On our talking shop episode this week, we have two new resources to review. Sarah talked about another grammar book: 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' by Lynne Truss. Ashley's choice for this month was a book called 'Writing for Emotional Impact' by Karl Iglesias.

On this author spotlight episode, it was a pleasure to welcome Kat Winters onto the show, to talk about her writing experiences. Kat is an American writer born and raised in California, and writes to give people hope, featuring diversity and inclusivity in her novels. We immensely enjoyed talking to Kat and learning about her book, 'Free Me.'

Our topic for this week in our 'Culturing Creativity' space was accepting feedback. As a writer, you want to improve and be the best you can be. But sometimes feedback came come across in a negative frame that causes us to put up our defenses. So how do you cope with feedback? Listen to hear our perspective.

On another of hour craft episodes, we had a dialogue about dialogue, and included many tips on both style and grammar which we find improve dialogue and take it to the next level. Surprisingly, 'dialogue' doesn't refer only to a character's speech, but also includes action sentences, dialogue tags (otherwise known as attributions), and the emotional state and thoughts of the character before, during and after a portion of speech.

On this talking shop episode, Sarah discussed a filmed lecture series she discovered through her public library, called 'Writing Great Fiction: Story-telling Tips and Techniques'. This is a part of a wider series called 'The Great Courses.' Sarah focussed primarily on reviewing episode 1, which was about starting the writing process. Ashley turned back to books and reviewed 'Pep Talks for Writers' by Grant Faulkner, which had a wide range of mini-chapters that each touch on a different aspect of the creative process.

For this week's episode we chatted with K S Gray about their book, Color Blinded, a fictional retelling of the events and political climate that surrounded the outbreak of COVID-19. We greatly enjoyed having K S Gray on the show and discussing his process and the challenges he faced in writing and publishing this novel.

This week on our Culturing Creativity series, we explored the uses of modern technology and creativity to determine whether it is a help or hindrance on the way to becoming a published author. We discussed how we employ technology and how (for the most part) we'd be lost without it!

For this episode we talked about subplots, and how they both enhance and support your over-arching plot line. We discuss the functions of subplots, different types of subplots, and what to avoid when weaving them into your novel.

This week on Dear Writer, we shared some more resources that we've found useful. Sarah discussed 'Save the Cat Writes a Novel' by Jessica Brody, a version of Blake Snyder's original 'Save the Cat' series for screenwriters which Jessica Brody adapted for novelists. Ashley reviewed an article called 'The Rise of Strong Female Characters in YA Fantasy' by Lidia Elsdon in theJournal YA Hotline, 2020, Issue #112, Feminism and Fantasy.

You can find the full article here:

https://ojs.library.dal.ca/YAHS/article/view/10294

This week we interviewed Lynne Podrat. Lynne is an educator, dog trainer and author. She writes poetry, children’s books, and has a memoir out called, Listen to Me: How my Down Syndrome Brother Saved my Life. In her spare time, she does Dragon boating. We greatly enjoyed our talk with Lynne, and were in awe of her openness in sharing her unique and touching journey to becoming a writer.