Summer 2025 newsletter
Frenchman’s Bay Yacht Club, August 31, 2025
I’ve been thinking a great deal about belonging over the course of this summer. What it means to belong. Or not to belong.
I assume the need to belong is in our genes. Humans are primates after all, and primates are pack animals (mostly). There are many ways to belong. We can belong to a country, a profession, a political party, a religion…just to name a few. I’d even go so far as to say a prevalence of my-pack-is-better-than-your-pack convictions are fueling many of the world’s current problems.
But I don’t want to talk about international relations. I want to talk about writing and why I’ve been thinking about belonging, via a wee detour about sailing.
I have a sailboat and am a member of a club with other sailboat owners. The fact that I belong to this group gives me access to dozens of other sailing clubs around Lake Ontario, via reciprocal agreements. Over the Labour Day weekend, we sailed from Toronto to the Frenchman’s Bay Yacht Club in Pickering. As we approached, FBYC sailors watched for our sailboat, caught our lines and helped us dock. They didn’t know us. We’d never met them before we tossed them our midship line. But because we belong to their pack (Lake Ontario sailing clubs), their club was our club for the duration of our stay.
It was that sailing trip that helped me finish the third and final act of How the Invisible Woman Learned to Fly.
My main character Marcie Blanchard had evolved from a woman who suffered from a crippling lack of self-confidence, into a self-assured hero willing to put her life on the line to protect her loved ones. All I had to do was wrap it up and send Marcie off into the sunset, so to speak. But the plot in the final chapters wouldn’t gel. I was missing something. I spent weeks (!) writing, rewriting, and deleting the last few thousand words of my book.
As a few FBYC sailors led us on a tour of their facilities, then gave us the code to the doors and the gates, I was struck by the power of belonging and how it made me feel. Safe. Privileged. Valued.
The flipside of this powerful experience, of course, is feeling like you don’t belong. We’ve all been there. It’s an unsettling experience.
It’s unmooring.
That’s when I figured out what the final chapters were missing. Marcie had evolved, but the world around her had not. After her heroic acts, she’s still in a job she hates. Still trying to parent a hormonal, difficult teenage boy who doesn’t want her mothering. And as a middle-aged woman, she’s still invisible to most people.
Where does she belong? Who values her? What is her pack?
That needed answering, otherwise Marcie was at risk of becoming unmoored again - losing all the self-confidence she’d worked so hard to build.
And so, over the Labour Day weekend, as we were docked at the Frenchman’s Bay Yacht Club, I created a new character. She isn’t a major character. In fact, she only gets a few lines in the penultimate chapter, but the new character plays a very important role. She gives Marcie a way to think about belonging.
A mooring, allowing Marcie to find a new way forward.
Finale (finally!) written, I’m going to put the full draft away for a month or so, maybe even six weeks. Let it settle and come back to it with a fresh perspective, before tackling my final revisions.
Wish me luck!