Blog Your brain is not always in your head Yesterday I drove home from visiting my grandson who lives about 45 minutes away. My husband asked about the traffic and which route I had taken. I had no idea about either, which is slightly alarming when you're the one operating the vehicle. I don't have a self-driving car, but rather a deep familiarity with the area after repeated visits. At some point my body quietly staged a coup and took over the navigation. It's one form of m

The art, the science and the magic of visualization transforms I didn't know about visualization or that even that it was a thing, but at an early age, I intuitively understood that when I could imagine something happen, it opened possibilities, even if they didn't work out. Others called it daydreaming. Then I learned it was a powerful technique if used to its fullest potential. Visualization in sport is about the athlete mentally imagining himself performing a skill, not

I didn't plan this, but synchronicity no longer surprises me. As a fanatical reader, I am happiest when I have one book in hand and two more waiting on the dresser. A beta reader for my novel, The Cauliflower Ear Club , recommended the novel Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid. At the same time, quite randomly, our librarian handed me the novel Spectacular Things by Deck Dorey-Stein. Both these books explore the intense challenges athletes face, the emotional and phy

I did not plan to write a wrestling novel. I married into one. When I met my husband, it was at the end of his championship wrestling career. But then he started another wrestling career as a coach. That career spanned about seven years in the gym, and another almost 40 off the mat. Wrestlers speak differently. They do not dramatize victory –– until years later. They remember defeat. They exist in a world where two people shake hands and then try — quite respectfully — to dis

...for me at least. This discovery helped so much with my final edits that I want to share it, old news that it may be to many of you. It's the Read Aloud app available on Word. I like to read my work out loud after I have edited it to the best of my abilities. But reading almost 80,000 words aloud to myself isn't easy, and I still manage to fill in imaginary words. With Read Aloud, I could choose the pace of reading and the voice. Despite the lack of expression, or perhaps

The lineup for wrestling tournaments for the boys in the Cauliflower Ear Club It's a good thing that I'm a writer and not an artist, but I needed some visual aids to help sort out some of these characters. The problem is that I changed some names and still need to change a couple more. You see, I read Memoir by Margaret Atwood (wonderful, highly recommend it) and as one of the many asides and lessons in the book, she advised not to have two characters in the book with the sam

It was a thrill to attend author Terry Fallis' book launch last night. We are not friends, we had never met, yet I felt I knew him ever since ten books ago, when I laughed until I cried reading his first book The Best Laid Plans . Last week I picked up his latest and already best selling book The Marionette in Sault Ste. Marie, and although it was a departure from his others, it didn't disappoint. On the delayed flight home, I read the entire book in one sitting. It combines

A Wordcloud interpretation of The Cauliflower Ear Club tacked to my whiteboard I thought that The Cauliflower Ear Club was as finished...

Hands tell a story, mapping our lives and battles Our hands tell a story. Coming in all sizes, colours and shapes, they reveal our age,...

The shoulders of the coaches share the weight of the wrestler who then supports others, and so on and so on. In so many ways our past...

I have been asked many times why I chose to write a novel about wrestling and I come up with a different reason each time. First of all,...

Now that the manuscript of The Cauliflower Ear Club is finished (for today at least), the next steps are daunting. How to decide if you...

My friend Shelley Yampolsky , artist and potter extraordinaire, generously designed this card to help me find an agent or publisher for...

I had fun sharing how our protagonist Holly got her name, but the others came much less organically, as there are so many of them. You...

The novel I am working on, The Cauliflower Ear Club, is about a season in the life of a university wrestling team and all those connected...

Just one of many scenes showing how strong the bonds are among wrestlers. John P. and Joe D. competed against one another and then beside...

Anyone who has ever lived with a high-level athlete has shared a piece of that rarified world, observing the demands, the intense...