NovelTag

Read an Excerpt from Richard Scarsbrook's The Troupers, the Story of a Strange & Fascinating Family

We're wrapping up our spotlight on excerpts this week with a glimpse into acclaimed author Richard Scarsbrook's new novel The Troupers, in which the Trouper quintuplets are raised by their overbearing ...

Sink into a Dark, Tense, & Brilliantly Crafted Family Mystery with an Excerpt from The Good Son by Carolyn Huizinga Mills

For three decades, Zoe has harboured a secret about her brother. By now, she's almost forgotten, assuming that life has moved on. But when the investigation into the death of her family's erstwhile neighbour, ...

Book Therapy: Satellite Love

“I think my favourite thing about humans was how they couldn’t fathom the thought of being alone.”—Genki Ferguson, Satellite Love My birthday is in April and I’ll admit I’ve never been very ...

Grinding Out a New Novel

Writing a novel is a grind. It’s an arduous, meticulous, and often repetitive process that can take years. There’s the actual typing of words onto the page, and then come the edits and rewrites, which ...

Poets Becoming Novelists: On Trusting Leaps and Fragments

I finished the first draft of my novel in mid-March – in the first week of isolation. I hadn’t grasped the gravity of the pandemic then, so I was grateful for the sudden reprieve from the real world. ...

How To Become That Kind of Bitch (or, One-Night Stands and New Selves)

Before the pandemic, I had a one-night stand with a person I met at a rave, Tyler. The morning after we slept together, I was buttering my toast and he began to ask probing questions about my life and ...

How to Keep Dreaming in the Pandemic (or, How I Finished the Third Draft of my Novel)

Living in a pandemic means that we are facing death every day. Thinking about death pushed me into survival mode. I was stressed and depressed to the point of migraines and insomnia. I stopped doing things ...

Book Therapy: Cordelia Strube’s Misconduct of the Heart

“I so wanted things to be normal.”“They can’t be normal. Make a new normal.”—Cordelia Strube, Misconduct of the HeartFrom the moment we went into isolation, people were making jokes. I don’t ...

How Ableism Stopped Me From Writing

“When will your novel be ready to send to agents?”Maddy asked this question as we lay on the beach. It was a hot August day and we were looking out at the water and eating cherries. I smiled and put ...

Home

This October I travelled to Calgary from my home in Kingston to do some book promotion and to catch up with my family and cherished friends. It had been a little over a year since I’d returned home, ...