WritingTag

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Between Writing Projects

Lately, I’ve felt a bit unmoored. For the last 6 years, I’ve organized my spare time around working on my novel. I’ve either been working on it or worrying about not having time to work on it, or ...

Why We Need to Celebrate All Our Writing Milestones – Even the Small Ones

A few years ago, I got an offer to purchase a small personal finance blog that I ran. The buyer agreed to the amount that I asked for – only there was a catch. They would give me a third of the money ...

How Heated Fitness Classes Improved My (Writing) Life

It’s a given that entrepreneurs are supposed to invest in their business, accumulate assets, and build something bigger than themselves. Writing is what I do, it’s my business. When I started teaching, ...

How to Secure a Literary Agent

With spring just around the corner (we hope), there’s a renewed sense of optimism in the air. Writers are slowly emerging from the depths of their hobbit holes, and some have manuscripts ready to be ...

On Burnout

I’ve finished my first book. I’ve done the writing, the rewriting, the editing, more rewriting, the copy editing, the fact checking… I think you get the point. It was a lot of work. But now I’m ...

Coming to Voice

I worked on this piece while at a residency for BIPOC writers in the fall of 2017. I did not pick it up again when I returned. While workshopping it there, I was not convinced it captured what I was trying ...

A draft

For years my partner and I lived in a condo, one of the four sides of which was flanked by windows, only one. The world was out there and we were in here, boxed, safe, separate, tucked away in the proscenium. ...

Why 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 ...

Writing What You "Know"

I’m one of countless writers who found his way thanks to this old standby, and having just published a book of stories set in small Southwestern Ontario towns a lot like the ones where I grew up, it’s ...

On the business of writing

In 2002, when I formed my writing group (still going strong!) with June Hutton and Mary Novik, we made a promise that we would always, always share our experiences with the business of writing—the shadowy ...