Monthly Archives: March 2026

I love hearing the voices

Leave a comment

They have been lurking in the recesses of my mind, waiting for their opportunity to slowly insinuate themselves back into my daily life. The voices from my next book are extremely vocal right now, and they are insistent that their irrational ideas now be taken seriously.

Somehow, they knew Crossing the Lines had reached the moment where my creative interjections are now complete. The book is finished. And these voices are hyper-aware that my neurons are seeking a new source of creative stimulation. They reached out and forcefully took hold of whatever lobes in my brain are responsible for making stuff up and they hijacked any input I had over any of the creative control I thought I had.

My mind is going in eighteen different directions. This story is new, and it has so many possible directions it could go, but the hook of the story will never deviate from the characters who feel real to me. They have always been with me, and they were gracious enough to give me the time to share the space that was meant to be dedicated to Crossing the Lines. But now it’s their turn.

My next book, I am the Storm, is alive and well in my mind, and it has begun its journey from my imagination to a smattering of words on a blank page. Silas is ready for the journey, and Scout is ready for the crazy that is about to unfold.

The monster under the bed

Leave a comment

There are many stages of writing a book. The initial excitement of coming up with the concept is energizing, almost euphoric. Getting lost in the fugues of writing the guts of the story is heavenly. Getting through the final edits and formatting the story is a mild form of torture. But having to summarize your 90,000-word story into a 200-word blurb is excruciating.

I have written about this dilemma before, and I received a comment that I will carry with me as I journey further into my writing career. The creator of the comment told me it should be easy, and summarized the movie Home Alone by saying, “A child is left alone at Christmas to defend his home against burglars”.

While I agree with that summation of a movie I watch every Christmas, it is difficult to separate myself from the tedious hours I spent creating each character, and each scenario, in my book. The stories I write, and the personalities I create, become a part of me. To dissect every nuance of every storyline and squeeze it into 200 words is almost impossible. I am involved with these characters, invested in their lives, and to have to curtail the fabric of their very being by choosing a limited number of words to describe their story feels like a disservice to them.

The initial idea, the guts of the story, the character development, and the relationships I create in my stories are the fluffy pillows, the feathery duvet, and the soft comfortable mattress. The blurb, the 200 words I must extract from the 90,000 words in my story, is the monster hiding under the bed.

A welcome surprise

2 Comments

In the winter of 2025, I spent the cold, snowy months fiercely hammering away at the keyboard on my laptop. I had a new book in mind, and the premise of the story kept me awake at night as my mind churned with ideas. It was a story I quickly became attached to because the central focus was on the location of the three cottages on Armstrong Point in Muskoka that once belonged to generations of my family.

The further I dove into the plot, the more my childhood memories bubbled to the surface. Every sentence I wrote describing the character’s travels from cottage to cottage brought me back to my childhood days of bouncing on the springboard between our brown cottage and the green cottage that belonged to my uncle. And not far beyond that was the yellow cottage that belonged to my mom’s cousin Harry. It stayed in the family until it was sold not that long ago.

Flash forward to this winter. I was excited to read through the story I had written last winter and begin my first round of edits. I found a small room in our local library and started from the beginning. It had been a year since those characters were so firmly embedded in my brain, so the story almost felt new to me. As I began reading chapter 46, I knew the end of the story was near. When I scrolled to the next page, it was blank. The chapter had no end. The story wasn’t finished. And nowhere in the manuscript had I typed the words ‘the end’.

Suppressing both my shock and disappointment, I packed up my laptop and gathered my things. As I exited the small room, I noticed the plaque on the door. The room had been dedicated by Dr. D.G. Massey to his late wife. The shock of the book not being finished had now been replaced by the shock of seeing the name Massey on the plaque. My middle name is Massey, and the book I am working on is based on my family’s extended branches of the Massey family tree. The symbolism was not lost on me, and I returned to the library the next day to add the final chapter to the book and write ‘the end’.

The piece of land on the cover of Crossing the Lines is Armstrong Point on Lake Rosseau. Every member of my family has many wonderful memories of the time we spent together in those cottages, and many stories we could all tell about the conversations we had around each of those dining room tables. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to take a piece of my history and pay a sincere homage to such a big part of my life by including it in one of my books.