Because I can never resist the chance to redesign my book covers, here's a special winter holiday cover version sale of Just Like You Said It Would Be. Set mainly in Dublin, Ireland during the summer, the coming of age/first love novel begins in Toronto on New Year's Eve. 

E-copies everywhere are $2.99 or equivalent through January 2nd. Due to printing costs I can't discount the paperbacks but if you order one during the holiday period it'll sport the winter 2025 cover too. Come January 3rd the regular cover will return. 

E-copies of my literary horror Shantallow are on sale for $1.99 across major online booksellers for October. If teenage exes kidnapped for ransom and held in a malevolent abandoned house sounds like your thing this one's for you.

When Misha sees the girl from his recurring nightmares—a girl he's never set eyes on while awake—in a neighbour's front lawn he can't believe his eyes. The two tumble into an intense but ultimately toxic relationship.

Months after it's over, Misha still can't entirely let go. Driving past Tanvi's house he witnesses a kidnapping in progress—hers. When he attempts to intervene he's beaten, bound, and thrown into the back of a utility van with Tanvi, her ten-year-old cousin Lauren, and another teenager. The four are driven to a decaying, remote house, and told no one will be hurt if they cooperate. But soon the entire group is under siege from something far more sinister than the captors themselves.

As the house grows more hostile and the supernatural violence escalates, the fate of the kidnappers and the hostages entwine. Misha must not only fight for his life, but come to terms with the things he's done and the long shadow his father's abuse has cast over his life. 

 

Rights will soon be reverted for three of my young adult books so I've been working hard on cover art plus print and ePub files. With any luck these new versions of The Sweetest Thing You Can Sing, Delicate and Shantallow (the latter published under the author name Cara Martin) should be available from major online booksellers within the next ten to fourteen days. Voila the new covers below!

 

 

Most of the text within hasn't been changed, aside from an updated section regarding intimate partner violence at the end of Delicate to include some fresher stats and resources. Unfortunately, since Delicate was first published in 2015 intimate partner violence in Ontario has increased substantially. "But most cases of domestic violence still go unreported. In fact in 2019, 80% of those who experienced intimate partner violence did not report to police."  

 

Other things you'll see dealt with in Delicate are a dangerous peanut allergy, and a case of chlamydia. It's not the end of the world when one of the main characters, Ivy, catches chlamydia from having sex with her ex-boyfriend sans condom, but it really sucks. Or more accurately, it burns. The second cousin, Lucan, she barely knows at the start of the novel is having an exceptionally crappy summer too (losing patience with overhearing his mom and her new boyfriend have sex)—something the two bond over, until even that gets complicated . . .  

 

Meanwhile in The Sweetest Thing You Can Sing fifteen-year-old Serena and her friends are intent on fighting the sexualization they continually face from many of their male classmates, including Serena's ex, as she tries to cope with the absence of a beloved older brother who is estranged from the family (whereabouts unknown) because of his unwillingness to undergo treatment for drug addiction. Enter down-to-earth nineteen-year-old Gage who feels like a breathe of fresh air among the fray, except that he's bothered by the age gap between himself and Serena. Something he doesn't even know the whole truth about. 

 

Unlike the other two novels, Shantallow isn't contemporary YA but it does share some DNA with them in the form of an at first heady young relationship that later verges into abuse. The toxic relationship between Misha and Tanvi (the girl he has nightmares about before he ever sees her in real life) is enfolded into the horror tale of a kidnapping for ransom gone wrong when the remote, long abandoned house the kidnappers confine the young couple and two others in violently turns on all of them, determined to drag its warped past into the present. 

 

Shantallow marks a shift from writing mostly contemporary fiction about young people to focusing on adult speculative novels, which is why I've chosen a different pen name for it and more recent books. Although Shantallow and Rise, Tomorrow Girl both feature seventeen-year-old main characters I think of them as crossover novels rather than strictly being YA in nature. Subsequent horror and sci-fi novels written as Cara Martin will primarily focus on adult characters, but I'm not entirely ruling out the odd speculative crossover. On the other hand, if I ever write more contemporary YA (which I'm not eternally ruling out either) it will likely be under the name C. K. Kelly Martin. 

 

 

 

  

As we move into summer this week, the e-book version of my first love (but will it outlast the summer?) novel Just Like You Said It Would Be is on sale for 99 cents at Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google, Smashwords, Amazon and other retailers. 

The first cut is the deepest.

On New Year’s Eve seventeen-year-old Amira texts the Irish ex-boyfriend she’s been missing desperately since they broke up at the end of summer, when she returned to Canada. They agreed they wouldn’t be friends, that it would never be enough. But that was then—back when Amira’s separated parents had shipped her off to relatives in Dublin for the summer so they could test-drive the idea of getting back together on a long haul cruise. Back when Amira was torn away from a friend in need in Toronto only to fall in love with a Dublin screenwriting class and take a step closer to her dream career. And only to fall for cousin Zoey’s bandmate, Darragh, the guy who is first her friend, then her enemy and later something much more complicated—the guy she can say anything to, the guy who makes every inch of her feel wide awake in a way she hadn’t known was possible. The guy she confides in about the dead sister she has no living memories of but who has remained with Amira nonetheless. The guy she might never see again. Or is there, despite the distance, somehow still a chance for them?

 

You can read the first chapter here, listen/watch the Just Like You Said It Would Be playlist on YouTube. The first four chapters and more extensive information about the book is available on the Just Like You Said It Would Be dedicated website.   

 

 

Continued thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts who supported this book through an invaluable writing grant!

 

• I  acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.


• Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

So much hangs in the balance here in Canada and we have a whole weekend plus most of Monday to get through. Hold your nerve, Canadians, and for those who haven't voted yet, support whoever can beat the Cons in your riding. Keep authoritarians out of power.

If you're not sure who stands the best chance to block the Conservative Party in your area, you can use votewell.ca. 

 

At this point, Pierre Poilievre is well known for declaring a war on 'woke' and vowing to defund the CBC. The broadcaster has long been an integral component of our nation, reflecting Canada's evolving identity back to us. Thanks to Stephen Harper (who  fundamentally changed the media landscape by allowing the foreign takeover of Postmedia) far too many of Canada's outlets are rightwing media hedge fund owned and that bias increasingly shows, making the CBC's survival, in both English and French, even more crucial. 

During Poilievre's federal election campaign he's restricted media access, limiting access at campaign stops by only allowing handpicked reporters to pose questions. Unlike Canada's other major political parties, the Conservative Party of Canada refused to allow journalists to travel with Poilievre on his campaign bus and plane, "ending a decades-old tradition of reporters embedding with a prospective candidate to lead the country." Poilievre's demonizing of the press and his disturbing restricting of  reporter access is far from new. His ongoing war on journalism demonstrates a marked lack of respect for a cornerstone of democracy. This should concern all Canadians. 

There's a reason why Poilievre's Elon Musk's choice for Prime Minister and that Canadians are being bombarded with rightwing disinformation on X as well as Meta. Given the chance, Poilievre intends to make Canada over in the U.S.'s image from the inside. A slew of regressive changes delivered with a sneer. He's continually courted the far right, playing fast and loose with the truth while fermenting rage that he's hoped to ride to power. His own record and recent campaign promises starkly demonstrate his malicious intentions. Tax cuts at the expense of keeping our healthcare system and social safety net strong, scapegoating rather than nation building.

Poilievre was a leading defender of the “Fair Elections Act,” a voter suppression Bill  that "impaired voting rights, reduced political participation, injected partisan bias in election administration, increased the influence of money in elections, diminished transparency and accountability, and seriously undermined the integrity and fairness of the electoral process." Here are some other highlights of his voting record as an MP.

 

Let's not forget that soon after securing his own government pension, Poilievre voted to raise the retirement age for others to 67. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when asked about the CERB benefits that kept many Canadian afloat, Poilievre admitted "We're Conservatives we don't believe in that."

 

Unconcerned about everyday Canadians, unsurprisingly Poilievre also shares Donald Trump’s cruel indifference toward the rest of the world's welfare. The Conservative leader's costed platform, released Tuesday, reveals the almost complete gutting of foreign aid. A reduction of $9.5 billion over four years (that's a whopping 85%). This "will mean defunding critical health care, slashing development assistance, axing disaster relief, and ending a litany of other life-saving and security-building programs. Just like Trump." A humanitarian disaster in the making. "Poilievre’s Conservative Party opposes all significant federal measures to address climate change" and frames "ecological protection as an assault on freedom and prosperity." In his is twenty years as a Conservative politician, he's voted against environmental protection 400 times, and a mere thirteen times in favour.

If you'd like to read more about why Poilievre is perceived as an authoritarian threat that would destroy Canada as we know it if given free reign, here's some further reading material for you.

● The Tyee: Six Policy Areas Where Poilievre Mirrors Trump

● Charlies Angus/The Resistance Substack: Take Nothing for Granted 

● Policy Options: (the digital magazine of the Institute for Research on Public Policy): Voters must not allow Poilievre to import Trump’s war on science 

 

● Greenpeace: Politics of Exclusion: Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s Voting Track Record 2004-2024

● The Vajenda (Dr. Jen Gunter's substack): Dear Canada, Pierre Poilievre is Coming for Your Reproductive Rights

 

● Greenpeace: Pierre Poilievre’s positions on climate change, biodiversity and social justice

We've seen where voting for Populist politicians who vociferously feign being a friend of the common man while actually representing a select few elite and disenfranchising and impoverishing everyone else gets you. That's not democracy. That's not the kind of Canada most of us want. 

If there's anything more Canadian than a Canadian band (Our Lady Peace) covering another Canadian band (The Tragically Hip) in an arena called the Canadian Tire Centre in the nation's capital it's starting a singalong of the national anthem, which happened last night too!

A clip from OLP's cover of  Locked in the Trunk of a Car last night:

 

 

Anyone who has lived in this country awhile is these days no doubt experiencing much the same thing as I am, which is a unity and demonstrative pride in Canada unlike any I've ever seen outside of Canada Day, the Olympics or hockey games. Much as Canadians love this nation, we're not ordinarily showy about it. With few exceptions Canadians are traditionally not flag-wavers, and when we sing the national anthem aloud (which is not often) it's generally underneath our breath. 

 

An antagonistic United States, making threats to our sovereignty and repeatedly disrespecting our Prime Minister, has unleashed something inside us that won't be put back in the bottle anytime soon. We're shopping Canadian, avoiding U.S. products and travel, and wearing our hearts on our sleeves.

I don't know how well you can make the sound out on the below video but OLP's Raine Maida had the CTC audience singing the national anthem late in their show in Ottawa last night. I've never seen anything like this at a rock concert before. The emotion in the arena was incredible.

Here are a couple of other clips from Our Lady Peace's amazing show in Ottawa last night. I always find myself thinking of Finn, from One Lonely Degree, during Clumsy in particular. She was fifteen when the book was released in 2009 which would make her around thirty-one now, but I know she'd still be hitting Our Lady Peace concerts.