When I’m writing this, it is a flawless day on Pender Island, one of 200 breathtaking Gulf Islands nestled in the Pacific off British Columbia’s coast. I’m hiking through an enormous old-growth forest where time has stood still with majestic pine trees that have stood undisturbed for centuries. I’m awed by this impossible silence with a sense that uttering a solitary word would be a terrible trespass.

While Craig Russell liked to be called a female impressionist, we can comfortably say now that he was a drag queen.

He loved all things female, all things fashion, and all things Hollywood. Performing tributes to great female entertainers – impressionism – was his passion and the key to his art, and drag was the lock where that key fit to open the door to what became a remarkable career on screen and stages across the world.

Here are five facts you may not have known about Craig and drag in Toronto:

I’m kind of over dystopian stories.

There, I finally said it. I read 1984 and Brave New World and The Giver when I was young. I’ve read a lot more since then, bookshelves full of destruction and disaster. But here’s my problem with a lot of dystopias: they warn us that the future could be bad. That the apocalypse—environmental, nuclear, viral, the super-patriarchy—is coming if we don’t change our behaviour right now.

But what if we’re already living in the apocalypse?

Jennifer McCartney’s wonderful review of BOY, a sensitive meditation on my novel as a reflection of the stressful pause that COVID-19 has imposed on our lives, has followed me to Ottawa. This is a city not quite in motion, and McCartney’s observations seem particularly apt as I stroll around the downtown with my daughters, Alida, 4, and Nora, 7.

Remember 2019? I sure do. After years of writing, dreaming, querying, pitching, revising, and more dreaming, I signed my very first book deal. The novel in which I poured so much of myself was going to be published in the fall of 2020. What a perfect time to release my first book, I remember thinking. I love fall! And it’s the first year of a new decade!  

I look back at my 2019 self and can’t help but smile. What an innocent fool.

Today, I recorded an interview for The Last Chapter with Shelagh Rogers. We talked about writing SEVEN and the complexities of shining a light on one's own community through fiction.

I can’t remember when I discovered fantasy stories. My best guess is inside a comic book panel or when I first saw The NeverEnding Story. It would be cool to remember something like that.

After Elias by Eddy Boudel Tan

“Arresting... [a] deftly crafted novel.” — Foreword Reviews

Never Forget: A Victor Lessard Thriller by Martin Michaud

Hailed as “Master of the Quebec thriller,” Martin Michaud makes his English language debut with Never Forget. As the bodies pile up in Montreal, and secrets start to emerge around a pivotal polital moment, it's up to tormented, rebellious police detective Lessard, and his partner Jacinthe Taillon, to track down the killer before they strike again.

TAKE 3: THE LIE

So I was invited by Dundurn Press to write a guest post. That was over a month ago, plenty of time, no problem. I started to write about the latest in my BC Blues crime fiction series, River of Lies. At that time COVID-19 was in the news, but seemed distant. Life went on as normal, here in Nelson. Though we learned to sing happy birthday when washing our hands.

I started writing my post, but the news kept distracting me. Things were getting scarier. The numbers were surging. I scrapped Blog Post Take 1.