Did you hear, friendly swimmers: a 16-foot female Great White shark named ‘Kara’ has been tracked winding its way through British Columbia waters (cue JAWS theme). Call the kids in!
In honour and awe of her large arrival, I offer a little video I recorded a few years ago for writers and non-writers about the magic of JAWS.
Full disclosure, I was a shark fanatic in the 70s. Anybody else fanatical about stuff when they were kids?
Click on the photo:
Updated: Feb 11
I’ve never self-marketed a book before, or anything else. I’ve never launched a book in 2026 before, either. I’m more adept at watching the world with concern, second-guessing myself, and throwing ideas to the wind.
But amid all the weird sales graphs, ads, algorithm noise, and small mysteries of a book launch, something lovely and unexpected happened. As sales for My Last Friends on Earth picked up, readers have been finding my earlier novel Understanding Ken again—and picking it up.
Bonus!
If you came for three kids fighting an empire in the future—and enjoyed the ride—there’s another kid, about 150 years earlier, dealing with divorce, confusion, and growing up in the 1970s.
Two different stories. Same real questions.
How do you fight for what’s right?
How do you forgive yourself for mistakes?
How do you keep joy while figuring things out?
Those questions feel very real for me right now, too. How about you?
If you’ve read either of these books, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
More to come, god-willing
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Updated: Jan 21
I’m thrilled the novel is out, and grateful for the positive feedback it’s received.
But writing is a strange process. It’s not super natural for me. It’s not a gift. It’s not a wild talent.
It’s a compulsion. In a way, it's madness. And sometimes beautiful.
I’m not always aware of it, but I write to examine myself and the world: what I believe, what I think, what I hope for, what moves me, what scares me.
In My Last Friends on Earth, a YA dystopian sci-fi/fantasy, the kids (15, 16 and 9) are up against existential threats—fictional versions of what we are all up against today: data-mining, mega-surveillance, manipulated polarization, discrimination, inequity, the breakdown of community, rising authoritarianism—and other creeping forces that threaten our children’s future.
The first draft clocked in at a bloated 111,000 words, written in third person. The manuscript did receive positive feedback from some readers, but did not fully resonate with me. It would eventually be published in first person, 66,000 words.
So what was missing?
After countless rewrites, the characters in the story—the kids—gave me the answer.
How?
They would literally wake me at night—triggering my anxieties—yelling about the trouble and danger they’re not equipped to deal with.
I could relate.
“You put us here. You set up the premise and the dangers. Figure out who we are so we can fight the cruelest empire in three galaxies. We need help.”
I still had to maximize chapter cliff-hangers and wild action. But I realized my real job was to imbue these kids with sufficient inner life—character, resilience, fortitude, instincts, vulnerability, humour and a moral compass—to make their resistance ring true.
They needed allies in the book, and I had to be an ally on their journey, obviously—but how?
Feeling, thinking, writing, and re-writing. Finding what I'd need to have more courage, and passing it on.
From a literary point of view, I can’t say if I succeeded in capturing magic. For me, I did. I hope some bright readers experience the passion and adventure I was trying to convey. But the biggest failure, my lack of resilience, would have been abandoning the storytelling journey itself by not re-imagining, re-thinking and re-writing until I discovered not only who the kids were, but who they could become.
After that, they were on their own.
I had done all I could to prepare them for the fight ahead—and that kept me going, too. Now I could finally release them to you, the reader.
In the process, I realized something else—something even deeper.
In my desperate rewrites, I was simultaneously and subconsciously trying to convince myself that my own kids, and yours, with guidance and love, could also—if necessary—find the courage, vision, decency, deep friendships and solidarity, to fight back against inequality, injustice, big lies and tyranny.
That rewrite—guiding our kids by example toward kindness, resilience, courage and freedom—continues to unfold.
May it never end.