I am so looking forward to these events coming up in September and October. For event details and times, visit my Events page. For those of you in Creston, BC, I’ll be signing books at Good Company Coffee on Saturday, September 9 from 11:00am-1:00pm. I’d love it if you’d stop by and say hi, have a coffee and get your book signed. In Nelson, I’ll be reading at Elephant Mountain Lit Fest, as part of the Cottonwood event at the… Read More »Fall Events
Have you ever thought your family’s history would make a great novel? I have to admit this is not something I ever gave much thought to. That is, until I inherited the personal archives of my great-aunt when she died in 2014. In many ways, my great-aunt, June Grant, was ahead of her time. She never married and became a career woman instead. (She lived in a time when women were expected (or forced) to leave their jobs once they… Read More »Turning Family History into Fiction
I am so very pleased to share the cover art for my new novel, A Real Somebody, with you. I hope you love it. (I love it.) I saw a few different versions of the cover art and this was by far my favourite. I love that it’s a typewriter. I love the colours and textures, and I especially love the pattern of the wallpaper in the background. And I think June would love the typewriter. (Though I did show… Read More » A Real Somebody Cover Art! (Are you ready?)
In my soon-to-be-released novel A Real Somebody, I turned my great-aunt June into a character and fictionalized a season of her early life – in Montreal in the spring of 1947. Today I thought it would be fun to look back at some of the early research I did for A Real Somebody and give you an example of how I captured details from June’s personal archives and fictionalized them to use in the story. In June’s archives I found… Read More »Turning Life into Fiction
For a lot of the years that I’ve been writing, I’ve given free writing advice to anyone that asked me. Honestly, I thought I was obligated and also I’d never learned to say no. I would scrabble hard to make time for my own writing and then give away my time to someone’s cousin’s friend who was thinking of maybe writing a book someday. (Sorry if you missed that decade. 😉 ) Then I learned how to say no, and… Read More »A New Thing! Get Unstuck Calls for Writers
Last month I wrote about the many things I learned when I took a year off writing. I had learned about letting go. Remember? Let go, I said. No, more than that. More. That’s what my year off writing novels supposedly taught me. I’m not in charge, I said. Who knows what actions lead to which results? Just do the creative things that give you joy and share them and call it good. And then I went ahead and took… Read More »I Am Still Not In Charge
I recently wrote about the year that I took off from writing novels. Today I wanted to summarize what I learned during that time, and the direction I will be heading next. 1. Action Does Not Equal Result Over the last 15 years, I have done everything that was asked and expected of me, including writing 1000 words a day, networking, joining writerly organizations and volunteering, attending conferences, pitching manuscripts, keeping up to date with social media and generally following… Read More »Six Things I Learned When I Took A Year Off Writing Novels
(Here’s what I did instead.) Last November I decided to take a year off from writing novels. A Real Somebody was ready for querying, and I thought the manuscript was in great shape, but I’d thought that about my last two manuscripts, and they did not find homes. Was this life’s way of telling me I should just move on? If so, I was willing. But I’d been writing novels every weekday morning since 2006! What was I supposed to… Read More »I Took A Year Off Writing Novels.