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September 10, 2020A Wolf at the Dog Show
If you’re reading this article you are no doubt familiar with the names of major publishers and their imprints—Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Knopf, Mcclelland and Stewart, etc. You might ...
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September 02, 2018Show Me the (Writing-Grant) Money!
Hello, and Happy September! Thanks to the excellent folks at Open Book for inviting me here, and thanks to you for tuning in, lovely readers-who-I’m-guessing-are-mostly-also-writers.All right, let’s ...
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September 12, 2018Notes on My Futile Attempts to Evade the Creeping Tendrils of Inescapable Progress
The other day, my six-year-old daughter told me that I’m on my phone too much.This was right after I’d grinned at a parking attendant and told him how thrilled I was to see a person at the gate instead ...
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September 16, 2018Schmoozing for Introverts
It’s that time of year again, when students return to school, the leaves change colour, and Fall Book Season begins.The brilliant Sarah Selecky has already written this excellent antidote to those icky ...
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September 19, 2018Talk to Me
My little sunroom office at home (which is also our dining room) faces a fairly busy street, so when the weather’s good and our windows are open, bits and pieces of random conversations drift up to ...
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September 27, 2018You’re Going the Right Way. It’s Just a Really, Really Long Way.
I’m often asked by aspiring writers, “How did you become an author?” or “How did you get into the publishing world?”I used to think this was a really tough question. Because of course there’s ...
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September 06, 2018Anatomy of a Short Story, or Where I Get (Some of) My Ideas
I’m not one of those writers who makes everything up completely from scratch. And seriously, do those writers even exist? (If they do, I am jealous of them.)In my fiction, almost everything comes from ...
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September 10, 2018On Kindness, and Generosity
The Toronto literary community has recently lost two very bright lights, mourning the deaths of Priscila Uppal and Ann Ireland.Though I didn’t know either Ann or Priscila all that well, I feel fortunate ...
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September 17, 2020To Pandemic or not to Pandemic
Surely any period of upheaval and uncertainty is a difficult one to start a novel. And here we are, seven months into the pandemic and with no end in sight. Let’s say that you’re a novelist ...
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September 08, 2020Picture Book Magic
People are often surprised to learn that a picture book begins with the words. But every children’s book editor I’ve met has preferred to read a picture-book manuscript without any images. A good ...
