Taylor Gray Moore

Writer of fiction, poetry, etc - based in Vancouver BC

January 27, 2024
2024-01-27 00:53 I’ve thought about what it is what I get from literature, and art in general I guess, what its for. The thing that guides me through it when I write it and what I’m looking for when I read it. I’ve thought about it for years. Something clicked in the shower, and so I’m writing it down while its lucid.   There’s a freedom and limitlessness behind every moment. We stymie that all the time while we go throughout our day, let things get away, get sad, get mad, get distracted, but it’s always there...
January 24, 2024
2024-01-24 23:09 Visited the Richmond Public Market today, with Cali—who is just recently back from a cross-continental train journey—on this the day the busses came back into service. It was my first time in there. Even after working a block away for five and a half years, I had managed to never go inside. It had become a sort of legend.   Half of the shops on the first floor was shuttered, half or more, and we walked past this and a number of groceries stalls on our way to the stairs going up to the second l...
Cafe Noir Poems! (January 13, 2024)
2024-01-14 09:38 Another nine hour shift today, so not terribly exciting. Except for one thing: I heard back from Cactus about Cafe Noir Poems (I) today—they want it! I’m getting published again!   I will probably be more excited later once I’ve had time to process on a day when I am not working a nine hour shift. About that: story was empty again, I was miserably cold. I ate too much food too fast on my fifteen minute break. They also gave me a plaque congratulating me for five years of work there. Looking at...
January 12, 2024
2024-01-14 09:37 I am again too exhausted to write—I need to work on this problem. It’s, what, about 11:30 on a night after a nine hour shift. I got home at 10:20, warmed up a bowl of rice. Came down here. Stared ahead of me a few minutes to give the day time to scuttle off my back, and then I sit down. This is not the ideal time to be doing time--but I’m dedicating more daylight hours, when I can claim them, to work on other projects. That is more important. A good friend recently expressed concern that these s...
January 8, 2024
2024-01-08 23:43 A week since my last entry. Well, that’s probably healthy. Not like I haven’t been working on this, though—for that week, most of which was taken up by 2-9:30 evening shifts, I was working on the Montreal content. Wake up, write, go to work, come home, write, go to sleep, wake up, write… etc. I got sick of it and needed to step away. Now I can take steps back again.   Since yesterday have started thinking about my short story collection as a whole work, too. It is absurd, oversized and pretent...
December 6, 2023
2024-01-05 11:34 I suppose oysters were important… and Verdun followed. Verdun also came first, but it followed too. And that’s fundemental the outline of the entire day.   In more detail:   I wake up with a hangover, (no kidding), an hour later than I would have if I’d gone to bed at a reasonable hour. Nine-ish: about the plan. I lay in bed a little bit listening to the traffic, the day out there that’s underway without me. But I get up. I let myself have a moment of standing in the middle of the kitchen lo...
December 5, 2023 cont.
2024-01-03 10:52 Le Vieux Europe is a place I used to like to go but not buy anything, only window show. I didn’t have much of a disposable income back then—although I did dispose of it plenty of ways I probably could have done without. I probably could’ve bought more there—but I would just go in and bask in it. Lots of specialty meats and cheeses, an entire wall of coffee beans from around the world behind glass screens and ready to be taken home. European Chocolates. Panettone. It lives up to its name.   I’m...
January 1, 2024
2024-01-01 21:37 I have a ritual on New Year’s Eve—no matter where I go out to, I want to be back at home for midnight. I want to have that instant with my mom and grandpa, letting off a bottle of champagne, watching the cork fly away into the dark of the front yard, and begin another year together. It started when I lived in Montreal, and was only back for a week or two at a time, so it was that important to share these small rituals I could be there for; it continues because I know these small rituals remain i...
December 31, 2023
2023-12-31 14:59 It’s New Year’s Eve day, and the end of a busy week.   I’ve decided to cut down on how much I write these, or at least how long they are when I do write them. I am still slogging through my time in Montreal—although it’s fun to relive that, I would rather be writing about events still happening. There’s more of a crackle to that; and once it gets old, it becomes something else. Other than what this was supposed to be.   It’s been that odd week between Christmas and New Year’s. I only worked ...
December 26, 2023
2023-12-26 23:34 What did I do today?   I worked on “OVERCOMING FEAR OF EXTRATERRESTRIALS THROUGH SELF-HYPNOSIS,” that story in my collection that I want to finish. Editing a draft. It’s at the stage where I’ve printed it out and am going over it with a multicoloured pen. The first satisfying stage of the progress—I always feel like I’m beginning to understand what I’m working with when I get here. One never understands an unfinished story by simply staring at it on a computer screen: it always feels insurmoun...