(As in what exactly is creativity worth?)  

Editor, columnist, author, and radio personality Robert White is the interviewer.  

If you live in the Kitchener/Waterloo area, you can check it out on Faith FM 94.3 at 10 p.m. (ET)

It will also be webcast at www.faithfm.org

Please be patient. I'll be working through the pages and posts, making sure links work and everything is in the right place and things aren't duplicated.

I'll also be changing up the appearance a little bit.

Hopefully, once it's finished, I'll be able to keep it a little more active than it's been over the last year or so while all my energy was going into A Second Cup of Hot Apple Cider.

This is the new cover for the Shaded Light e-Book.

Hope you like it.

Click on the image below to enlarge it.

Click to see a larger version of the above image.

Get to know more Canadian crime writers at the Crime Writers of Canada website

Anyway, here they are.

Best Crime Novel: Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead, Little, Brown UK

Best First Crime Novel: Avner Mandleman, The Debba, Other Press

Best French Crime Book: Jacques Côté, Dans le quartier des agités, Alire

Best Juvenile/Young Adult Crime Book: Alice Kuipers, The Worst Thing She Ever Did, HarperCollins

Best Crime Nonfiction: Stevie Cameron, On the Farm, Knopf Canada

Best Crime Short Story: Mary Jane Maffini, “So Much in Common,” in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

Best Unpublished First Crime Novel – The Unhanged Arthur: John Jeneroux, Better Off Dead

Derrick Murdoch Award Winner: Louise Allin

Like the first book, this one was edited by Wendy Nelles and me. It took virtually all my time from August until the end of January. Well, more than that actually because now we're in marketing mode. 

There are 37 writers showcased in it, a number of whom have not really been published before.

Like Hot Apple Cider, it has a mixture of true-life stories, fiction, and poetry; 51 individual pieces in all. 

My entry this time is fiction – a short story about four women in their 40s who haven't met since they graduated from college. It's called "Twenty-Five Years Later."

Do you need a copy of this book? Do birds have wings? Of course you do.

Check it out at hotapple.cider.ca

Wendy Elaine Nelles, my co-editor for Hot Apple Cider, plans to co-edit this one, too.

Because my company (That's Life! Communications) is working in partnership with The Word Guild and World Vision Canada, we're only looking at submissions from members of The Word Guild (Canadian citizens or landed immigrants who agree to the Apostles' Creed).

Submissions are open until October 18, 2010, so if you qualify to be a member of The Word Guild, you might want to join now, and get a submission in.

If you're a reader, stay tuned for more information. I'll be posting here as we proceed.

Over 30,000 copies of Hot Apple Cider have gone out through World Vision's Girls Night Out and Couples Night Out programs and another 15,000 have gone out through various means. We're hoping for similar results with Hot Apple Cider 2.

We also managed to touch base with other members of The Word Guild from the area, including Lando Klassen, owner of the House of James, and authors Grace Fox and Carolyn Arends.

Plus we checked in with Flyn Ritchie of Canadian Christianity and even had a quick interview with managing editor David Dawes, who has interviewed me in the past, but always via the  phone or email. Nice to connect in person.

The rest of the time over the past few weeks we were connecting with family, from 90 members of Les's mother's family (including her five sisters – see photo below – Les's mom is on the far right – and four cousins from Norway) at a family reunion near Swift Current, Saskatchewan to a visit with my birth father and some of his family in Northern Saskatchewan, and an evening with my cousin and her mother, my 96-year old aunt, in Saskatoon.

Can't omit the great food at the reunion, the super Saskatoon pie my cousin made, the borscht Les helped my birth father's wife make, or the pancakes with chokecherry syrup my cousin's husband made before we left for the airport to fly to BC.

In BC, we stayed with Les's mother, and managed to see more of Les's family, including his brother from Toronto (whom we rarely see here!), an aunt, and his niece and her family from Cape Breton Island. Then we saw my aunts from White Rock and Winnipeg (another timely visit) and my birth mother and some of the members of her family. The timing was interesting since my birth mother had a pacemaker put in while we were there – not planned, but worked out very well. We also had lunch with a pastor friend we church-planted with in Regina years ago.

On our one free day, we went to Granville Island and Queen Elizabeth Park and the Bloedel  Conservatory.

Yes, there was more great food, including some terrific seafood (salmon, shrimp, clam chowder, halibut, etc.), an amazing piece of blueberry pie, and some great yam and sweet potato fries. Got some amazingly good licorice at the Granville market.

And now we're home, dealing with the three-hour time change, and feeling a bit deluged by all the things we need to do for the coming months. More on that later. Technically I'm still on holidays until September 7th. Realistically, well, we'll see….

9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Vancouver Bible House 700 Kingsway, Vancouver BC

with N. J. and Les Lindquist

9:30 a.m. – Registration

10:00 a.m. – Workshop 1: The Art, Craft, Business, & Ministry of Writing with N. J. Lindquist

11:30 a.m. – Update on The Word Guild with Q & A

12:00 p.m. – Lunch and Networking

1:00 p.m. – Workshop 2: What Writers Needs to Know about Trends in Publishing with Les Lindquist

2:30 p. m. – Wrap-up

Click here for more details

Many writers get ideas from listening to the news, reading newspapers or the internet, watching programs about current affairs, noticing topics that are trending… 

In fact, being alert to what's going on in the world is usually a great way to get started as a writer. Many local or regional newspapers are interested in stories of community events. A simple news item might give you inspiration for a follow-up feature article, a poem, a story, a related news item, or something larger. A story in a national newspaper or magazine might give you a bigger idea.

Or you might simply use something in the news as part of a larger story or book. 

Let me give you a few examples:  

Years ago, I decided to enter the Toronto Star's short story contest. I think it was fairly new at the time. However, I had difficulty thinking of something to write that I thought the panel of judges would be interested in. I tried several things and was feeling my wheels spinning. Nothing felt right.

After some thought, I decided that the judges would likely be looking for something that was "current" in some way. So I pulled out the newspapers for the past week. I found several stories about the closures of some of the VIA rail services. Hmm. What did I know about railway services? Well, I had been raised in a small town and I knew there were some people who depended on the train. Plus one of my mother's uncles had been a railway station manager. And I began to ask what if? I thought of my grandmother. What it she lived in a small town and didn't drive a car? And what if there was a railway train she could take to the city once in a while?

The resulting story, One Last Ride on the VIA Rail, was a Judge's Choice in the Toronto Star Short Contest that year, and was published in the Toronto Star. 

One more example:

Even though my novel, Glitter of Diamonds, is a mystery, it's actually based largely on actual events.

One of the main characters is a young pitcher who has escaped from Cuba and been granted asylum in Canada.

I got the idea for this book from three different news/events sources.

1. Listening to Bob McCown on the FAN 590 one day, he and his guests were talking about sports figures who act like jerks and how some of them needed a good wake-up call.

2. A Cuban ball player had recently defected. I knew that over the years, Livan Hernandez and a number of other Cuban baseball players have escaped from Cuba and gone on to play for major league teams. Surely there would be more.

3. My knowledge that Worldteam Canada, a mission organization, is planting churches in Cuba because Worldteam USA cannot (due to government regulations).

I put the three things together: what if a Cuban baseball player defected and came to Canada, where he got lost in the glitter of the opportunities and became a jerk, while at the same time, back in Cuba, his wife was being influenced by Christians from Canada? What would happen when they were reunited in Toronto? 

And that's where my starting ideas for Glitter of Diamonds came from.

Read the first chapter.

Note: The irony is that the Toronto Blue Jays recently signed a Cuban player who defected. He's a short stop, not a pitcher, and hopefully he'll remain a nice guy. :)