It’s my pleasure to host my former partner in crime (at Crime Writers of Canada), Winona Kent, who has just released a fabulous short story collection titled Ten Stories That Worried My Mother (how’s that for an attention grabber?). But it seems my pal Nona has had a turn or two at being distracted. She’s here today to talk about that and a few other things. Take it away, Nona!

For all of my writing life, I’ve had to work full-time in other occupations. In spite of that, I managed to get eight novels and a number of short stories out there and in print. Two years before I turned 65, I started a countdown clock on my phone. It was a lovely little app – it told me all the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and even seconds until I could retire and finally – FINALLY – become a full-time writer.

That magic moment came in October 2019. I launched myself into my newfound creative freedom with incredible zeal, celebrating everything to do with being able to devote my best productive hours to my own work, instead of someone else’s. Over the past four years, I’ve published two more novels and written three more short stories which have appeared in respected anthologies. One of them was long enough to be chosen as a finalist in the Crime Writers of Canada’s Awards of Excellence for Best Crime Novella.

I’ve just released an anthology of nearly all of those short stories. And I’m working on Novel #11 (the fifth instalment of my Jason Davey Mystery series).

This fifth mystery is turning out to be a bit of a challenge. It starts out with a suicide, which, in itself, is a daunting topic…but it’s also a more thoughtful and different kind of story from the previous four Jason adventures.

And I’ve found that, after four years of flat-out writing, promoting, advertising, book-signings and everything else that goes with the business of authorship…I’m getting distracted. It’s quite worrying, actually. Am I avoiding work? (gasp) Is it a symptom of getting old? (I’ll be 69 in a couple of weeks – not really OLD, but, you know…not really that young anymore.) Am I burning out? (How do those writers who produce at least two novels a year AND seem to live permanently on social media do it?) Or am I just revelling in the availability of information that I didn’t have the time to explore when I was a slave to all those jobs that weren’t related to my writing at all?

I spend the first two hours after I wake up each morning reading news. I use Google News and the BBC so I get a nice selection of sources – respected (and not so respected) newspapers, agencies, tv and radio. Three countries: Canada, the US and of course the UK, which is where Jason Davey is based.

But then…I start following threads of information. For instance, I saw a BBC story about a famous “wonky” pub that had suspiciously caught fire – and I remembered reading about that pub sometime in the past – so, of course, I had to follow up on it, and because I love uncovering the history of buildings, I went on a long search to track down stories and pictures of the place when it was a farmhouse centuries ago and had subsided four feet on one side due to mining in the area…and that led me to social media in search of peoples’ postings about the fire but instead, I saw something about a London Underground map for people who were colour-blind – it’s all in black and white with various patterns replacing the colours. And that led me to Transport for London which has SO MANY MAPS that are designed for SO MANY DIFFERENT PURPOSES…of course I had to explore those and then download the ones I knew would be useful for me as I sent Jason investigating things around London. And then, going back to social media, I saw a post by someone whose dad had taken pictures of England in the 1960s. He was contrasting the old with the new, just as the Beatles were gaining prominence, and I HAD to look at that because I remembered London in the 1960s when I was there as a child – and the existence, still, of bombsites from WW2…

Perhaps, really, I just have the naturally inquisitive mind of a writer. And that of a lifelong learner. And of someone who never misses an opportunity to use what they’ve learned – or observed – in a work of fiction.

Which leads me back to my new anthology. The first six stories were written before the internet, when I had to rely on my memory, dusty old card catalogues, periodical indexes and microfilm in libraries, and my own personal experiences as reference points. The last four were written after the internet arrived, and my world expanded exponentially. Time-travel romance set in London in the Swinging Sixties? I grew up in the 1960s but it was incredibly helpful to be able to reconfirm what I remembered and actually see photos of those World War 2 bomb sites…and the actual clothes that people like Patti Boyd and Mary Quant were wearing, and what Carnaby Street looked like in those glorious years. That shortlisted story featuring Jason when he was still working aboard a cruise ship in Alaska? So useful to be able to track down the history and pictures of the ship I based the Star Sapphire on. (It was the Empress of Canada, and I sailed on one of her last transatlantic voyages in 1971…She eventually became the Mardi Gras, Carnival Cruise Lines’ first ship).

The anthology is called Ten Stories That Worried My Mother. And while she would probably have been one of the first people to assume that my “distractiveness” was folly…I know better. I am a writer. And, for me, no distractions are ever a waste of time. They’re opportunities to learn and to soak up all that knowledge I had to abandon when I was NOT working as a full-time writer.

Winona Kent is an award-winning author who was born in London, England and grew up in Saskatchewan, where she completed her BA in English at the University of Regina. After moving to Vancouver, she graduated from UBC with an MFA in Creative Writing and a diploma in Writing for Screen and TV from Vancouver Film School. Winona has been a temporary secretary, a travel agent, a screenwriter, the Managing Editor of a literary magazine and a Program Assistant at the University of British Columbia. She’s currently the BC/Yukon Representative and Vice Chair of the Crime Writers of Canada and is an active member of Sisters in Crime – Canada West. She lives in New Westminster, where she is happily embracing life as a full-time author. Find her at  http://www.winonakent.com.

Ten Stories That Worried My Mother (Four prize-winners, three mysteries, two previously unpublished works and one where the hero manages to spare-change John Lennon at the premiere of A Hard Day’s Night in 1964) by Winona Kent was published August 22, 2023. FIND THE BOOK AT https://books2read.com/Ten-Stories