Thanks to @cbcradiocanada for inviting me to be a guest on last Sunday’s episode of Cross-Country Checkup (which aired November 30, 2025).

Show host Ian Hanomansing was away, so I spoke with Rebecca Sandbergen.

Listen to Cross-Country Checkup’s transit episode. I’m the first interview at the 2:25 mark.

The episode focused on a recent original investigative CBC report. They found transit violence is on the rise, particularly in cities like Toronto, Edmonton, Montreal and Winnipeg.

The numbers square with my experience.

My long history with the TTC

I’ve ridden the TTC all my life. I remember sitting in the front and back cars as a kid to watch the track. It was always exciting to sit in the big window (so many people kindly offered us seats).

In my 30s, I wrote three drafts of Chaos Calling and Chaos Armor, Books I and II of my fantasy action series, The Xenthian Cycle. The series is set partially in Toronto and features a scene on the TTC (Chapter 18 of Chaos Calling).

I used my phone to write chapters during my commute, usually when leaning against the side door with my headphones on.

You could say with confidence that the subway doors are one of the most productive work spaces I’ve ever had.

More about my TTC writing origin story.

But the mood on transit has changed in recent years. There’s more agitation. There’s more distress. And there’s unfortunately a lot more violence.

In August 2024, I was assaulted at my local station. It wasn’t a serious incident (thankfully!), but it reinforced that the post-Covid vibe is different for regular riders.

Will I keep riding transit?

All the same, transit remains a key part of my life in Toronto. It’s often faster than driving, it’s definitely cheaper and most of the time, I feel perfectly safe.

I support programs to enhance that safety, and Mayor Olivia Chow is moving us in that direction.

Where to watch / listen

There’s a TV version of the interview floating around but I’m not sure where to find that. You can listen to the radio version on the CBC Cross-Country Checkup page on Apple podcasts (Nov 30: “Violence on Transit? How to stay safe!”) or Spotify.

Thanks to the Cross-Country Checkup team and producer Chiara Greco for having me on.

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I was.

That morning, I traveled downtown by TTC with my children and my parents. We decided not to go to Nathan Phillips Square at the end of the route, figuring the crowds would be largest there (and we were correct).

Instead, we found a spot outside Union Station at the intersection of York Street, Front Street and University Avenue (it’s a five-way intersection). On the southwest corner, there’s a restaurant with a concrete retaining wall around its garden. We settled on its flat top and got comfortable.

Good thing, too. It was a looooooooong wait.

A sports thirst like no other

Toronto is a sports-mad city. The Maple Leafs haven’t won a championship since the ’60s. Until 2019, the Raptors, formed in 1995, had never made it past the second round. And, while our other sports teams like the Blue Jays have been blessed with wins over the years, we wanted more.

Badly.

So, when the Raptors triumphed over the Golden State Warriors, the atmosphere was electric. People drove and ran through our neighbourhood honking their horns and cheering. Local bars cleaned up.

The crowds that showed up to the parade were so large that the open-topped buses carrying the team had trouble advancing through the packed streets. The police presence wasn’t adequate enough to keep bystanders back.

Overwhelmed cell towers failed. For several hours, I couldn’t see my social media feeds send or receive texts.

By the time we spotted Kawaii and the trophy, we’d been waiting for five hours. By that point, my family had been pressed against the retaining wall by the sheer crush of people. Those moving through the crowd had to inch past us. It was a literal sea of humanity.

Media estimates claimed 1 million people attended. That’s over a third of Toronto’s population.

Nothing describes what it was like to cheer with a million people that afternoon. And as I stood there, in the presence of what felt like the entire world, I thought:

“If everyone here is ready to celebrate Toronto in sports, will they be interested in celebrating it in other forms? What if everyone here is a future reader of my book?”

Diversity everywhere you look

If you told me that there was someone in that crowd with familial ties to every country in the world, I’d believe you.

Basketball is a dynamic, exciting game that attracts a wide international fan base. During the Raptors’ championship run, the players talked about how inspiring it was to know that a whole country, not just the city, was cheering for them.

On that stifling afternoon, people moved around us in a constant flow from all walks of life: young and old, families and groups of friends. After the pandemic and so much social isolation, it’s the kind of memory that feels like a fever dream.

But standing among everyone celebrating, Toronto’s future was obvious: It’s young, passionate and diverse.

Equally obviously: Stories that hope to tell our story on the global stage must reflect that same diversity.

Toronto is ready to be itself

We have a long history in this city of pretending to be other places.

Chicago, Mean Girls, American Psycho, Good Will Hunting, The Virgin Suicides, The Umbrella Academy, Hairspray,The Shape of Water, X-Men, Pacific Rim, Suicide Squad, and The Incredible Hulk are only a few of the many films and TV series filmed in Toronto.

Even on the rare occasions when Toronto plays itself, as the city does in Orphan Black, the reference isn’t explicit. You have to catch mentions of places like ‘Scarborough’ to be sure we’re not pretending to be New York, Chicago, or literally anywhere else.

For a long time, the outlier was Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which is based on a Toronto graphic novel series of the same name:

Recently, however, things have shifted.

CBC shows like Schitt’s Creek and Kim’s Convenience, set in small-town Ontario and Toronto, respectively, found global audiences through CBC, Netflix and other streaming services.

Last spring, Pixar scored a critical hit with Turning Red, an animated feature film explicit about its Toronto connection and inspiration. Director Domee Shee is Chinese Canadian and told a story grounded in personal detail about a teenage girl entering puberty, torn at points between her mother and her friends.

Despite a few fringe reviews that questioned its relevance, audiences found glorious universality in its specifics.

A global urban brand in a changing world

In his victory remarks post-parade, Raptors President and Vice-Chairman Masai Ujiri was vocal about the Raptors and their potential to be a global brand. Here’s an excerpt from Cathal Kelly’s Op-Ed that week:

Ujiri spoke of the Raptors franchise in terms reserved for European soccer elites – truly global teams as likely to be followed in Taipei or Kinshasa as they are at home. This is a team that for years struggled to articulate why it should even exist.

Are the Raptors now bigger than the NBA?

“Yes. There’s no doubt about it,” Ujiri said, then referenced Liverpool FC: “We’re the new Reds. We’re going to capture the world.”
This is dizzying stuff. Nobody in this country talks this way. Too show-offy. Too treacly. Perhaps we should ask ourselves: Why not? Because it sounds kinda nice.

~ Cathal Kelly’s column, “With Churchillian rhetoric, Masai Ujiri envisions the Raptors as one of the world’s great franchises,” published in The Globe and Mail, June 25, 2019

Three years later, Ujiri signed another contract with the Raptors. He’s still bullish about the city and its prospects:

There is something unique about this place, which is why I took the job here. Even when we’ve won the championship, it’s almost still unknown. It’s a gold mine. Because it’s outside the United States, I don’t think people recognize that as much. There are so many things that can expand the minds of players, partners, workers.

~ Masai Ujiri in conversation with Louisa Thomas from, “How Masai Ujiri Builds a Team,” published in The New Yorker, November 7, 2021

Ujiri was the first to suggest that the power of that Raptors parade crowd could power a wider global movement. Five years into my own Toronto novel project, I was moved to hear someone of his achievements agree that there’s something special about this city’s blend of people and experience.

Could Chaos Calling be another story that captures the hearts of a global audience?

There’s only one way to find out.

Two weeks to go until launch!

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Editor’s note about “Don’t Stop Believing”: I originally published this essay on Medium. But their analytics are getting increasingly weird, so I’m giving it a permanent home here.

* * *

It was raining that night. The kind of chilly, damp rain you get in North Toronto in late November or early March.

Transition weather.

I was coming home from the gym. Rain was pounding on the car roof as I pulled into the driveway. The radio was on. Steve Perry was belting out the chorus to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” as I turned off the engine.

I sat and watched the rain fall on the windshield. And in that moment, I realized that I had stopped believing I was capable of writing and publishing a book.

I realized that the story I’d been telling myself about what my life would be was a complete and utter lie.

And I burst into tears.

From childhood, I always wanted to write

Writing is the only dream I’ve ever had, and it caught me young.

I used to sit at an old-fashioned desk (the kind with a steel beam connecting the wooden chair to the table) in my Scarborough bedroom and copy out stories I was reading in little notebooks. I was five at the time. Maybe six.

I was eight when my dad brought a desktop computer home in the mid ’80s. I used it to write a short story about Megan and Sundance from My Little Pony. I remember liking the yellow letters on the black screen.

At 12, I caught another flash of inspiration during a bus ride to school. It prompted me to write a science fiction novella for my Grade 8 independent study project, this time using the world’s heaviest laptop that my dad no longer needed for work.

The story kept growing. I kept writing. When I was 18 and in OAC (Ontario’s former Grade 13) I finally finished a full, novel-length draft for my English class. Mr. Whelan encouraged me to “do something with it.”

I didn’t. An alternate historical fantasy series had already put its claws into me as I was finishing that draft. It didn’t let go until I was in my early 30s.

Life didn’t wait for me

I sought more feedback on my work. I took a writing class with the great Nalo Hopkinson via the University of Toronto’s School for Continuing Studies. I met a wonderful writing group through that class and made a couple of lifelong friends.

Our kids were born. My career became busier than it had ever been. And as Elizabeth Gilbert notes in Big Magic, sometimes if you wait too long to see a creative idea through, that fiery nugget of inspiration dies on you.

That’s what was happening in the car.

My novel had died, and I had finally noticed.

Don’t Stop Believing: What happens if you do?

When I say that I cried, I don’t mean I shed a few artful tears. I was devastated. I turned off the radio, put my head in my hands, and sobbed like my heart was breaking. Because it was.

After 15 minutes or so, I dried my face, took the key out of the ignition and went on with my life.

I told myself that it would be okay — I had changed careers, if not disciplines. I was still a writer.

Our children were at that joyful age between tantrums and curiosity. I was working for a non-profit in Toronto’s startup space. The work was interesting. My colleagues were fascinating. I made more lifelong friends. And I regularly wrote web copy and other collateral.

But it wasn’t the same. And I knew it.

As I’ve written before:

“Thinking about writing during that time was like touching an empty tooth socket with my tongue. I knew what was supposed to be there but was surprised and disappointed and sad when it wasn’t.”

The longing never let go.

Inspiration is a funny fish

In March 2014, we sold our townhouse in North York. At the time, my husband and I were both working downtown. The long commutes were brutal. We wanted to be closer to work. We got lucky with a house listing, and things fell into place.

Complications with the sale meant that, from April to early June, we moved in with my parents. They still live in the house where I was a teenager in Greater Toronto. While we stayed with them, my commuting time doubled from two hours each day to four.

During those long hours in the car, something strange happened to me.

I’d seen Edge of Tomorrow and Captain America: Winter Soldier that spring. Parts of both stories kept echoing in my head while simultaneously mixing with other bits and pieces to ricochet off in an entirely new direction.

I couldn’t leave it alone. While driving, I found myself acting out bits of dialogue. Sometimes I made myself laugh. Sometimes I cried, blinking furiously to keep clear eyes on the road.

Honestly, the whole thing was embarrassing. I’ve always had a rich interior life, but I hadn’t daydreamed this intensely since I was a teenager. I told no one, but I thought about my secret world constantly.

The move came. We settled the children into our new house. That fall, Caitlin Moran gave a talk at the Toronto Public Library that I attended. And she said something that made me sit upright in my seat.

I’m paraphrasing, but it was essentially:

“Whatever you feel most taboo about, whatever feels too strange or bizarre to share with anyone else, that’s the universe’s special content gift to you.”

What if what was happening during those commutes wasn’t just a diversion to keep me from losing my mind out of sheer boredom?

What if it was another book?

How do you recognize inspiration?

The next night, I had a dinner date with my friend K-Town. She’s a writer, too, and had generously been one of my beta readers for that dead-in-its tracks fantasy epic.

Giddy with the question of whether I’d latched onto a viable idea, I told her this new story as though vomiting up my very guts. It took a long time. My cheeks grew hot and my voice grew thin, the way it gets when I’m trying to talk but I’m too excited to do it properly.

When I’d finished, K-Town looked at me for a long minute. Then she said, “That’s the most commercial thing you’ve ever come up with. GO. WRITE IT.”

So I did.

Without endless evenings and weekends to spend at a desktop computer, I had to get crafty. Eventually, I realized that I could use Wattpad to write during my subway commute. By standing in the doors that never opened until I reached my stop, I could put my headphones in, pull out my phone, and get in 25 to 40 minutes of writing each way.

Getting out of my own way

Using this method, I wrote a first draft of 135,000 words in 15 months.

In the beginning, I thought the story was a standalone book. As it turns out, that draft was the highlight reel for a five-book contemporary fantasy action series.

I wrote five more drafts between 2014 and 2022, refining my world-building, characters, and villains, while interlacing the plot as I went. I got feedback from 26 beta readers, a structural/line editor who works for a major publishing house, two sensitivity readers, a copyeditor, and a proofreader.

It’s been a labour of love, but Chaos Calling: Book 1 of The Xenthian Cycle is now available for pre-order as an ebook.

Don’t Stop Believing: What I wish I’d known

Why tell you this story?

In part to share my book’s origin story and perhaps inspire you to read it, sure.

But there’s something deeper at play.

When I got out of that car carrying a dead dream, I was between 33 and 35 years old. I thought I’d missed my shot. I thought I was a failure. I thought I’d lied to my family and myself about what my life would be.

I’ve never been so wrong.

And the kicker?

I built Chaos Calling in the wreckage of that earlier novel. Wrestling with my slow-paced, ridiculously flawed fantasy epic taught me more about craft and persistence than any class ever could. I just needed time, both to finish becoming the adult I needed to be, and for this new idea to emerge.

And so, as I think about that distraught young parent sobbing out her heart in that car, I want to ask you one small question:

What might you be wrong about?

* * *

Chaos Calling: Book 1 of The Xenthian Cycle is available as an ebook and paperback. It’s about three childhood friends who don’t know they’re on standby for the end of the world. Slowly, they realize that their unusual adolescence was training for what to do should an ancient enemy appear in their lifetime.

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I originally wrote this post on Medium in 2015. I remember being excited that some ‘important’ Twitter accounts engaged with it. I’ve left the references to the manuscript that would eventually become Chaos Calling as-is.

Once upon a time, I wrote a post assessing the pros and cons of the Wattpad platform for aspiring writers on my blog [2026 me: I’m referring to The Analytic Eye, which is now offline]. I wrote 3,000 words and took a fence-sitting position on its value.

Instead of getting into the thing to really understand what it could do, I responded like a critic. All these months later with with 100,000 words of a novel draft in hand thanks in large part to the existence of Wattpad, I’m struck by how wrong I was.

What changed?

Talking to an Angel

The first thing that helped open my eyes to Wattpad’s platform was a discussion with one of the company’s early angel investors.

I know him through my work in Toronto’s startup land; I expressed curiosity in his Wattpad involvement one afternoon and he told me about his decision to invest. During that discussion, I posed my analytical concerns about the platform, which essentially boiled down to this:

Why do the Wattpaders who generate content make nothing when the platform is valued in the millions? Doesn’t that devalue content, writing and writers?

“I didn’t really consider that,” he said [I’m paraphrasing because I didn’t make detailed notes]. “Wattpad’s power is that they’ve built something extraordinary for the Internet: a respectful, friendly community that welcomes writers and lets them thrive. A lot of them are young women. They go on there and find an audience for their work. Maybe they get better. They might do it for fun. Or, they could make friends and connect with others like them all over the world. But that community is what I thought was exceptional.”

This conversation, which took place in late September 2014, coincided with five or six other events that I now realize were pivotal in reigniting my creative writing life.

“Hmm,” I remember thinking. “All I did when I was researching that blog post was upload some existing content to Wattpad that I had already written. I didn’t try composing on it.

“Maybe Wattpad could work for me, too.”

And so when inspiration coalesced in my brain barely 72 hours after that conversation, I decided to give writing on the platform a serious shot.

On Passions, Day Jobs and Parenting

Like most adults in North America, my day-to-day life is demanding. I’m married and we have two fantastic kids in grade school. I have an intense career, love my family and wish I saw my friends more. My chore list is a perpetual motion machine. I’m disciplined about my gym membership.

But I’ve written since I was a child. It’s how I make sense of the world and the activity that most consistently allows me to experience flow.

Yet after our kids were born, my writing life died.

During an interview I did with Guy Gavriel Kay while working at the University of Toronto in my late 20s, he surmised I was an aspiring writer and kindly asked me about my ambitions. He warned me that writing while parenting is tricky, particularly for women. And he suggested, wisely, that I get a manuscript done before I reproduced.

Didn’t happen.

After my first child arrived, my writing slowed to a trickle. I stopped submitting work to my writing group. I also gained some perspective and shelved my research-heavy, ambitious, alternate-history/fantasy novel that I’d been trying to complete for the better part of a decade.

As Elizabeth Gilbert aptly describes in her recent book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, I’d taken too long to develop that idea and its fiery core was stone dead.

I no longer had endless evening and weekend hours to reanimate that dream or catch a new one. So I thought I’d missed my shot.

And here’s the thing:

However rewarding it is to be a parent (and it is), it’s devastating to feel your creative dream has died.

Thinking about writing during that time was like touching an empty tooth socket with my tongue. I knew what was supposed to be there, but was surprised and disappointed and sad when it wasn’t.

Enter Wattpad: 100,000 Words in 13 Months

Thirteen months after opening myself to the idea of using Wattpad as a mobile composition tool, I’ve written an entirely new novel.

I hit 100,000 words last week.

[2026 me: I finished the first draft of what was The Xenthian Cycle in full about six weeks after writing this post, completely unaware it was a series and not a standalone novel. Oh, 2015 me, you have no idea what you’ve done.]

I haven’t published as I went like many Wattpaders do, though I was tempted. While writing and work-shopping that earlier novel draft, I learned that feedback while writing derails my ability to finish. I’m more productive in a vacuum.

If you’re a numbers person, my fictional output over the last six years averages between 3,000 and 5,000 words a year (my day job also involves writing). Using Wattpad increased my productivity by a factor of 20.

By any measure, that’s a blistering shift. How’s it possible?

With Wattpad’s iOS app, I discovered I love writing on my phone while standing on the subway.

I sometimes edit with the desktop interface, but the bulk of my draft was composed by phone in the doors of TTC subway cars during my daily round-trip commute. I put my earphones on, find a spot and make out with my imagination for 25 minutes each way.

Did I know writing on the subway was possible?

Before you ask, I remember reading articles like this 2010 Telegraph story about Peter Brett writing a novel on his phone and thinking, “Yeah, right.” I’m skeptical I could have written a book this way before contemporary smartphones. Bigger mobile screen sizes coupled with better digital keyboards and the solid Wattpad interface made it feasible.

Writing with Wattpad means I don’t have to worry about how crowded the car is or about getting a seat. I’m right handed, so when I was trying to write in a paper notebook I had to have a left-sided seat on the end of a row. Ask anyone from Toronto who takes transit and they’ll tell you that’s next to impossible during peak travel times.

I also didn’t have to shoehorn writing into the time I need to work or see my family, exercise, sleep or whatever, though I’ll sometimes take my phone out and keep writing after my kids have gone to bed.

Before this change, I thought of myself as someone with no time. Wattpad found me slack I didn’t know I had, provided I was willing to upend my old writing process, Lewis Carroll-styles.

Better still, I didn’t have to quit my job, ignore my family, move to Tibet, plow through my savings or disown my social commitments to gain this freedom.

What it all means for my creativity

While it’s early to say if the novel will resonate with others, my days of siting at a desk and staring blankly at the blinking cursor on the barren white space of an empty Word document are over. Writing on my phone with Wattpad feels like play.

I don’t feel anxious about beginning a new chapter or finding the next word or scene. I just open the app and trust that flow is waiting for me.

And, like self-fulfilling magic, it usually is.

So believe me when I say Wattpad has completely changed the way I write fiction. I don’t have words for how much joy this change has brought back into my day-to-day life.

What about my earlier criticism? What if I never make a dime from the book?

It doesn’t really matter (though of course I’d be open to it).

Using Wattpad brought back my creative satisfaction. The joys of this past year have been just that: a string of pearl-like delights for me alone.

So thanks, Wattpad, for facilitating this experience (with bonus mad props to the Zen Desk support team).

Here’s to the last five chapters.

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