In the second half of September, I fulfilled a lifelong dream to visit England, the kingdom of many beloved stories. At last, I would walk the same streets of Austen, Dickens, Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Shakespeare—the list of British authors who have shaped my imagination and filled my library is very long…

If you’re following me on Instagram, you’ve seen the deluge of dahlias! One of my favourite summer activities is cataloguing the new varieties by photographing a single bouquet and comparing its colours to the rest of my collection. Allow me to share my notes with you on some of my favourites!

There's the annual kids-in-the-dirt potato scavenger hunt, which involves a lot of giggling and a muddy bath afterward. My neighbour's plum tree was cracking from the weight, so we picked a few baskets and froze plum concentrate for drinks. I had a boon of sweet peas, which has been so delightful while the roses catch their breath. Dill abounds, nasturtiums mound, the beans are spiralling up, and the peas are winding down.

Kristen sent me her finished review of my full manuscript, three days after I concluded my book cover contest. I'll be honest, her feedback wasn't at all what I expected.

You'll laugh to hear that I spent a full day convinced that I hadn't gotten my money's worth, that perhaps I had picked the wrong editor, or that she had rushed the job because she was two weeks late.

All because she had no major structural recommendations. 

While I did end up receiving over 100 cover submissions, they were only from 22 designers (many of those being revisions per our mid-contest conversations). 117 covers sound like a lot, but it's surprisingly easy to disqualify options. No to obvious AI use; no to hair on fire or planet eyes or lava, lightning, portals, or designs that relied solely on a single piece of non-copyrightable stock imagery.

Each editor's approach is different. The tricky part, is learning to adopt their unique lens for a time to examine your writing, and discern for yourself how much you can improve while staying true to the story you want to tell.

I have to laugh. The editor who read the first chapter in April said it was too bogged down with world-building and backstory. I removed most of the backstory (which probably created lack of clarity for Susan and also forced some of the exposition into dialogue), and wrote an entirely new, shorter Chapter 1. I was pretty confident, in fact, that I had finally resolved my Achilles heel opening.

Not so!