Had the wonderful opportunity to moderate a Q&A with prolific Canadian historical (and fantasy) author C.C. (Chris) Humphreys last week, September 15, at Creative Academy meet-up. Chris is not only a very productive writer, he is also an actor, swordsman and voice-over narrator (more about Chris can be found on his website here). I took …
Read more “September 20, 2022 – Q&A with C.C. (Chris) Humphreys”
First off…hard to believe it has been two years since I posted. But maybe not. We’ve all been wondering what happened to the two plus years as we look back at the bloody great pothole of our lives and wonder, “What next?”. Time to look forward. With that in mind, I’ve discovered that Beta readers …
Read more “August 6, 2022 – Editing…with a little (lot!) help from my (Beta) friends”
So I had finally decided on an editor through Reedsy.com and the work began. I sent her the manuscript, and she agreed to get back to me within 3 weeks with edits and notes. The time passed, which I used to focus on the other two novels, and then her edits arrived. I was initially …
Read more “August 16, 2020 – The road to publishing: Finding an editor, part two”
I recently got to a point in the journey of the The Storyteller’s Reputation where I finally knew I had to do something different. It might have been the pandemic and my sudden lessening of creative thoughts and energy. Or receiving one more rejection letter. Regardless, I realized I needed help to be ready to …
Read more “May 3, 2020 – The road to publishing: Finding an editor, part one”
In 1353, five years after the Black Death (bubonic plague) killed over fifty percent of the residents of Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio published The Decameron. The book is a compilation of one hundred stories told by a group of seven women and three men, wealthy courtiers all, who try to escape the death around them by …
What a full three days that was! The 2019 Surrey International Writer’s Conference is now over and I’m still processing the experiences, learnings and bondings. I always find I’m a bit topsy turvy after the conference, shaken like a martini. What I do love about the conference is the ability to run into an agent …
Off the Eurostar in Lille, waited an hour with an Americano (funnier when I first wrote “with an American”, who would be Laurie, a North American…), then picked up the rental car and drove to Vimy. You see it approaching along the valley below and it doesn’t look like much. Then it’s a windy road …
I was actually going to skip Florence when I originally made plans for this trip, as Florence was all about the Renaissance, the late 15th and early 16th centuries of da Vinci and Micheleangelo and Raphael; I was looking for the 14th century, painters like Giotto and Donatello and Ghiberti. Florence was a hundred years …
We left San Gimignano at 8:30am and drove through the winding roads and (surprisingly) heavily forested hills southwest to the Abbey of San Gelgano in Tuscany, a Cisterciean monastery completed around 1280 AD. Visitors must park a kilometre away and walk down a road lined by trees, so the abbey stands clear in the distance …
I met a Princess yesterday who is descended from Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo – the Mona Lisa, whose painted face I saw for the first time four days earlier in Paris – and whose family has been growing wine in Tuscany since 994 AD. Yeah it was that kind of day, one that I’ll never forget. One …
Read more “September 10, 2019 – Finding Vernaccia, Boccaccio and the story”