It’s been awhile since I blogged about my writing progress. You’re probably wondering how it’s going…or not! I’m going to tell ya anyway. To recap, I’ve written two novels during two consecutive National Novel Writing Months in November 2009 and 2010. A year ago, I had written, received feedback on, and revised my first novel [...]

Listening to my mother reading out loud the comments on my canada.com article, my father interrupted her and said, “Shireen advocate for private insurance? I don’t believe it.” He was right. I didn’t. I advocated for privately operated clinics funded by public insurance. But, as is their wont, people didn’t read my text; they read [...]

Postmedia News, the news service that supplies content for Postmedia newspapers and websites, as well as canada.com, has launched an online election project at canada.com called “The Real Agenda.” The idea is to publish a wide range of voices from across Canada on what Canadians think our politicians should be talking about on the campaign [...]

Brainline.org is one of the best brain injury information websites out there that also has a Twitter feed and Facebook page. A multimedia project between the Seattle PBS station WETA and Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center (many veterans return home with concussive brain injuries), BrainLine offers videos, articles, widgets on all sorts of brain-injury [...]

This is from a talk I gave to my fraternity on their Career Day. We are in an age of transition. Like those who went from calligraphy to the Gutenberg press, so we are going from pen and print books to tablet computers and ebooks. Up until early last century, manuscripts were written by hand. [...]

First comes writing, then comes revising, then come the Beta Readers, then comes more revising, and last comes the dreaded editing. That’s what a publisher is supposed to do for a writer: edit. But these days, some advocate the editing step before finding a publisher or agent; other writers do it on their own because [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I can up my income so that I can afford to edit, proofread, and publish my two novels. Of the three, editing is the most expensive part – if I published them strictly as ebooks. After I revised my first novel early last year, had it critiqued, [...]

The envelope is thin. There’s no return address, but I know. It’s from a literary agent, one of many I wrote asking them to consider representing my latest book. I slit it open. Dear Author, “Dear Author”? Whadya mean “Dear Author”?! I spent hours reading guidelines, and y’all said: read the books we agent, find [...]

I’m pleased to announce that Lifeliner: The Judy Taylor Story is now live on iTunes! For free!!! Podcast one chapter at a time, it makes for a good way to make a commute go faster, to inspire you in only 15 minutes. I will be podcasting a new chapter on my website each Saturday until [...]