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7 Ways to Develop Secondary Characters

Many authors do a good job at developing their protagonist or POV characters. After all, readers will be in these characters’ heads throughout an entire book. But as many readers can attest to, sometimes ...

I think I have a manuscript

This is what I said to myself about four years into publishing my poems in journals, magazines, and through chapbooks. Sifting through folders to put poems into a single Word document, I saw the page ...

Things I Learned from Working in Publishing (That I Wish I Knew Earlier)

I spent 12 years in children’s publishing and here is a selection of things I learned on the job that I wish I had known beforehand. You don’t need an illustrator to submit your picture book manuscriptIn ...

Book Therapy: My Body is Distant

“(Y)ou can be an elf, a monster, a kind of person you can’t be in Real Life. You can get outside of your head and escape.”- Paige Maylott, My Body is Distant Escape as a therapeutic avenue is ...

Tips for Writing in a Hybrid Genre

Hybrid genres are on the rise, but many writers feel unsure about how to manage expectations of the different genres while writing, and how to market their finished product. As a reader and a writer, ...

Book Launch Season, Part 2: Being an Audience Member

In the first part of “Book Launch Season,” I talked about how to enter this period of time as an author. Writers are (I hope) readers. As a poet especially, going to readings and sitting there as ...

Grant writing 101: Writing a budget

Writing a grant budget can be daunting, but I promise it doesn’t have to be! Many writing grants don’t even require budgets (TAC and OAC!), but some grants, including the Canada Council for the Arts ...

I’ve been invited to present at a literary festival, now what?

From the Brigadoon-esque setting of The Eden Mills Writer Festival to the hustle and bustle of TIFA Kids, it’s literary festival season. Everyone loves an invite to a party, but make sure you have all ...

The Pull of Two Needles

My first version of this essay was about how my two obsessions, knitting and writing, don’t compete with each other. I wrote at length about how they spin together in my brain in complicated steps, ...

The work of an editor at Coach House Books

Editing, at its best, is invisible. The reader of a book will never know what the manuscript looked like when it was submitted, never know what the author and editor changed to make the finished book ...