Like many people, I spent a long time staring at this photo of Earth taken by Artemis astronaut Reid Wiseman on April 2:

The thin line of atmosphere, with the aurora australis at the top right and the aurora borealis at the bottom left — wow wow wow. Amazing stuff. We may have thought we were used to photos of Earth, but this one, with its perspective so unlike most maps (South America is at 4 o’clock and North Africa is the red-brown land at 8 o’clock), and its amazing details and play of light, resurrected my sense of wonder.

At one point, I put my index finger to my computer screen, without thinking about it, and traced a curving line from Gibraltar down toward the bottom of the globe (which is, in this case, the Atlantic). I was thinking of a journey that plays a key role in the plot of my upcoming novel Mercutio, the real historical journey undertaken by the Vivaldi brothers and their companions. In 1291, two galleys left Genoa, went through the Strait of Gibraltar and disappeared. Their destination was the far east by way of what was then called the Ocean Sea; this probably means they were trying to go around Africa, but it’s also very possible that they were trying to reach India by heading due west from Europe, as that distance was the subject of a lot of debate in the 13th century, and there were some who thought it was a feasible journey. (And yes, they knew the world was round.) Whichever of the two routes they planned to take, it was an incredibly dangerous and ambitious undertaking.

Hello all! First off, let me say that if you happen to be in Montreal tomorrow (Saturday March 28), I’ll be signing books at the grand opening of the Indigo Marché Central, from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. (more info here). I would love to see you!

The last few weeks have been, well, a lot, as I made a big life change. I’m no longer a freelancer, and have started a new position as a full-time writer for the foundation for a pediatric health centre here in Ottawa.

It’s a wonderful job that I’m enjoying very much, but it’s been a big adjustment when it comes to family logistics and commuting and, frankly, just wrapping my head around the idea of not being my own boss anymore after 10.5 years self-employed. But freelancing in these uncertain times was getting so stressful, and this position is just perfect for me and such a good cause. I think that once I get settled, not having six or seven gigs and clients on the go at any one time will actually make it easier for me to focus on my fiction in my off hours. I used to write novels on evenings and weekends the last time I had a day job, and in fact I did that despite having a very young child as well, back then, so that part is not much of an adjustment. I’ll always write fiction, even if it’s only for five minutes a day, and even if a day comes when no one wants to publish it. It’s the way I process everything else.

I was working constantly the last month or so to finish all my freelance projects before the new job began, so I’ve been slower than I hoped getting the revisions on The Realm Invisible back to my editor — and I don’t want to rush it, and there’s a lot of deep thinking that has to happen to make sure the revisions are as good as possible. Still, I’ve made good progress and I’m nearing the end.

There are some ideas that swirl around in your daydreams for years before you introduce them to the blank page. (I was just reading a post by Phenderson Djèlí Clark about the long origins of his novella Ring Shout, which is probably my favourite of his works, which is saying a lot, and one of my craft/approach touchstones for a novella I’m working on now.) He writes that the idea had been rattling around for years before he felt that it was time. I’m not sure we’re ever completely “ready” to write any story worth telling, in that the writing itself is the thing that teaches us how, but we can become ready to begin. And sometimes that requires a lot of living first, a lot of magpie gathering.

Mercutio was one of those long ideas for me. Back in 2016, I wrote a novella for a Shakespeare-themed anthology called Monstrous Little Voices. In a promotional interview, when I was asked whether I’d write more Shakespeare-inspired stories, I answered, “I’d love to write something about Mercutio sometime. I’ve been fascinated by him since I first saw John McEnery play him in the 1968 movie. I have some ideas about his past.” That was 10 full years ago now, and by that point, I’d already been thinking about it for who knows how many years.

I don’t even remember the first time I saw that 1968 Romeo and Juliet, which I know practically by heart. I was very young. It was, of course, the Queen Mab speech that got its hooks into my brain:

Happy end of February! I’ve hit the point of being pleasantly busy with my fiction projects without being stressed or burned out, which is a nice place to be. I got the revisions on The Swordmaster back to its editor, and the edits for The Realm Invisible just came in. That’s the novel coming from HarperVoyager UK in 2027ish. The draft of that one was really difficult, so I’m very pleased that my editor likes it, and now I get to dig in to revisions, which are my favourite part. It already exists; now I just have to make it better.

I’ve also started drafting a novella that has been a passion project on my to-do list for a long time — that’s the one I’ve got a Canada Council for the Arts grant to write, and I’m really pleased to be digging in to it now.

A few bits of news to share before I get back to work!

• I have a short story called “Lady Misfortune” about 16th century pirates off the coast of Newfoundland in Rising Tides, a pirate anthology coming out from Outland Entertainment on March 3. You can pre-order the paperback now (depending on where you live) and it looks like the ebook is available right away. One side of my family is from Newfoundland, so it was a real pleasure to dabble in some of its very weird history.

• If you happen to be in eastern Ontario, please come out to Bubba & Bugs, my favourite coffee shop, in Kemptville on Saturday Feb. 28 (that’s tomorrow) at 7 p.m. I’ll be one of four authors (with Scott Godwin, Beth Granger and my good friend Kevin Hearne) chatting and reading from our books. It’s ticketed ($10) and there is a cap, so email bubbaandbugs@outlook.com or call them at 613-258-2782 to hold your spot.

• It’s now on the HarperCollins site, so I can share that the narrator for the audiobook of Mercutio will be Maxim Reston, and I’m so excited to hear what he does with it. Mercutio is coming out on May 7 in the UK in all formats (and May 7 is also the ebook and audiobook date worldwide; the print date is in August in Canada and hasn’t been set yet for the U.S.). Please do pre-order if you can from anywhere you like to buy books, and put the book onto your to-read shelves on Goodreads or Storygraph or wherever you share your reads if you do. It’s available now on Netgalley UK if you’d like to ask for an early copy to review. The more evidence of interest there is now, about two months before publication, the more copies bookstores will order, and the more readers who don’t already know my work will encounter it. My publisher created some lovely graphics for it. Here’s my favourite!

  

Hello, friends! Last newsletter I wrote that I had finally handed the draft of The Realm Invisible in to my editor at HarperVoyager UK, and this newsletter, I can report that I’m just about to hand in my edits for The Swordmaster to my editor at Solaris. So we’re ticking things off the to-do list over here!

Meanwhile, we’re ramping up for the UK release of Mercutio in May (eek). If you’re in the UK yourself, and a blogger or reviewer, it is available now to request on Netgalley, and I would really appreciate some word of mouth for this one as I am very proud of it and I’d love it to find its readers.

It turns out the Olympic Games have been perfect for recovery from drafting burnout. I’ve been glued to the curling, hockey and figure skating while I work on line edits, emails and other distractible tasks.

I’ve also been reading, and I have a long pile on my to-read list, including a couple of exciting forthcoming books from other authors to blurb, and some research for my next project.

Hello friends,

I write this week with a worn-out brain. Very pleased to report I have finished the draft of the Tudor spy novel I’ve been working on since the spring. I tore up the first third and re-wrote it, then I tore up the first two-thirds and rewrote it, then I wrote to the end, then did a quick revision of the whole. Working title The Realm Invisible. The draft is about 97,000 words and is finally in my editor’s hands. This will be my ninth published novel, coming from HarperVoyager UK in 2027 or 2028.

While I wait for her feedback, I’m turning my attention to the edits from another editor for my novel The Swordmaster, which is the novel I have coming later this year from Solaris, as part of their Vampires of Dumas series. I’m enjoying getting back into that world, which is a lot of fun.

My freelance work is busy too; I have two big projects on the go.

Hello, friends. I write to you from within a snowstorm of the kind we get a few times in a typical Ottawa winter: we’re expecting between 15 and 25 centimetres, and at the moment, the world outside is very white. So I’m hunkered down, which I would be anyway, because I’m still finishing the draft of my next novel, and then I have edits to get to on another novel. I’ve been in hunkered down mode for weeks, and neglecting things like exercise and socializing because I keep thinking “I just have to go hard for a few more days and this will be done” but, as anyone who has ever written a novel knows, the ending tends to turn into a particular kind of Zeno’s paradox in which a finite distance to travel can be divided into an infinite number of tasks. Anyway, I just have to go hard for a few more days and this will be done.

I am thinking constantly of Minnesota, so there’s nothing better I can think to do with today’s newsletter than share a few of the resources I have come across, if you’re in any position to help. I grew up in Manitoba, so Minnesota is my neck of the woods, and I have several friends and colleagues there. I’ve been inspired by the bravery of ordinary people keeping their kids and neighbours safe from roving gangs of unidentified masked goons.

There’s a list of organizations to support on the Stand With Minnesota website. One effort that I have been watching with admiration is the supply of dash cams to observers, which you can support through this wish list if you don’t mind buying through Amazon. Another great wish list to support is this one sending ice cleats and other cold weather gear to neighbourhoods. You can also support a collective of people 3d-printing whistles, information zines and other resources at this fundraising site, and if your neighbourhood/store/community organization anywhere in the US could use some whistles, email them at whistlerequests@proton.me.

A very happy 2026 to you all, and good riddance to 2025. 

My birthday is in a few days. I try to cultivate a good attitude toward aging, and for the most part I have, but I do struggle with the impending mortality of it all, especially on years when I'm feeling like I'm not quite where I would like to be. I'll save you the therapy session but I do feel that way this year, just a smidge, so turning 49 has me a little melancholy. 

Enter poetry! It came into my head not long ago to memorize one of my favourite passages of Shakespeare's, the hollow crown speech from Richard II. I adore it. I get bits of it stuck in my head like earworms. I don't know about you, but when I get an earworm of a song in my head, sometimes the only way to exorcize it and move on is to listen to the song. It's the same with poetry, and I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could just recite the speech to myself when I needed it?

I've long been interested in deliberate memorization as a practice. I used to memorize prayers when I was a child. I memorized the "to be or not to be" speech when I was in Grade 4 as part of an individualized curriculum endorsed by an excellent teacher. I studied piano through the Suzuki method, which means performing without sheet music. When I was still a journalist at the Ottawa Citizen, 10 years ago, I wrote a feature about memorization, which included talking to a 13-year-old who had just finished memorizing the entire Qur’an.

A couple of things to let you know about: I’m currently doing a Q&A about The Tapestry of Time on Bookbrowse for the next day or two; please come check it out!

Also, if you’re in Ottawa, please come by the St Laurent shopping centre this afternoon (Friday) for the CBC All in a Day used book sale to raise money for the Ottawa Food Bank, between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. I’ll be there signing (new) books and doing some on-air shenanigans.

I’ll take a break from this newsletter over the holidays, and be back on Jan. 2.

In the meantime, I thought I’d talk a bit about some of the art that brought me joy this year.

Every year in November or December, I write a newsletter about what I published that year, which serves not only as an eligibility post to aid those who read for awards nominations, but also just to take stock. This year, except for a story chapbook I distributed 33 copies of for fun at Can*Con, I didn’t publish any fiction — for the first time since 2011, eep. But I do still want to take stock of my writing this year, as I always find it a valuable exercise, to look back on the year.

It’s a little early — December hasn’t happened yet! — but I’m doing this now, in all honesty, because I’m feeling a little extra November-y. The world is grey, the sun is shirking, and a frustrating home repair project is eating what hours remain after long hours spent on bill-paying freelance work, teaching, and trying to get my novel drafted by deadline. It’s a season for brooding.

One reason I published nothing this year is that I have two books scheduled to come out next year. The other reason is that I have not been writing much short fiction lately. But here’s the fiction writing I’ve done in 2025:

• Finished drafting my novel The Swordmaster (this was mostly done in 2024, but a bit in 2025.)

• Revised my novel Mercutio after developmental edits, copy-edits and proofreading.

• Planned, researched and drafted The Next Novel (that’s the one I’m still drafting, but it should be done next month. This one has required tearing up and starting over a few times, but it’s finally coming together.)

• Successfully applied for a Canada Council grant for the novella I’ll write next year (this required provisional planning and outlining, and writing the first chapter.)

  

It’s November, the dismal season where I live, and the traditional knuckle-down season for my people (ie, novelists). The NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month) organization closed recently, but it had been around for 25 years before that, and it’s embedded in the culture to some degree. There are lots of WriMo challenges happening in more distributed ways this month; I’m doing one with some friends, where everyone sets their own goals for the month and reports in once a day.

There are many novelists for whom the idea of writing a lot of words in a short time has never been very appealing, which is fine and fair. For others, NaNo is a way to draw strength from camaraderie and get over some of the barriers that can get in our way with big projects. I have never seen it as a time to “write crap”, which some people do (both critics and some participants). It’s been useful to me to get focus on projects, and I always have a project on the go.

Besides, if you’re a working writer with deadlines, the idea of writing steadily to a certain word-count goal over a given chunk of time is not likely to be outside your experience, even outside of group challenges. Art can be slippery and requires a lot of staring out the window, but for most of us, it also requires discipline and some tools to get the thing done.

Last weekend, I was one of the guests of honour at Can*Con, here in Ottawa. My fellow guests of honour were Premee Mohamed and Stephen Kotowych, both of whom are extremely cool people to hang out with. I’ve been going to Can*Con every year for, well, I don’t even remember how long but roughly a decade and a half. So I was particularly touched when they asked me to be guest of honour — I mean, they know I’m going to come anyway! It also made the experience of being a guest of honour anywhere for the first time more comfortable, since it’s a convention where I know so many people and where the culture and vibes are familiar to me.

There are various kinds of festivals and conventions that authors go to, and they all have different cultures and expectations. Can*Con, like other fan-run conventions that focus on science fiction, fantasy and horror, is run by volunteers and is not trying to make a profit. Very much a labour of love. Unlike literary festivals, the speakers on panels are attendees like everyone else, and expected to pay their own way, including the membership fees. (Some cons discount or refund membership fees for panelists, but not many, in my experience, and anyway, that’s only a small part of the overall cost: travel, hotel and food are the big budget items.)

The great thing about everybody-pays con culture is that there’s (almost) no line between the “talent” and the other attendees, and we all eat together and chat together.

I’ve grumbled enough on social media about the rise in AI-generated scam emails that now, more than one of my author friends has sent an email to me, asking whether I think it’s a scam or not. (This is great; please always send these emails to author friends for second opinions, and I’m always happy to be that friend.)

My answer, I’m sorry to say, has always been “yeah, that’s the typical scam pattern”, but I can’t fault anyone for being unsure. I’ve just seen a lot of them, I think because I have a pretty big backlist now.

Most of these emails are pretty slick. They come from Firstname Lastname at a gmail address and have a real-looking signature. Most of the time, everything is spelled correctly and they have enough specific details to seem plausible. Some of them even impersonate real events or book clubs, so searching the name of the organization will seem to confirm that the email is genuine. And they never ask for money right away, so the scam is not apparent in the opening email.

Here’s a bit of one that came in five minutes ago:

Hey everyone! Some lovely news: I’ve recieved a grant from the Canada Council of the Arts for a project I’ll work on in 2026. I’ll tell you more about that as time goes on, but for now I’ll just say that I’ll have a small chunk of money to pay myself to work on a book part-time for a couple of months next year. It’s not easy to get a Canada Council grant these days (I struck out with Mercutio, with a note that the project met the threshold on its merits but that most projects are not accepted because of the increasingly constrained budget for funding. I did receive a smaller grant from the City of Ottawa for Mercutio, which made a huge difference to me last year.)

Next month, there are two events here in Ottawa that I’m very excited about.

I’ll be one of the guests of honour at Can*Con. My schedule is below. If you’re coming and would like to attend the kaffeeklatsch, please don’t forget to sign up. I’ll have some chapbooks I’ve been printing up to give away at my kaffeeklatsch and signing.

I was talking with a writer friend in the U.S. the other day, someone I've known for years and whose work I've long admired. They mentioned that they've been finding it difficult to write lately, because of the state of their country and the world in general. They feel pressure to write something that would, even in some small way, make things less terrible. To write something meaningful and valuable to the struggle. So they struggle to write.

It's a conversation I've had with many writer friends over the last few years – actually, over the last few decades, because the world has always been on fire. But more frequently over the last few years. 

I told my friend that, for whatever reason, I have not felt that kind of pressure to write with the times in mind. Maybe, I said, it's because I keep noticing how my values have a way of showing up in whatever I write without my having to think about it; that morning, I had been working on a scene set in the 16th century, and realized that a character's bitter speech about the geopolitics of that time could have been me talking about the war in Ukraine. 

And yes, that's true (and not just for me). But I felt there was something missing from that explanation. After our conversation, I kept thinking about how my own writing practice has been in 2025.

Hello friends! I’ve been travelling in France, Belgium and the UK for the last couple of weeks. I didn’t plan the trip with this in mind, but our route has been very much the same as the path my grandpa travelled during the “phony war” period in early 1940: over the channel to Cherbourg, then across northern France to Belgium, then to Dunkirk, where he was among those safely brought home (and where we have ferry tickets).

We’ve seen a number of sites associated with D-Day in Normandy, and I was particularly struck by Juno Beach, where the Canadians launched their assault. The Picardy-Belgium part of the trip has been about seeing WWI sites. Nothing about this trip was intended to be book research — it’s for my kid, mainly — but, well, everything is research. I’ve got a future project in mind that involves a Canadian soldier from the Great War, so being on the Somme and in Ypres has been very useful for that. It’s also been wonderful to see parts of the landscape I wrote about in Armed in Her Fashion/The Chatelaine, and imagine Margriet and Beatrix and Claude making their way across those fields and towns.

One of the highlights of the trip for me was finally getting to see the Bayeux Tapestry in person. Since the Tapestry plays a major role in my novel The Tapestry of Time, I’ve read a lot about it, and stared at its digitized version for hours, but there’s nothing like seeing the object itself. I’m so glad I was able to. So I thought I’d write this week about that experience.

Hi everyone! Tomorrow (Aug. 16), the Edmonton WorldCon Bid is hosting an online party highlighting Canadian creators. I’ll be on the discussion panel about Canadian science fiction and fantasy, and I’ll also be interviewing my longtime friend and mentor Julie Czerneda about her work. It’s free to join and you don’t have to be a member of WorldCon. There will also be social spaces. Come on by!

Also, a heads up that I’m offering a full manuscript critique for the We The People summer fundraiser, which is raising funds to help families in Gaza, with some funding also going to immigrant and trans rights collectives. I don’t offer a full manuscript critique as an auction donation often, as it’s a lot of work and time, so if this is something that interests you, it’s worth grabbing if you can. (Don’t worry if your manuscript isn’t quite ready yet; I can do it any time in the next several months.) The auction starts Aug. 18, and it’s got hundreds of items worth checking out.

I’ve had a chance to get an early peek at a couple of forthcoming books that I want to recommend to you all. One is The Drowned Man’s Daughter, which a gorgeous, strange, dark ecological novella about how people form and break community. It’s by a friend of mine, C.J. Lavigne, so I am biased, but I’d love it even if I didn’t know C.J. It’s coming out in early September from Newest Press.

Hi all! A couple of things to share: I recently had a post on John Scalzi’s Big Idea series about the history behind The Tapestry of Time. You can also find some book club questions for the novel here.

I’ve been reflecting lately on a particular set of qualities in retellings — a category that includes my novels The Valkyrie, The Swordmaster and Mercutio to some degree. I thought I’d share those reflections with you.

Forty years ago this summer, Italo Calvino was preparing a series of lectures he was scheduled to give at Harvard throughout the next academic year. He died that September, 1985, before he could deliver them. They were published after his death as Six Memos For the Next Millennium (even though he only completed five.)

Each of the lectures is about a quality or value in literature. The first is on lightness. I've listened to the audio version¹ of this lecture dozens of times, and I always find something new in it. By lightness, Calvino means a style of writing that subtracts as much as possible from language, from structure, and even from the images and characters within a story. Lightness tends to move from the concrete to the abstract, to atomize and dissolve.

I was thinking about tense this week, in part because of this useful thread on Bluesky from editor David Thomas Moore about some of the grammatical tangles we writers can get into in present tense. Truth be told, I’m usually thinking about tense, when I’m not overthinking it. 

It's an aspect of writing feature-style journalism that many students struggle with, which means that as an instructor, I have had to figure out ways to explain why past or present may be suitable for a given verb within the context of a piece — something a lot of writers do instinctively. 

As an author, I have particular ways of thinking about tense — in some sense, what tense means to me as the author at the story level is distinct from the way tense manifests at the sentence level. So I thought I’d explore that this week.

(This is going to get into very nerdy weeds and I fear it might seem either obvious or unhinged or both, in a "have you ever really thought about your hands?" sort of way. Sorry. Feel free to skip the rest if you're not into it. My only news to share this week is that the US paperback release of The Tapestry of Time hits shelves on July 22, hooray! Available from anywhere that sells books — you can order if they don’t yet have it in stock — and please do request from your library if you can.)

Hello all! July is upon us, which means The Tapestry of Time comes out in the U.S. in a few weeks, and the paperback comes out in the UK in September. If you’re in either place and you’re able to pre-order the book (ideally from an indie bookstore) that would help spread the word. Any bookstore should be able to order it for you. Library requests are also a huge boost. And thank you!

Today I want to talk about the connection between the fantastical in the book and the themes I set out to explore. I often say that I write history "with something weird going on" but the choice of "something weird" is never arbitrary!

Tapestry begins in June 1944, with a woman walking in Paris, when she sees something impossible.

The main reason I chose to make the sisters clairvoyant is that I wanted the book to ask questions about how we know things and/or think we know things, and whether there's a difference. This is a book about fascism and its claims about history, after all, so "How does anyone know they're right? How do we know they're wrong?" is woven through it.