I started reading The Westing Game, because I’d heard good things and because I’m studying mystery structures these days. I know many people love it, but, well, we can’t all love the same things, alas. Ordinarily, when I don’t wish to finish a book, I keep that to myself. But Ellen Raskin has been dead for 42 years, so there’s not much harm I can do to a fellow writer by grumbling (and she won a Newbery medal for this book, so it’s not as if my opinion matters anyway).

If The Westing Game is a favourite of yours, please know I respect that — I’ve read essays about how brilliant its construction is, and I’m sure that’s true.

Trying to figure out precisely why I wasn’t engaged with The Westing Game helped me understand some things about myself as a reader, and perhaps also as a writer. I share in that forensic spirit, and not to dump on this beloved book. It allows me to talk about patterns that also appear in more recent books, which I’m not as eager to pick apart publicly. Also, a benefit of examining an old book is that the question of how being surrounded by AI online is affecting our writing doesn’t come into it; we can just look at prose choices without leaping into that exhausting topic.

Increasingly over the last several years, I’ve found my thoughts slipping and sliding when I read. It’s definitely an attention span problem (who among us these days) but, surprisingly, it tends to happen to me with fast-paced books written in clear, simple prose — the kind that one might think would hold a reader’s attention more easily. Perhaps, I thought, it’s just that “easy” prose doesn’t interest me. But it’s not quite that. Every so often, I’ll pick up a fast-paced book with very simple sentence structure that does grab me. Why one such book and not another? It’s frustratingly unpredictable.

Hard to believe we’re one month out from the Canadian release of Mercutio on August 18! (And I think it’s releasing in some other countries soon too; looks like Sept. 1 in Australia, for example.) I have some events planned here in Canada, mostly in September and October, and I’ll have a rundown of those in an upcoming newsletter. In the meantime, if you’re interested in the book, it’s incredibly helpful to request it from your local library, and/or pre-order it from a bookshop. The Canadian release will be simultaneous hardback and paperback, so you have your choice. (And of course ebook and the audiobook read by Maxim Reston).

Some of my favourite bookshops in Canada are Bakka Phoenix in Toronto, McNally Robinson in Winnipeg, Argo and Joie de Livres in Montreal, Mill Street Books in Almonte, Books on Beechwood, Perfect Books, Octopus Books, and Spaniel’s Tale in Ottawa. Many of them will ship, and if it’s not available for sale near you, Blackwell’s in the UK ships internationally.

Ten or 15 years ago, whenever I compared writing to a more visual art form, I’d talk about throwing a pot on a wheel. I was most interested in the shape of a story at that point, because I had struggled with plot and structure for years. I was also learning the importance of revision, so I liked the comfort of telling myself that the first draft was for putting the clay on the wheel — formless and misshapen though it might be. Similarly, some writers talk about piling the sand in the sandbox, before building the castle.

The other day at David Jón Fuller’s launch for his novel Venue 13, we talked about the way writing is a storytelling art that keeps its rehearsals private, unlike theatre and other performing arts. That’s always been comforting to me, too: I can tell and retell until I get it right, before I share it with anyone.

These days, when I think about how I write, I think about painting. The way I layer, scrape away, mix right on the canvas, let some layers show through to the layers beneath while others lie thick, feels like painting with a knife. I am more concerned with texture than anything else these days, so every scene gets at least six or seven layers before it looks like what I want (and some of the more tricky or crucial ones get 20 or more). The first draft is no longer the ugly lump of clay; it’s the underpainting.

First of all and most importantly, have you seen the video of the cat who joined the final scene of a ballet performance of Romeo and Juliet?

The cat has nothing to do with the subject I want to talk about today, but it brought me joy.

Another staging of the story has made me scratch my head a little. A current Shakespeare in the Park production puts immigrants on one side of the feud and anti-immigrant state violence on the other; I have not seen the production and perhaps it’s great, but I am wary of the approach. I have no problem with political readings of R&J, and in fact I think it’s difficult to read the play as anything but political (I will get to that in a minute), but stagings that randomly assign the Montagues and Capulets to sides in real modern conflicts (or worse, genocides) that are not rich-family feuds often end up incoherent or worse. The rich-family feud part is important! Shakespeare’s play deliberately does not care about the reasons for the feud and goes out of its way to show that the two sides are equal in power and wealth. Nobody thinks “if only border agents and immigrants would bury the hatchet, I mean, who even remembers what they were arguing about.” That would be grotesque, frankly.¹

Hi folks! First off, I want to thank everyone who entered the draw for the three copies of Mercutio last month. I wish I could have mailed books to all of you. I’ll delete the entry form and its info now that the books have been mailed out.

If you’re in Ottawa on June 16th, come by Perfect Books at 7 p.m. for the launch of Venue 13 by David Jón Fuller, for which I’ll be the host. I’m looking forward to it!

I’m working on my novella, and pondering my next steps, and having a lot of very navel-gazey thoughts about art and publishing which I will spare you, at least until they’re less half-baked.

Since tomorrow’s the anniversary of D-Day, I thought instead I’d devote the newsletter to an excerpt from my 2024 novel The Tapestry of Time, which hinges on the events of Operation Overlord in northern France in June 1944. A key section of the novel is about the training of agents for the Special Operations Executive, and it draws very heavily on the real history of those agents. The Jacqueline in the section below is my little tribute to Yvonne Rudellat (code name Jacqueline) who really was a grandmother in her 40s deemed too old for parachute training, but not too old to be the first female SOE agent sent to France, where she was captured at a roadblock after picking up two Canadian agents. She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

My revisions for my next novel, The Realm Invisible, are done, so now we enter the production phase! We are talking about the cover! There will be copy edits, but the book is the book now, after long labours. When I have news about a publication date, I’ll share it and tell you more about that book.

So my publications for the next while go like this:

• Mercutio, out now in the UK, August 2026 in Canada, April 2027 in the US (although the electronic versions are available in the US now)

• The Swordmaster, September 2026

• The Realm Invisible, sometime in 2027, I expect

And then, who knows! I don’t have any publishing contracts beyond that, and to be honest I feel like I need to take a big breath anyway, so it’s a good thing. I am working on a project, though, which is a novella I’ve wanted to write for a while, and which I received a grant to write from the Canada Council for the Arts.

He’s arrived! Mercutio is on bookstore shelves in the UK as of yesterday. The audiobook narrated by Maxim Reston is also out worldwide, and the ebook is also available in some parts of the world, including the U.S. Here in Canada, Mercutio will be in bookstores in August, but you can pre-order from your favourite bookstore now. I have a page on my website with more info about the book, including its back-cover copy and very kind endorsements.

I know it’s frustrating that it doesn’t release to all territories at once, but I do have a small compensation: I’ve got some author copies to give away! If you’d like a signed copy mailed to you anywhere in the world (my treat), just enter your name and email on this form. I’ll use a random number generator to select a few winners on Sunday, May 10 at noon ET, and I’ll let you know by email if you’re among them and I’ll get your mailing address and personalization requests at that point. Anywhere in the world is fine.

This novel takes an approach to retelling that seems to be a favourite mode of mine (and which I have learned is slightly risky, because it does not necessarily recreate the familiar vibes of the best known version). I look at all the extant versions of a story, and then I speculate into existence one possible now-lost "original" that would explain how the elements of all versions (even the contradictory elements) came to be.

With Mercutio coming out in the UK in less than two weeks, I’ve been fielding questions from eager readers about when it will be available in their country, whether it’s hardcover or paperback, whether it will have a special edition, whether there’s an audiobook, how they can buy a signed or bookplated edition, whether it will be translated, and why the plans are what they are.

I’m always happy to do my best to answer those questions and any others, so do feel free to ask me any time (you can respond to my newsletter, or find me on social media.) Communication with readers is the main reason I try to be easy to find online, why I write this newsletter, and why I try to put as much information as I can on my website. I love to talk to readers, especially when they want to read my books!

(And I love to talk about my books; my publisher shared a video from me yesterday for Shakespeare’s birth-and-deathday. If you have a blog or podcast about Shakespeare, Dante, medieval / fairy / stories, writing or reading, I’d love to be a guest.)

But when the questions are about publication plans, I always feel a bit apologetic about the facts I can share, which sometimes aren’t what readers want to hear (or what I want to tell them). In traditional publishing, authors can do very little to affect things like publication dates and special editions, and sometimes we’re nearly the last to know about those kinds of plans.

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 [email protected] 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 [email protected].

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.