Tag: writing

Our Dystopian Future

Joan McAndrew Leave a comment

Wait a minute—what just happened? I was living this very active busy life going to the gym 3 times a week, seeing my massage therapist, my chiropractor, writing, working part time, knitting and watching whatever appealed to me on TV. I spent my free time travelling, visiting my friends and having a grand old time. Then someone “hacked” into my world and took over, telling me where I can go, when I can go, and how I will behave when I am there. My last place of refuge currently is my home and my own property. 

I have always admired writers who create fantastical worlds and populate them with weird and wonderful things. Harry Potter and all of his adventures, the Hunger Games trilogy being two of my favourite series. My imagination never takes me to such places in my mind. Instead I am fascinated with “true” stories, the stuff of everyday people living their everyday lives. I want to figure out what makes people behave as they do. In my world everything makes sense and there are always underlying reasons waiting to be discovered to answer, “why would she do that?”

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Information Overload

Diane Ferguson Leave a comment

I like history; I like to understand why the world is as it is. I like to make sense of things. I like to learn. I like to read. These times feel unprecedented and I’ve found myself caught up in the 24 hour news cycle. Before the internet and social media, I always read the letters to the editor, hoping it would shine a light on what my fellow Canadians were really thinking. Now this has exploded with facebook and twitter, where I can read what hordes of people think. Some of it scares me and some of it brings me comfort, but all of it is way too much distraction. I have to limit myself.

I’ve worked from home for a long time, so this new paradigm of social-isolating is not so strange to me. Saying that, I had a busy life with skating lessons, hockey, choir, writers group, book group—which are all things that feed my soul and exercise my body. In other words, necessary.

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Trail Making and the Creative Process

Connie Miller 1 Comment


Many times the simplest things in life bring us great joy. For me, sharing time with dogs does that, and in particular, off leash hikes. Their pure joy in running and exploring is palpable, if not contagious. 

We walk the perimeter of hayfields adjacent to our home property. I stay to the fields’ edge to avoid damaging the plants. Even in winter, my snowshoe trail is along the outer edges of the fields, the trail followed day after day. Making a nice trail makes the next days’ walk easier, and provides an easier path for a dog needing a rest from bashing through the snow. It’s in walking these trails I have come to realize… SSDD. Same step, different day. 

This phenomenon is particularly evident in winter. If I walk randomly, the snowshoe falls in the same step as the day before. I’ve tried walking the opposite direction. Roughly the same thing happens. In summer, if I’m not careful I step in the same hole where there’s an underground rivulet.  I’ve realized I’m experiencing the manifestation of “muscle memory”, and all the frustration it can produce. I’m sure on some level in an evolutionary sense, muscle memory ensured survival in that one could hone their spear throwing skills and become a successful hunter.

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Words! Marvelous Words

Bernice Connell Leave a comment

“A gorgeous, aching love letter to stories.”

I bought a book based solely on reading this brief, beautiful review on the back cover.

These words comprised Christina Henry’s review of a novel by Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January. The intriguing title was a bonus.

What a challenge it is for writers to hit just the right note, find the perfect word in the hopes of moving a reader the same way this phrase moved me.

At the beginning of my very first creative writing class, the instructor made a pronouncement that I remember to this day.

“Success,” he said, “requires either the ordinary use of extraordinary words or the extraordinary use of ordinary words.” 

An oversimplified statement to say the least but it sounded incredibly profound to my eighteen-year-old ears. I decided at that moment that the extraordinary use of ordinary words might be achievable for me. Probably because the reverse inferred sophistication, academia and eloquence, all of which was unfamiliar territory to me at the time. 

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Opportunity Knocks on a Holiday Monday

Lori Twining Leave a comment
Seana Moorhead & Lori Twining writing short stories at a Writescape Writing Retreat

Today is not a national statutory holiday in Canada, but in Ontario, Family Day is celebrated on the 3rd Monday of February (and many of us have a holiday away from our daily jobs). This holiday was originally created for people to spend time with their families, however, it also allows a day off between New Years Day and Good Friday (which are three months apart). These three months are a loooooong stretch of time when the sunshine goes on vacation to Florida (to hang out with my parents). When this happens, the Canadians end up battling snowstorms every other day and need to deal with the extremely cold winds whipping through the land freezing our facial expressions of sadness until mid-April.

Family Day is great for people who have young kids that want to celebrate by playing board games all day in their jammies by the fireplace, or going snowshoeing, skating or skiing together in the -35 degree weather. But, if you don’t have children, or if you are like me, your kids have grown up and have moved out, Family Day becomes more of a “Catch-up-on-all-the-other-stuff-you-have-procrastinated-doing” Day.

If you are a writer, it also becomes a “Finish-My-Novel” kind of day or a “Let’s-Write-A-Short-Story” kind of day. After reading Seana Moorhead’s blog post on 10 Reasons to Write Short Stories on January 27th, I thought I should investigate all the possibilities of where to send these newly-created short stories. Then, I decided to share the information with you. There is no better feeling of sending out your work and having it be a finalist (or a winner) in a contest.

Okay, that was a little lie above…

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One Writer on Vacation

Diane Ferguson 2 Comments
Varadero, Cuba

There’s nothing better than lying on a warm beach with a good book and your bathing suit on. A rare treat in the midst of a cold Canadian winter. I just returned from Cuba where we had days filled with sunshine, crystal clear waters and some of the best reading I’ve done in a long time.

To have that kind of time and space for reading was something I wasn’t even sure I could manage anymore. There’s alwasy so much that needs to be done at home, my days of reading for hours seemed long ago. At night, I’d be a few pages in and falling asleep.

And I couldn’t imagine a week of vacation without some writing in there, but I didn’t want to bring a laptop. So I took my fountain pen, my spiral-bound notebook and Sarah Selecky’s deck of writing prompts and Robert Olen Butler’s book on writing: From where you Dream.

But my biggest writing lesson was falling back in love with reading. Here’s my reading list and how I saw these novel’s from a writer’s perspective, in the order I read them:

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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