2020...

This is going to be a rewrite year for me; DOGS IN HEAT is on its final, final stage. LAMB TO THE SLAUGHTER will get its first proper rewrite and sit pretty as a somewhat polished second draft. ANIMALS will get its first thorough read-through and its first proper rewrite.

I'm thinking any new original work will begin in 2021; a new novel hasn't found me yet, but I'm feeling some sporadic itchings, so it's only a matter of time. For now it's cleanup time. By the end of 2020, I will have hopefully found a home for Dogs, and have two others approaching the queue.

The older I get, the less inclined I am to rush my work. My first novel was nearly 20 years ago and I rushed it and it reads as such. I just wanted to be published. That was it. But I was young; part of the process of trying to find my way in this strange bubble of being a writer. Now all I care about is getting it right. DOGS IN HEAT has been a project of mine for over 20 years now, going all the way back to my Carleton days. It has evolved into what I first envisioned while working my shift that one afternoon in the Fiction section at the South Keys Chapters; that lightbulb moment: "What if God?..."

There's something to be said about the intimacy of an unpublished manuscript. It really feels like a part of you; a secret side, as intimate as the voice in your head; your other you. Once it's published, you lose that. But it's a nice problem to have. I won't complain if 2020 is the year I unleash the DOGS and set them free. They're ready, finally, and so am I.  

   

2019 progress...

After a down year in writing in 2018 (I wrote the first draft of a novella titled ANIMALS but that's it), I made a New Year's Resolution to write an average of a page per day each month. I started a new novel on January 3rd and have never looked back. It's titled LAMB TO THE SLAUGHTER, is set in my hometown of Streetsville, ON, and I'm flying through it. I'm expecting to have a completed first draft by the end of August. Expected word count is around 90,000; the biggest by far of any of my previous novels, which are all around 53,000 words (with the exception of DOGS IN HEAT at 63,000).

My novels: The Making of Harry Cossaboom (Dreamcatcher Publishing, 2000), The Dirty Milkman (Oberon Press, 2005), A Place of Pretty Flowers (Oberon Press, 2007), The Goon (Oberon Press, 2010), The Moon is Real (UFP, 2016)

In the Fall I plan on a complete rewrite of DOGS IN HEAT. I'm in a good place right now and I'll be in a good place for a while; sitting on three complete manuscripts; one needing a bit more work, and the other two in their infancy. I'm in no hurry to publish again; five novels in and I'm learning what kind of writer I want to be and what kind of press I want to be with, regardless of the time and effort it's going to take to get there. After I put in the work over the winter I'm hoping to have some big news in the Spring. That's the goal.

Whatever happens, 2019 has been productive for me. I'm happy with my work, and that's all that really matters.

An earlier version of Dogs in Heat, along with Animals, and Lamb to the Slaughter