The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: writing

  • Another Form of CNF True Crime: Trauma and Abuse Memoirs

    This isn’t material I would teach as mandatory reading in a creative writing class, and probably also not in a literature course, no matter how well crafted. Teaching fiction that deals with childhood violence has offered me enough instances where undergraduate students, many of whom are still teenagers, react strongly and not always predictably to…

  • Solving Plot Problems

    Most of my focus has been on revising a novel draft that I’ve despaired of, these past two years, since I completed my 75,000 or so words. [Worse than feared: 104,665, which is, for my chosen genre, a baggy monster of a book, and unpublishable as a first novel.] I could see the plot and…

  • In Praise of Editors

    I’ve just completed comments/corrections in response to the best copyediting of my academic work that I’ve ever experienced (for a forthcoming MLA volume on teaching Margaret Atwood). It was a marked contrast to some past mediocre experiences, and one real disaster, when an entire book manuscript, including my chapter, was outsourced to a non-English-speaking country…