Started my first day of an eight week screewriting course. It was funny that the only place I could find a screenwriting course in Toronto, being offered right now, was at my old alma mater, U of T. I went down by subway, hadn’t been downtown for a while and then walked onto the U […]

So I gave the sequel to one of my daughters to read and like I said  before, I was a bit nervous. I told her she should feel free to tear it apart, and then she did. And that was fine, even expected, but what I didn’t expect was how angry she was. She had […]

It seems to me that in writing this sequel for Wanting Mor, I’ve either done something extremely clever, or extremely dumb. I’m not sure which yet. I was leaning towards the latter (dumb) but after reading a few reviews of Wanting Mor on goodreads.com, I’m wondering if what I did wasn’t brilliant. Despite the fact […]

Happy New Year everyone! I can’t believe 2010 is gone! What a year it was!!! Last night while hubby was unwrapping the new sofas for our living room, he told me to put the second part of Kill Bill on. I said, “You really want to watch it?!” He said, “Yeah, sure, why not. It’ll […]

You know that feeling when you get something you weren’t sure you could accomplish, done, and on time for a deadline? Well, I’ve been basking in that feeling all day. Finished my second screenplay for that animated series and the problem was I’d waited too long between the two to do them. This second episode […]

There is an inferiority complex operating in Canada. I’m sure people from other ethnicities experience it too. I remember in Singapore, talking to some very passionate people about children’s books, who’d turned to self-publishing because their books were considered too ‘regional’ to make it in a North American market (and if you want to be […]

Labbaika la shareeka laka labbaik. Innal hamda wal ni’matha laka wal mulk, laa shareeka lak. This is the chant that all pilgrims going for hajj, going to visit God’s house in Mecca, make. It means: Here I am, O Allah, at Your service; here I am at Your service. Here I am at Your service. […]

Yesterday I just got another rejection from a publisher out west for my controversial teen novel. That in itself is of course not remarkable. What was remarkable, was that it was a FORM rejection! And this after a number of interesting phone calls back and forth, and after I’d been considerate enough to include a […]

They say that the eavesdropper never hears anything good about himself, but there can be exceptions to that. Just found out that my book Wanting Mor has been nominated for the Red Dot Award. What has been happening is that many of the international schools, in order to foster a greater love of literacy and […]

Today I did a presentation at Seneca College, Newnham campus, to a group of students in a children’s literature class. That wouldn’t be very significant except that in 1980-1982 around, I went to Seneca College, at that same campus, to study what I thought would be my life’s career: biological chemical technology. To say that […]