At the Saskatchewan Festival of Words, we were being housed at Temple Mineral Spa which had renowned healing waters. They told us to bring our bathing suits. Yeah right! But the lady I was corresponding with was adamant. ‘Bring your bathing suit, you’ll want to partake in the healing waters!’ So I packed a spare [...]

In Urdu we have a word for a kind of excited fascination about something. This word is ‘showk’, don’t know if I’m spelling it right but you get the idea. I can’t seem to find an English equivalent for ‘showk’. It’s more than enthusiasm, it’s more than being charmed by something, and it’s more than [...]

You know when  you’re first starting out writing you dream of people reading your work and being touched, even moved by it. You know how books touched and moved you in your formative years and you long to have that kind of effect on other people. Especially with children’s books, they can leave an impact [...]

LOL. Knew I wouldn’t win the Hackmatack! But really! Losing to a cat named Binky! It was a little graphic novella, all of sixty odd pages, about a cat that wants to go into outer space. Now this award is chosen by grades 4 and 5 I think. They don’t have a young adult category, that’s [...]

I’m writing this from my hotel room in Saint John New Brunswick, on tour with the Hackmatack award. The ceremony is on Friday the 13th (in three days or two–too tired to count) and WANTING MOR is up for the award but I doubt it will win. The old adage of it’s an honour to [...]

With minimal but significant damage. Gained four pounds!  I could blame it on the stress but really, there’s no excuse. We celebrated my father’s 75th ‘birthday’ on Saturday, even though we’re not exactly sure which day he was born. Pakistani birth certificates are notoriously inaccurate. He was born at home and parents have a certain [...]

I came home from only two presentations, quite exhausted today. Mind you, one of the presentations was really two melded together, and I had traipsed up and down three flights of stairs three times carrying about thirty pounds of equipment and books, but I still couldn’t understand why I was so wiped. Maybe I muttered [...]

It probably wasn’t a good idea to watch mythbusters right before I watched Kill Bill (for the second time I think). The guys in Mythbusters had just busted a scene in Hellboy I or II where the demon protagonist punches an SUV on the front of the trunk and the car flips headlights over tail [...]

On Saturday I drove out to Pearson Airport, to the Canada Customs agents in charge of luggage that comes in later, I guess, and finally got my luggage from my Hajj trip! Yippee! I feel like it’s closed the chapter on the whole experience. One thing I really learned from this…make sure you get a [...]

This is the final installment of the journal I kept during Hajj, from Oct. 30 – Nov. 20th. I’ve transcribed it almost exactly as written, any recent thoughts are in parentheses. Nov. 18th cont’d There’s nothing like the feeling of throwing the last stone. I hefted it in my fingers, said, “Allahu Akbar” God is [...]