Is it possible for an author to have a love-hate relationship with her fictional characters? Merriam-Webster defines a love-hate relationship as “strong feelings of both love and hatred for someone.” The website Love Bondings takes that a step further, stating that the strong feelings can occur in any time of relationship – romantic, familial or […]
Establishing a Writing Routine: My Best Tips
Establishing a writing routine can be a challenge for many newer writers. There’s plenty of advice out there on how to establish a routine, so I decided to compile a list of the strategies that worked for me. Make Writing a Priority: If being published is your goal, then you must make writing a priority. […]
My Writing Strength: Snappy Dialogue
Writers often are asked, “What is your strength? Narrative or dialogue?” That’s an easy question for me to answer. My writing strength is dialogue. My characters’ dialogue rarely changes between the rough draft and the published version. My narrative passages, on the other hand, will go through five or more drafts. I blame my journalism […]
My First Novel: Katherine and Leeann
Angel of Mercy is the first novel I published, but it is not the first novel I wrote. In the last blog, I introduced you to my early, unpublished work. Most of it was written while I was in high school, although a few stories were written either earlier or later. The oldest work is […]
Author’s Life: Unboxing My First Fiction Manuscripts
Angel of Mercy is the first novel I published, but it is not my first novel. I’ve been writing since I was 10 years old. Because I began writing before I had a home computer, until very recently, all my stories were written longhand in a series of notebooks. I kept these notebooks over the […]
Where Do I Write? Here’s Where the Magic Happens.
Ask 10 authors where they write, and you’ll probably get 10 answers. For example: Some authors write in cafés. I would find this distracting to the extreme, and I would be unable to concentrate, yet alone relax, with all the people coming in and out and engaged in conversations. Some authors write outdoors. If the […]
Six Methods I Use For Naming Fiction Characters
Naming fiction characters is like naming a baby. The person you’re naming will be stuck with that name for life. Or, in the case of fictional characters, potentially for centuries. In fact, a quick web search shows that some writers take naming fiction characters more seriously than naming children. I say this because I found […]
Origins of Angel Surnames: Accuracy in Historical Fiction Writing
In the course of writing Angel of Mercy, I did some research into the origin of the family’s surnames. This is what I found out: Bartlette – English with some pockets in Scotland Steward – Scottish-English Goodwin – English Grey – Anglo-Saxon Taylor – English with French origins Winthrop – from Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire Appleton […]
A Family Church: St. Andrew’s, Barrie
The Steward family’s church in Angel of Mercy is St. Andrew’s in Barrie, Ontario. Why St. Andrew’s? The church is Presbyterian, which kept with the family’s Scottish roots. I also used it because Presbyterian was a very large denomination at the turn of the 20th century. History of St. Andrew’s St. Andrew’s began in 1843. […]
The Inspiration Behind an Angel’s Hometown
The hometown of my main character in Angel of Mercy, Henrietta Steward, is Barrie, Ontario. Many real-life buildings were the inspiration for her family and friends’ homes and workplaces. Without leaving many spoilers, here are a sampling of photos that inspired places in the novel: These houses were the model for the Steward home which […]
Toronto Normal School: Establishing Standardized Teaching Practices
Hettie Steward, in my novel Angel of Mercy, is not the only woman in her family to have a profession. Her mother blazed the trail, becoming a professional teacher after attending the Toronto Normal School in the 1880s. What is a “normal school”? It is what today we call a teaching college. The purpose of these […]
A Brief History of Royal Victoria Hospital — Barrie, Ontario
My fictional character Hettie Steward worked at her hometown hospital, Royal Victoria, in the year between finishing nursing school and joining the Canadian Army Medical Corps, Even though the hospital plays a very small role in Angel of Mercy, its history gives us an interesting glimpse into medical care during the first part of the […]