Story title: "Beating the Odds."
1. How did you hear about the Blood Is Thicker anthology, and what convinced you to spend days (weeks? months?) crafting a story about the attempted murder of a character by a member of their family on leap day?
I am the president of the National Capital Region branch of the Canadian Authors Association, so I heard about the contest through them. I was intrigued to see how writers would take the common seed of an idea in wildly different directions.
2. What was the writing process like? Did your story come out with a bang, or did you struggle to make something of the premise?
This one came out in a bang. It felt close to home, in a way. My brother-in-law’s birthday was February 28 and my mother-in-law’s birthday was March 1, so some of my story flowed from that. If she had been born in a leap year her birthday would have been February 29, and that would have affected her in a way that March 1 never did.
3. How long have you been writing, and what are some of your writing goals and/or successes so far?
I worked as a television and video producer for twelve years and I wrote as part of that job, but it was never considered “writing.” When my second child was born, my husband and I decided that my work should be in the home. For four years my children were my full-time job, and then I started to do part-time freelance television-related writing from home. That work kept expanding and broadening in scope, so now I do video scripts, web content, and speeches. I also do creative writing and I have had some short stories published in literary magazines. Those short stories are part of a larger work that I am polishing at the moment.
4. What’s your favourite line or passage in your submission, and why?
“The important part of that sentence is could have,” is repeated in my story, so it has to be my favourite. It reinforces living with “what is,” not “what if.” That is, living with gratitude for the present and without regret for the past or fear of the future.
5. What’s your writing routine?
Ha! Don’t I wish. I am on a writing contract where I actually have to go into an office part-time these days, I work part-time at the Ottawa Public Library, and I have many volunteer commitments. My time is full and unpredictable. A routine is impossible. My saviour came in the form of Caroline Pignat, who led a writing workshop for CAA. She advised us to set aside the idea that conditions need to be perfect to write. We don’t need to be alone with candles burning and soft music and flowing water sounds, or whatever. We need to write with family coming and going and with noise and interruptions and life happening. I started to do that and it has been transformative. It also sent a message to my family that writing is important to me and I am going to do it no matter what. That was a message I had set aside for too long.
6. What do you do for a living (or if you’re retired, what did you do), and what do you do for fun?
I mentioned my work in the answer above. I also try to post to a blog once a week. I go for a long walk every day (well, when I can work it into a day), I read, I play tennis and we do a lot of downhill skiing in the winter.
7. If you could have a lunch date with any person living or dead, who would it be and why?
I wrote a blog post about this. It was entitled: "My grandparents, Roger Federer, Shakespeare and Darwin come to dinner." Of that list I will pick Roger Federer. He is so unafraid of greatness, and yet humble and gratifyingly down-to-earth at the same time. I find his ability to have his feet on the ground and his aspirations in the sky inspiring.
8. What’s a favourite book that you’ve read in the past five years? Notice we didn’t ask you to name your ultimate favourite. We’re not monsters!
I spend my days surrounded by books. It’s so hard to pick just one. To keep things light, I’ll pick a children’s book: Harold and the Purple Crayon. It’s a simple book about the profound concept of how we co-create our own story, draw up our own fears, and come up with creative responses to problems. It’s impossible to feel down or overwhelmed when Harold and his purple crayon solutions are close at hand.
9. What else should readers know about you?
I’m a sports fan. People always assume a person has to be male to love sports like I do, but not so! When I start to have a conversation with people I’ve just met about baseball, they start out assuming that I’m their idea of a “typical” woman who knows little and doesn’t care. After the third or fourth sentence, there is the double-take, the look that says, “Wait a minute, she really knows what she’s talking about.” Sigh. Yes, I do. Baseball, tennis, hockey, curling and football are my favourites.