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 The shock of the book not being finished had now been replaced by the shock of seeing the name Massey on the plaque.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.