During the rotten cold I’ve had for the last week and half, I managed to finish the kawandi quilt, and here it is in all it’s glory. I thoroughly enjoyed doing it and I’m looking forward to doing another one. Sadly, I’m pretty sure my next planned fabric venture won’t work using this technique, but […]

[Read more →]

Flash! August 4th! BLOOD & CHRYSANTHEMUMS is on sale for $1.99, wherever you get ebooks. Now that’s out of the way … As a change from book promotion, here are some vacation pictures instead. We went to Italy for two weeks in May. This was our first real travel since 2019 and our third trip […]

[Read more →]

Well, I’m not sure about the art, the prestige or the spite parts, but I did like this piece by John Waters from the 2017 Venice Biennale. New e-books editions with gorgeous new covers come out July 9th but you can pre-order now, if that strikes your fancy. Here’s more information from the good people […]

[Read more →]

I’ve gone on a lot of walks over the last year. I’ve got several regular routes, some of which involve the alleyways of garages that are common in my area. In my perambulations, I’ve discovered that there’s lots of interesting art on garage doors and back fences. I decided to assemble some of my favourite […]

[Read more →]

One of the advantages of living in a city that Guillermo Del Toro likes to shoot movies in AND that possesses a major art gallery is that you get to see the incredible exhibit “At Home With Monsters” (currently running at the AGO). In fact, in our case, we got to see it twice. I’d go […]

[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 →]

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 →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]