Samantha Garner, Freelance Web Writer & Editor

Sit back, relax and spend a couple of minutes watching this video of a book cover being designed, courtesy of The Awl and Orbit Books. Oh, and sit far back from your monitor; there’s a lot of wiggling going on.

It’s so rare to see book-related things translated into visual format (yes, I know one can see a book, but that isn’t quite what I mean) and I love videos of words-and-books-related things. Let me know if you come across any good ones!

Yes, this looks like an ad for Ikea’s Poäng chair, but it’s not. This is my favourite writing spot in the house. There are windows along one wall and continuing for a bit around a corner, so I feel surrounded by light. And, okay, the Poäng chair is pretty comfortable too.

Oof. What busy times I’ve seen since my last post! On Friday I left on a last-minute trip to visit my parents in Ontario, returning on Monday to a busy workload. While I was at my parents’, I did unearth some . . . interesting material from my writerly past that I have planned for a blog post once I can sit down and prepare it. In the meantime, here are some good things other people have written recently:

• Are Your Clients Really Getting Your Best? from Men With Pens.
• Teri Vlassopoulos blogs about choosing the name of her new short story collection.
• Lija at The Writer’s Pet writes about Fifth Business, a favourite novel we have in common!
• An article about the writing advice industry at the Globe & Mail.

Another plagiarism accusation’s popped up in the book world, this time involving a teenage author. Not that every teenage writer does it, but I mean: I wrote two books when I was 13/14 and – I’m not gonna lie – they were pretty blatant ripoffs of The Outsiders. Anyway, from the Independent:

Ms Hegeman, whose father is the renowned German literary director and theatre professor Carl Hegemann, has already written a play and the script to her own film. But her novel about a 16-year-old girl who suffers the death of her mother and subsequently plumbs the depths of wild sex and heavy drug taking on Berlin’s techno music scene has been her first runaway success.

Read the full article here.

The above is a tagline from an Ontario tourism campaign that, I don’t mind saying, used to bring me to tears when I first moved to Alberta and was terribly homesick.

My dear friend Suzen and I, among the many things we have in common, share the unique preoccupation with Home that only being away from it can bring. Admittedly, her Home, Newfoundland, is a bit more picturesque and immediately evocative than mine. However, Ontario works its way into almost everything I write. There’s even a literary style named for my home region, though I don’t think my fiction fits into it – much as I’d love it to.

So, it made my wee expat heart soar to read:

This summer, Ontario’s literary history will become a permanent part of the province’s physical landscape with a new project called Ontario: Read It Here.

A series of eight plaques will be installed across the province in the exact geographic location where Ontario-based literary scenes takes place.

The full article can be read here. Having lived here in Alberta for nearly a decade, I’ve taken my fair share of lumps about being an Ontarian. Say what you will about Ontario – I’m excited about this and wish I could see it!

The other day, I made a post about Doris Lessing. Below is a video which further illustrates why I think she’s so great. She discovers she’s won the Nobel Prize for literature and is kind of sassy about it. She’s old, was taken off-guard and was previously disliked by Nobel representatives, so this response is pretty great. Observe: