I have many writing avoidance behaviours, honed over the long years of my block and my continuing struggles to keep up any level of productivity. One of my favourites is finding out about other people’s process, in the hopes that somewhere there is a magic bullet that will fix mine. So far, I haven’t found […]

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This year, I managed to read 16 books during our annual two weeks in Haliburton.  The seven physical books are shown above and the additional nine ebooks, sadly, exist only in the ether. Topics ranged from a biography of Gertrude Bell (Desert Queen), a book about birds (The Thing with Feathers), a romance novel chosen […]

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Because books on sale is always good news.  CZP is having a sale on ebook only editions this month, which means that my first three novels are available via Amazon for $2.99 each (links at the CZP site linked above). And there are two incredible short stories from the brilliant, award-winning Gemma Files plus books by […]

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Well, not excuses not to travel. Or to travel. Just excuses to explain lack of progress in writing, no blog posts, too much good food and wine, too little exercise (except for the 20,000 steps a day trip to Alberta, which I’m fairly sure did not offset the aforementioned good food and wine). In the […]

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Since I retired (mostly) last year, I’ve been trying to find something charitable or community-related to do. This has been hampered by a number of things: the fact that I’m not good at all that much, the fact that the potentially useful things I’m ok at are not things I want to spend my time doing […]

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Saturday night was my second flamenco dance show. This time around, I was part of six dance numbers, did silent acting in a vignette about emigrating to Canada, and performed a somewhat sardonic monologue about Spartan women.  I was happy that I hit my marks, only screwed up once, and that so many of my […]

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Like the fey, especially amoral, untrustworthy, dangerous ones?  Then you definitely need this new Storybundle offering.  Why? It includes my own Cold Hillside It was curated by the amazing Sandra Kasturi: award-winning writer, editor, publisher (and my good friend) It includes such luminaries as Gemma Files, Jane Yolen, Lisa Goldstein and Nancy Springer It’s a […]

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I’ve been stalled on both the “real” thing and the “let’s pretend this isn’t real” thing because it seems I can no longer turn off my internal editor and everything is hard. This, naturally, means I have even less to say on this benighted blog than usual.  So today’s topic is: how to justify the […]

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I’ve been feeling stuck on the Witch Thing in Progress (see avoidance behaviour post) and so I thought “why not try writing something fun? Something silly and frothy and maybe a wee bit fanfic-ish and romantic and without world-building or pressure or magic systems or any of those things that scare you.” I dutifully hauled […]

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To clarify, the avoidance is all on my side.  The teachers on the Masterclass site are doing their jobs.  My husband decided to sign up for a year’s access to the online learning site, Masterclass, which features lectures from such luminaries as Ron Howard, Steve Martin, and Annie Leibowitz.  It’s not cheap but we figured […]

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