Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.
I can have my day carefully planned, but if someone wakes up with a cough or a sniffle, then everything changes. Thinking quickly and adapting without grumbling are essential skills to learn, in my opinion.
I grew up in a very small town where nearly everyone knew each other, and odds were that whatever you said about a person would make it back to them by nightfall - something incomers learned, to their frequent embarrassment.
I have seen and really liked the varied movie adaptations of the book, but 'Little Women' has a sprawling, richly tangled story that needs time and space to weave its magic.
After the loss of my sister - my darkest time - I tried to think of the beauty she'd brought to this world and the lives she had touched and the love she had left behind.
I once walked through an exhibit in a large American museum that displayed First Nations artifacts in old dioramas, with mannequins that hadn't been changed since the 19th century.
When I'm dealing with the 18th century, as I do in 'The Firebird,' the difficulty isn't only finding what a woman did, it's finding her at all. Most of the sources I'm dealing with - letters and memoirs and written reports of the day - have been written by men.
One of the more interesting challenges I face when doing research for my novels is to trace the lives of women who are vital to the narrative and try my best to give them back their voices.
The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people.
A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.
In my book 'The Winter Sea,' set north of Aberdeen, I couldn't just ignore the fact some people there - especially the people in the past - would speak the Doric.
Such is the endless dilemma of dialect. Not every reader will ever agree with the way that I handle it, no matter how hard I work to keep everything readable. But again it's that balance I have to maintain between keeping it easy and keeping it real, and I know that I'll never please everyone.
How much of our lives is consumed with meeting people, attracting people, keeping people and missing people? Usually, when everything is resolved romantically in one of my books, the characters stop talking in my head, and I stop telling the story.
When you say that you write romantic fiction, there are a lot of people who have an image in their mind of the 'bodice ripper.' It's the one term that most romantic fiction writers absolutely hate because it has no bearing on what people are writing.
There was no DVR, no Netflix, and no binge-watching. We didn't even have a VCR till I was nearly out of high school.
The best way to show an emotion is not through a character's words, but their smallest expressions - to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to 'see.'
I was born in the city of Brantford, Ontario, Canada - but by the time I'd left high school, I'd moved seven times with my family, my father's engineering work taking us to places as far-flung as Bay City, Texas, and Wolnae-Ri in South Korea.
Brantford was the fixed point of my universe, growing up. Both sets of grandparents lived there, with various cousins and uncles and aunts, and no matter how far we'd moved off, we came back there for regular visits. In a way no other houses have ever been, my grandparents' houses were 'home,' and the sale of the last of those houses was hard.
I spent five years of my childhood in Port Elgin and came back to spend another five years of my young adulthood there as well, including the years in which I was first published.
My children are as at home in the Port Elgin library as I used to be, and they've sat in the cinema seats where I sat with their aunt every Saturday afternoon, watching the matinee movies.
