Welcome friends and new subscribers. 

Happy autumnal equinox! September is my favourite time of the year. The leaves are changing colours and slowly beginning to fall from the elm trees that line my avenue, and while I enjoy the spectacular beauty, I also get excited to stockpile the harvest.

I'm the neighbour who doesn't rake her leaves and who encourages others to join me in this act of conservation. Instead, I collect bagged leaves that are left in the alley for garbage pickup and put them to good use in my compost. Hopefully this year I will collect enough to last until late spring. 

It hasn't rained since mid-August, we've had a lot of heat, and my rain barrels are empty. My poor annuals in the front yard are suffering, as the hose spigot doesn't work and it's a long haul to carry watering cans from the back yard. Also, by this time of year, I'll admit to having watering fatigue!

I want to send out a big THANK YOU to everyone who creates beauty in their yards in gardening beds or pots. On daily walks, I have appreciated the blooms. 

Hopefully fall will bring some precipitation, and I will have the opportunity to do a deep watering before the freeze comes. 

My second round of edits is in! 

And I'm happy to say the book has improved with each round. My editor says I have one more chance to make changes before the copy edits and final proofs. As hard as it will be to finally stop adding new material and tinkering with sentences and images, I'm also looking forward to being finished (even though I will miss mucking about in mid-twentieth century America).

The writing life is strange and miraculous. I have no idea how my protagonist Trevor Westmore came to me, but I have enjoyed getting to know him and would certainly accept a coffee invite and look forward to a good conversation if he were a real human.

At times in the lengthy drafting process when the writing felt hard and I thought, why bother?, I reminded myself that I owed it to Trevor to keep writing, for without me he does not exist. I can't wait for you to meet him. 

Also, after much deliberation (and an inability to come up with anything better), the title Dog Days of Planet Earth has stuck the landing. 

The photos above deal with some of the themes in the novel. Dogs, of course, and while my current and last dog have both been golden retrievers, it's a German Shepherd who headlines the book, along with some beagles. You'll also learn a bit about the Nevada Test Site (NTS) and nuclear testing. 

As an aside, my "now accepting queries from agents" post was before signing my publishing contract with ECW and just my way of having fun with the awfulness that is the query process. If I never have to write another query letter in my LIFE, I will be happy.

I always have more than one book on the go, 

so here's a little teaser: my next novel is set in Manhattan circa 1895-1900 and deals with Irish domestic servants, "missing" husbands, a former jockey turned detective, and more. Tentatively titled The Domestics, it's proving to be a lot of fun. Stay tuned.  

Ten days. 223 shows. 40 venues.

And much mayhem and mischief. For those who don't know, the Edmonton festival was modelled after the Edinburgh Fringe. Ours is the first Fringe festival in North America, and the oldest and largest. 

This un-juried theatre festival works on the lottery system, which means it's a level playing field for all who submit work. The festival brings amazing energy, creativity, and passion to the Edmonton Fringe grounds and, for creatives (or anyone with a modicum of curiosity and adventure), it's not to be missed. I volunteer and am well-compensated with tickets to as many as 50 shows.  

This year I saw 35. A few were outstanding, some were pretty good, and many more were mediocre. BUT sometimes bad shows can be as inspiring as good shows, just as "bad" books can be motivating to power on with my own writing.

My Fringe highlight of 2025 was Peter Pan Cometh, by a Twin Cities collective of artists called Clevername Theatre. Imagine, if you will, a mash up of Eugene O'Neill's 1946 play The Iceman Cometh and J.M. Barrie's 1904 play (yes, it was originally a play) Peter Pan: Or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up.

When Peter Pan returns and says he's grown up, is "off" the pixie dust, and has taken a job in London, Captain Hook, Tinker Bell, and Smee are suspicious.

To juxtapose O'Neill's flophouse of alcoholics who are barstool dreamers trapped in an endless loop of addiction with Barrie's Neverland, a fictional island where Peter Pan and the Lost Boys remain children and never grow up (believing they are getting away with something when, in truth, the repetition becomes stagnating), is story genius. I'm still thinking about it.

There are times when I'm creatively charged,

when everything I look at has a sudden and unique relationship to other things, when my mind jumps from this idea to that and thinks, "what if?" I love that mindset. It makes me feel so alive. Yet at some point that hyper-creative engagement goes dormant, and I now understand that it's my job to re-activate it. How? By reading, a lot, and by being active in my local arts scene. Thankfully, Edmonton is the cultural capital of Alberta.

Recently, I attended the opening for Edmonton sculptor Catherine Burgess at the Art Gallery of Alberta — "Temporal: Catherine Burgess and Alison Rossiter." I have long been a fan of Burgess's work, and seeing it juxtaposed with Rossiter's photographic images brought out new interpretations for me. (Rossiter creates photograms on expired, vintage photo paper and situates the images within the historical context of their expiration. The synchronicity of how she discovered the medium or, rather, how it found her is fascinating and renewed my belief that art finds the artist.) I also became a member of the art gallery again, to ensure I take myself out more often on artist dates. 

Yann Martel was recently in town for the opening of The Life of Pi at the Citadel Theatre. I read the novel shortly after it came out in 2001, and to see it performed live was quite miraculous and much better than the movie version (that was more in love with the special effects than the story).

Prior to opening night, Martel gave a talk titled "Fiction and the Shipwrecked Reader" in which he discussed what motivated him to write the book and offered insights on what the ending meant to him.

Pi tells two versions of his shipwrecked tale. The first story contains animals. The second humans. "Which is the better story?" Pi asks the people investigating the ship's sinking. The facts of Pi's suffering do not change in the two versions (the ship sank, his family died, he spent 227 days at sea), but the details to account for it do. Martel says we have a choice how to interpret our suffering in life. We get to tell our story. In essence, the book asks us to tell the better one.

From page, to stage, to silver screen, the 39th Edmonton International Film Festival runs September 25th-October 4th, and I'm all in. I will always remember calling in sick to work to attend the Montreal Film Festival in 1988. How glorious it was to spend the daylight hours moving from one dark theatre to another to watch movies. That remains a highlight of my fledgling creative years.

I've attended a few book clubs over the years, 

and some readers have suggested I would do really well if I wrote something less serious, a beach read, perhaps, and they may be right; then again, maybe my heart wouldn't be in it, and the writing would suffer. For whatever reason, I am inspired by large scale social injustice. When people ask what I'm working on now, I struggle to get the elevator pitch ready that doesn't delve too much into heaviosity and leave them slowly backing out of the room. 

However, a novel can carry any content at all if the characters are interesting, the plot compelling, and the writing doesn't draw attention to the scaffolding used to construct the story.

Canadian author Guy Vanderhaeghe once said, "history tells us what people do. Historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt." And it's in the act of imagining that compassion grows. Readers get access inside of a characters head to see what thinking motivates their actions. That's profound! Nowhere else are we privy to the inside workings of a human's mind. 

Historical fiction also takes readers places they might not go on their own. Even though Dog Days of Planet Earth ends in 1986, the subject matter remains relevant. 

How can it be that the seeds are planted or

transplanted or dropped or blown onto a patch of dirt, and things grow?! I am stunned by the beauty that emerges from the soil in my yard. I shall miss the colours as the garden slowly goes dormant. 

The tulips below look so beautiful against the background painting by Steve Mack, titled "The Pink Chair." It's one of my favourites. 

Thank you for reading. 

Do you have any questions about the writing life, gardening, or how to stay creatively inspired? Feel free to contact me. 

And as the days get shorter and the light becomes less abundant, stay engaged. 

See you next season.

Until then, may great books find you.