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February 14, 2014
Creative Writing as Martial Art? Part 1
I have always tried to define the ethos that guides my writing. Until recently, the closest I could come to a complete answer was the idea of writing as craft. I was taking literature out of the world ...
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June 21, 2014
Social Media Bare Minimums for Authors
Have a new book coming out? Don't want to self-promote? Too bad. You must do at least these few things if you want to get the book rolling:1. Like it or not, you’re in the business of trying to sell ...
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June 08, 2014
Comfort Food, Comfort Reading, Comfort Movie
My new novel The Oakdale Dinner Club is very food-centric – it’s about a group of suburbanites who get together once a month to eat good food, drink good wine, and do other wicked things.One of the ...
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May 22, 2015
Agents on TV: Samantha Haywood
To get a different perspective on the ways in which books and television intersect, I asked some agents to give us some insights. First up is Transatlantic Agency’s Samantha Haywood.What is the market ...
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October 29, 2016
L.M. Montgomery, Ontario, and Poetry
Today I gave a reading from How to Draw a Rhinoceros from the pulpit of the Historic Leaskdale Church, a somewhat unlikely location for my first public reading from this book. The occasion was LMM Day, ...
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May 27, 2015
Agents on TV: Sam Hiyate
Sam Hiyate is president of The Rights Factory, a boutique literary agency in Toronto. In his 24-year publishing career, he has worked at literary magazines, small presses and with New York Times bestselling ...
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July 21, 2016
Work Lit
Many of the reviews I’ve received for my books so far have made some reference to the idea that I tend to write about people who work for a living. I’m not complaining – honestly, I’m delighted ...
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June 28, 2014
What to Eat While Reading: Savoury Stilton Pecan Shortbread
My novel The Oakdale Dinner Club is about two women who become friends in their senior year of high school after they hand in identical answer sheets for a math test and are accused of cheating. They ...
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June 13, 2014
The Art of the TV Show Recap
My first exposure to the 21st century art form known as the TV show recap came in 2003, on the ground-breaking website Television Without Pity (TWoP). Its motto: Save the Snark, Spoil the Network.My show ...
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October 28, 2016
Poetic Inspiration IV
This is the fourth in a series of posts highlighting inventive poems that have broadened my sense of what poems can be and do, and sparked me to stretch further in my own work. (The previous instalments ...