Writing what you don’t know? No problem!

Tracey Richardson Leave a comment

I’m a fan of reading medical romances, but for a long time, as a writer of romance novels, I was too scared to attempt to write one. Too intimidated, more like.

There are medical professionals with more than enough street cred out there writing successful medical romances. So why should I attempt writing them when I’m not a doctor, nurse, paramedic or even an employee at a hospital? I mean, isn’t it a bit “fraudulent” to write these kinds of novels when you’re not “one of them”?

Well, my answer is an emphatic no to that last question, since I’ve now written four medical romance novels (including two that were finalists for the Lambda Literary awards…the most prestigious award for LGBTQ books in the world). Read more

The End Is Nigh

Kelly Babcock Leave a comment
Time’s up!

That’s right. I said it. It will all soon be over. The end is coming faster than you think. And there will be no way to stop it, and no way to save yourself from its coming.

The end of 2019 is just a day and a half away.

And when it gets here, you are required by tradition, and by your anxious nature, to take stock of your declared resolutions and admit failure and defeat.

It’s okay, it happened to all of us

The thing is that you didn’t fail so much as you miscalculated.

You swore you’d have written that book. You resolved to have submitted a short story every month. You decreed that you would create a schedule and then stick to it.

There’s your trouble

No, not that you made resolutions. Your trouble is that you worded them wrong.

Listen, you’re a writer. How many times have you rewritten some sentence or paragraph or even just a phrase or a word? Read more

A Christmas Tradition

Bernice Connell Leave a comment

It’s Christmas Eve, 1957, so the story goes.

The pilot of a De Havilland Vampire experiences a complete electrical failure on his way home from Germany to England. He is lost in fog and low on fuel over the North Sea.

“It’s a very lonely place, the sky, even more so the sky on a winter’s night. A single-seater jet fighter is a lonely home, a tiny steel box held aloft on stubby wings, hurled through freezing emptiness by a blazing tube throwing out the strength of six thousand horses every second that it burns.” 

These words are from Fredrick Forsyth’s novella, The Shepherd, a story my family reads or listens to this time of year. 

Fans of CBC radio will be familiar with Alan Maitland’s narration of The Shepherd which has aired on, or close to, Christmas Eve for most of 40 years. Readers may also know that Forsyth has written twelve thriller novels including The Odessa File, The Day of the Jackal and Dogs of War. In recent years he has also written his memoir.

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The End of a Decade: Glancing Back, Racing Forward

Lori Twining 4 Comments
Lori Twining writing in Hotel Heaven

It is hard to believe, but another decade is ending in 16 sleeps!

Glancing back over the last 3, 650 days, I wonder what the hell I have been doing with my life? How did ten years just disappear in a blink?

Sure, as a mother, I’ve raised three wonderful children and sent them off to University: one is married and has a job, one is almost married and has a job, and my baby is currently wading through a whole bunch of biomedical science jargon that I can’t even begin to understand and always has a summer job. Obviously, education and jobs are important in this household. All three kids are smarter and more respectful than their mother and can handle the world without me. What more can a mom ask for? Seriously, that means I did my job as a mother.

But, as a writer… hmmm, that is a completely different story.

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How Not To write A Blog

Joan McAndrew Leave a comment

Step 1: Forget that you agreed to submit one in the first place.

Step 2: Remember as you fall into bed that the nagging feeling you have forgotten something was in fact accurate.

Step 3: Grab a pad of paper and begin making marks on the page and hope that something of relevance to writing will appear.

Step 4: Recall all the other times in your life you have forgotten a looming deadline.

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Story Tellers

Andrée Levie-Warrilow Leave a comment

A few days ago I attended an interview with Indigenous writer and CBC host of Up North, Waubgeshig Rice. I had recently read his latest novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow, and was looking forward to hear the writer discuss his dystopian saga set in the Rez, after the sudden crash of electricity, internet, and all communications. By coincidence, my nonfiction Book Club’s selection for this month is Waub Kinew’s biographical work, The Reason You Walk. 

 Both books deal with what the writers term the native apocalypse. Kinew relates the effects the institution had on his own father and his ensuing inability to be a father to Waub and his siblings as a result.  Rice, meanwhile, has created an allegorical apocalypse, which, the way the climate crisis is progressing, has the chilling tinge of real possibility all through its narrative. 

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Finding Lost Words

Seana Moorhead Leave a comment

A friend recently leant me a book called “The Lost Words”.  This book lists twenty words relating to the natural world that were taken out of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (OJD)—a reference book aimed at young children and contains about 10,000 words.  The book, beautifully illustrated by Jackie Morris and written by Robert Macfarlace, highlights twenty of the removed words, all connected to nature.  

Obviously, when deciding upon what 10,000 words to use in a dictionary, choices have to be made.  What would you pick?  What would you leave out?  Dictionaries have been doing this for years, adding in new words or new spellings, often to outraged critics.  The editors of OJD decided to drop certain words relating to nature and added in new “modern” words.  For example, “acorn”, “buttercup” and “starling” were all dropped. The words added were “blog” (ah, the irony in writing a blog about this) and “voice-mail” and “chatroom”.   

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A Writer’s Need for Exercises

Diane Ferguson Leave a comment

I’ve been doing a complete re-write of my novel. I’m not quite at the climax, but I can see it from here. I’ve been working with my novel for a long time, so I thought I knew my characters. But in the re-writes, they’ve become a little unfamiliar. And because I don’t know them well, they’re feeling a little flat.

In my doggedness to reach the end of my novel, I lose my sense of play and creativity. One of my wrong ideas is that I don’t need writing exercises, that I don’t need to generate new ideas.

Of course I couldn’t be more wrong. New ideas are exactly what I need to bring my characters to life.

I was working at my day job and looking for a new podcast to listen to. I found: Inside Creative Writing, by Brad Reed. In Episode 3, Sparking your Creativity, Brad gives us two different idea generators to use on a character, place, or plot. The one I tried went like this:

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