*While pondering which of the many pet tales with which I could regale you, I decided to roam through my files of essays and happened upon something I wrote two and a half years ago as we were about to hand off the litter of puppies our dog Sassy had borne to their new owners. It’s a bit long but I hope you enjoy it. Today is the day. In…
If you walk into my house you can usually tell if I’m deeply involved in working on a book. Once I’m sucked in, everything around me goes to hell. The dishes sit undone in the sink. Laundry piles up. Toys left on the floor tend to stay there. Taped to the walls are huge sheets of newsprint covered in story boards, chapter outlines and various other novel-related brainstorming. Coffee and…
I like to think of myself as a smart person. I read books with really big words. I have not one, but two, university degrees. In my day job I often serve our provincial Supreme Court as an expert witness. So the only excuse I have for the following story- is that some things apparently have to be learned through experience. It is that or I am in fact mentally…
When I got the call from my agent telling me HarperCollins had made an offer on my novel, I was cleaning the toilet. It’s funny… you envision moments like this, fantasize about them for months and years, then when they happen, they never quite play out the way you had imagined. I was in my rattiest house cleaning clothes. I had the white plastic brush in my hand and was…
Well, based upon my replies this week you’ve likely come to the conclusion that I’m a bit of an organizational freak (because you’ve all been so carefully following my replies, right?). But when I look around, frankly, I don’t have much to organize. When it comes to paraphernalia, I’m a bareback kind of gal. I have one laptop, one red pen, one spiral notebook, one cardboard box. That’s it. That’s…
I wrote my first (as yet unpublished) novel out longhand in notebooks back when we lived without electricity. Then I’d take the notebooks and my laptop to a café and type it all in. I had a full time job back then and I wrote in the mornings and evenings (and okay, sometimes during staff meetings). When I sat down to write my second book (soon to be published as…
I am sure that those who know me think I came up with this topic, The Hairy Thing That Lurks Under My Bed, because I actually do have one (see above example: Niko Vom Kiernan), and I spend a large portion of my daily life cleaning up after it. My family has heard it. My friends are tired of listening to it. For the record, I didn’t invent this…
