West With the Night

I found this book at that little neighbourhood library by our place. It's an amazing read. I particularly loved it after having experienced bits of Africa and fallen in love with the continent. 

Beryl's father took her to Kenya in 1906 when she was 4 years old. With no mother and only the…

Mixed Marriage by Elizabeth Cadell, written and published in 1963, is one of those "timeless" novels. 

So, how does such a novel create a sense of "I can relate to this," or "OMG, that's so true," or set the reader laughing out loud at familiar antics of the characters. 

Eseentially, what you are reading with a book…

 I often see posts on various book pages where the person is asking what to do when they fall into a reading slump. 

They go on to say that they've read all of X's books and Y's books and now they don't know what to do to get reading again. Essentially, what they are saying is,"I'm…

Have you ever written to an author and told them you couldn’t make yourself read their book? I have and, in this instance, it was an enlightening experience.

I read Night Must Wait, by Robin Winter. This is…

I have refrained from talking politics or the current world situation on my blog, but feel compelled to share this with Mr. Sawyer's permission.

https://www.sfwriter.com/

I am privileged to count Rob a friend. I first met him a number of years ago when I attended one of his writing courses at the Banff Centre (School of the…

 Many years ago a young girl left the safety of Canada for adventure in Africa. This was in a generation when young girls didn’t go anywhere on their own and certainly not to the “dark continent.”

I was that young girl and…

Today, I'm talking about photos instead of books.  

I spent the last two days going through three huge boxes of old photos from the pre-computer days with the original intent of scanning them to my computer.

Instead I threw the vast majority into the recycle bin.

Why?

I flog my books via blogs, Facebook, Twitter etc. so I thought it only fair to recommend books I’ve discovered and liked, some, but not all, written by fellow indie authors. Here are my reviews of nine books I’ve read recently. All can be found on Amazon.

Book recommendations are all around us -- friends and family, blogs, sites we signed up for like Bookbub, The Fussy Librarian, ads on Facebook, etc.

We make choices based on who made the recommendation (someone with similar reading tastes, someone we trust), the author (one of our favorites), or the cover and the blurb. Do we…

A bit about how my books came to be.

1. Was writing a novel harder or easier than you thought it would be?

Laugh! I had this naive idea that I would sit down and write from page one to page 397. Instead the book developed in fits and starts. I’d have an idea, write it, and…

First Fond Memory

Riding on the sleigh under the moonlight with my father, the bells on the harnesses tinkling harmoniously along with the squeaking of the horses’ hooves on the hard packed snow—a romantic memory of a harsh life on the lonely prairie.

Books

No electricity, no radio, no TV. What’s a kid to do? Read and read…

I remember wanting to write when I was young and taking creative writing courses, but not really knowing how to go about the whole novel thing. Joining the provincial writing guild and getting into a critiquing group got me on the right track. Most of my first novel was written on yellow stickies—yes, you read…

France, Greece, Turkey, Bali, Hong Kong, Kenya (safari, of course), Mexico… All wonderful holidays, but none can match the mystery and intrigue of living in and exploring West Africa—from Mali to Morocco, Ghana to Senegal, Bamako to Accra, Freetown to Tombouctou (aka Timbuktu).

Visit the Dogon Plateau northeast of Mali’s capital, Bamako, and you’ve time traveled…

Crash landing On You: Korean - rom/com adventure – limited series (16 episodes)

The absolute top secret love story of a chaebol (large family-owned business) heiress who made an emergency landing in North Korea because of a paragliding accident and a North Korean special officer who falls in love with her and who is hiding and…

Oh boy, I have to say I dislike either/or questions because most of the time I want both. Greedy, I guess, but I can’t imagine writing without reading and I lived too many years of reading without writing to stop now.

As a kid I always had my nose in a book. I carried it around…