Category: My Posts

This is the name of this category until I figure out a better one.

My Posts

Braco Blog Tour

lesleyanne7 Comments

A few weeks ago, my debut novel Braco abawas nominated for the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award. I was thrilled to learn of the nomination and plan to be in Halifax on May 16th when the winner is announced at the Atlantic Book Awards.

As Braco is a deeply personal story to me, I’m grateful others have connected with Atif’s story as well. I’m fortunate in that I’m surrounded by an incredibly supportive writing community and wish I could take them with me. As such, they’re giving me a pretty impressive send off.

In the time running up to the awards, some local writers have been kind enough to host me on a blog tour. My very first! What a strange new world we’ve embarked on. The tour will give you an opportunity to learn more about myself and my novel, and at the end, I will have two signed copies of Braco to give away. We will ask a question at the last stop on May 15th and draw for the two winners from a hat. The answer will be found in one of the tour posts.

The blog schedule is as follows:

17 April 2013 – Kate Robbins

24 April 2013 – Paul Butler

1 May 2013 – Michelle Butler-Hallett

8 May 2013 – Rati Mehrotra

15 May 2013 – Valerie Francis

This is all new to me and I’m excited to see it all come together. A heartfelt thanks goes out to the bloggers who will host me and I hope you can join us.

My Posts

Why I wrote Braco

lesleyanne5 Comments

When I started to write Braco, a lot of people were interested in where I came up with the idea for the book. It’s a personal story that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to tell, but the response has been so positive, I decided to include it in my readings.

Srebrenica is a small Bosniak town located close to the Serbian border about eighty kilometres east of Sarajevo. Before the war, the town had a population of six thousand with 60% identifying themselves as Bosnian Muslim/Bosniak and 30% as Bosnian Serb. (Today, the population is 95% Bosnian Serb).

When the war broke out in 1992, the town was quickly surrounded by the Bosnian Serb army and the Bosniak population in the town swelled to over 50,000. With little aid making its way through the Serb lines, a humanitarian crisis developed. Thousands lived under blankets in the streets in sub-zero temperatures. People killed each other over food. Disease was rampant, and through the winter of 92-93, the Serb army continued to shell the town from the surrounding hills. It was only a matter of time before this caught the attention of the world press. Continue reading “Why I wrote Braco” →

My Posts

Quick Press

lesleyanne9 Comments

I’ve been a bit quiet since getting home from the surgery two weeks ago, and while recovering physically has been going very smoothly, my head has been a bit sluggish. Nothing horrendous but enough to make it hard to write a lot. Someone suggested that it could be a side-effect of the anesthesia, and sure enough, I googled it and this kind of sluggishness is not unusual, especially the older we are when we have surgery. And I’m no spring chicken. The good news is that it should fade over the next few weeks.

So, I’m taking this opportunity to experiment a little with Word Press and I’m trying out the Quick Press function.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of my cat, Shadow.

Shadow

She’s letting me know what she thinks of the new hairball treats.

Happy Vitamin C Day!

😀

My Posts

Shortlisted!

lesleyanne2 Comments

Well, I just got back from hospital after a minor surgery and just wanted to drop a quick note to say that Braco has been shortlisted for the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award at the Atlantic Book Awards! I am thrilled. Absolutely thrilled!

And delighted to see fellow Breakwater author Joan Sullivan also nominated for the Rogers Communication Award for Non Fiction for In the Field.

You can read the press release here.

Looking forward to the Awards ceremony in Dartmouth on May 16th.

🙂

My Posts

Web Presence II

lesleyanne1 Comment

Well, I said I’d finish the weekend with a full head and I was right. It’s Thursday, so it took four days for my head to empty. The two day course on Digital Marketing for Authors was presented by Ross Laird who flew in from BC. That meant, with the time change and the switch to DST, he got up around 1 or 2 am, BC time, on Sunday morning. We appreciated the sacrifice.

He started the weekend by determining the level of “geekiness” of the participants. He even defined a geek for us as someone who chooses “concentration over conformity in the pursuit of knowledge and imagination.” He asked us who knew what www, html and http meant and most got that. He lost us all at CSS. We were level 3 out of 10 on the geek scale. Continue reading “Web Presence II” →