charged with criminal harassment over the It Campaign, over possession of illegal weapons, or instigating a riot (as in what happened in June 1993)? No again. No criminal charges were ever laid (though rumour is, the handler was either demoted or fired, though I cannot confirm this).

What makes a hero in the eyes of Canadian media? Somehow I doubt in involves such dubiously-heroic acts as teaching underage girls like myself how to break into answering machines and how to “fuck with people’s heads” until they “shit their pants and have a total breakdown.” Though that is precisely what he did.

However, such heroic acts are deemed to merit exposure in press arenas such as Walrus Magazine, or worth standing ovations from synagogue audiences who blissfully had no clue about the character of the man who they were thanking, and what they were really giving applause for.

In contrast to Bristow, I’m not as full of myself as to claim that I acted heroically. However, I can answer yes to the first 3 of the above questions.

1. YES, white supremacists were charged as a result of my information. And not just anybody, but Wolfgang Droege himself and a couple of his cronies went to jail.
2. YES, my testimony resulted in convictions. And if CSIS hadn’t told the OPP and RCMP to back off my affidavits in order to protect their operative, many MORE convictions might have resulted.
3. YES, my information was used to weed out a KKK-attending, Heritage Front member who just happened to be a police officer and gun-totting member of the Toronto Police Services.
4. NO, I wasn’t given a three-car garage mansion in the suburbs, or an allowance of $3000 a month for years and years afterwards. Hell, I wasn’t even given a change of ID.

 I panhandled on the streets of Ottawa and Halifax to feed myself. I dumpster-dived for food between court appearances and lived in shelters. After I did my part to take down the Heritage Front, I had nothing, couldn’t use my ID, and was on the run for my life. I received absolutely nothing, not even protection, from this government.

 But I ain’t a hero, and unlike Bristow, I wouldn’t feel comfortable making such a claim. I’m just a nobody, someone who did what they had to in order to dismantle a vicious organization and take those bastards down.

And no, I’m not only talking about the Heritage Front here.

This time of the year, around Remembrance Day, I get more emotional than usual. I search through my genetic memory and reach for my dead, faceless grandfathers. One was a captain in the Austro-Hungarian army during WW1, the other died in battle during WW2 while my mother was an infant. I never knew either of them. I never saw a photo of either of them.

 War is a brutal, awful thing. It destroys photographs, it curls up the edges of memories and leaves only a hollow longing in its place.

My mother’s father was shot through the head in the Romanian battlefields at the end of the Second World War, in 1944.  A bullet smashed through a gap in his helmet and entered through his left ear just as my mother, an infant at the time, fell from a great height and shattered her tympanic membranes, rendering her deaf in the same ear.

My father’s father was a highly-decorated captain who met my grandmother Anna in Transylvania, where his troops were stationed. She eloped with him to Hungary, where she had her baby. But his family, because of religious differences and Anna’s lack of dowry (my great-grandfather denied her inheritance because she’d ran off with a Hungarian and a Jew), intercepted the marriage. My poor grandmother, all of nineteen, was put out on the street with a baby in her hands. A baby who ended up deaf, the villagers gossiped, because Anna had kept him a secret throughout the pregancy. But my father would never know his own Papa, because my grandfather would be killed in battle only two years later. 

Even though I’ve never known, much less seen a mere photograph of them, both my grandfathers are here with me today. Their courage flows through my bloodstream. The untold horrors they must have faced in open combat claw at my consciousness.

We live in a world where so many people my age take for granted the freedoms we enjoy, the personal liberties that surround us, the fact that we can sit back and write sarcastic quips on the internet mocking this war and that one, but we lack the understanding that sometimes war is necessary for survival. That sometimes picking up a weapon is not an option, but a need. That is courage. What those naive, red-cheeked young people who entered battles for the love of country, for the love of all that was right, and met with hatred, and terror, and death. Who came home — if they were lucky — scarred in psyche and in body, their innocence ripped from them by the savagery of war.

War is in my blood, and whether you deny it or not, it’s in your blood also. You can’t run from it. Its legacy, for better or for worse, is all around us. We are the descendandants of several millenia of bloodshed and revolutions. The fact that we are here signifies that our lineage is built on the triumph of the victorious. We are the ones who survived, and we did so because of our ancestors. Because of the countless wars and savage battles they fought to give us our freedoms today, as frought with uncertainty as they are.

So let us remember our grandfathers and grandmothers and all those brave souls who were forced to grow up way too fast, and whose innocence was robbed well before their time. For if we forget the greatest treasure they gave us — our life and our freedom — then history is destined to be repeated.

Within a few hours, Twitterverse was buzzing with conscientious shoppers doing their part to help the poor. Instead of dropping a fiver into the empty cup held by that drunken bum at the corner, Manhattan fashionistas were walking away from Starbucks with a frappuccino and a piece of garbage elastic trinket around their wrist, feeling all the better for having done their social duty. Who would have thought helping the impoverished could be as sexy as a lattee-soaked biscotti? I mean, how better a way to celebrate having a job (and therefore, money) than buying a $5 lattee while thinking that you’re helping the unemployed?

The sweet irony here is that it’s Starbucks — Starbucks! the ONE company whose profits have not gone down during this recession, but way up — of all companies, to come forward with the whole “let’s help the poor without hurting our profit bottom line” idea, when, if you really think about it, they could help society all the better by donating one day’s worth of sales to any of a gazillion agencies helping the unemployed.

Methinks if Starbucks donated so much as ONE HOUR’s worth of total profits, the world would be a far better place. Instead, they come out with a marketing/advertising campaign designed to draw people inside their coffee shops — where hopefully they’ll buy more than a shitty nylon bracelet. But speaking of that shitty trinket, whose minuscule net profits (after marketing and production costs are deducted, understandably) will go toward some faceless unemployed schmuck in the hopes that he/she will soon raise back to their feet and revisit their neighbourhood Starbucks.

So yeah, let’s see this transformation from Starbucks-the-obscenely-priced-superchain to Starbucks-the-superhero-chain which single-handedly tackled the US jobless woes with a wristband and a cuppa java. Pretty ironic, ain’t it, for a monster company that has long been criticized for putting small coffee shops out of business.

Ten years ago, if I couldn’t sell my book to a Big Six publisher I would gladly have taken the small press route. Heck, even as far back as five years ago I’d gladly have signed on the dotted line, and bragged to all my friends that at least I got a “real” publisher. I’d have used words like “legitimate” and “prestigious”, and snubbed my nose at the yucky self-published vanity “authors” who used to lurk in the gutter alleyways of imprints like Lulu.

But now, with the possibilities offered by Amazon and Smashwords, I wonder if any small publisher can come even close to the advantages offered by self-publishing. Not that self-publishing is a radically new thing. It’s basically what writers used to do for hundreds of years before established imprints took hold in the last century. So I asked this question on Twitter: If you can’t sell your book to Big Six publishers, would you go to a smaller press and get small/no advance OR self-publish?”

One person managed to give a nearly mono-syllabic answer: “small press”, but when I questioned whether splitting my royalties with a press who doesn’t have the marketing dollars to launch me (and thus force me to do my own marketing) is even worth it, she didn’t respond.

The answer seems obvious to me. I don’t begrudge the efforts of small presses and their editorial teams, but the fact of the matter is, most books published by small presses rarely sell more than about a thousand copies. Small presses do not have the budget for premium spots in bookstores, for massive advertising, and do rely heavily on authors marketing their own books. Which is something I already do every single day. And when my earnings are so small to begin with, I’m not sure I really want to split my royalties 85-15 (or worse) with a small press. I’m just being honest here.

Some may argue that small presses add an indispensable value to one’s book by providing expert editorial services and cover design. What I’d suggest is that if a writer so wishes, they can easily hire out editorial, formatting and graphic design services for a flat rate / one-time fee, rather than entering into contract with a publisher who cannot pay you an advance higher than four figures.

I believe we are living in the gold rush age of publishing. For the last couple of years, Big Six traditional publishers have bemoaned what they call a new evolution of the Guttenberg Press, an electronic Golden Age that they hope to survive unscathed. Hatchette and Random House executives have flown (no doubt first class) to meet Steve Jobs in the hope that Apple can somehow squash the Amazon revolution that precipitated a system in which Gatekeepers are being eliminated faster than one can say “Tyrannosaurus Rex.”

 I had a little laugh when I read about it, imagining all those execs in their crisp name-brand suits and ties, oiled briefcases in hand, walking pompously through Apple’s doors, thinking they have anything to leverage their arguments on. It was all the funnier, knowing that in the next five years, those New York penthouse residents will be lining up at their local Unemployment Office. Unless they package themselves out first, as several NY top editors already have been – and starting self-publishing consulting firms. Ah, the irony.

 This new age spells the end of MFA programs ran by greedy writers of the old generation, many of them mediocre writers in their own right, but who lucked out at a time when publishers would print nearly anything legible passed up the chain through nepotism and tapped favors. I mean, who in their right mind (aside from a trust fund baby) would spend $100K to get an MFA when there is no more Random House or Doubleday?

In the future literary universe, you’ll never get a huge advance. You’ll never have publishing execs speculate over your future success over endless luncheons. No, the only thing you will have to produce is a work that is good. Translation = that sells. That audiences, rather than editors and studio execs, will love.

 No more nepotism. No more favours. Of course, if you’re rich and can afford thousands on marketing, you’ll probably still manage to launch yourself out there. But without the gatekeepers, the world becomes a much more even playing field. Any hipster with a stack of flyers and a penchant for podcasting can generate the kind of grassroots buzz that can turn a coffee-stained manuscript into a bestseller.

In the new age we are entering, the ultimate gatekeeper will be the public. Only the AUDIENCE and the power of their mighty dollars will decide if your book has a future. NOT a nail-filing twenty-five year old acquisitions editor who’s rejecting anything on her desk that isn’t vampire teen porn.

 We are in a time of golden rushes. Thousands of new writers enter the self-publishing stampede with tin pan in hand, hoping to make their fortunes. Most will fail, in the same way that most authors in bookstores will fail to earn out their advance and never get anywhere.

But a few WILL succeed. Their ideas and manuscripts WILL strike gold, and when the dust settles they will enjoy the knowledge that they did it all on their own. That their success was entirely in their hands, and the profits they earned are not going toward paying for a Big Six publishers’ Fifth Avenue office suites and expense accounts, but in their own pockets.

We need to embrace this time of revolution, rather than cower and cling to sinking ships that are too bloated to sustain anybody. We need to remember that we at least have our talents and our fresh ideas, but agents and publishers, without their 15-90% cuts, have nothing. And that it was only a matter of time, in an industry that is barely a couple hundred years old, for things to change. For the unwashed masses on the outside of the palace gates to break through, behead anyone in the way and torch the whole bloody place down.

 Allons enfants de la Patrie! Le jour de gloire est arrive!

To those of you who are fortunate enough to know your family history – you’ll never know how fortunate you are. Never, ever take that knowledge for granted.

Last week I stumbled onto an Anderson Cooper show, a program I’d never watched before (I hadn’t even realized that he had his own show). In it there were two young women who had both been abandoned in trash bins or by the side of the road, respectively, as infants. Although unrelated, both grew up under similar circumstances, and both had always wondered where they had come from. Toward the end of the show, they were given the results of DNA tests they had taken prior to the show taping by a company called 23andme. By discovering which Haplogroups they belonged to, at least they would have some answers.

One of the things that moved me most during the show was when Anderson said this: “My father died when I was ten, and for the longest time I thought he would have left me a letter to tell me more about himself.”

My own father had died around that time also – I was thirteen when he left Canada and shortly thereafter died somewhere in Bucharest. Because Romania was still a communist country and we had been forced to relinquish our citizenship as part of our emigration process, there was no way possible to obtain further information as to what happened to his remains.

 But as I got older, I realized that the absence of a grave or details about his death were only a small part of my frustration, as it compared to the questions I still had of him – and of my own self. Like Anderson, I felt that my father’s death had prompted in me a disconnection to my past, to my own history. My father took to his grave the answers to innumerable questions that will never be answered, and I am forced to live with that for the rest of my life.

My father was fifty-five years old when I was born. He had lived an entire lifetime by the time I was born – 3 wives, two careers, countless mistresses – a life in which a child was not expected or wanted. Consequently, my father kept himself apart from me, a remote man whose aloofness was further accentuated by his deafness. Even as I, as all children of deaf parents, grew up with sign language as my primary way of communication, it mattered not; my father didn’t tell me anything.

He kept all his secrets within the pages of a couple of old notebooks in which he wrote every afternoon, and which he purposefully hid from my prying eyes. Those notebooks were in his valises when he died in Bucharest. After he died, his so-called friends rummaged through his suitcases for anything of value, and discarded the rest as garbage in the alleyways behind their house.

Even today, as I walk through alleyways and backstreets, I find myself scanning the gutters and trash cans, irrationally asking myself, What if? What secrets about myself could I find there?

So many more years later some answers would come, but never the truth that I have searched for – the identity of his father, of an entire line of Hungarian relatives that I will never know because my grandmother took revenge at being abandoned with her infant son, and swore never to tell anyone their name. Even my father’s birth certificate, which I obtained from a Debrecen courthouse, yielded nothing – as she had carefully omitted the father’s name as “Unknown” and given him her own last name.

 It took even more digging and scouring through rumours in the old East European villages of his past to realize that his ancestry involved Jewish roots that everyone from my grandmother to my own mother sought to keep from me. It disturbs me that so many of my relatives have chosen to die with secrets on their lips than to consider the emptiness that their offspring might experience. And furthermore, it saddens me that I may have to rely on an internet-bought $99 DNA test to discover things about my history and lineage that my own family should have shared with me.

But nothing that I can gain from spitting into a test tube would even marginally account for the profound loss of my own history – which, because of shame and selfishness and thoughtlessness, will be inaccessible to me forever. No matter how painful or shameful a secret may be, no matter how much anger still festers, one should never deny one’s children the ability to access their own legacy and history.

Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada and leader of the Official Opposition, has lost his battle with cancer.

It is hard to put into words how significant a loss this is for Canada. Whether you voted NDP or not, Layton was universally admired for his sheer determination and devotion to Canadians – families, gay people, seniors, the impoverished – everyone who needed help. He genuinely believed we could lift each other up and create a fairer society. And he showed us all that when you believe, miracles can happen. The results of the Canadian elections that placed his party in a historically-unparalleled position were the fruits of his vision and hard work — and produced a victory that he only was able to enjoy for three months.

It has been a toxic year tainted by the disgusting spectacle of British politicians rushing to distance themselves from the corrupt media empire they had helped to create; revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere that provided hope which was quickly extinguished once it was clear youth, women, and moderate voices would have nothing to do with the new order; America brought to the economic brink by petty partisan bickering and a rabid right wing; London burning ostensibly over a police shooting but looters gone wild, torching their own neighbourhood and leaving hundreds of innocent people homeless. I have not even touched the economic roller coaster and the repulsive charade of bank bailouts followed by enormous-bonuses-as-usual on Wall Street.

Amid all this toxicity, negativity, and despair, Jack Layton had this to say from his deathbed:

“… consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.

Amid the shameful circus of global politics, Jack Layton was a rare genuine spirit, the epitome of public service, and someone straightforward and most of all, real.

I am going to repeat Jack’s words many times to myself, and resolve to borrow from his stubborn, effervescent, indomitable spirit in this dark hour.

Rest in peace, Jack.

The girl in this picture is me. Or rather, it was me. The me I was between age 16-18. The me I lost when I left Toronto, after testifying against a bunch of neo-Nazi leaders who led an organization co-founded by a CSIS agent. Founded, and funded, by our own Canadian government.

Nobody knows what it is like to live in the underground. It’s been romanticized, glamorized, but unless somebody’s actually lived it, nobody can imagine the toll this life can take on you.

Nameless cities, countless names, and through it all, you just ask yourself, Why do I bother? Why not just let them find me – the ones who kept tracking me down, phoning me in the night with threats like “we’re coming to get you,” and “rats end up in the sewers.”

By writing this entry, I’m coming out. Not as gay (that happened a long time ago!), but as a poser. A faker. An impostor.

This is an open letter to all my friends who will be reading this, whether via this blog or through my Facebook account link. Friends I’ve made in different cities and different countries. Friends near and far who have all called me by different names. I’m here to tell you that no, I wasn’t going through eccentric, creative phases whenever I changed cities and switched names.

 There was a reason for it. At least at the time. But as the years went by, I found myself repeating a pattern that was no longer necessary, yet I didn’t know how to stop – lying. Lying had become part of my identity. Lying about my past, my family, my name. All of it as easy as a knee-jerk reflex. Because when you discard identities like you do clothing, sometimes you don’t know how to relate to others without exposing yourself. Even when the threat has long ended.

So for all those who called me Emma in Nova Scotia or Kat in Ottawa or Elisa in the GTA, or the countless little monikers I’ve worn between one place and the next, this entry should provide the answers to some of the questions you’ve always been too polite to ask.

Why am I “coming out” now? Some of you know about my novel Race Traitor, which is loosely based on my own story. You probably didn’t realize there was a connection. What you’ve been told is that it’s a cool little thriller I’ve been working on for the last couple of years. What you don’t know is that it’s full of demons. Not of the supernatural kind, because those can be vanquished easier than those who come to you in the night, through nightmares and flashbacks and terrors that leave you shaking and wondering what the hell’s the point of going forward.  These demons are real people, and they are out there in the world. Seducing and recruiting young, impressionable people, into movements that rob them of their minds and souls. And you owe it to this world, and to all of those lost youth, to understand what happened to me. And what forced me to write this book.

The irony is, this fall my memoir was going to come out with Penguin. I turned them down, because they wanted me to expose myself and offered me nothing to compensate for the threat to my life and that of my loved ones. So instead of telling my secrets, I turned the memoir into a novel, and wrote new secrets for a new character. I’ll never regret this decision. It led me to create an updated story that will reach far more readers than the decade-old story of a girl who disappeared in 1993.

I paid the price for my privacy. I had to publish it myself. Sure, it came close to being bought several times, but ultimately rejected with comments like “this isn’t pertinent to our society anymore. The heyday of right-wing extremists is over.”

Then the shootings and bombing in Norway happened. It was a wake up call for me. Ultimately I had to fire my agent, take my career back into my own hands, and publish the book myself. Incurring, of course, the silent disapproval of nearly all my writer friends who were horrified that I’d subject myself, and my manuscript, to the ghettos of the “Indie” world. Regardless of the quality of my writing, no respectable newspaper or magazine would review my work now. I’d effectively committed career suicide.

So where does this leave me? Yeah, I guess I could go around peddling my wares on writers’ forums now. Bombarding everybody with tweets and emails begging them to buy my book. But I won’t bother to do that. I won’t plead, beg, or steal you attention with requests that you buy it.

All I wanted to do is to tell you the truth about me, and the truth behind my book. If you don’t like the subject matter or don’t want to waste five bucks on something that took me over a year to write and a lifetime to escape, I don’t give a shit. Really.

 I don’t really give a damn about anything anymore.