Dark Fiction & Children's Fiction
Dark Fiction & Children's Fiction
Last weekend I completed my first draft of Raccoon Retreat, the sequel to Raccoon Rescue. It came as something of a surprise: writing the book has been a slog, and I thought it might take at least until the end of the month. That’s because for me, endings are almost […]
For such a spur of the moment thing, this past week’s contest turned out to be a lot of fun! I did turn it around fairly quickly, and it remained largely the domain of friends and family, but the results are in: The raccoon’s name is Roxy, and the winner […]
Leave a comment below, or comment/vote via Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, for a chance to win a free copy of Raccoon Rescue! (Read on for a full set of rules…) The day job takes me roughly once per quarter through Toronto Pearson International Airport. Headed home from my previous trip […]
I’m not much of a superstitious person. I take most everything mystical with a heavy dose of science-based skepticism. (For that matter, I take other things that way, too. I’m not, for example, likely to believe that medication cures all.) And yet. There are not insignificant parts of me that […]
I had a little bit of a rough month. Early on I was struggling with flagging energy, anxiety, basically all symptoms I only experience when I eat foods to which I’m sensitive — grains in particular, except I wasn’t eating grains. I had, however, reintroduced nightshades into my diet. Long […]
I don’t normally blog about my day job, not least because I already mix genres enough as it is; why add business-to-business content marketing to the jumble? In fact, I’ve thought for a long time that marketing and fiction, for me, make each other better. Fiction makes my marketing content […]
A couple of weeks ago a longtime friend asked me to join her class of 19- and 20-year-old college students to talk about writing as a career. I joined virtually, via Skype, and had a good (if somewhat short) conversation. In fact, it turned out to be an extension of […]
I admit it: until last year, I didn’t read very much fiction by Black authors. I read Colson Whitehead’s Zone One because it was zombie fiction, and Tiya Miles’ Tales from the Haunted South because it was research for a short story I was writing. I’d read Black Like Me […]
If you read Sodom & Gomorrah on a Saturday Night, you know that it takes place in a United States where most of the government has been privatized and crimes like human trafficking have been legalized. (Think this is ludicrous? You may want to read articles about the trucking industry and […]
The last year has seen a rather contentious debate over whether sensitivity reading — the practice of having stories critiqued or edited by people who represent the marginalized communities from which characters might come — constitutes censorship. This actually isn’t a new issue. Nearly 20 years ago, Debbie Reese, a […]