Terrace. While checking-into the hotel, one of the authors I am travelling with said, "Is this place called Terrace because it is built on a terrace?" And another said, "It could be named after a person, like Bob Terrace." No one had the right PDA.

My book, 8x10, was nominated for this year's Ethel Wilson BC Book Prize for Fiction, and I, along with Kristin Butcher (Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize), Kari-Lynn Winters (Christie Harris Illustrated Fiction Prize) and Cathleen With (my competition), have consented to a week-long tour of northern BC towns, places like Kitimat, Hazelton, Prince Rupert, Prince George, Quesnel, Smithers, and our first stop, Terrace.

The tour is young, and after a wobbly Dash-8 descent we got our legs back and gave our first reading at the Terrace Art Gallery, where we met another itinerant writer, Josh Massey, whose engaging novel about tree-planters I am twenty pages into.

A beautiful warm day here in Terrace, the mountains looking like an over-iced bundt cake. Outside my hotel room, a guy is barbequing chicken on the back of a CN repair truck, while in the window opposite, a girl in a tank-top loads a bong.