We launched Time Squared this week, and during a Q&A, Elizabeth Renzetti asked a challenging question. She asked a series of them—Liz being, of course, an award-winning Globe and Mail columnist as well as an author herself. Check out her wonderful essay collection, Shrewed. But I’m thinking of one question in particular. Why is Robert Denholm always a […]
Technical stuff. This is for writers with backlist books they want to put up online. Also for people who want to self-publish a book they’ve written. Same process, at least at the start. As I wrote last time, I’ve re-published older titles for several years. I can’t emphasize enough that for published writers, the first […]
I just checked one sales site. In the past three months, five copies of my backlist e-books were downloaded in Ethiopia, I have no idea why. The National Library of Malaysia bought my travel memoir, Foreign Correspondences. Other titles on this particular site—I use three of them—were sold in the U.S., the U.K. the Netherlands, Australia […]
It’s out: the e-book of my first novel, Poor Player, which I’ve published with a lovely, flashy new cover. The book is a noirish literary thriller set in Mexico. Human rights, drug trafficking and foreigners: the action occurs at a heady nexus. Jack Hall is an actor who comes to Mexico, quitting his hot career in L.A. […]
Bringing out the e-book of my short story collection, Hard Travel, sent me back to the journals I kept while writing it. We were living in Mexico at the time, my husband posted there as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail. These days, being a foreign correspondent sounds romantic and a little bygone. It was pretty […]
Now out: the e-book of Hard Travel, a short story collection and my first book. The seven stories are set in Guatemala, the Copper Canyon of Mexico, and at a bluegrass festival in North Carolina. Also in the old CBC Radio building on Jarvis Street in Toronto, where rumour had it, the pair of pants […]
I opened my closet this morning and decided that I hate all my clothes. I’m tired of the ones I’ve been wearing around the house for a year and a half, and they’re shabby, faded, washed too many times. The ones I haven’t been wearing belong to a previous life, and they look strange. Is […]
On Canada Day, I decided with a degree of irony to write about Waubgeshig Rice’s award-winning novel Moon of the Crusted Snow. “Chilling in the best way possible,” says the cover quote from novelist Eden Robinson. I would say chilling and warm and distressing, although that’s a bit of a mouthful to put on a cover, […]
Research. People keep asking me about it. What’s the first thing you do when researching a new novel? Especially now that you’ve learned not to over-research–something I wrote about last time. My books usually start with a scribble. I write down story ideas in my journal all the time, and most of them don’t have traction. […]
“I’ve just spent a term teaching first-year writing based foundationally on primary source digital archive,” reads an email I got recently, “and I loved seeing my students discover that writing was much more interesting when they had research that was personally interesting to them. “What does the research process look like for you, and when […]
It was a stellar panel. Online, of course, at the Library Journal Day of Dialogue. Not that my personal zoom square was stellar, since I’d looked at the weather forecast that morning and seen that the day was supposed to be cloudy. My father-in-law was a meteorologist so I trusted the forecast, and didn’t move […]
Charlotte Brontë was born on this day in 1816. It’s also the 95th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II, who opened her historic eyes on April 21, 1926. That makes Charlotte exactly 110 years older than the queen. But who seems the most modern? Every time I re-read Charlotte Brontë’s best book, Jane Eyre, I think I’m finally […]