I wrote “The God’s Eye” in a notebook during my regular train commute to my corporate job with a book retail company in downtown Toronto. For the most part, I squeezed it in during the ride home, when I had a better chance of getting a seat, instead of standing and trying to keep my balance without bumping into anyone else crowded around me.

Other than some really early (and unpublished) work, “The God’s Eye” is the only piece I ever wrote by hand before transcribing it. Everything else I’ve done has been typed directly into some kind of device.

I didn’t do this out of any kind of romantic notion. It was just easier to slip a small notebook into my bag, instead of lugging around a laptop. (Even when I did get a seat on the train, I had to stay on my tiptoes to keep my knees from banging against the person sitting across from me.)

“The God’s Eye” came to me as an idea story—something that stood apart from anything else I was working on. For as long as I can remember, my husband (Mark) has told me to write short stories in addition to my novels. Up until around this point, I usually responded by telling him I wasn’t good at writing short stories (despite having won a local contest in my teenage years with a fantasy short). Besides, fantasy lends itself to sweeping, epic books, not measly short stories, right? (lol)

In a partial effort to prove him wrong, I wrote another fantasy short story called “The Unclean” and submitted it to a couple of larger writing contests (which is a whole other story). Anyway, after “The Unclean” placed third in the Writers’ Journal annual fiction contest, Mark seemed to have some ground to stand on.

So I thought maybe I would see whether that win was a fluke. Continue reading →