I take to writing again --- this time --- I can write about what I know: My CITY

As an aspiring writer, I realize that I need to keep my fingers tapping and my creative juices flowing.

There is a lot about writing that involves silence and waiting.  Rather than think and muse upon the finished book, I am encouraged to keep moving onward and upward producing more and keeping my little brain-wheels turning.

I wrote my first novel in a very intensive spurt and was very exhausted after it.   The querying and landing a place with an agency, the proposal and submission guidelines, the last-minute edits and suggestions--- all of it was scrunched together in the beginning part of this year and I needed a breather---which I happily took. To read, to recharge. To socialize with the people that I ignored while I was Boo Radley-ed up in my apartment and to watch baseball.

But  my fingers have started tapping again for a fresh new series idea: something that ( and this is the amazing thing about literary agents, they have brilliant ideas strewn from their close attention to market needs and trends) without a planted suggestion I never would’ve thought of trailing.

So now I am off and down the rabbit hole, hoppity hop, and giggling like a mad-woman because it is so silly and yet. so. Me.

As much as I enjoy the idea of my imagination planting a kernel which sprouts into a story of my own mental fruition; so I enjoy picking up a bread crumb and following a trail.

While my previous books (some in embryo ) take place in Eastern Canada, the new series idea is here. At home. In Victorian Toronto.

This locale is in and of itself, an exhale of relief for me.  While I am familiar with Nova Scotia from several trips and visits and musings and research, Toronto is my home.  Not my hometown. But, my home.    Weaving through the Old Town Toronto---through  the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, down Jarvis and the beginnings of the City of York. I love Victorian Toronto.  I love Toronto in general. I am in love with my city and setting a book here just sends little shivers down my spine because my city is so ingrained in my consciousness and so accessible.  When I write of Halifax I still  rely on a map. I don’t need a map of Toronto, I can walk its circumference with my eyes closed: looping down alleys, taking lesser known paths, following the peal of the St. James Church bells.  I know the smell of the harbour and the slip slope of the skyline as it would have looked before we planted skyscrapers. I know Toronto.

So I am kind of in love with this new book idea because I am kind of in love with where I live.

And while I am in love I giggle at the prospect and where my funny little brain comes up with this stuff.  Like, really giggle.

Giggle like this, giggle.