Tag: author

You Just Never Know

AI-generated image of witchy late-night internet trolling for signs of life.

Sometimes when I’m bored, I google myself. Don’t be judgey now – you should try it sometime. It can be enlightening. I found out for instance, that there is a terrific yoga teacher with my name right here in St. Catharines, and my old Indeed profile from my days of working at John Ross & Sons is still kicking around. Really ought to update that. I’ll put it on the list of other things to do when I’m bored.

Anyhow, I’ve found that once your book or books have been on the market for a while, listings for them show up in some unexpected places. It is common knowledge that Amazon sells your books internationally so it was fun but not unexpected to find me available for sale in places like Ireland, England, India, Japan and Australia. For sale, mind you. Not necessarily selling! Then there were actual, physical booksellers offering my stuff in Great Britain and Australia. Wasn’t expecting that!

But the discovery that made me say WTF was the listing for ‘The Cottages at the Cape – Margie’s Summer Getaway” on the Sacramento, California Walmart Business website under:

Shop by Industry – Education – k-12 Education – k-12 Library

Have you read it? If you have you know it’s not for kindergarteners. I hope someone in charge reads it before shelving it, that’s all I can say.

Some Links

https://reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/author/kathy-mcwilliam/#

Above is a link to my profile on Reedsy. You can find some of my short stories there.

Reedsy.com is a site where authors can go to grab a writing prompt to inspire them to write a short story. To motivate you and keep you focused, Reedsy has a weekly short story competition. They create and post five prompts written around a different theme every week. Writers choose a prompt, write a story around it and finish it within a week. Then, by paying a $5 entry fee, they can become contestants in a weekly short story competition. Each week, one story-teller wins $250.00.

Any writer, contestant or not, can submit their stories to the website for other writers and the world in general to read and comment on. This is another valuable part of the Reedsy experience – knowledgeable people see your work and give you feed-back.

/https://www.amazon.com/author/inspira-shun

Above is the link to my Author’s Page on Amazon. It lists my current books and has a brief bio.

What the heck am I doing?

I have written a lot of stuff over the years, most of it academic and/or technical in nature. I wrote for school or I wrote for work. I entered fiction-writing a little late in the game, but I’m doing my best to make up for lost time! Since January 2025, I’ve written and published two novels, ‘The Cottages at the Cape – Margie’s Summer Getaway’ and ‘The Burin Girl’(submitted to a couple of competitions) and a novella, ‘La Veuve Michel’. I’ve written several short stories that feature my adopted home of St. Catharines, Ontario which are currently making the rounds of short fiction competitions, and will eventually be published as a collection, and I’ve started on a third novel which will be a sequel to The Cottages at the Cape.

What’s the rush, says you? I’m seventy-four, says I.

So what do you do when you are seventy-four and you suddenly decide you’re an author? Well, you can’t play the usual games, that’s for sure. You can’t woo agents and wait months to hear back from folks. What you become is an ‘Indie Author’ and you learn the hard way how to prepare a manuscript to become an ebook, and/or a paperback or, if you are truly narcissistic, a hard-cover to display coyly on your coffee table. (Yes, I just yesterday published ‘The Burin Girl’ in hardcover – how could I not?) Bless all the publishers who provide an outlet for us ‘Indies’.

The downside is that self-published writers don’t qualify to enter the biggest, juiciest, most lucrative and prestigious competitions. No false modesty here – I’m a fine writer and I think it’s a shame.

And I could use an editor. I’m still finding typos and silly-looking shit in my stuff.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, let me tell you that this writing adventure? It’s one of the most exhilarating, challenging and enjoyable things I’ve done in decades and I’d recommend it to anyone who feels they have something to say or a story to tell. If you feel it, my friend, just go ahead and do it!