Tagged With: Mad Richard

Notebook Download: Las Vegas

February 25, 2016

As a writer, I spend hours a day inside my fantasies. Staring at my laptop screen—or more often at the floor—I’m fantasizing 19th century Egypt, Charles Dickens walking the streets of London, an Ontario commune in the 1970s or mayhem in a Mississauga chop shop during a police raid. (Novel, novel, short story, film script that’s […]

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Virginia Woolf, Ancestors and Things That Survive

February 1, 2016

One small fact sent me diving down a rabbit hole as I read about Virginia Woolf. In 1919, Virginia and her husband Leonard Woolf bought a cottage south of London called Monk’s House. It was located in Sussex near the River Ouse, where Virginia would drown herself in 1941. The Monk’s House name cropped up […]

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Research Redux

March 5, 2015

When you’re researching a novel set in the past, the details you churn up can often sound surprisingly contemporary. Who called reviewers from The Times of London “despicable assassins of men’s reputations?” You’re probably thinking of a raft of contemporary politicians and actors, but in fact it was the actor William Macready in 1838. Lately, […]

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