The manuscript I’m working on involves a few places I’ve never seen except on a TV screen — police stations, courtrooms, and jail cells. Until I started these characters’ stories, I tended to set my fiction in places I was familiar with: high school, parks, fantasy lands that bore striking…
Welcome to TWT 247, where we play the best hits of Toxic Writing Thoughts 24/7! The exact way you shouldn’t! Coming up next, we have a few perennial favourites, so throw away your keyboard, embrace self-doubt or overweening arrogance or both (your choice), and, above all, don’t write for the next…
So, Fiancé and I are planning our wedding. It’s no surprise that there’s a huge industry dedicated to selling weddings and a sub-industry to help couples navigate all the overwhelming details of said weddings. We knew when we talked about getting married that planning the kind of wedding we wanted…
As a Jew, I’m torn when I read debates on whether it’s right to write stories with sympathetic Nazi characters.
It’s difficult to believe 2017 is only 25% over. Because of their position in the school year and my general mood cycle, January, February, and March are the most intense part of my year. That’s why I’m always looking for new entertainment, tools, and practices to make them go easier than previous…
I was an e-reader skeptic. Hard-copy books were good enough for me growing up, and, when they weren’t, well, dangit, I could read EPUBs on my phone and PDFs on my laptop. Why would I want another gadget taking up space in my life and outlets on my precious power…
When I was a teen, the writing books I picked up admonished me to write longhand and edit from printouts. They pooh-poohed using a computer as not quite the same thing. And for a while, that style of writing worked for me: I wrote first drafts by hand, ran through…
Ah, Baby University Instructor Sarah of five years ago. I’m jealous of you because there’s so much for you to learn and do. But I’m also totally not jealous, because there are a few important things you don’t know. Like…
Recently, I was searching for reviews for CBC’s recent podcast Missing and Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams? (with Connie Walker). I’d listened and found it informative, engaging, and thoughtful, but I knew my perspective was limited; I wanted to see what others, particularly Indigenous listeners and critics, had to say. What…
Don’t worry, this is my last to-do kick for a while. In Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the White Queen tells Alice that she sometimes believes six impossible things before breakfast. This is in response to Alice’s denial that one can believe impossible things, and I have…