For a book, of course. My first two novels (The Night Inside and Blood and Chrysanthemums) were set in Toronto, so finding locations wasn’t that difficult.  I just shamelessly stole from the places that I lived and worked.  Other bits I hand-waved as required (mostly deserted industrial lands … yeah, I think there are some […]

[Read more →]

I am not an art critic. These days, I feel barely able to throw together a coherent thought about anything. But I had a lot of thoughts, coherent or otherwise, while viewing the huge show by Damien Hirst (or Damien Fucking Hirst, as one of my friends calls him) in Venice. It spans two locations and includes […]

[Read more →]

We spent two lovely weeks in Italy in May.  This time it was one week in Venice for the Biennale plus a few days in Lucca and in Florence.  Because we’d hit all the big sights last time, we were able to take things at a more leisurely pace, which involved a lot of long […]

[Read more →]

My “to do” list says “Blog post this week”.  It says that every two weeks (or three, if I push it off).  But I’ve got nothing. So here’s a song, by the wonderful Barry Andrews of Shriekback, from his solo piano album Haunted Box of Switches, Vol 1 & 2.   Sue me.

[Read more →]

SPEAK, DON’T SPEAK V.  Hereafter follows the first-person version of IV. A sharp-edged gust of wind threatened to snatch my hat from my hand and send it cartwheeling down the beach. I was out of practice at this, it seemed. My skirts were too long, my coat too thin, my hat nothing more than a […]

[Read more →]

Suzy McKee Charnas’ novel The Vampire Tapestry was a formative influence on The Night Inside, though I could certainly never equal the cool, elegant, and fine-honed prose she brought to bear on this brilliant depiction of the vampire as alien creature making its way among humans that were both its prey and an irresistible source […]

[Read more →]

  Continuing the variations on a theme exercises I did from Wonderbook.  I’m sparing you the “dialogue only” version, which did not really work, and the combined “description only/dialogue only” version, which was not much better. Today’s version is third person and ended up being past tense vs. present. I think I might need to […]

[Read more →]

  I’ve been less productive than hoped since Christmas (work, events, general laziness to blame) but I did revisit some of the exercises I did from Wonderbook by jeff Vandermeer.  The last one was quite challenging, as it involved rewriting a scene multiple times (some of which I admit to having skipped from lack of interest).  […]

[Read more →]

The hardest character to find a decent picture for has been Leontine.  After hunting around for a while, I finally decided to go back to my first inspiration, which was a little girl in Fillippo Lippi’s “The Coronation of the Virgin”.  And lo and behold, Signor Lippi had a few other lovely paintings, one of […]

[Read more →]

Being the second in my series of inspiration pictures for the WIP. I found the first of these images on my Beautiful Bizarre Magazine instagram feed, which is a constant source of incredible art that could serve as inspiration for dozens of stories (were I the sort of person who could have that many ideas).  It’s […]

[Read more →]