It’s time for my annual blog post about what I read in the past year! Buoyed up by having read 67 books in 2018—more, in fact, because I realized later there were a few that I had forgotten to count--in 2019, I joined the #95books challenge. I was way ahead…
Read MoreI got a lot of use out the delete button over the past month while working on my thesis novel. So far, the thesis process has gone down more or less like this: Draft one: 60,000 words. Written over two summers, including all the outlining and such. Draft two: 89,000…
Read MoreMyself and I realized that we hadn't posted anything for a while, so we sat down at our disorganized desk today to ask and answer a few questions. The theme: personal taste, naming the books, movies, TV, and music we've actually been into lately, because the actual titles can tell…
Read MoreI recently got tagged in the Canadian Writers’ Writing Process Blog Tour, which has been going around for months. I was tagged by Ottawa writer Cameron Anstee. So, I’ve got four questions to answer: 1. What am I working on? Well, this is awkward, because that was what my last…
Read MoreIt turns out that the narrator of Richard Brautigan's prescient 1968 masterpiece In Watermelon Sugar was Steve Jobs. To whit: iDEATH It was about dark when I arrived at iDEATH. The two evening stars were now shining side by side. The smaller one had moved over to the big one.…
Read MoreThis installment of Books I Have Loved is actually more like Books I Currently Love, and am reading, and reading, and reading, and reading, again, and again, and again, and again. To my toddler, that is, and if you have or ever have had a toddler, you know what I…
Read MoreI interviewed Anita Daher, today's CreComm guest speaker and Winnipeg writer extraordinaire, by email just before classes started--but decided to save it for when she arrived to speak about her extensive experience as a children's writer. Note carefully her point about grammar and how editors roll their eyes! 1. What’s…
Read MoreIf I haven't stressed this enough in Creative Writing class: surprise me. This week I handed out the short story assignment, and along with it gave a scintillating PowerPoint presentation about things not to write the short story about, a presentation comprising both some useful tidbits of advice inherited from…
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