I’m writing this as 2020 draws to a close – and you’ll be reading it with 2020 firmly in the rearview mirror. The challenges brought to all of us by MMXX have been unprecedented. For authors, the traditional ways we’ve engaged with readers – book fairs, bookstore signings, book club gatherings, Renaissance festivals, historical re-enactments,… Read more »
Falling In Love I fell in love for the first time in July – there were fireworks (literal and figurative) and I wanted nothing more in my whole thirteen years of living than to kiss that boy. Growing up in a small Atlantic Canadian province I hold snapshots of summer in my memory – the… Read more »
A boarding school furnishes the perfect setting for a mystery/thriller. They provide the claustrophobia of the locked room mystery and are often in an isolated location. They also have a long history of teenagers and their combustible emotions, which gives the perfect opportunity to incorporate the supernatural (sometimes explained away, sometimes literally supernatural). My favorites… Read more »
Have you ever read a scene and felt like it didn’t go anywhere, or didn’t have a purpose? Do you struggle to write scenes that develop characters? On a scene-by-scene basis, do your characters experience external and internal changes? Do you do in depth scene analysis? Whether or not published in a book or jotted… Read more »
I know Indigenous Peoples’ Day was back on October 12th. Heck, Canada’s National Indigenous Peoples Day was way back on June 21st, but I wanted to share some of my favourite Indigenous Science Fiction and Fantasy authors with you in the interest of diversifying your reading. Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse I first encountered Roanhorse’s… Read more »
In my last article Poetry Can Change the World, I make an argument about how vital poetry still is, even in our mad-pace world. Or, lately, just our ‘mad’ world, am I right? In this article I am going to compare poetry to espresso. Hear me out. Maybe it’s my lingering ADHD, maybe it’s my… Read more »
In an effort to get our fellow word nerds to know Team DIY MFA a bit better, we decided to commandeer one of the #5onFri slots and talk about our favorite books. Predictably, each member approached the notion of “favorite” in a different way and each of us chose a different favorite. We’re a team… Read more »
As the world enters into a winter of COVID, grief hangs over so many people, it’s hard to know how to comfort others, to console oneself, to anticipate the next loss coming round the bend. It seems ridiculous to say with any kind of certainty what’s best to do in these shifting, traumatic and disruptive… Read more »
This week our #ownvoices series shifts slightly from the experiences of BIPOC mystery/thriller writers to share the story of a woman who endured an extraordinary event and became part of a large and varied group – people with disabilities both seen and unseen. Linda Olson was a young med student and wife in 1979 when,… Read more »
Full disclosure: the impetus for this article came from my own research about medicine. I was having fun because I was finally getting to use Bald’s eyesalve in my story – though I’m not so sure the character was enjoying it quite as much as I was. Bald’s eyesalve (from a 10th-century medical text) is… Read more »
