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.

In case you missed the news, I'm now a Nebula award winner! My nine co-writers and I were pleased and, I think it's fair to say, somewhat astonished by our win in the game writing category for A Death in Hyperspace. I can't say what was in the voters' minds, but it feels to me like a vote for small, weird, indie works of the heart, and it's just lovely. With so many of us on the ballot, we don't all get enormous lucite cubes (the Nebula trophies) but my certificate's in the mail. I really like this overview by Stewart C Baker about how A Death in Hyperspace came together, if you're curious.

Awards are strange beasts. I've had four Nebula nominations now, and three of them are for game writing (as is my only win), even though games are not the bulk of what I do or what I'm best known for. There are so many dynamics that go into it all. It can also be an odd thing to cope with; the emotions that accompany being on an award list can sometimes take us by surprise and be more complex than one might think. (This is probably especially true for those of us with imposter syndrome, and fear of taking up space, and mortifying terror of showing off). I actually struggle with all of that more than I struggle with disappointment over not being on awards lists (which happens most of the time! I've never been nominated for a Hugo, for example.) 

Not being on an awards list is the default expectation, to me, so it doesn't sting at all. And I've never been disappointed when I’m nominated but don't win; it truly is an honour to be on a ballot in the company of one's peers. What makes it all more complicated, of course, is the feeling of obligation to the work and to the team behind it. We want our books, games and stories to have the best chance of finding readers (and, frankly, paying for the groceries) and while awards don't always translate to a bump in sales, anything that might introduce your work to one more reader is welcome.

Anyway, what I really want to talk about this week is occasioned by the fact that copy edits have landed for Mercutio, which is very exciting. At this stage, my editor (Jane Johnson) and I have already worked through any structural issues (characterization, plot, etc) and we're happy with what's on the page. So another editor has gone through line by line and checked for clarity and consistent style. (I cannot get into the habit of putting an S at the end of toward to save my life, even though I made a concerted effort this time!) Copy editors also check for any hiccups in the plot (a character being described one way on page 10, another on page 74), and they check on things like timelines (always an area where I'm prone to make errors, since I revise so much and tend to write novels that take place over many years.) 

I’ve been working on a very cool project with Solaris, and since we announced it yesterday, now I can tell you about it! It’s called The Swordmaster, and it’s a vampire novel set in the world of Alexandre Dumas. Solaris began this series with Emma Newman’s novel The Vengeance—which I have read and loved, and which is getting a sequel of its own.

Although it’s a series, my book doesn’t follow from Emma’s. In fact, The Swordmaster is set earlier than The Vengeance. I set my novel during the time of Dumas’s Valois novels — during the time of Catherine de’ Medici and the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris in 1572. For the Dumas fans out there, my novel is set roughly in the same period (and with many of the same characters) as La Reine Margot. I’ve also drawn from his other books and stories; for example, his vampire story The Pale Lady. My main character, Françoise de Montesquiou d’Artagnan, is a member of the same family as the famous musketeer. (I deeply love Françoise and I hope everyone else does too.) There will be Easter eggs for the Dumas readers, but I wrote it to be accessible to people who have not yet read anything by Dumas, as well.

It was a real privilege to write a vampire novel, to tap into (ha) that long tradition, which has so often been used to make social commentary and push boundaries. We have a first draft of The Swordmaster already, and I’m so pleased to be working with my wonderful editor Amanda Raybould on it.

Hello, folks! In my next newsletter, I’ll be able to talk about a secret project I’ve been working on for the last year and a half, so I’m looking forward to that. If you follow me on Bluesky, Instagram or Facebook, I’ll be sharing the news there once it’s out.

Today, I want to talk about the situation facing Canadian cultural events and festivals.

In many cases, paying audiences are still not back to the levels they were at before the pandemic began. First the mid-pandemic global inflation and supply chain crisis, and now the new global economic crisis engineered by the U.S. government, have ensured that ticket revenue is likely to remain stagnant; people are cutting back on discretionary expenses, for good reasons.

The same government is destabilizing stock markets, and that always has an effect on the philanthropic sector. Another thing having an enormous impact on donor behaviour around the world right now is the destruction of USAID and other U.S. agencies; wealthy individuals and foundations are shifting their money to try to fill in the most urgent gaps — ie, to keep babies alive. That means that there is less money to go around for everything, including arts and culture.

In the face of the constant pressure to welcome generative AI into every aspect of our lives, we writers often protest that "writing is thinking." Thinking is not a skill or process that we, as a species, should be eager to farm out! But it's sometimes difficult to think of examples that illustrate what we mean, in the heat of those arguments.

This week, as I was noodling with the first draft of the first chapter of a new book, I came across a little example I thought I'd share. It's very unusual (and a bit uncomfortable) for me to share anything about a book that is in the very early stages, but here we go! This one is set in the 16th century, which is all I’ll say about it for now…

Whenever I'm drafting a new book, I play around with point of view and tense, trying on different options. It might seem rote to change the tense of all the verbs – in fact, on the surface, it seems like precisely the sort of tedious job that software could do for us. But I have found, over and over, that it isn't rote at all. When you tell a story in past tense rather than present, you tell it differently.

For example:

Tomorrow, Saturday April 26, is independent bookstore day! Here in the Ottawa area, we’re blessed to have 8 independent bookstores that throw a fantastic bookstore crawl, and any independent bookstore in Canada is likely to have great deals, events and prizes this weekend.

I’m a reader in large part because of independent bookstores, both in real life and in literature. (Over and over I read The Hounds of the Morrigan, in which great events are set in motion when a boy buys a book in a shop in Galway.) One of the things I love about independent bookstores is that they can be vast palaces or they can be a single shelf inside something else. I treasure the beaten-up paperback of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I bought when I was 17 at a pizza parlour in Belize City, because it arrived precisely when I needed it (I’d finished the other books in my backpack), in the most unexpected place.

In 2022, I did a reading at the Gaynor Family Library in my home town of Selkirk, Manitoba, north of Winnipeg. I didn’t think anyone would come, but the place was packed. And to my delight, we had books for sale, thanks to the local shop Hi Tone Records, which sold books as well as vinyl (and is now, sadly closed.)

Hey everyone! One quick piece of news to begin: I know this is coming up soon, but I'm teaching a two-hour public seminar at Carleton University on Monday, April 14, from 10 a.m. to noon, on Research for Writers. Still time to sign up if you can make it!

I love getting requests for topics to cover in this newsletter. (You can respond to them any time, or ping me on social media.) I had a request recently for recommendations of books by Canadian writers. That’s a topic I’m happy to talk about — actually, the challenge for me is that once I start talking, it’s hard to know where to stop! I know a lot of Canadian writers, both personally and through their work.

A good place to start, if you’re interested in Canadian speculative fiction, is the series of anthologies edited by Stephen Kotowych. Volume 3 of the Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction is kickstarting now.

To keep this list short, I’ve set some parameters: these are recent books by 9 Canadian and Indigenous writers whose previous work I have enjoyed, even though I haven’t read these particular books yet. They’re some of the books that are at the top of my “to read” pile. I'm up to my eyeballs in research books for the next novel at the moment, though, so the "to read" pile is going to keep taunting me for a while.

I got the revision of Mercutio off to my editor shortly after my last newsletter, and I just heard back from her that she loves it. Hooray! I’m very happy with how it’s coming along, too. This revision wasn’t a structural renovation the way The Tapestry of Time was, but it required a lot of new material to put flesh on the bones, so to speak. (I’ve given up trying to avoid mixed metaphors. We’re all tired.)

My next task is to do a relatively quick read-through and make some smaller corrections, and then we’ll send it off to a copy-editor, and after I go through the copy-edits, it’ll go to proofreading. At the moment, the plan is for Mercutio to come out in April 2026 in the UK (not sure of the dates elsewhere yet), so this gives an idea of timelines in publishing. We’re also talking about the cover design, which is always exciting.

I have another project that will come back to me soon with editorial feedback, but in the meantime, I’m working on the research and brainstorming for two new projects: my next novel, which is already contracted with HarperVoyager UK, and a passion project I’m noodling on.

A few things to share:

Today I’m off to one of my favourite coffee shops, with one of my fabulous writer friends, to work on the last few edits on Mercutio. Even though the revision has been slow going (not helped by me getting sick last week), I’m really happy with the changes and eager to get this novel back to Jane Johnson, my editor at HarperVoyager UK. If all goes according to plan, it’ll be on shelves about a year from now.

Bits of news first off:

Tickets are now available for Can*Con 2025 in person here in Ottawa in October (where I’ll be a guest of honour) and also for the shorter, virtual version in April. I expect this will be the only convention I attend in person this year.

My novel about Nazi-fighting clairvoyants, The Tapestry of Time, is on sale in ebook ($2.99) and audiobook ($6.99) in Canada at all retailers for all of March (it was a contestant in HarperCollins Canada March Madness, from which it’s been eliminated, but the sale’s still on, and the contest is great fun and you should check it out and vote on the remaining books.)