It’s March already. Riding the bike at the gym is deadly dull and boring. Also you don’t get the wind resistance and the hills. Time to get out there! Besides the spring flowers were out.
Snow DropsCrocuses
My very first ride was 10 km up and down the Beltline via Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. Not too bad, despite dodging ice patches and mud.
But then the snow storm started…
Next ride much better with the temps up +15 degrees. I was hot by the end of my 20 km with a rest stop in between at my fav cafe, Balzac’s in the Distillery District.
The Lower Don Valley trail is still shut. Many unhappy hikers and bikers who’ve inscribed on the notice: Give me back my park! and on the Danger sign: Danger due to Incompetence.
The Bayview Extension trail offers an OK alternative. At the lakeside, spotted a freighter being loaded with sugar.
I have no talent with plants, but here’s a weird story. Two Christmases ago, a friend gave me an amaryllis bulb.
It bloomed beautifully then shed a mess of red petals. I was ready to toss it in the compost bin when Ed, my husband, speculated about what would happen if we simply left it alone. OK, why not?
Far from dying, it grew a profusion of long green tulip-like leaves – and stayed that way. When the weather warmed up, I popped it outside on our upper deck. There it flourished: the ultimate boring plant.
Winter, back inside. Boring leaves persisted. Summer back out on the deck. No change. Finally though this fall, the flopping green leaves, by now 3 or 4 feet tall, began to die.
This is it, I thought, plucking off yet another rotting yellow leaf. The mundane end to our curiosity experiment. Out you go, time to rejoin the earth.
Then I noticed a strange oblong shape at the root. Could that be a bud? Damned if it wasn’t! The stem grew like a triffid several inches a day until – wham – four crimson flowers burst out of it.
Wham – four flowersYep, four, count them
Even stranger, yet another bud has appeared. What did I do right?
Yet another bud!
Turns out my neglect was just the right thing: loads of sunlight on the deck and dry soil from forgetting to water it.
I don’t usually read psychological thrillers so it was great to discover author, Miranda Rijks. And through the mundane route of an Amazon book recommendation, no less. I’ve now devoured two of her thrillers, The House Swap and Every Breath You Take, after purchasing both at a ridiculously low price that really discredits the quality of Rijks’s prose and her plotting.
What first intrigued me was the premise of The House Swap. A late friend of mine who was married to a professor often swapped houses with other professors when they vacationed in the UK. The British professor and their family lived in my friend’s Toronto house and she and her family lived in the British family’s house. Free accommodation – not bad!
All went well for my friend, but Rijk asks, what if the arrangement goes horribly wrong? From the house being a dump to hostile neighbours to murder? Great suspense and satisfying plot twists kept me reading well into the night.
Sorry, readers, no spoilers!
I hesitated only a minute to dive into another Rijks’s thriller, Every Breath You Take.Here the husband of the protagonist suddenly disappears. Soon she learns that he’s been kidnapped. To save his life, she must perform humiliating tasks set by the kidnapper and post them on social media. No one believes her, especially the police. Once again amazing suspense and a great twist I did not see coming.
Both books are published by Inkubator Books, a digital publisher specializing in crime fiction.
So who is Miranda Rijks? Good question. In 2016, she was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer in the middle of her successful business career. She survived 11 rounds of chemo and having her femur replaced. After recovering, she retired to pursue her lifelong dream to write – and write she has! In less than 10 years, she’s written no less than 26 novels; in other words two to three books a year!
Read more about Miranda Rijks here. And eat her books!!
Looking forward to the New Year with the publication of the Mesdames and Messieurs of Mayhem’s 7th anthology, The Power of 13. And possibly a novella from me!
Here’s to many more author events and adventures with fellow writers! Hope to meet many of you readers in the Real World in 2026.
I love both reading and writing noir crime fiction. When it comes to modern day noir authorts, it’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Sean Cosby’s work.
Cosby is a superb stylist, which makes his work a joy to read. More importantly, he give readers true insight into what it means to be African American in today’s USA. He also shares some unusual knowledge because his wife is a funeral director.
His protagonist, Nathan Waymaker, in My Darkest Prayer, worked for a funeral home. But that was a mere hint of what’s portrayed in his latest and what may be his toughest book yet: King of Ashes. You may learn more about crematoriums and the firing process than you every wanted to know!
The Carruthers’ family business is running the crematorium in the decayed town of Jefferson Run, Virginia. Many years before Mama Carruthers disappeared without a trace and ugly rumours about her demise and her husband’s hand in it persist. The eldest of the three children, Roman Carruthers, escaped to Florida where he’s now a highly successful financial manager of among other clients, “gangsta” rap artists. His sister, Neveah, is the one who’s left behind to run the family biz while younger brother, Dante, wastes away in dissipation.
When their father is badly injured in a car accident, Roman returns to help the family. He soon learns that Dante is mixed up with two ruthless local drug dealers – real and vicious gangsters, not rap wannabees. To save his brother, Roman tries to placate the gangsters by offering up his financial acumen and the darker benefits of the crematorium business…
Roman’s fall from grace is true noir and the deeply tragic twist at the end of the novel is unforgettable. This thriller may be too tough for readers who enjoy the lighter side of crime fiction but if you love noir, King of Ashes is a must-read.
Our grandson adores “Dad jokes”. Here’s one of his favs: How do you weigh a dragon? Depends on its scales.
Recently I was having a one-on-one dinner with my daughter. Fixing me with a gaze steeped in the superiority of youth, she asked: “What do you think of the chicken joke?”
Me: (thinking of grandson) You mean the old chestnut, Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.
Daughter: “Do you get it? I mean, really get it?”
Me: What’s to get? It’s Captain Obvious. Chickens are stupid. They follow their beaks across the road to the other side. If you don’t see the joke, you’re as dumb as the chicken.
Daughter: (deep sigh) No, think about it: the other side. What’s the other meaning of “The Other Side”?
Me: The hereafter?
Daughter: (convinced her mother is beyond help) Right!
Oh, so the real joke is about a suicidal chicken or a bird so brainless it’s about to become roadkill.
I’d honestly never thought about the irony inherent in “the other side”. Neither had my husband when I retold our conversation. Was there some deep philosophical meaning behind our misunderstanding the true joke? A denial of life’s mortality? Or a deep-seated faith in the superiority of humans to the idiot chickens we regularly eat?
Probably not. The sound you now hear is the whistle of the penny dropping through the decades stretching from the Jurassic Period of my childhood till now.
On the other hand, our daughter didn’t get the joke that made our grandson laugh his butt off:
Why couldn’t the bike stand up by itself? Because it was two tired.
The first inkling that I’d strayed from dark mystery into horror happened when the multi-genre conference, When Words Collide, put me on a horror fiction panel.
Horror – moi? I never watch horror movies, they’re far too intense. I hardly ever read horror fiction. Well, I have read Clive Barker’s masterpieces, but that’s about it! Somehow, somewhere my writing crossed over to the dark side.
What I learned from my fellow panelists at WWC is that the core of horror literature is fear.
So that was it! It had to be my novella, Snake Oil, the one about snakes and real estate agents, nominated for a CWC Award in 2018. Many people have a deep-seated fear of snakes.
I remember reading from Snake Oil at a Noir at the Bar event south of the border. My reading went pretty well, I thought, but the following day, a macho noir writer stopped me. You know the type: shaved head, muscular, loads of tattoos. He fixed me with a wary eye and said: “You – you’re the lady who wrote about snakes.”
Even the scariest dude can be undone by slithering reptiles apparently.
Looking through my stories and novellas, many do pivot on fear. In my most recently published story, “The Lost Diner” (Pulp Literature, Issue 47), an older woman driver strays off the main highway and pulls in to a deserted diner. Soon she ends up fighting for her life. The owners of the diner like to disappear customers who won’t be missed.
Isn’t this a primordial fear we all share? The fear of an unknown place where we are on our own and defenseless.
Even my comical stories, like “Must Love Dogs – or You’re Gone”, edge into darkness. (Published in GONE, Red Dog Press.) My heroine is forced into working off her murdered ex-husband’s debt at a doggy daycare. It’s either groom dogs or die! There she discovers that her ex used their dog, Flea, to smuggle diamonds into the USA, since Flea will eat anything. The resolution is a pretty dark fight at the edge of Niagara Falls…
Perhaps the difference is this: in noir fiction, the often violent characters remain in control though a bad outcome is often assured. In horror, the characters are not in control: they are frequently isolated and must battle through to an ending that promises to be bleak.
So what to do? Why not embark on a new adventure? And so, like Bilbo, I’m quite ready for a scary dive into the realm of horror writers!
When friend, Donna Carrick and I co-founded the Mesdames of Mayhem in 2013, little did we realize that our 13 member group would double in size and become a national organization. Nor did we foresee that we’d have a CBC documentary made about us and publish six anthologies, all with the brand of “13”. After all, thirteen has been our lucky number!
Every year stories in our antho’s have been nominated for the CWC Award of Excellence or the Derringer. Two of our stories have won :”The Outlier”, by Catherine Astolfo in 13 Claws (never trust a man what keeps pigs) and “Hatcheck Bingo” by Therese Greenwood in The 13th Letter (never underestimate hardworking women).
And so, we’re super-delighted to announce our seventh anthology, The Power of 13, with the theme of luck, fate, karma, chance, games of chance, deadly gambles…
Publication date September, 2026. Stand by for our spectacular cover reveal!!
Better to be busy than being a hermit and doom-scrolling!
October has been a crazy busy month with the book launches of three friends: Jon Redfern and his dark thriller, The Ogre Club; Lisa De Nikolits and her noir novel, Mad Dog and the Sea Dragon; and Lorna Poplak and her latest true crime book, On the Lam, which I also blurbed.
And lots of personal readings!
I started off with a reading at a Zoom meet-up held by the Short Mystery Fiction Society on October 8th. Then a wonderful evening as at Queer Noir at the Bar organized by friend, Hope Thompson, at the Black Eagle Pub, Toronto. I read the raunchy “karaoke strip night” passage from my thriller, Windigo Fire, one of my personal favs.
Tonight I’ll be reading from my horror short story, “Snake Oil” at Drunk Fiction, organized by Emily A. Weedon, a Halloween special held at the Caledonian pub, Tuesday, October 28th at 6 pm.
It’s March already. Riding the bike at the gym is deadly dull and boring. Also you don’t get the wind resistance and the hills. Time to get out there! Besides the spring flowers were out.
