Reading time: About 2 minutes Bill Arnott likes to inspire himself with a quote from Australian novelist Tim Winton, who advised: “Watch, listen, remember, wonder, and READ.” Bill Arnott is the BC Book Prize bestselling author of A Perfect Day for a Walk, A Perfect Day for a Walk by the Water, the award-winning Gone Viking […]
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Reading time: About 2 minutes Are you ready for the holidays? Use the month of December to relax a little, to declare your priorities and to make a vigorous plan for the next year…. If you’d like to write without getting lost down the research rabbit hole, this is a reminder about my one-hour class,
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post about why it’s important not to overwork…. When I was a newspaper editor, I was overworked. Most days
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Reading time: Just over 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes and metaphors by Rebecca Mead…. A writer for the New Yorker, Rebecca Mead joined the magazine as a staffer in 1997 and has written about many high-profile
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Reading time: About 1 minute Melanie Jackson says that writers would benefit from adapting the Hemingway strategy of “less is more.” Melanie Jackson is a freelance Vancouver writer/editor. As well as corporate-communications work, Melanie contributes to The Seaboard Review of Books. She’s also the author of such middle-grade/young-adult suspensers, mostly with Orca Book Publishers, as The Big
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Reading time: About 5 minutes Looking for some recommended books in time for Christmas reading? Here’s my semi-annual roundup of books I’ve read this year. I aim to read 52 books every 12 months, and my habit is to post a complete list of the names of them for you, twice a year. Here is a description
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Reading time: Just over 1 minute This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post about how to stop trying to do it all… Are you the type of writer who does too
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Reading time: Less than 1 minute I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors from JoAnna Klein…. JoAnna Klein is a freelance science journalist based in Brooklyn. She grew up in North Carolina and earned a master’s in experimental psychology. From
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Reading time: About 2 minutes When Ryad Assani-Razaki doesn’t feel like writing, he still positions himself at his computer desk. “Whether or not I end up writing, I’ve put myself in the right conditions to do so,” he says. Born in West African Republic of Benin, Ryad Assani-Razaki moved to North America in 1999, to study
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Reading time: About 3 minutes Does writing ramp up your stress and cause you to blow the occasional gasket? Here’s how to become a calmer person… I’m usually a calm person, but I’ll never forget the time a crisis threatened to obliterate my composure. It occurred when I had a busy, C-suite job at a
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