Stockholm Syndrome. On TV.

Yeah baby! I’m on TV Cogeco’s Local Matters.

Brenda St. Louis & Melissa Yi, post TV Cogeco interview

Interviewer Brenda St. Louis and I, both wearing cut-out sleeves. What are the chances we’d be fashion twins?

It’ll air today at 9:30 a.m. (ahem), 17:30 & 1800 before it gets bumped for the year in review. Edit: I got the YouTube link, with thanks to Gabriel Riviere-Reid: https://youtu.be/D22X6OVNN-Y

Super thanks to Phil Legroulx for taping it and Melissa Branchaud for watching it!

TV Cogeco Stockholm highlighted

Just in case any TV Cogeco cool people click on by, here’s the Kobo promo code again, with help using the code here:
Stockholm Kobo coupon 72 dpi

With thanks to Dr. Raji Menon for introducing me to Brenda and therefore to Cogeco.

A small group of committed citizens: CFUW Cornwall

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.~often attributed to Margaret Mead

Last June, I opened my Cornwall mail file, which is usually full of unsigned charts, but this time, it held a card. Was it from a happy patient?

No! It was from Hilary Blackburn of CFUW, the Canadian Federation for University Women, asking me to speak at Casa Paulo on January 27th, 2015. Thrilling!

CFUW funds scholarships. Green Party candidate Elaine Kennedy spearheads their work on environmental legislation (I wanted to do the one for bees. Melissa means honey bee in Greek. Plus, we would starve without pollinators). Kendra Smith, Coordinator for the Agapè Centre, organized the local Coldest Night of the Year, a fundraiser for “hungry, hurting and homeless” Canadians.

Anyone who works in Cornwall’s health care knows the challenges: scarce family doctors, high smoking rate (including people who already have COPD, lung cancer and/or asthmatic children), unemployment, teen pregnancy, low breastfeeding rate, and so on. Anecdotally, I can tell you that nearly every mom I see in the emerg is young, and when I started working here over a decade ago, zero of them breastfed. I don’t mean a handful. I mean zero. But in the past few years, I’d estimate the breastfeeding rate at 10 or 20 percent, which is a vital improvement.

So you can imagine how good it felt to witness this group of committed citizens working for change.

Of course, I couldn’t relax, because I had to present. I sat with my laptop in my lap, waiting for them to call on me, but it turned out I was supposed to talk after the meeting. “That way, you can enjoy the food,” said Jennifer Adams, one of my hosts.

The food was delicious. I had the salmon, which was just right, and the al dente vegetables particularly impressed me, because often vegetables seem like an afterthought. But at continuing medical education dinners (“drug dinners”), they present during meals, so the doctors can listen while eating and then bolt.

“Okay. I just hope nobody leaves,” I said, glancing around the room of happy, laughing women.

“Oh, no. We have extra guests here who came specifically to see you. They’re not leaving,” said Sally, the president, who was wearing a cool red jacket and gave me a hug.

They did stay. They applauded. They did the wave. They bought my books. And it just occurred to me that a few of them might be able to make it to my Fifty Shades of Grey’s Anatomy launch on April 1st at 10:30, at the Williamstown Library.

But they might be too busy saving the world. Please, keep saving the world. Cheers.

No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation. We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that’s fragile, that’s only one, it’s all we have.~Margaret Mead

Warning: Contains Me. In the Flesh.

Saturday, March 22nd, at 10:30 a.m. at the Alexandria Public Library

2 p.m. at the Cornwall Public Library

Jump to event page

terminally ill book launch poster with SDG & cornwall logos & kobo

I wasn’t going to do a book launch. It just seems to invite humiliation. I’m asking people to give up their precious time (on a Saturday!) to move their physical bodies (not just press Like!) to come see me, because I’ve done this archaic thing: write a book.

Brené Brown has written a lot about vulnerability, and I never understood why people got so excited about it, although this Zen Pencils cartoon kicks flying donkey eggs. I mean that as a compliment. Pow!

Then I realized that every time I write a book and publish it, every time I submit a story for publication, heck, every time I sit down at the computer to write, I risk failure and mortification. But I’m used to it. Each time I pick up a patient’s chart in the ER, I might screw the pooch.

I basically never wear white coats, except for author photos. And for this book launch!

I basically never wear white coats, except for author photos. And for this book launch! Photo by Jordan Matter

Raising kids? Ample opportunity for failure. (Side note: Anastasia broke our upstairs toilet by falling off of it while I was on the phone with the auto insurance agent. A. tells this story quite proudly. “I wanted to. I want to break the toilet!”)

melissayi_terminallyill_eBook_final with bleed and curlies

So if we’re “actually in the arena,…face…marred by dust and sweat and blood,” celebrating Terminally Ill, we are doing it balls out. Ovaries proudly on display. (That expression doesn’t work so well. But “ovaries lovingly nestled in our abdominal cavities” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. And this is more than any ol’ book launch.)

Mark Leslie Lefebvre will rock the casbah. Not only is he an author who has outsold Stephen King, the editor of Tesseracts 16, and the Director Self-Publishing & Author Relations at Kobo Inc., but he is a hilarious speaker and a genuinely nice guy driving all the way from Hamilton to attend. Mark flies around the world to speak and was just a guest instructor at the Superstars Writing Seminar, which costs up to $1499 in tuition. So if you have a novel tucked into your hard drive—or just in your brain, or your heart—please, please come and learn for free. I know that if no one shows up, I’m going to pick Mark’s brain mercilessly. So come on down and save his neurons.

If you just want to discover fresh new writing (readers! We love you!), Williamstown writer L.K. Below will read from one of her latest books. Lindsay writes everything from YA to romance and beyond. I once heard her sing a song she’d written for a musical about the Sirens. So I can’t wait to see what she’s up to.

Plus: door prizes! And music!

Even I’m getting excited!

One more exclamation mark: Publishers Weekly calls Terminally Ill “entertaining and insightful”! (http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-927341-23-0)

Montreal physician Hope Sze is looking for simple entertainment when she attends escape artist Elvis Serratore’s show, but when Elvis nearly dies in mid-act, Hope’s medical skills are available to save his life. She is less enthusiastic about his plea for her to use her detective skills to find out who tried to kill him by sabotaging his equipment. The subject of unwanted fame as a sleuth, Hope struggles with a too-complex love life, is faced with an ominous death at the hospital at which she works and becomes concerned about a young patient whose requests have deeply disturbing implications. She soon learns that if she does not seek out mysteries, the mysteries will seek her. The most recent installment in a series comprised thus far of three novels and a radio play, this novel demonstrates familiarity with the conventions of mysteries without being constrained by them and with the realities of Canada’s medical world. Although the tone is light, the author is not afraid to introduce darker themes. The three intertwining mysteries and Hope herself provide a narrative by turns entertaining and insightful. (Feb.)

 

    Goodreads Book Giveaway

        Terminally Ill by Melissa Yi

          Terminally Ill

          by Melissa Yi

            Giveaway ends March 06, 2014.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win


For anyone who can’t make it to our launch in the flesh (what, you don’t want to drive for six hours each way, like Mark? What’s wrong with you?), the Terminally Ill Goodreads Giveaway ends March 6th. Free, free, free!

 

I’ll give the last words to Elizabeth Gilbert, who speaks out on vulnerability:

“I live a creative life, and you can’t be creative without being vulnerable.  I believe that Creativity and Fear are basically conjoined twins; they share all the same major organs, and cannot be separated, one from the other, without killing them both. And you don’t want to murder Creativity just to destroy Fear!  You must accept that Creativity cannot walk even one step forward except by marching side-by-side with its attached sibling of Fear.

So here’s my magical thinking — I decide every day that I love Creativity enough to accept that Fear will always come with it. And I talk to Fear all the time, speaking to it with love and respect, saying to it: “I know that you are Fear, and that your job is to be afraid. And you do your job really well! I will never ask you to leave me alone or to be silent, because you have a right to speak your own voice, and I know that you will never leave me alone or be silent, anyhow.  But I need you to understand that I will always choose Creativity over you.”

So You Want to Write a Mystery…

IMG_1222

Will shoot for milk

I did a WritersFest workshop on writing mysteries. That was the idea, anyway. Actually, most people wanted to talk indie publishing and making money. It wasn’t until I checked my notepad later that I found some mystery craft questions, which I will answer here.

I also randomly picked a winner for the book draw. But because it was a mystery workshop, and I’m a pain the bum, I’ll announce the winner at the end of the post.

Question 1. How do you keep the protagonist hidden until mid-point?

I don’t. I like to have the protagonist, the main character, front and centre. In general, I don’t recommend hiding anything in a mystery.

Mystery readers are smart. They like to piece clues together. If you just hide information, they’ll throw your book across the room. So give them the information they need, but distract them while you’re doing this. It’s like the author’s a magician, saying, “Look at the hand, look at the hand,” and the audience is hypnotized by the bunny he pulled out of the hat and completely misses the knife he’s carrying in his left hand. Kris Rusch said that Ellery Queen is the best at this.

Or, to put it another way, check out this Daniel Simons’s awareness test video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo). The clues are always there. But the reader has to piece them together.

I’ve got to work on this myself.

Question 2 & 3. How do you plot your mysteries? How do you effectively incorporate plot twists into your book?

I like to write by the seat of my pants, surprising myself, and then I go backwards and try to braid it all together. Fun but inefficient.

If you’re more organized, I highly recommend Camille Laguire’s blog. This is my favourite post, about how to turn a missed phone call into a plot device. Brilliant: http://daringnovelist.blogspot.ca/2012/12/writing-cozy-mystery-twisting-your.html. She outlines plot here (http://daringnovelist.blogspot.ca/2013/06/plotting-game-movie-of-week-plot.html), comparing it to a movie of the week.

And now, moving on, since people may be tired of hearing about me (another secret of writing–don’t bore the reader):

Thanks to Jodi White for trekking all the way from Toronto to join in WritersFest, after I asked Kobo to participate. (How many corporations would do this, and donate five Kobos to give away? And did you know that for every e-book you buy on that Kobo, a portion of the sale will go to the local Coles bookstore in Cornwall, because they support indie booksellers?)

I also learned from Jodi that the best way to link to your book is through the ISBN, and that Kobo now has a separate children’s section, which just might help spike children’s book sales. They’ll also start a reader loyalty program next year.

Thanks to everyone who came to WritersFest. Time is valuable when you’re pursuing the writing dream. I especially thank those of you who spent your hard-earned money on my books (and in Linda’s case, at least three times). I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Finally, I just have to give a shout out to Joseline Beaulieu, a multi-talented tour de force who not only expertly teaches me yoga at Sunset Yoga, but also belly dances with sabres, has a degree in marine biology, and raises money for the Madagascar School Project. She came to the workshop and brought me a card, an armload of flowers, and a squash. A squash! How could you not love this woman? You’d be hard-pressed to create a character this unique!

Joseline Beaulieu, sabre dancing to raise money for Child Haven

Joseline Beaulieu, sabre dancing to raise money for Child Haven. That’s right, she puts us all to shame.

So now that I’ve kept you in suspense long enough, who won the book draw, based on a randomly selected number?

Congratulations, Judy S!