Next show: May 2nd. I have not been deterred by hip problems, muscle tears, rather hideous photos from the last show, and my general acceptance of the fact that I’m not that good at the thing flamenco is known for, i.e. footwork. Maybe I just figure it’s easier than writing. Below is the only decent […]

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My relationship with romance novels (or romance in novels) is complicated. Among my favourite books I count Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. My comfort viewing is the 1995 BBC production of the former. My SF and Fantasy reading really began with Andre Norton whose books often followed an arc of heroine and hero learning […]

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Through the miracle of modern technology (otherwise known as the history feature of the Toronto Public Library website), I actually have a record of which ebooks I borrowed. If I add the physical books and ebooks I either purchased or downloaded from Gutenberg, I come up with roughly 130 books read this year. I will […]

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I’m 475 words away from hitting 30,000 this year and, at the risk of invoking the displeasure of the gods, I’m relatively certain that I can manage that before midnight on December 31st. Roughly half of them will be for the Witch Novel, bringing me to almost 62,000 for that project. I had some breakthroughs […]

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Made it to 5,020 words, which was half of my target but better than expected. A great deal of vamping was done, some of which led to the realization that it really would be so much more dramatic if character A AND character B went to see character C but that would certainly put a […]

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Never mind that stuff about April. Not true. November is the worst. It’s grey, it’s cold, and, for heaven’s sake, it actually snowed this week. I’m supposed to be doing Nanowrimo and after a successful start it too went all to hell. I’m going to vaguebook this one (as they say) but it’s shitty and […]

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October is done and it’s National Novel Writing Month again.  Not that I’m planning to write a novel in November – heaven’s forbid!  But 10,000 words is a do-able goal and I try to use this time to force myself to override my pesky internal editor and get shit done.  If I make my goal […]

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A Terrible Beauty is on sale for a short time for just $2.99 (ebook edition) at Amazon.com and Kobo (US sites only). Treat yourself for Hallowe’en this year.

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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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