I am finally getting serious about a historical fiction that looks at how my family came to be in this modern world. The earliest known Longpré was mentioned in an obscure work where a Guillaume Longpré was supposedly in a minor supporting role at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Of course, the family didn’t begin then. He had parents, grandparents and the roots go far, far back in time. For this story, I am starting in the middle of…
There is no doubt about it. It is getting harder to focus on a task and finish it. There have been changes made to this site and there are more changes to come. I know that you, as a reader here, deserve to have this site fully functional with a full listing of my books and even options to buy via major online outlets. But getting older somehow enabled my attention-deficit to have freer rein. I just turned seventy-seven. I…
A moment along the Mekong River in Laos They say the Mekong is a river only in the way a body is a body. Those who live along its banks step toward the water with a quietness that borders on reverence, as though approaching an elder who has seen too much to be impressed by human urgency. The young man who came each morning did not bow, but he paused. That small hesitation was his offering. His name was Somchai,…
This story must be told, not because it is ancient, though it is, and not because it is sacred, though it might be, but because it speaks to something that has always lived quietly inside the human heart. Long before the first cities rose, before the first names were spoken, before the first grief carved its hollow into the chest of the world, there was a tree that grew in the space between what is seen and what is felt….
A Decision Has To Be Made It was small, barely a curve in the coastline, where the water held a stillness that did not belong to weather, I saw three small boats. The sun hesitated to show its face and though a rain threatened, the world stilled. Even the wind seemed to hesitate before crossing the inlet. The palms leaned inward, as if listening. And three boats tied loosely together, floated with the quiet assurance of things that had been…
A Mythic Tale They say that before humans learned to speak, the world was already full of stories which moved through the land like wind through tall grass, unseen and unheard. Yet, the unspoken words were never lost. Some stories settled in stones. Some curled into the bellies of rivers. And one, the oldest story of them all, rooted itself in a tree that grew where the forest opened into a quiet bowl of the Earth. No one knew when…
It has been a busy month since my last post. The biggest news is that I have submitted my latest novel-in-progress to Thistledown Press located in Saskatoon in hopes they will pick it up for publication via the traditional route. Like the Saskatchewan Awards submission, it will be months before I hear anything from them – if they respond. If not accepted, I will go back to self-publishing. The novel is written. I am going through it for the third…
The sky, a Saskatchewan sky as dawn breaks, is always breath-taking. Each day is filled with potential. My life as a writer is in constant change as I get older [not necessarily any wiser] likely due to the fact that my best-before date is approaching. I took this photo this morning while waiting for the coffee to be ready. No wonder why they call this place the “land of the living skies.” My book, Time’s Children, has been submitted to…
Well, since it is almost time to renew my subscription for webhosting service, I decided it was the perfect time to avoid paying $112/year and use my old laptop as a server – a temporary server for the present time. There was no way I could do this on my own, so I had my son-in-law, Lawrence, do the heavy lifting with me serving as a cheering squad on the sidelines. It is a big learning curve, but the deed…
Over the past several days, I have been going over my records since publishing my first eBook in 2014. I first published at Smashwords and then made a switch to CreateSpace and Amazon a year later at which time I began to sell paperback books as well. I had sold print books at Blurb beginning in 2009 until 2015. As of this past year, CreateSpace has been absorbed into Amazon and as such doesn’t really exist anymore for me as…