Columnists

The Need for More Non-Traditional Mentorship in Canadian Publishing

When I was in school, the act of reading books was just that, reading books. I wasn’t categorizing them. I wasn’t thinking about publishing, editors, marketability, or whether or not a book was considered ...

How You Get Paid Writing Children’s Books or: Math is Fun!

One question I rarely get asked is how you get paid when you write and/or illustrate children’s books. I know people have a lot of questions regarding how much they might get paid, but how does the ...

The Great Kingston Bake Off

December! The end of the year! The end of a doozy of a decade! Bring on the next few weeks of excess, acid reflux and the superhuman effort to not compare my own work and efforts to anyone else’s as ...

How to Make and Keep Writing Resolutions

Resolutions. I’ve made them. You’ve made them. We’ve broken them the next day, the next week, a few months into the new year. We’ve even forgotten about them. A resolution involves making a decision ...

Book Therapy: Christy Ann Conlin’s Watermark

 “It can always be worse.”-Christy Ann Conlin, Watermark When my grandmother’s memory started to go, she would occasionally become belligerent. The sweet woman I had grown up knowing, the one ...

A note to future book creators from a friendly book publicist

It has recently come to my attention that not everybody is familiar with what a book publicist does. On paper, a book publicist’s main responsibilities include, but are not limited to securing earned ...

The Unselfish Act of Being Alone

 I want to talk about the power and necessity of being alone.It’s 4:30 am and I should be asleep, but jet lag is real. And I can’t shake the feeling that I shouldn’t be thinking about exhaustion ...

Becoming Bigger Than Ourselves

In mid-November, a few days after I’d returned to Vancouver from the Singapore Writers Festival a week prior, I saw an owl.I was in a jet-lagged haze at dusk, on my way to the convenience store to get ...

What Does Work/Life Balance Look Like for Writers?

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”This is a question children are often asked with a bemused smile by teachers, family, or friends. They expect that you’ll reply with some fantastical thing: ...

What to Do When Your Story Already Exists in the World

We all know that every story has already been told and our challenge, as writers, is to come up with new, original ways to tell stories. Unfortunately, sometimes you think you’ve done just that and, ...