My new novel, The Oakdale Dinner Club, will be published in May, 2014 by Dundurn. It’s a suburban comedy of manners about food, infidelity and friendship. Here’s the book description:

After affluent suburban mom Mary Ann’s husband cheats on her, she decides to have her own extramarital affair. She starts up a neighbourhood dinner club as a cover, earmarks three men as potential lovers, and invites them to join. Along for the ride is her best friend Alice, a university lecturer who has recently returned with her young daughter to Oakdale, the leafy bedroom community where the two women grew up and briefly shared a telepathic past.

Over good food and wine, new friendships develop, new dreams simmer, Mary Ann pursues her affair candidates, and Alice opens her heart and mind to ways out of her single working mother social rut. The stars align on the night the core dinner club members consume an aphrodisiac, go to a local dive bar, hit the dance floor, and rock their worlds.

More info to come! Now available for pre-order (!) at amazon.ca.

On Sunday October 28, 2012 at 11 am, I’ll be hosting a roundtable event on behalf of the Humber School for Writers at the International Festival of Authors, at Harbourfront Centre, in Toronto.

The event is called “How We Write” and features authors Richard Scrimger, Eva Stachniak and me talking about the craft of writing fiction. Come on down, and find out (in just over an hour!) how we approach story and novel writing from start to finish.

On Friday July 20, 2012, I’ll be hosting an event called “Shifting Tides of History” at the Lakefield Literary Festival in lovely Lakefield, Ontario.

Acclaimed Canadian authors Frances Itani (Requiem) and Steven Heighton (The Dead Are More Visible will read from their works and I’ll lead a discussion with them about common themes in their writing and other exciting subjects yet to be revealed.

Again this year, the Humber School for Writers and the International Festival of Authors are presenting the Author for a Day contest (administered by lucky me).

Submit two pages of fiction or narrative non-fiction by October 7, 2011 for a chance to read at the October 23, 2011 “Word Doctors Are In” Master Class event at the IFOA at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, followed by a literary lunch with the event speakers.

Entries (maximum 600 words) should be cut and pasted into the body of an email, identified by genre, and sent with name, address, phone number, and proof of contest entry fee payment to authorforadayifoacontest@gmail.com by October 7, 2011. The $15 contest entry fee can be paid to the Harbourfront Centre Box Office at this link.

The winning entry will be chosen by Humber School for Writers faculty.

I’m very pleased that my YA story Marcus the Great has just been published in an anthology for the educational market  by McGraw-Hill Ryerson. The anthology has the rather clunky title of iLit: Reality Imagined: Stories of Identity and Change and also includes stories by Jean Little, Richard Scrimger, Sheree Fitch, and several other established and up-and-coming Canadian writers.

Marcus the Great is a coming of age story of sorts, about a mellow biracial basketball player from downtown Toronto who attends the city’s Northern Secondary School, likes history class, and starts dating an uptown girl. It was totally inspired by the exposure I got to the fascinating Toronto high school basketball scene when my two sons played ball for Northern. Go Red Knights!

The story will also be available soon as a download for teachers who want to pick and choose from  a selection of stories on offer to put together their own classroom anthologies at ilit.ca. To that end, the ilit site is currently offering up Marcus the Great as a sample work – you can read (but not print) the whole thing, with illustrations! – here.

How much do I love the idea of high school students studying my story?  A lot.

I’m pleased to announce  that I have a new book coming out in March, 2011.  It’s a long story/short novel called And Everything Nice for publisher Orca Book Publishers’ Rapid Reads line of short, “easy-read” books for adult readers, which Orca describes as “well-written, well-told novels that can be read in one sitting.”

And Everything Nice is a crime novel about theft and blackmail in a community rock choir, told with humour and music. High concept-wise, I’d describe it as Glee meets Nancy Drew, for adults.