It’s National Novel Writing Month and I’ve been using this year’s 50,000-word challenge to kick around some ideas. (And they dearly needed some kicking…) Hopefully, most of the writing will go into the mix of my next novel. Regardless, I love [...]
read on... →My pals Chis O’Neill and Ken Schwartz of the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts have come up with another brilliant idea…
The Ross Creek Secret
Join Ross Creek Centre for the Arts in Halifax for a unique, entertaining & creative fundraiser known as the Ross Creek [...]
Mid September, Scots Bay lost a landmark establishment to an early morning fire. In recent days, it was known as The Sand Dollar Cafe and before that as Dee Dee’s Dinette. If you came out this way to hike Cape Split, to visit the summer cottage, to go [...]
read on... →From time to time I’ll be sharing some words from my personal journal/sketchbook for my next novel, The Virgin Cure. In this first installment, I’m journaling about my recent experience of learning to suture. (The Virgin Cure is set in NYC in the 1870′s and is inspired by my great-great grandmother and her fight to [...]
read on... →Here’s a round-up for today…
As most of you know, I’ve always been partial to the “pregnant belly” covers of The Birth House. So, when the cover proof for the upcoming US trade paperback from Harper Perennial arrived the other day, I placed it next to “the bellies” to see how I felt about [...]
read on... →Earlier this month, my back went out. It was only a couple days before I was supposed to get on a plane and fly to BC for the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts. I’ve had back pain before, but not like this. This was a special kind [...]
read on... →Loneliness is simply a misunderstanding of Solitude.
I’m not sure where I first heard that phrase…I think it might have been from a woman who was once a nun. In the past few days, I’ve grown to realize that many people don’t have a grasp on the meaning and importance of solitude.
read on... →
June took me to Toronto for Booked!, Book Expo Canada, and the CBA Libris Awards.
It was a fantastic few days…I even got to meet and read with Jeanette Walls. She’s very sweet and we spent a little time swapping stories about our “Oprah moments.” (mine, oh-so different than hers!) I’ve since started reading The [...]
And now for a bit of an update…
May brought Atlantic Book Week and the honour of winning the Atlantic Independent Bookseller’s Association’s Bookseller’s Choice Award. What a treat to have the award presented by Trudy Carey of Woozles! (If you’re in Halifax and in need of books for kids – go see [...]
read on... →
Today while hanging laundry on the line I thought I saw a firefly going by. Hard to say what it was in the daytime, and I was mid-clothespin so I couldn’t leap off the porch to pursue it. I’ve yet to see one in Scots Bay… and I miss [...]
When I was a child I loved finding things…a jar of my grandmother's old buttons, a cigar box filled with boy scout badges and river stones, a flouncy party dress pushed to the back of my mother's closet - circa 1955. With every relic I discovered, there came a story. Real or imagined, the tales that surrounded each object were magic, making the 'thing' more immediate, something more than it was before I'd found it.
Fact or fiction, fantastic, joyful or sad, stories make us more than we were before we found them. Welcome to my shoebox of buttons, sealing wax and scribblings.
- posted on 16/05/2012 23:03:49
