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October 27, 2018
Characters like family
One of my favourite parts of the writing process is creating and developing characters. I’ve always believed a story is only as strongly crafted as the people in it. Characters are the pillars of and ...
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October 30, 2018Independent Publishers Win Big at the 2018 Governor General's Literary Awards
It was a great year for independent presses at the 2018 Governor General's Literary Awards. The seven English language awards (along with their French counterparts) were announced yesterday, with six ...
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July 16, 2018Why It’s Okay If You Haven’t Finished Your First Book Yet
I thought I would finish my first novel by the time I turned 25.I laugh at the absurdity of that now. But in my early 20s, I believed it when people told me that anything was possible with hard work and ...
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October 30, 2018SK Dyment on Crafting Characters in Steel Animals, a Smart, Hilarious New Book of Queer Magic Realism
Jackie is a quiet loner who happens to secretly be a badass bank robber. Vespa is a artist who rides motorbikes and obsessively plans her revenge on an ex-partner. Together, they find love and a heap ...
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July 16, 2018
Make It New (Again)!
I was shocked a few years ago when, in a workshop I attended, a thirty-something writer who had already published a book (and has since gone on to publish two much more successful ones) dismissed the ...
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July 19, 2018Scott Thornley Introduces Your New Favourite Detective Series
Lovers of mystery and detective fiction have a new a favourite to discover in Detective Superintendent MacNeice, the protagonist of Scott Thornley's Erasing Memory (House of Anansi Press). The story ...
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November 01, 2018
A Question of Motivation
If you ask any group of people about future goals they hope to one day accomplish, one of the most frequent responses would probably be that they’d like to write a book. Some of them may have ideas, ...
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July 20, 2018On Literary Festivals and Crossed Boundaries
As a writer of creative nonfiction—in particular, one who draws very heavily from my own life and experiences—I’ve learned it’s important to determine whether something I want to write about is ...
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July 21, 2018
You Just Need to Write a Bestseller
If you’re a writer and you’re not rich and famous—so what I mean is, if you’re a writer—you’ve heard this one, often enough from someone who doesn’t write fiction or maybe even read it.Have ...
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July 23, 2018David Ward, Back from 5 Years in a Tiny, Isolated Newfoundland Community, Shares Publishing Highs & Lows
For writers in Canada, Newfoundland is a special place. After five years living in an isolated Newfoundland community, ecologist David Ward understood that intimately. His story of that time, Bay of ...