Fall is in the air, complete with blowing leaves and weather that shifts from rain to brilliiant sunshine and back again several times a day. For me, the autumn air means one thing: Surrey. Exactly one week from when I’m writing this, at 9:00 on Thursday evening, I’ll be ensconsed in one of my favourite …
Four of the women I know from the Compuserve Books and Writers Forum have started a joint blog called All The World’s Our Page. It’s joint venture across continents: two of the contributors are Australian, the other two American. Four like-minded people coming together from totally different parts of the world appeals to me, so …
Like most as-yet unpublished writers I know, I daydream from time to time about seeing my books on the shelves of my local bookstore. I suppose it’s a dream that motivates me on those days when the words don’t come easily, just like the dream of that new book smell I anticipate when the first …
It’s Thanksgiving here today, north of the 49th parallel. We don’t have much of a Thanksgiving tradition in our family. My mum came to Canada from Scotland, and she never picked up up the Canadian Thanksgiving tradition. The only time we ever really observed it as a family was when I was away at university, …
The nature of my current WIP has me thinking about the nature of morality. However varied people’s moral stances may be, most of us have one, bordered by the lines we believe we would not cross. Some of those lines seem absolute, like the belief, say, that we wouldn’t – couldn’t – kill someone. We …
In honour of my dear friend Pam, whose recent post about her husband’s special mug was one of my favourites on her brilliant blog, below is a picture of my new giant tea mug. I spotted it on the first day of our summer vacation this year, and couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I …
My daughter’s favourite thing to do on weekend mornings is, well, nothing. After a busy week at school, the lure of TV, toys, and time to play makes her tough to drag out of the house sometimes. But it’s a beautiful day today, and I think we were all in the mood to do something. …
After much discussion and deliberation, we finished the shortlists for the fiction and non-fiction sections of the writing contest at the SiWC, the two categories for which I volunteer as a reader. Now karen, the conference – and contest! – coordinator gets the very pleasant job of notifying the people whose stories have been shortlisted. …
Seems like I’m encountering generosity all over the place at the moment. My dentist is crowding and re-working his day tomorrow so that I can get some necessary work started and finished before I leave for the conference. I think it’s probably cutting into his lunch hour to do it for me, and I didn’t …
The other day, my good friend and fellow writer kcdyer said she thinks this is the time of the biggest changes in the publishing industry since the introduction of the printing press. She’s probably right. Minutes before she said it, we’d filled out release forms for a podcast (and who’d even heard of such a thing a few years ago?) …