Adult fiction? More pirates, a book three? Poetry? That plus editing, photographing, teaching. The year is stacking up. Somebody burst in and threw all the windows open and it was fresh and bracing and I think, maybe, it was all of them doing it all at once.
Read MoreI spoke at the TEDxHalifax event in March of this year. Seeing it all summed up like that—my worst and my best and all the threads that connect the two—is a teary-eyed, wonderful thing for me.
Read MoreSay all you want about food and shelter but this really is the ticket. Well of course you can be an author, said my mom and dad. Better get to work.
Read More“There came a point when the book became itself, and the people in it became real to me. I didn't know if it would end up getting published, but I felt like I owed the characters a chance to exist properly either way by finishing it. Otherwise, they just stagger off like untethered spirits…”
Read MoreFor the next month or longer, I'm banned. No edits, no additions, no tweaks. The story is in my editor's hands and from there, we'll figure out what to do with this heavyweight, set a deadline, and look forward to line editing and production.
Read MoreYou know when you rip things up or yell or slam a door? When you feel that way, there's a ball of red energy right there in your chest, under your skin, inside your ribs, on top of your lungs and all stuck up in your throat. It's red, a bad red.
Read MoreI wrote a book, a little one, and I want to exist beyond all hope. I want it so badly. I need it to be set to paper and illustrated and bound. I've submitted it to the loveliest publisher. Now I'm trying to forget I ever wrote it.
Read MoreI wrote about a pirate ship and a secret clubhouse for spies, but I look grown-up. Except the babyface that got me kicked out of restricted movies until I was 26 now has the effect, a decade later, of people thinking sometimes I'm 26.
Read MoreRoald Dahl says you're a fool to become a writer, your only compensation being absolute freedom. He had more in the way of compensation than absolute freedom. He's got a point, though, even if his own point no longer applied to him.
Read MoreTorture by elbow and knee, clammy hot perpendicular push shove the bed could be three miles wide but I get four and a half inches. One of us says This has to stop. Then another one of us says MMmmm, I hadda good sleep. Now pancakes.
Read MoreSome books are written to be read aloud and The Dread Crew definitely fits. A rollicking, rowdy hoot of a book ... there are identifiable characters for both boys and girls, and humor akin to Roald Dahl at his most satirically anti-establishment.
Read MoreTwo weeks since the manuscript. The first draft is in her hands but it's got holes and dubious underpinnings and while I've obeyed the stay-away order in principle, I've reorganized and rewritten the story fourteen times in my head.
Read MoreI went to tear out a sheet for a grocery list and found the birth of a Dread Crew scene, written while curled up on the high side of a starboard tack because for a while, I had to write everywhere. So I did. In waiting rooms, on long drives, on the boat.
Read More“It's a world filled with secret documents, maps, and mysterious totems. Kate has made a world where there is still adventure in the woods... the pirates of the backwoods will not disappoint even the most unruly jackanape under your roof."
Read MoreGrammy award winners and Giller Prize nominees and pretty much anyone who's managed a creative life—even on a small scale—have all done one thing on their respective epic journeys. They were all willing to suck. In front of an audience.
Read MoreOne month later, I've gone from 24,483 to 43,287 words. I am a cross-eyed hunchback. Camille, a Dread Crew reader and daughter of a friend, sent me a much-needed package of nudge notes.
Read MoreParenthood—and writing—is pain and sacrifice and the extinction of free time and the postponing of dreams and the scrabbling in the folds of the couch for spare change and sanity, peppered with flashes of pure joy.
Read MoreIs it so wonderful, writing? I don't know. It's romantic and indulgent and optimistic, an inherently defiant act. It is a squawk that hopes to coax the squawks of others. But it's lonely and bloody work both greenlit and sabotaged by ego.
Read MoreThe next book turns its attention to Missy, you might already know. She travels the world and meets new and strange pirate crews, and becomes a spy herself, and encounters a mystery -- in that order. We'll still have Dreads, and Eric and Joe feature too.
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