Slices of Summer is a new editorial feature at 49th Shelf where once a week, an author will provide us a quick peek at what they're doing in these long (but never long enough) summer weeks where "work" can seem like an alien concept.

Ann Ireland kicks off the series. She is the author of A Certain Mr. Takahashi (winner of the Seal First Novel Award), Exile (shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize) and The Instructor (finalist for the Ontario Trillium Award). Her fourth novel, The Blue Guitar, was released in January 2013. A past PEN President and current contributing editor at Numero Cinq, Ireland is in the middle of writing her fifth novel, tentatively titled "Where’s Bob?" However, some distractions are in play: it is Toronto in the height of summer, after all!

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The world outside the studio window is blooming. I’ve got all winter to hunker down indoors and write a novel. Life beckons. I can smell it, wet grass and blooming shrubs, the teenager next door smoking pot on his deck. I can hear it, the thwack of baseball hitting glove in the park across the street. Birds peeping like there’s no tomorrow. For all I know, maybe there IS no tomorrow.

I want out. It’s wrong to stay indoors on a day like this. There’s the novel … but so many other things demand my attention:

1. Haven’t ridden my bicycle yet this season. I did get so far as to grease the chain and pump up the tires. I bet the Ashbridge’s Spit is wonderful on a day like this. Only one way to find out. Take a spin along the Martin Goodman trail or whatever they call it now. Hazelnut ice cream cone on the boardwalk. Hi to the ducks. Wind against my face. 

2. Why live in Toronto? Why not move somewhere with more nature? Cash in the house and buy a cute cabin or house somewhere cheap, on a lake, say, or near crown land where trails wind through the escarpment. All the money I’d save selling out in Toronto would mean I could do NOTHING BUT WRITE NOVELS from hereon in. This takes lots of research on the Internet.

3. The farmers’ markets are going great guns. There’s one nearly every day in the city. Three in my immediate neighbourhood. Recall dismal winter days buying cruddy half-dead vegetables wrapped in plastic, imported from god knows where. Take advantage of this window of opportunity. To market to market to buy a fat lettuce.

4. I just bought a Kindle. So I better download some books. I’ve already read one. Lisa Moore’s Caught. It was good. E-ink means I can read in the park, catching whatever breeze is available. I can’t work here in my studio today—the teens next door are gathering, cracking open beers and etcetera, celebrating end of school. I can hear everything they say.

5. Don’t you like those Frisbees that are just a circle of orange, no inside part? Aerobie is what they are called. They fly very well and they don’t bust your fingernails when you catch them. I see Tim and me shooting one around after supper, when the sun’s gone down. I wonder where I can buy one? Maybe the toy shop on Danforth. Better scurry up there now, while I think of it.

6. And I’ll add a number six, just to demonstrate how this particular day is going. It’s very hot and muggy and my I.Q. has sunk to double digits. I certainly can’t write great literature while in this frame of mind. I’ve been saving up that gift certificate of fifty dollars for the restaurant underneath TIFF at King and John. It would be good to walk down there in this Amazonian heat, just to prove I can. An hour and a quarter. Maybe Tim will join me. I bet we can get a fancy lunch there for fifty dollars. (Note: we did this. The food was not very good. But we walked there and halfway back, chased by a thunderstorm.) Now I’m too hot and tired to actually do anything.

You can learn more about Ann Ireland on her site http://www.annireland.ca/. Good luck, Ann!