"Edson’s vivid portrayal of the urban area, as well as the working class and underclass, creates a vision of Saint John that highlights the discrepancy between the pre-modern idyllic notion of life in Atlantic Canada and the more complicated reality of the region."


-The New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia

Thursday, July 11, 2019

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