YOUNG at heart

I’ve decided to self-publish a series of children’s stories that I wrote a few years ago. I call them Victims of Vowel Play, because each one is a retelling of a common folk tale but written without using one of the vowels. For instance, the first one is based on Snow White and doesn’t use the letter A.

These were so much fun to write! And I’m having fun making a few illustrations for them using clipart images on Canva. My name conveniently has every vowel in it, which I didn’t realize until I started making the covers. I have three of the six done so far.

They are only available as Kindle eBooks for now – and only $0.99 each! I haven’t decided if I’ll do anything more than that with them. But for now, I’m just working on getting the other three done.

I was having some issues with my website (HUGE thank you to Devin Hind of 5Design for helping me out!) so this post is late in coming. I have extremely proud to announce the publication of my ninth book – Dear Me: The Mother Letters.

I received so much positive feedback after releasing Dear Me: The Widow Letters in 2018, both from widows and others, that I decided to expand the conversation. I put out a call for mothers who had experienced the death of a child, and asked them “If you could send a letter back in time to your newly-bereaved self, what would you say?”

I received letters from across the country and chose eighteen for this anthology. There are actually twenty letters in the book. One woman asked if she could write her letter in French, as that was the only language she spoke to her son in (which I immediately assured her was absolutely okay), so her letter appears in French and is followed by an English translation. The final letter in the book is addressed to “Dear Everyone Else” and is an amalgamation of suggestions from the mothers in the book of how to help someone who has experienced the death of a child.

I am honoured to have published this book, and extremely proud of the courageous mothers who submitted letters to this project. This is, thankfully, not a tragedy I have ever experienced, but I learned a lot from reading these letters, and I hope you will too.

There will be a virtual launch in the near future, but plans are still underway.