Baby’s nontoxic nursery: Preparing a healthy space for your newborn. What paints should you choose when decorating baby’s new room? Surrounding your new child with noxious fumes is the last thing you want to do.

Lawn warfare: Pesticide and herbicide use in Canada. I interviewed the PR person from the David Suzuki Foundation as well as a professor of biomolecular chemistry to write this one.

Get in the habit: 10 easy ways to shrink your carbon footprint. This one is self explanatory. But did you know the concept for a carbon footprint was derived from those newfangled desktops in the early 90s that stood upright instead of lying flat?

In it for the money: Green initiatives that are good for our ecology economy. This is one of those slightly cynical pieces. The intro comes from a really funny ad for IBM that you can watch here on Youtube. The art department did an awesome job with this one.

The eco dilemma: Why electric cars won’t save the world. Once again, an alternative look at a green deus ex machina (a term, incidentally, that I had originally used in the intro – but my editor wisely replaced this rather academic term with “save the day”).

Selenium and cancer: Good news and bad. A short piece on the links between cancer and an antioxidant called selenium.

Two very short pieces: Cleaning our lakes – about a government restriction of phosphates, and When TVs die – about the switchover from analog to digital and the potential aftermath of discarded TVs in our landfills. 

Even if you’re not into this genre, and admittedly, I’m hardly the target audience either – do you know how lucrative this market actually is? A few years ago, I got a book called “The Art of Romance Writing” as a gag gift, but am now seriously thinking of writing a racy novel and retiring on the inevitable movie deal.

Anyway, here’s an article I really enjoyed writing because, well, I love surfing! And so does Scott over in the art department. He took some glorious pictures in Tofino and quite simply graced my article with them. Click on the thumbnail to hit the beach dude.

Seeing these two articles juxtaposed like this evokes a stark contrast between Western frivolity and Aboriginal reality. Note how they’re both sitting in the same cross-legged position too. I almost wish the art department had actually planned it that way.

“But how?” my students ask. “How do you actually do it?”

You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again.

Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind – a scene, a locale, a character, whatever – and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape has to say above the other voices in your mind. The other voices are banshees and drunken monkeys. They are the voices of anxiety, judgment, doom, guilt. Also, severe hypochondria. There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk. There is a vague pain at the base of your neck. It crosses your mind that you have meningitis. Then the phone rings and you look up at the ceiling with fury, summon every ounce of noblesse oblige, and answer the call politely, with maybe just the merest hint of irritation. The caller asks if you’re working, and you say yeah, because you are.

Sound familiar? The hardest part about writing is definitely the writing part. Anyway, just wanted to share that with you.

Of course you could always browse on Amazon or check out the New York Times book review, which most book junkies religiously follow.