News/Blog - Marie-Claude Arnott

The news is that Writing Is Living is now home to my book.

Running a website is like gardening. You begin with a seed of an idea, and then it grows and multiplies.

My book was still a draft when I created my website. I was still honing my craft: learning from proficient writers, taking workshops, and attending symposiums, for example. I share my experiences in News/Blog as another way to assimilate them. As Albert Einstein said: “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

My book still had a working title when it began to take flight to agents and publishing houses. Then something clicked, and it landed at Tule Publishing Group, and a new learning curve began.

Biography of a Friendship was released on March 14th, 2024.

Join that Zoom Meeting for Writers!

It was 5 am in Jerusalem and 8 pm Vancouver local time on November 2nd, 2021 when Rena Rossner joined the North Shore Writers Association, for a Zoom meeting.

I didn’t even have to go anywhere, yet I wasn’t sure I’d join at first. I may have Jewish friends, but I don’t write fiction… →

The Query Countdown

The countdown has begun. On September 4th, I sent a query to four of the first twenty agents I had selected out of my initial list of 50. Replies may come within 4-6 weeks unless I get none. A no reply means either implicit rejection or my submission is still among the hundreds of queries an agent.. →

Working on My Book Proposal

All I have been doing in the past weeks is working on my book proposal, the one I wrote more than a year ago. Since then, learning and practice have helped me identify the mistakes I had made, then.

A book proposal is like a business plan. It will either convince agents to read my manuscript.. →

What Is a Memoir?

Memoir is a writing genre that is often misunderstood. It is not an autobiography, as per my Interview of a Memoirist published in WordWorks (pages 21-25), the magazine of the Federation of British Columbia Writers. You can also read that article in Other Stories.

A memoir is not a biography,.. →

The Power Of Accountability

Ah, the power of accountability if only to oneself.

Out of frustration one day, I wrote down my mental roadblocks about the memoir I had finally completed. It forced me to review how I got to those roadblocks, to ask myself questions, and to think of a course of action. Before I knew it, I.. →

Welcome to my website!

Who said, “Never say never”? I had to look it up. Charles Dickens coined the phrase in 1837, in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers.

I was working on a memoir – then – knowing I needed a website yet resisting it. As if the digital world needed just one more… Besides, I was.. →