A Dangerous Commitment

Woot, woot. Yesterday I signed a contract with Renaissance Press for the third book in my Dating Coach Mystery Series. It is titled A Dangerous Commitment and goes with A Killer Match and A Lethal Proposal. Not sure when it will be out yet.

A Killer Match-Book One of The Dating Coach Mystery Series

 

Jenna Hamilton is a dating coach and the co-owner of a bookstore, with Adam Owens, in the Net Loft on Granville Island in Vancouver. Hillary Greenwood is her best friend and owns a hair salon in the Net Loft. Hillary’s car is being repaired and one of her hairdressers, Bruno King, offers her a ride home after work. It is dark and raining heavily as they leave Granville Island in Bruno’s vintage car. A truck comes up behind them and rams them three times—the third time sends them crashing into a streetlight pole. Bruno is killed.

     At first this looks like a case of road rage until Bruno’s condo, and Hillary’s house and her salon are trashed. Jenna had set up her part time worker and Bruno through her dating coach business and she helps Michele adjust as the life Bruno had presented to everyone begins to unravel.

https://www.amazon.ca/Killer-Match-Joan-Donaldson-Yarmey/dp/1990086241

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Canadian Authors-Quebec

 

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      I am a proud Canadian author of over twenty fiction and non-fiction books in my long writing career. But I am just one of thousands of published writers from this huge country. Canada has had a long and illustrious history of producing world renown authors and books going all the way back to the 18^th century.

     Frances Moore was born in England in 1724. She was a well-known poet and playwright in England before she and her husband, Reverend John Brooke moved to Quebec City in 1763, for John to take up the post of army chaplain. During her time there Frances wrote The History of Emily Montague, a love story set in the newly formed Quebec province.

     The story is told through the voices of her characters by way of personal letters between the two. This is known as epistolary (of letters) type of writing and it was popular during the1700s in Europe. The Brookes’ returned to England in 1768 and the novel was published in 1769 the London bookseller, James Dodsley. The History of Emily Montague was the first novel written in what is now Canada and the first with a Canadian setting. Frances died in 1789.

 

Quebec

Marie-Rose-Emma-Gabrielle Roy was born on March 22, 1909, in Saint Boniface, Manitoba, which is now part of Winnipeg. After her early education she took teacher training at the Winnipeg Normal School. She taught in rural schools in Manitoba until she was appointed to the Institut Collegial Provencher in Saint Boniface. She saved her money and moved to France and England to study drama but after two years returned to Canada when WWII broke out in 1939. She settled in Montreal and earned a living as a sketch artist while writing. She became a freelance journalist for La Revue Moderne and Le Bulletin des agriculteurs.

     Ms. Roy’s first novel, Bonheur d'occasion (1945) was an accurate portrayal of Saint-Henri, a poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Montreal. It was published in French, earning her the Prix Femina award in 1947. The book was also published in English under the title The Tin Flute and won the Governor General Award for fiction as well as the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal. It was the first major Canadian urban novel.

     The novel sold almost a million copies in the United States and the Literary Guild of America made the novel a feature book of the month in 1947. Because of all the attention the book received, Gabrielle moved to Saint Boniface to escape the publicity. There she met a doctor, Marcel Carbotte and three months later, in August, they married. They headed to Paris for the next three years where Carbotte studied gynecology and Roy wrote. On their return to Canada in 1950, they settled in Montreal for a couple of years and then moved to Quebec City. Carbotte took up a position at the Hôpital du Saint-Sacrement and they lived in an apartment. Wanting a quiet place to write, Grabrielle bought a cottage in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François, Charlevoix County. There she wrote the bulk of her work. In total, she wrote twenty books.

     Gabrielle and her husband didn’t have any children. Besides writing she travelled around the world and spent time visiting her family.

     Gabrielle Roy is considered to be one of the most important Francophone writers in Canadian history and one of the most influential Canadian authors. She became a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1967 and won many awards, including the Governor General Award three times. She was on the panel in 1963 that gave the Expo ’67, Montreal World's Fair and Canada’s 100^th birthday celebration, its theme: Man and His World (Terre des hommes).

     Gabrielle Roy died of a heart attack on July 13, 1983, at the age of seventy-four. Her autobiography, La Détresse et l'enchantement, was published posthumously in 1984 and the English translation, Enchantment and Sorrow won the Governor General Award in 1987.

In 2004 the Government issued a $20.00 bank note in its Canadian Journey Series which had a quotation from her 1961 novel, The Hidden Mountain: Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?

 

Mordecai Richler was born on January 27, 1931, in Montreal, QC. He was raised on St. Urbain Street and learned how to speak English, French, and Yiddish. He studied at Sir George Will College (Concordia University) but left before getting a degree. He moved to Paris at nineteen and lived there for two years before returning to Montreal. He worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) for a short time then moved to London, England in 1954 where he married Catherine Boudreau. She was a non-Jewish French-Canadian divorcee who was nine years older. Just before their wedding he met and was infatuated by another non-Jewish woman Florence Wood Mann, who was the wife on his close friend, Stanley Mann.

     While in England he wrote and had published seven novels, the most well-known one being The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959). The story was about Richler’s favourite theme: the hardships of Jewish life around St. Urbain Street in Montreal in the 1930s and 1940s. He wrote a screen play for the novel and it was made into a film in 1974 starring Richard Dreyfuss. In 1960 Richler divorced his wife and Florence divorced her husband and they were married in 1961. Mordecai adopted her son and they had four more children.

     Richler and his family returned to Montreal in 1972. A compilation of his humorous essays was collected into Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (1974). He also wrote the Jacob Two-Two series of children’s fantasy books (1975, 1987, and 1995). His novel Joshua Then and Now was published in 1980 and made into a film in 1985.

     Besides writing novels, Richler also contributed articles to magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Look, The New Yorker, and The American Spectator. He wrote a column for The National Post and Montreal’s The Gazette and wrote book reviews for Gentleman’s Quarterly.

His last novel, Barney’s Version (1997) was based on the events surrounding his divorce and remarriage. Barney’s Version was made into a film in 2010.

     Richler was awarded the Order of Canada in 1999. He died of cancer on July 3, 2001, at the age of 70.

 

December

 

The word December comes from the Latin word decem which means ‘ten’. In the Roman calendar, which began with the month of March, December was the tenth month. The days between the end of December and the beginning of March (cold and snowy in the Northern Hemisphere and hot and sunny in the Southern Hemisphere) were originally unnamed. Eventually, those days were given the names January and February and they were considered the first months of the calendar year. Although December was now the twelfth month in the Gregorian calendar, which was introduced in October 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, its name was kept.

December has the shortest daylight hours and longest nighttime hours on December 21 and that day marks the beginning of winter. It is the opposite in the Southern Hemisphere, with December 21 having the longest daylight hours and shortest nighttime hours. That day marks the beginning of summer.

The long, dark days of December can cause a drop in the hormone serotonin which can lead to a depressed mood and loss of energy. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) was first described in 1984, by Norman Rosenthal and colleagues at the National institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD., as recurrent depressions that occur at the same time of year. But that wasn’t the first time it was talked about. In 1679, Dr. Richard Saunders advised eating fruits (apples and pears) and vegetables (onions and cabbage) after eating meat to counter the ‘melancholy and phlegm’ brought on by the shorter days in December.

The Anglo Saxons had two names for the month of December. One was ‘Winter Monath’, which is self-explanatory, and the other was ‘Yule Monath’ which is the custom of burning a Yule log as part of the pagan Yule celebrations. Yule, at the time, meant the observance of the Winter Solstice. It is now synonymous with the word Christmas and the celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. When the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity they changed the name of ‘Winter Monath’ or ‘Yule Monath’ to ‘Heligh Monath’ meaning ‘Holy Month’.

For the Native American first peoples, the full moon in December was called the ‘Full Cold Moon’ because of the cold winter months that followed it.

The unluckiest day of the year is considered to be December 28. On this day King Herod ordered all baby boys to be put to death in an attempt to kill the baby Jesus. Even now, it is considered unlucky to start a new job, begin a new venture, or even do anything new on this day.

In more modern times and on a happier note, Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901. He took art classes in school and was hired as a commercial illustrator at the age of eighteen. He moved to California and established Disney Brothers Studio with his brother, Roy. They developed the character Mickey Mouse in 1928 and went on to produce such feature cartoons as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi. In the 1950s, Walt expanded into amusement parks and television programs. Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966.

December has two birth flowers and holly is the first one. At one time the Celts believed that the holly brought luck and protection. The red berries of the holly represent the bloody wounds of when Jesus was nailed to the cross. The second flower is the paperwhite narcissus which symbolizes sweetness. The birthstone of December is the turquoise which can range from vivid green to a blue-green, to a sky blue.

There are other important holidays observed in December along with Christmas. The Jews celebrate Hanukkah, which takes place on the 25^th day of Kislev on the Hebrew calendar and lies between late November and late December. This is in recognition of the rise of Jews against their Greek/Syrian oppressors, as well as, the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the 2^nd century AD.

The Buddhists celebrate Bodhi Day on December 8. A man named Siddhartha sat under a Bodhi tree and meditated for three days until he found the root of suffering and liberated himself from it. On the third day he discovered the answers he sought and became enlightened. He was then known as Buddha or the ‘Awakened One.’

A Hindu festival, Datta Jayanti, commemorates the birth day of the Hindu Deity Dattatreya or Datta, which is the combined form of the Hindu male divine trinity of Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma. The festival takes place between November 30^th and December 3^rd in the temples throughout India.

December is a month full of historical events, festivals, and observances of special days. And it marks the end of the old year and a time to look forward to the new one.

Sayings

 

https://www.amazon.ca/Killer-Match-Joan-Donaldson-Yarmey/dp/1990086241

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Be Careful What You Wish For is an old saying with an ominous warning to it and Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining is also an old saying but it has an upbeat tone to it. Both of them apply to my story.

Be Careful What You Wish For

For years women who had had breast cancer surgery were told not to use their arms for any strenuous activity for fear of causing lymphedema, a build up of fluid in the arm. Don McKenzie, a Canadian sports medicine specialist at the University of British Columbia, opposed this idea. In 1996, he formed a dragon boat team composed of 24 women with a history of breast cancer in Vancouver, B.C. They called themselves Abreast in a Boat. And they proved that strenuous exercise was good for their arms and for their overall health.

A few years later, they entered in the Vancouver dragon boat festival and I saw them on the television news. I had never heard of dragon boating before and I said to my husband. "That looks like fun. I'd like to try it sometime."

In January of 2001, I was doing a breast self examination and found a small lump. My annual mammogram at the Breast Centre in Edmonton was scheduled for February but I called the centre and told them my news. They booked me an appointment in two days. Although no one said the C word, after the questions, the mammogram, and the ultrasound, I was pretty sure it was cancer. Then I was told that I needed a biopsy and that it could be scheduled for the next week. However, they added "We have an opening in the next hour and we can do it today." I knew for sure it was cancer.

At my pre-op session a woman came in to tell me about a group of women living with cancer or who had had breast cancer that met every month for coffee and to offer support. I asked her if she knew of a breast cancer survivor dragon boat team in the city. She found the contact information for Breast Friends and two weeks after my surgery I joined the team. I wasn't allowed to get in the boat until three months after my last radiation treatment so I didn't get to actually paddle until 2002. Each summer we practiced on the North Saskatchewan River and attended dragon boat festivals in Alberta and British Columbia.

When I moved to Vancouver Island in the fall of 2004, I joined Angels Abreast in Nanaimo. We practiced in Departure Bay (staying out of the way of the ferries) and on the narrow strait between Vancouver and Newcastle islands. We went to festivals up and down the island and in Vancouver.

Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining

In 2006, an international festival was held in Vancouver to celebrate the ten year anniversary of breast cancer dragon boating. Besides the teams from Canadian, teams came from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, Italy, and Asia. It was great to walk through the paddler's village and meet fellow survivors from around the world.

In Sept. 2007, another international breast cancer festival was held in Caloundra, Queensland, Australia, and Angels Abreast went to that. What a wonderful time we had. The residents of the city were friendly, the venue was excellent, and the hosts did a great job of organizing. The 100 teams of twenty-four paddlers, steersperson, and drummer paraded through the streets dressed in pink, and many people yelled "Canada" or honked their horns when they saw our Canadian flag hanging from our balconies. The festival lasted three days and again I met many special women. After the festival some of us toured around Queensland and New South Wales. We went out to the Great Coral Reef and even with my fear of heights I climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. From Sydney we flew to Fiji for a week.

The next international festival was held in Sarasota, Florida, on October 24, 25, 26, 2014, and the team decided to attend. The other members were going to fly down, tour around some of the sites and head home. I wanted more than that, so my husband, Mike, and I decided to do a three month tour of the U.S. Since I needed to be in Sarasota by October 22 to practice with the team, we picked September 23 as our leaving date and Dec. 16 as our return date. I applied for and was given three months off work.

We had such a great time touring through nineteen states. In Sarasota I stayed in the hotel with my team for the three day event. Again, such a wonderful venue, although at 6:00am it was dark and cool. Once the sun came up, we warmed up fast.

The last international festival was in Florence Italy in 2018. Again, rather than fly there for just the festival and maybe some local touring, I opted to spend nine weeks in Europe. I did two bus tours, travelled by train and stayed in hostels and hotels for eighteen days and then did a Baltic Sea cruise.

Since my diagnosis I have met so many strong, caring, fun-loving women plus I have visited some awesome places around the world. I am now back living in Edmonton and paddling with Breast Friends again. Only one woman is still with the team from when I paddled here years ago.

I am looking forward to paddling this year and many years to come, the silver lining to my cloud.

 

 

Virtual Writing Conferences VS Physical Writing Conferences

Virtual Writing Conferences Vs Physical Writing Conferences

Last weekend I took part in my first virtual writing conference put on by my publisher Renaissance Press. I was both a panelist and in the audience for some sessions. I have attended physical writing conferences in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton and there is a definite difference between the two. In my opinion each has its own pros and cons.

     There is a lot of coordinating and cost for the organizers of the physical conference. They have to find a venue usually a hotel with boardrooms. This allows the panelists and attendees to book a room and stay close to the conference. There are usually guests of honour who have to be paid. Besides monetary costs it takes a lot of time to figure out the panels: subjects, panelists, and the timing of sessions to accommodate writers or editors publishers who are on more than one panel. They also have to recruit volunteers to look after the rooms. These volunteers make sure the moderator runs on schedule, the audience clears out in time for the next one, and there are fresh glasses and jugs of water for each new session.

     There are also costs for the panelists and audience members of the physical conference. If they don’t live in the city where the conference is being held they have to travel which entails gas, hotel, and meals or plane tickets and car rental plus hotel and meals. If a presenter wants to be in the audience of any of the sessions they have to pay the registration fee just like everyone else. There is the also the extra cost of a banquet ticket if one is planned.

     I live on Vancouver Island and in order to attend a physical conference I have to drive 1.5 hours to the ferry, and to make sure I get on it I have to be there about an hour early or pay for a reservation. Then it is almost two hours ferry travel to Vancouver. So that is four hours. If I am going to Calgary or Edmonton, it is another day’s drive. I could fly which is quicker but I would still have to pay for the ticket and to rent a vehicle to get around once there.

     Like the physical conference it would have taken a lot of time to plan the arrangement of the panels and panelists of the virtual conference. Monetary costs were probably low because there was no venue, no banquet, and no guests of honour.

     It cost me, and everyone else who took part, nothing to attend the virtual conference either as a panelist or an audience member. I had no plane ticket or vehicle gas and parking to pay for, no hotel room to book, and no new clothes.

     The length of the physical conference has to work around the time frame of the panelists and attendees. Unless they take a day off work the first panels can’t start too early on the Friday because of ability to get there. For that same reason, it has to close early on the Sunday so those leaving can start their long drive home or get to the airport in time to catch their plane.

     Because there is no travel involved, the first session of a virtual conference can start around the time people get home from work on the Friday. The only thing everyone has to remember is the difference between time zones. Being on the west coast the morning sessions started very early for me. The evening sessions ended before my supper time.

     When it was time to be a panelist I set my computer up and clicked on the link a few minutes before the session was to start. Pictures of the other panelists showed up on my screen and we visited a few minutes before the moderator started the session. When I was in the audience I clicked on the link and waited for the panelists to show up on my screen.

     For a virtual conference because it is basically a shoulders and head shot I just have to wear a good top and comb my hair. I have to make sure there is no light like a window behind to put my face in shadow. Also, depending on where I am I could have some unexpected interruptions—pets, children, phone ringing.

     Getting ready for a physical conference I have to pack enough clothes for the weekend. If I am on a panel I have to make sure I have all my material with me when I leave home. If I forget anything, I am out of luck. No packing for a virtual conference and all my material will be in my house somewhere.

     At a physical conference there are many panels taking place at the same time which can be frustrating if I want to attend more than one of them. For this virtual conference only one panel was offered each hour so I was able to take part in as many as I wanted. When I finished my panel or the presentation was over I could leave my office and pet my cats, pick strawberries, sit on my deck, or train my chickens to run an obstacle course.

     The downside to the virtual conference is that the only people I see are my fellow panelists. I don’t see the audience expressions so there is no interaction between me and them. I like to watch them to see if they are bored or glad that they came. I am happy to see that ‘ahah’ moment when something I say answers a problem they have been having.

     At both conferences there is time for the audience to ask questions. When answering a question at a physical conference I can speak with the audience face to face, I can judge to see if my answer is making sense. The questions at a virtual conference are typed so I don’t see the person asking. When I answer it I am only looking at my fellow panelists.

     Part of the fun of going to a physical conference is the contact with my fellow writers. We can meet for meals or a drink or have a quick chat between panels. I can walk through the conference centre soaking up the writing atmosphere. I meet readers, talk about books, and get feedback on my own books. It is wonderful when someone comes up to me and tells me they enjoyed a presentation I made or want some advice, or liked one of my books. This does stroke my ego because we writers need to have our egos stroked once in a while. We spend months, years alone writing a book, wondering if a publisher is going to like it and if a publisher does, will the readers like it and if they do will they tell us. It is a great feeling to go to the Vendor’s Room and see my books displayed on my publisher’s table. Even better to have someone buy one of mine and ask for an autograph.

     During a virtual conference, there is a Vendor’s Room showing a picture of all the panelists and their books. There is also a chat room where authors and readers can connect.

     There are a lot of differences between the two conferences. Most physical conferences have been cancelled for this year or turned into a virtual conference which is perfect in today’s time of lockdown and social distancing. In the future I am sure they will return as writers and readers decide what they like best: the convenience of the virtual conference or the comradery of the physical conference. I like both and if, in the future, I am able to attend either of them, I will.