Orillia has been running Summer Saturday Nights this year, where downtown is closed to vehicle traffic, and the stores and restaurants set up out on the street.
Manticore Books invited local authors to do "meet and greet" sessions with visitors, as their part of these street festivals. And I'm happy to say that I was the local "meet and greet" author for Saturday July 6.

I had a great time hanging out with my 11 year old on Saturday night and meeting a few visitors to the street festival :)  I can't wait to do it again!

And here are a couple more photographs from my morning bicycle commutes to work. Best wishes everyone .

To begin, some recent photos from a life of waking up early and getting out to see the sunrise via a bicycle or a kayak. The old wooden piling photo below was from kayaking on Monday May 20; the photo of a fence with trees to the left was taken during a longer bike ride this past weekend, and the "geese" photo and the sunlight through the tree photo are from morning bicycle commutes to work over the last week and a half or so.

I have a tiny bit of summer news that I will post about later, once something fun arrives in the mail. But otherwise I'm still puttering away, trying to find a traditional publisher for the young adult "Within This Darkness" trilogy. I sent Book #1 to a Canadian publisher in western Canada in the winter, and received a fairly polite "no thanks" in reply. I was kind of charmed by that publisher actually, because they still requested an old school "paper" submission (as opposed to submitting your manuscript electronically via email etc). They also responded fairly promptly and actually seemed to have given the manuscript a good careful look, so I appreciated that as well.

Just late last week I sent Book #1 to ANOTHER Canadian publisher, and expect that with these folks I might be waiting up to a year to hear from them. Neither "young adult" or "fantasy" are really in their wheel-house, but they quite obviously look for quality and originality, so I have some hope that they will take their time with the manuscript. If these folks decline, I suspect I will be self-publishing again.

Best wishes everyone!

I've done a few readings from Close Your Eyes in the past (they can be found in this post on my website, and include a walk along the boardwalk at sunrise), but I've never done a reading from Festival - until now!
Festival is a coming-of-age novella set in 1990s London (England), and Toronto. There is a very kind review here on the Reader's Favorite site  ( The ending of the book left me heartbroken. I still have not made my peace with it. But the end somehow fits the story. I loved this book.  ) and there are definitely people who have enjoyed Festival more than Close Your Eyes, which has been my more broadly popular book.
​In this video I do a brief reading from one of the Toronto scenes.

Festival is here on Amazon US (and is on most international amazon sites), and is also enrolled in Kindle Unlimited if folks subscribe to that.

In other writing news, I participated in NaNoWriMo this November (despite the controversies that sprang up 1/2 way through the month) and after months (years?!) of prep work and background reading, finally hammered out a first draft of Book TWO of my young adult trilogy.
I continue to hold onto Book One by the way, hoping I can find a traditional publisher to take it and the trilogy as a whole.

​Best wishes everyone :)

Well, it's highly likely that I'll be the only author interviewed by History Bards, whose thumbnail photo has the author wearing a toque!  :)  (a toque is Canadian-English for a warm winter hat). But I'm a Canadian and live in a snow-belt, so maybe it's appropriate  :)
The interview focuses on the writing of Close Your Eyes, though the writing process for that book definitely feels like it was a while ago now.

For Within This Darkness, I am continuing to do research for the World War II scenes in book #2. If you took a look at my recently read shelf on Goodreads, you'd see some of the titles I've been reading. The focus now is primarily on the armed resistance to the Germans in the Zamość region, which would be a lot easier if I spoke/read Polish and was able to locate and read Polish-language texts on the subject.

If anyone gives the podcast interview a try, I hope you enjoy it! Best wishes!

Hi everyone - I have an online event coming up that I thought I would shoot a couple readings for, and I've posted them below.
I tried this on Saturday afternoon as well. I had my 9 year old film me, keeping me in the shot as I read, but something about the glare of the mid-day sun and me on camera the whole time was just boring. So I got out at sunrise this morning and did the readings a bit more informally, holding my device myself as I did the reading.
I think - mostly showing the sunrise as I read - is a lot nicer than seeing me the whole time anyway!  :)

Here's reading #1 - this is the Joan of Arc scene, which shows up in one of Tycho's brief journal entries. This is past the 1/2 way point of the book, and is when Tycho is somewhat in distress about what he's meant to be doing with his life.

And this one below is the picnic scene.
The context here is that 16/17 year old Tycho has been chasing, lustily, after Agnieszka (who is about 20) for months prior to this scene - but increasingly, his feelings have become conflicted about what exactly he feels for his friend.

I hope you enjoy these!
Best wishes everyone!!