I first heard Dessa (aka Dessa Darling, aka Margaret Wander) listening to one of Welcome to Nightvale’s live podcasts. She and Paper Tiger performed “Call off Your Ghost” and I thought, well, that’s pretty cool, I should find out more. So I did, and discovered that Dessa is a singer, composer, songwriter, rapper, and spoken word artist […]

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I finished off Nanowrimo at just over 4,000 words so it was reasonably productive.  However, I’ve now started a three-day a week work contract so the next few months may be a bit slow. One lovely way to pretend to be working is to look for visual references to help ground your words in something […]

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Well, I’m a bit behind on this, as expected. No, I did not expect to write a novel during November. However, I did use the National Novel Writing Month period to try to get as many words down as possible while I was working on Cold Hillside. I never managed more than about 10,000 – […]

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Not very original, but hey, I’ve been sick.  We spent 10 days in California and returned to fever, weird dreams about Escher bodies, architecture and Hillary Clinton. First stop: San Francisco.  We went to a distillery in a old airplane hangar, to Alcatraz, to a free museum full of arcade games, to the Japanese Tea […]

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  Or more precisely, Here’s How to Finish that Fucking Book, You Monster, courtesy of Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds blog. To the surprise of no one who has been paying attention, I find it very hard to finish books.  Hell, I find it hard to start books. And as for the stuff in the middle, […]

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I’m still working through the exercises from Ursula K. LeGuin’s Steering the Craft.  I’m currently rewriting a snippet from the novel in limited third person, detached narrator, observer narrator, and involved author (omniscient) styles.  Needless to say, I’m quite adequate at limited third person – which is my primary mode of writing – and I […]

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To keep my writing muscles working while I’m suspended in “I’ve written everything that I know happens and now must actually develop a world and a plot” mode, I’m doing writing exercises. I’ve just started on the ones featured in Ursula K. LeGuin’s wonderful book Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the […]

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In keeping with the visual inspiration theme, here is a collage I created at the recent “Hello Dali” surrealism collage night at Spadina Museum.  I used some scrapbook paper, Egon Schiele postcards from a set I bought while working on A Terrible Beauty, images provided at the event, and phrases from the incredibly cool card I […]

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I find visual inspirations very helpful when working on a book (see my earlier posts about the “mood boards” for the novels).  I’m just starting on what might be the new novel, but I already have a couple of touchstones. This girl with the wary eyes is part of the painting The Coronation of the […]

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I’ll be in Kingston at the Limestone Genre Expo the weekend of July 23, 2016.  This is the second year of this event and there’s a great line-up of writers and some fascinating panels.  It’s a small, friendly convention in a beautiful town. I’ll be taking part in three panels (Where is Fantasy taking the […]

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