I’m going to be interviewed on Shelagh Rogers radio show The Next Chapter tomorrow. It’s on CBC, which stands for Canadian Broadcasting Company and is national. It’s not the first time I’ve been on her show. But the first time was a different show. Years ago, when she was host of Sounds like Canada she was doing […]

On Tuesday March 9th, I’m going to be interviewed on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) Radio by Shelagh Rogers. Yesterday a gentleman called me up for a kind of pre-interview and he asked me this question: “Why YA?” He was referring to Wanting Mor, my novel that is based on a true story and set in post-Taliban […]

I admit I approached my education in a very strange way. I decided to go to college (community college) before going to university. I went two years to Seneca college and studied, of all things, biology and chemistry. Eventually graduating as a biological chemical technician, not even a technologist, for goodness sakes. I wonder if […]

I was flicking channels and saw a bit of Interview With a Vampire starring Brad Pitt. Despite my squeamishness regarding the topic, I find it’s actually well written. The dialogue is compelling, at least as much of it as I watched a long time ago. I couldn’t get very far. Tried watching bits of Bram […]

When the twins were only girls they were once watching Little House on the Prairie, the Michael Landon show, and Mary was getting married and leaving someone behind or something, and she said to the guy, “I will always hold your head in my heart.” The twins burst out laughing. Even as young girls, they […]

That I described myself as ‘devastated’ yesterday even though I complained a few days ago about doing just that? It was when I was talking about being asked to leave (being dumped) from that writer’s workshop class I had paid to join. I will explain in case anyone wants to call me on it because […]

Was it twenty years ago that I joined my first writing group? Maybe it was nineteen. And it was a group/workshop that was offered through a local community college so I’m not even sure if that counts. But I attended every week. My kids were small, my oldest was five and the twins were two, […]

Just got news from the fabulous folks at Allen & Unwin, the Australian/New Zealand publisher of Wanting Mor that they’re reprinting before the book has even come out! (They’ve renamed it Jameela) It seems a distributor ordered 3700 copies. Wanting Mor came out in North America only last May, and it’s already going into a second […]

I’m feeling a little better. Not cocky, by a far way, but…resolved. Yes, that’s the word. Resolved is the first step back to cocky. Started rereading the novel and I think it might be pretty good. I’ve been working on it for almost a year now. I thought the fact that I’d written the first […]

When I first started writing, I wasn’t prepared for the ebs and flows of confidence. One minute I’ll be feeling positively cocky and the next like a fraud. I’ve heard many authors talk about this, even famous ones! So I’ve learned to basically–at the risk of sounding cliche–go with the flow. Just finished a novel […]