The Finding Place: Ten Days to Go!

Each day, for the next ten days, I will be posting a Behind-the-Scenes glimpse at one part of The Finding Place. These blogs will conclude with the release of my novel, ten days from now! Raizel’s Chocolate Shop Kelly’s special friend in The Finding Place is a girl by the name of Raizel. Even in the earliest draft of the novel her personality and her unusual name were very clear to me. However, her home wasn’t featured in the novel as it is now. Instead, the girls met to chat in a coffee shop that might easily have been Starbucks, or Second Cup. They drank hot chocolate, sitting opposite each other, and discussed their absent dads. There was something wrong with all this, but it […]

2015-09-05T19:30:29-04:00September 5, 2015|On Writing, The Finding Place|

The Finding Place: The Books have Arrived!

We hit another important milestone with The Finding Place yesterday when many, many boxes of books were shipped from the printer’s to the warehouse at Red Deer Press. I drove up to their offices immediately to collect my author copies. How thrilling it was to hold the book in my hands for the first time! Visiting Red Deer Press itself was equally exciting: being introduced to everyone who works there, seeing displays of all the wonderful books they have published… and then realising The Finding Place was displayed among them! It’s hard to believe, at times, that this is really happening. During our visit, I was asked to sit at an oak desk and sign copies of my book. This was, of course, the very […]

2015-08-29T17:56:02-04:00August 29, 2015|Home Page, On Writing, The Finding Place|

The Finding Place in Photographs!

Perhaps you have read The Finding Place, and you’re wondering what many of the landscapes described in the book actually look like. If so, this post is for you! Kelly’s birth village is a fictional creation, but is based on many of the villages I visited in the area around Yangshuo. The image above shows traditional cormorant fishermen putting on a demonstration like the one Kelly sees.

2015-05-16T00:58:49-04:00May 16, 2015|Home Page, The Finding Place|

The Finding Place – Front Cover!

What a thrilling moment, to see the front cover of your novel for the very first time! And here it is. The background shows the Karst Peaks around Yangshuo, a magical landscape that features prominently in the novel.  

About ‘The Finding Place’

The Finding Place is about that greatest, messiest, most essential of all things: family. Kelly didn’t have the greatest start to life. Like tens of thousands of baby girls in China, she spent her first few months in an orphanage. She will never know why her birth parents couldn’t raise her – but poverty, and China’s one child policy, likely played a part. Kelly was adopted into a loving family at ten months old and for almost thirteen years lived the life of a typical North American kid. She may have wondered, occasionally, about her birth parents and birth culture, but she had parents who loved her, and she felt happy and secure. All that changed shortly after her thirteenth birthday when Kelly’s dad walked […]

2015-05-14T23:20:34-04:00May 14, 2015|On Writing, The Finding Place, Young Writers!|
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