While writing Consumed Regrets, I spent years inventing strange connections between places that seemed completely different. One of the central settings in the novel is the relationship between the Cactus State and the Marsh State. At first glance, they appear to be opposites. One is dry. One is wet. One struggles with drought. The other struggles with excess water. Yet as the story unfolds, readers gradually discover that the two regions are deeply connected. What happens in

A few days ago, I came across a video claiming that the Sahara Desert is receiving more rainfall than before, and that one day the desert itself might disappear. The video went even further, suggesting that if the Sahara became green again, the Amazon Rainforest could suffer severe consequences. At first, this sounded absurd. How could a desert in Africa possibly affect a rainforest in South America? The two places are separated by an entire ocean. Yet the more I read, the mo

In January 2026, something happened that I never expected. An unfamiliar phone number was added to my PayPal account. Shortly afterward, my password was changed. Then, a total of $517.90 USD was spent through three separate transactions that I did not authorize. At first, I assumed this would be a straightforward case. I reported the issue to PayPal and expected the transactions to be investigated. Instead, I received a response stating: "We've completed our review of your un

Yesterday, I found myself doing something that felt less like design work and more like archaeological digging. I had been circling around a problem that looked simple on the surface: the cover image for my novel Nonimportantech. But as often happens with visual decisions, the “simple” part quickly dissolves once you start actually looking. I opened my Google Drive, thinking I would quickly find something usable. Instead, I found mostly videos—recent fragments of life, short

A week ago, I began working with a long-time client from Westmount. He brought in a collection that felt less like a “job order” and more like a time capsule that had quietly survived the century: photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, old newspapers, birth certificates, marriage announcements, obituaries—entire lives compressed into paper, ink, and fading emulsion. As I started scanning them, something unexpected happened. It wasn’t just technical work anymore. Each d

When I was in high school, there was a girl who seemed to have everything. She came from a well-off family. She was intelligent, athletic, confident, and admired by almost everyone around her. She was the kind of person who made success look effortless. Years after graduation, another classmate told me that she had died of leukemia. The news hit me harder than I expected. Life had already taught me that bad things happen to good people, but somehow I had never imagined that s

Today, a gentleman walked into my shop. As I always do, I greeted him first in French, then in English. "Bonjour." "Hello." He smiled warmly, pointed to both of his ears, and then made a soft sound from his throat. In that instant, I understood. He could not hear. For a moment, neither of us spoke. We didn't need to. He smiled. I smiled back. And somehow, communication continued. What struck me most was not his deafness. It was how quickly two strangers found another way to u

This morning, while walking through the neighborhood, I suddenly stopped in front of a small garden. Not a famous botanical garden.Not one of those luxury landscaping projects designed for magazines.Just a narrow strip of soil between the sidewalk and a brick building. And yet, it felt strangely beautiful. There were hostas overflowing onto the walkway, small evergreens planted with patience, flowers blooming from recycled tires painted green, and an old wooden wagon wheel le

This is a novel I am currently writing, unfolding in real time as a fragmented narrative about systems, identity, and the quiet mechanisms that organize modern life. At its surface, the story begins with something deceptively simple: labels. Names on lunch boxes. Tags on people. Categories assigned to objects, events, and even emotions. In this world, everything is readable, sortable, and transferable. Identity is not fixed—it is assigned, exchanged, corrected, and sometimes

I originally thought I was writing a dystopian story. At the beginning, everything pointed in that direction. A collapsing environment.Biological systems escaping control.Administrative absurdity.Media manipulation.Political structures feeding on narrative instability.People slowly losing the ability to distinguish memory from constructed reality. The world of the novel became increasingly strange, humid, fragmented, and emotionally unstable. And yet, somewhere along the way,