A.M. Offenwanger's Blog, page 13

#WordlessWednesday: Two Banded Doves in a Midwinter Cottonwood Tree

Two Banded Doves in a Midwinter Cottonwood Tree (Today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, so you know the tune)

And Yet More Beginnings

Now that I think of it, even the stories started when I was thirteen.

“This is going to be the last piece of fiction you’re going to write in your school career,” our teacher said. It was Grade 7; creative writing classes did not exist in the academic type of school that I attended where we were trained for university. So this one last piece of narrative writing we got to do was an assignment to first create a “narrative core” – a fake newspaper account – and then turn it into a 2-page story...

Speaking of Beginnings…

I was thirteen when I first fell in love – with pottery, that is. I can still visualize the pottery studio in my high school where I learned to handbuild a wide, shallow bowl. This bowl:

Yes, I still have it. My first pottery piece – or maybe it was my second? Regardless, it’s been my regular, everyday fruit bowl for the last forty years.

Life, the Universe, and Beginnings. This was where the pottery started.

New Beginnings

It’s a bit of a cliché, that. New Year’s Day, time for new beginnings! New goals, good intentions! If the calendar wasn’t already telling me that it’s that time of the year, a dead giveaway would be my social media feed, which is once again bristling with ads for exercise or weight loss programs (I ususally mark those ads as “inappropriate” or “offensive”). A friend of mine once stated that her goal for the new year was to stay fat and enjoy herself doing so – I can go with that, that sounds lik...

Testing, Testing, 1-2-3!

So, I think we got everything done, with much groaning and gnashing of teeth (especially, I’m sure, on the part of the tech support people that I was calling for help every five minutes). If the internet fairies are kind to us and properly appreciative of the bowls of milk we put out on the back porch for them, the blog should run smoothly once again, and be ready and waiting for renewed jollification in the not-too-distant future.

This post is just going up for a day or so to test if all you...

A Quick Notice

Hello everyone!

Yes, we’re still here, even though we’ve been quiet in cyberspace for nearly a year. This isn’t the startup of the blog again quite yet, but just a quick notice that we’re doing some very inexpert internet magic in the background, specifically moving the blog to a self-hosted site (I think that’s what it’s called). I’m hoping to port the email subscriptions as well, so hopefully you won’t notice anything at all, and when the blog bursts back onto the scene in its full and...

Merry Christmas To All, And To All a Good Night

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. And I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s time: I need to go dark for a while. No, it doesn’t mean I’m going to The Dark Side (even though they have cookies). It means I’m going to turn off the light switch on this blog.

Closed for renovations, remodelling, rethinking.

In the words of Tara Leaver, a lovely artist I’ve been following and taking inspiration from for some time: “I need to go dark. To be in the dark with my work – the wi...

“The Forty-Dollar Christmas: A Canadian Holiday Story”

Drumroll please: Another Christmas short story is now available for your delectation from Yours Truly!

THE FORTY-DOLLAR CHRISTMAS: A CANADIAN HOLIDAY STORY

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas… unless you don’t have the cash to make it happen.
When Liz is stuck at home over the holidays, she finds out that her downstairs neighbour is too broke to celebrate Christmas with his little girl. Can she bring her ingenuity to bear to show Jonathan that it’s not the content of his wallet ...

#TheTwelveDaysOfChristmas: The Ebook Edition

Remember The Twelve Days of Christmas? The serialized Christmas story I posted last year, starting Christmas Day?

It all started with a partridge in a pear tree
Macs boyfried goes missing on Christmas Eve, right around the time some unearthly beautiful people turn up in town. Will she be able to find Tom in time before the Twelve Days of Christmas are up?

Well, good news: its now available in book form! Thats right, you can get the ebook on Amazon (Kindle) or Smashwords (in whatever ebook...

Reviews: What’s the big deal?

An excellent post by the excellent E. L. Bates on why book reviews matter. Bonus: easy templates to help you write that review.

StarDance Press

Around this time of year, you will often see posts on social media saying something like, give an author the best gift imaginable: leave a review for their book! As an author, I agree whole-heartedly with such posts. I got to thinking the other day, though: if I werent an author myself, would I understand just why reviews are so important? And I...