While attending the Thrillerfest conference in June, I couldn’t help but notice the frequent use of the word “wheelhouse” in conversations about reading and writing books. The word became the newest buzzword of the year. It is a term that has slowly made its way into many writers’ vocabulary, including my own.
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If you’re a writer, chances are, you’re a reader. And there’s a high probability, like me, you’re a bookaholic. You can’t get enough. Walk by a bookstore? Only with the greatest inner fortitude. But now you don’t even have to walk by! I’ll be quietly working away at my day job, when—DING—there’s an email, Chapters / Indigo is having a sale. Pop to their website, scan the titles, order, pay, and boom, back to work. Or, I’ll be listening to a podcast while I work, a book suggestion comes up, pop over to Amazon, no min order needed to get free shipping, just a click away and the book is somehow already shipped.
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The dreaded ‘comp’ or comparative title is every querying novelist’s nemesis. You spend years writing and perfecting your novel—a book only you could have written, a story unlike any other—and then you’re asked to list the similar books.
What? Are they crazy? Of course, there is nothing exactly like your novel—that’s why you wrote it.
The trouble is—this is the business of books. If you want an agent to promote your work, if you dream of the day a publisher will commit to printing your pages and you can’t wait to see your glossy hard cover baby mingling on the shelves of your favourite bookstore, then you need to help everyone to position your book. Read more
“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers,” Dorothy Parker once wrote, “the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style.The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” Read more
You’ve heard that old saying, you are what you eat. In other words, you are a product of what you consume. Okay, so in its literal sense, it’s talking about food, but what about books? When we read a book, does it have the ability to shape how we think? How we feel? In other words, can it change us?
Of course books have that kind of power. Books can change lives. Books can save lives. Books can open eyes and minds. But what I want to talk about is how the books we read reflect our mood and feed our mood, and ultimately can change our mood.
Yes, books are a drug in that respect. They’re medicine. At least for me. The pandemic has taken a toll on most people’s mental health, and I’m no different. And not just the pandemic, but the Trump-inspired nonsense down south, the residential school saga, the racist mass killing in London, Ont. It’s been a tough fifteen months. No, make that a shitty fifteen months.
I saw a Tweet the other day from Canadian author Andrew Pyper promoting a course he’s teaching on writing suspense and it reminded me of something.
Pyper
is a good writer. I’ve read some of his books before and he’s the kind of writer who has the skill and talent to write any genre he wants. Those are the kind of writers I like to read. But what his Tweet reminded me of is that for a romance writer such as myself, there are many little tricks in the suspense author’s bag that can be helpful to a writer like myself.
Currently I’m reading Don Winslow’s “Broken”, a collection of novellas based on his drug cartel fiction series that includes “The Power of The Dog”, “The Cartel” and “The Border”, all based on the Mexican drug war. I love Winslow’s books because they’re fast paced, very suspenseful and well written. He knows how to tell a good story, and that’s why I’m reading “Broken”. Read more
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about death and dying.
Mostly it’s because I’m starting a new romance novel that features a character who is a death doula (cue the jokes and the confusion about writing a romance novel around death, haha!). But I suppose it’s also because I’m in the latter half of my own life now and have elderly parents and in-laws, and so it seems like the right time to delve into this great and final mystery. Plus, I like to challenge my writer’s self with unusual topics.
There is another reason, too. Frankly, I’m a bit haunted.
A former colleague and friend died more than three years ago after a very sudden and short terminal cancer diagnosis. He was only in his early 50s, with two teenagers at home and a wife who was battling her own health issues. He didn’t want to go, understandably so. In the short time he had remaining after his diagnosis, he could not come to terms with his own dying. He became depressed. He cheated himself out of talking about it, of comforting his family, of allowing himself to be comforted, and of coming to some kind of peace with how his life was going to end. Things progressed so quickly, that my goodbye had to be in the form of an email that was read out loud to him. Read more
I have long been fascinated by quantum physics, poetry, and the musings of what is reality, and it shows in my writing. I go about coolly accepting the unreality of the universe, peering enthralled at the night sky, knowing I’m only seeing the light energy of stars that ceased to exist aeons ago. Read more