For Thomas Chamberlain, the community he’s found in New Brunswick writers and in the programs offered by the WFNB has been the key to help him turn an isolated hobby into a craft, and launched his second act as a novelist.

This year, he’s received a book contract for a novel (working title, Happenstance) he began writing many years ago as a teaching tool for his English students. Not bad for a person who never considered himself to be a writer. His novel will be published by Galleon Press in October, 2025.

In 2023, Thomas submitted his novel excerpt to the David Adams Richards Prize for Fiction Manuscript (DAR prize), and won an Honourable Mention, which was a huge surprise. He was not expecting that outcome, and decided to attend the literary soiree, which presents the awards to the winners and gives them opportunity to read from their winning pieces. “When I went to WordSpring that year in Saint John, I was shocked and amazed at the quality and pedigree of the writers, and the writing that my manuscript was competing against. I had no idea. I thought it would be just like a bunch of amateur writers who wrote stories. But it wasn't like that at all. That’s when I figured I had something. It was a big tipping point for me.”

The writers he met that evening (WFNB members John Hanson and Trent Pomeroy) offered to read some of his work and gave their ideas and guidance. They became friends, and encouraged him to join local writers’ groups, to read at open mics and learn at workshops. Zev Bagel, managing editor of Merlin Star Press, gave him some pointers when Thomas brought his work to a WFNB Blue Pencil Café. With this growing circle of writers surrounding him, he made good progress, and they told him that the next step was to hire an editor, who would help him make his manuscript submission-ready. He hired Lee Thompson, and after ten weeks of rewrites, the manuscript was ready to re-submit to the DAR prize in 2024, and this time, he won second prize.

The 2024 judge, Newfoundland and Labrador author, Trudy Morgan-Cole, passed her congratulations on to Thomas upon hearing that his work would be published. “This is wonderful news,” she said. “I really loved all three of the winners, and I'm looking forward to seeing this one in book form - I felt the most suspense about this one - I wanted to know how it turned out!”

With a lifelong career as a math and English teacher, Thomas underplays his early writing experiences. “I did a little bit of writing in the eighties and nineties for the local paper, and I wrote an article for an outdoor magazine [now defunct], called Eastern Woods and Waters, but nothing of this magnitude.”

His first foray into writing longer projects was a memoir about school teaching that he began 15 years ago. He received some feedback and encouragement from the well-known author Gerard Beirne, an Irish writer who lived in New Brunswick for several years and served as writer‐in‐residence at the University of New Brunswick and as an editor of The Fiddlehead. (His son, Luke, is also an author and WFNB member, living in Saint John.) “Gerry told me I was writing roughshod all over the English language, but that I was telling a great story,” Thomas laughed, “so he helped me organize the manuscript.”  Dreamcatcher Publishing, a press in Saint John at the time, showed an interest, but the owner passed away suddenly, and Dreamcatcher subsequently folded before Thomas’s memoir could be published. “I kind of lost interest after that.”

But Happenstance was birthed several years ago as a bit of writing on a smartboard that students in Thomas’s English class would read, and they responded so well to his female main character, Darby, that he decided to continue to use her as a teaching tool. The character’s story began to grow and percolate in his mind. Over a couple of years, he decided on a plot and took about a year to write the first draft. He continued to use his work as a teaching tool until his retirement.

A few years later, Thomas’s partner Denise, “who is a100-books-a-year reader,” asked him about his reading habits. He said, “well, I do read, not as much as you--but I wrote a novel once.” After reading, she suggested that he enter it in the New Brunswick Writing Competition, and another friend, Saint John poet and WFNB member Melanie Craig Hansford, gave him advice on how to submit his manuscript. And the rest, as they say, is history.

After getting his novel submission-ready and sending the queries off to publishers, he received many rejections, but Lee Thompson, publisher of Galleon, contacted him again. “He said he couldn’t get the story out of his head, and they would be interested in taking it on if I was interested, which of course, I was.”

In the end, Thomas believes that winning that first Honourable Mention provided validation: it made him believe that he belonged to the community of writers and the win gave him the confidence and freedom to seek help from others and improve his work.

He realizes that the romantic image of a writer, sitting in his or her basement and writing a perfect manuscript from the beginning, never happens. “Seems like the only isolated part for me was writing the first draft. After that it was help, help, help, advice, advice, rewrite, advice, advice -- the first year was the easy part.”

The 2025 NB Writing Competition is open to submissions in eight categories for New Brunswick authors until March 31 (Wfnb.ca/Writing-Competition).

The natural thing when speaking to a writer with Valerie’s track record is to ask for a bit of advice on the craft. She advised to simply keep writing: listen for the voice of the story. Pursue it, until the end of the story presents itself.

Look for beginnings and endings in the body of your project.

“Some people know how a story is going to end before they write the first word, while I have just the vaguest idea. Most of my stories are character driven. When I start writing, the characters are quite well developed, but the stories are barely developed—It's almost like a theme more than a plot. I usually have a general idea of how it's going to end, but it's a loose idea. And if I did not write the ending until I was 100% sure how to do that, there would probably be a lot of unfinished work here on my computer.”

Rather than struggle to get the powerful opening paragraph right, she suggests looking for the beginning somewhere in the first few pages. “At least for me, I also find the ending in the right place. If you just keep writing, listening to the voice of the story, all of a sudden, you'll just know.”

Capture ideas before they evaporate.

Valerie writes ideas down as they come to her. In the days before smart phones, she dug around for a scrap of paper and pen in her handbag when lightning struck. The biggest danger, she says, is to not capture them. “It's easy now because you could just say it into your phone. Capture them right away. I've yelled out from the shower to my husband, ‘write this down!’”

Be consistent with your writing time.

In the early days, Valerie would take two or three months to write a young adult book, which explains her long list of published works. These days she isn’t quite so driven, “but I do try to write something every day. I'm more inclined now to look deeper and see where things aren't working.”

Kill your Darlings.

Valerie’s trusted editor once sent her a note regarding her writing. “He said, ‘I can see the author in this.’ That was the first time he ever said that to me, and I knew immediately what he meant.” Trying to be impressive with language did not serve the story. “The words that we get so enamored actually ruin things because it's just not the authentic natural voice of the story coming through. “

The Specific Challenge of Writing for Young People.

Valerie believes the way a story reaches readers and touches them, how they connect to the writing, is the measure of its importance.

“I think that's the challenge in writing for young people. You must make sure that you're connecting with them in a way that is relatable. I guess that's true for any kind of fiction, except that when you're writing for young people, you've got a very short window of opportunity to reach that child at that time with that story and be able to connect with the child in some way.”

Buy Canadian!

It’s unfortunate that Canada has a terrible habit of loading their schools and libraries with American books, Valerie says. “The percentage of books that are Canadian authored in schools, is abysmally low. I do know so many Canadian authors who write for young people whose work is amazing. There's no shortage of good, solid work by Canadians that never get picked up. It's very hard to make a living, you know, and we're very much overshadowed by American culture.”

Challenge yourself!

Valerie has written a couple of books in free verse. Counting Back from Nine (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2012), was already written in prose and submitted to publisher, when she approached the editor. “I’d like to rewrite this in free verse,” she said. Her editor agreed to let her try.  “I had a few sobby days when I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing,” she says, but overall, the experiment was worth it. Later, she wrote Standing on Neptune (DCB Young Readers, 2023), which was a completely different experience, since that story “was pulled out of thin air” rather than extracted from prose. The challenges that come from trying new forms can keep you interested in your projects.

Don’t write for the money…

Nobody should become a writer because they think it's going to lead to great riches, Valerie says with a laugh. “Chances are that it absolutely is not, and I have a large body of work and a certain degree of success, with positives from the critics. I do nothing that even remotely resembles earning a living, I just don't. I'm willing to,” she says with a wink.

…Write for the Joy.

If you don't love the creating part of writing, even the difficult parts that you're slogging through, it’ll be too easy to give up. “For most people that I've spoken to, including me whenever I'm writing a story, I get about two-thirds of the way through the book, and then I think, ’This is garbage. Nobody in their right mind would ever want to read this, it’s just trash.’

There's a certain weariness that can overwhelm a writer and threatens to make a person lose faith. “You can become dispirited,” Valerie says. “The only thing that can cure that is to put it away for a week or two and then pick it up again. It will give you a good boost to your confidence because you'll see what you loved about it, all of its strengths—you’ll find them again.”

The Toronto-based publisher, Dundurn Group, has recently produced a new print run of WFNB member Valerie Sherrard’s 2007 young adult novel, Three Million Acres of Flame, to commemorate the 200^th anniversary of the Great Miramichi Fire of 1825.

We chatted with Valerie about her long and successful writing career, a recent prestigious award win, and why she thinks the solution to having trouble finishing a manuscript is to simply keep writing.

***

IF you ask Valerie Sherrard if writers are born or made, she’ll say it’s a little bit of both. The signs of raw talent in Valerie’s life were evident by middle school, but the recipe which produced her impressive career required more ingredients that just natural interest and ability. Here are some of the elements that build a writer:

A nurturing formative environment.

“I think that people know if they have stories to tell and if they have the desire to do it right. And I think that's born in you—not everybody wants to tell stories. However, I think that we are influenced probably from a very young age, a growth that’s fostered in your childhood. It’s obvious that you’re born with it, and you develop it.”

Reading was always a big deal in Valerie’s house. Her parents read voraciously, especially poetry, and it taught Valerie to love the way stories were told, and to hear the rhythm and flow of words. Now, she can recognize if a sentence is falling flat. “I know it because it doesn't have something—there’s a pulse to the story that, you know, is missing?”

A champion who recognizes and encourages raw talent.

When Valerie was a kid, she used to amuse herself by playing pretend with an imaginary friend. But her affinity for imaginary play gradually progressed to the written word. When Valerie’s grade six teacher, Mr. Lower, read a writing assignment, he was impressed.

“Valerie, this is really good,” Mr. Lower said. “You could be a writer someday.”

His encouragement had an instant, powerful effect. “I can’t even describe for you…I can still feel that moment, almost frightened, trembling. That was the first time in my recollection that anybody ever told me I was good at anything.”

Mr. Lower encouraged her to continue writing for extra-curricular activities like poetry for the Christmas play, or working on the junior high newsletter, and by the end of the school year, her path was set in her mind. “I’m going to be a writer someday,” she said to herself.

Valerie remembered him in one of her early books. “It says, ‘This book is dedicated with love and thanks to my Grade 6 teacher, Alf Lower, for planting the seed that grew.” Valerie visited him in Ontario during her book tours and travels, and she was happy to be able to thank him for his early confidence which hummed and percolated through her self-perception.

Rich lifetime experiences.

“We have ideas, and then life comes along, and you know: it’s finish school, get married, have jobs and have children. It seemed like I was always busy. I was in my late thirties I guess, when I took stock a little bit. I said, if I'm gonna write a book, I better do it now.”

By this time, Valerie had begun fostering teenagers (she and her husband fostered seventy teenagers over the years), and for 12 years, she also worked as the Executive director of a group home in Miramichi. “I had spent a lot of time around young teenagers, and it just seemed like a natural fit when I started to write for that age group.”

Hard work and discipline at the right time.

Valerie began rising in the early morning to write for a couple of hours before her regular day began, when her daughter was about 13. “Something woke up in me,” she said. “If someone forced me now, it would have to be at gunpoint, but back then, I got up every morning at five and I made a cup of coffee or tea and came to my computer.”

Valerie’s first manuscript was about a girl with an inoperable brain tumour, and she was planning to kill her off at the end of the story. She approached her daughter Pam to read the first few chapters and thought Pam’s reaction would tell her if she was moving in the right direction.

Pam agreed to read her chapters, and a few days later, she returned the pages to her mother and said, “more.”

When the draft was complete, she mailed three chapters, a cover letter and synopsis to 18 Canadian publishers who publish books for young people. She received a response from three. An editor from Dundurn Group really liked it, but the board felt that, though the book was humorous, it was too dark a story to publish straightaway. But Valerie had another idea.

“Because of my work with young people, I had exposure to their different issues, and some of the background experiences that are often behind their negative behaviors and choices.” She sent the editor a note, offering to write a mystery series about crimes committed by a young person, because of something that happened to them. The editor liked that idea. “So I wrote the first story called Out of the Ashes, and it's about a girl who's a fire setter.”

Valerie explained that often, young people who set fires have been victims of sexual abuse. Her writing regularly deals with heavy subjects, but she does so without graphic descriptions.

Dundurn responded in only a couple of weeks after receiving the finished manuscript. Out of the Ashes (Dundurn, 2002) turned out to be the first of six books in Valerie’s Shelby Belgarden mystery series for middle graders. Out of the Ashes was short-listed for the Arthur Ellis Award and the Red Maple Award (Ontario).

“I was mildly excited,” she says, laughing. “It was just such a thrilling thing. ‘I'm actually going to have a book published?!”

By then Valerie had written the second book in the Shelby series, called In Too Deep, which. Dundurn signed right away. In Too Deep was published in 2003, followed by her original manuscript, Kate, the same year.

“Kate was the first book I wrote, but it was the third one I published. It did really well. In fact, I think I received more email, from readers about Kate than anything else I've ever written.”

Since that time, Valerie has published 34 books with a variety of publishers, including Three Million Acres of Flame (Dundurn, 2007), a historical novel about the Great Miramichi Fire of 1825. Dundurn has created a new print run of the book in honour of the 200^th anniversary of this little-known piece of New Brunswick, pre-Confederation history. The Miramichi Fire burned one-fifth of the province to the ground overnight, wiping out whole communities, and killing 160 people.

In her prolific career, Valerie has won or been shortlisted for at least 50 awards, including being the most recent winner of the prestigious Lieutenant Governor’s Award for High Achievement in the Arts. Valerie has the distinction of being the first children’s author named to this award, and it was particularly special because it referenced her entire body of work.

“I hope my win inspires a lot of other people to consider writing for young people. We have some remarkably good children's writers here in New Brunswick. There are people that have achieved things that I haven't... Like Riel Nason, for example, who won the Commonwealth Award for her first book (The Town that Drowned, Goose Lane, 2011). This is a fantastic, magical thing!”

For self-published, or “indie” authors, there are different paths that lead to that prized product: the published book. Before deciding which path to take, here is one of many considerations to ponder.

It is easy enough to draft your book, have it professionally edited (please), formatted and placed for sale in print or e-book. Where do you want to see this book sold? Here’s where the pondering happens. If you’re content with selling online, a massive river to float your finished project on might be fine. Seller beware: if you want your book to be sold on a shelf in a local bookstore, you may want to do your homework before deciding on your production path.

It’s one thing to include that big old river among your distribution avenues, being published by that same river may close the door at some of the great local stores you enjoy browsing for books yourself. Indie bookstores, like indie authors are not “chain-linked”. I’ve recently conducted a small survey with the concurrence of the WFNB BoD, asking locally-owned bookstores whether they’ll accept for consignment books published by Amazon (there, I said it. Don’t sue me, Jeff). Of those bookstores that replied, the answers were not unanimous. While some will accept books by local authors who are published by Amazon, others will not.

In short, my advice to you who are reading this is not to cancel your production plan, whatever it may be, but to check with those stores you’d like to see your book in beforehand, and make an informed decision. To the local stores who feel Jeff makes enough money from his river, I fully support the in-store policy, as I also support the stores that welcome such books nonetheless.

Many years ago, WFNB member Dusty Phillips was a serious practitioner of Tai Chi living in Toronto. He remembers that his instructor tried to convince him to settle in the city, saying that it was important to “set roots.”

“I thought that was an odd piece of advice,” Dusty says, “but it stuck with me.”  Born and raised in Saskatchewan, Dusty moved around a lot as an adult to work at various positions. When travelling through the Maritimes in 2009, he found the region to be a hidden gem. “It was this very intuitive sense. I feel like I was connected to New Brunswick specifically, and I don’t know why.”

Eight years later, Dusty and his wife Jen, an American citizen, moved to New Brunswick from Seattle in early 2017.  “Now, what I like to do here is plant trees, which is a very New Brunswick thing to do! I am literally setting roots.”

Now based in the Saint John region, Dusty is a software developer whose experience in the tech industry ranges from working for large organizations like World Intellectual Property Organization (United Nations), and Facebook, to a host of small start-ups. Through the course of his career, he’s written three nonfiction books on programming languages ((Python Object-Oriented Programming, Packt Pub Ltd., 2009, now in its fourth edition, Creating Apps in Kivy, O’Reilly Media, 2014, and Lazy VIM for Ambitious Developers, 2024).

But it was through the process of writing his first novel that he realized the need for an application like Fablehenge, which released in June, 2024. What began as a hobby project during the pandemic has developed into a subscription-based writing platform that provides better tools to keep worldbuilding notes organized and close at hand.

The idea began when Dusty’s wife Jen, a former editor, reviewed his novel manuscript and listened to him complain about how troublesome it was to keep track of all the story elements. “She said, ‘it sounds like you need Facebook for your book.’ And I was like, that’s exactly what I need!’ So that is what we tried to build with Fablehenge.”

Up until the creation of Fablehenge, there were only three digital tools for writers on the market: Google Docs, Microsoft Word or Scrivener, the latter being the only one dedicated to organizing a story.  “But I am personally more of a discovery writer—a pantser than a plotter,” Dusty said, “and I found that Scrivener was not organizing me in the way that I wanted it to.”

He wanted to create a product that was as easy to use as social media and would allow a writer to bridge the gap between discovery writing and the process of plotting or outlining. It needed to make it easy to switch back and forth between those two writing styles. “Every outliner and every discovery writer will tell you, ‘Yes indeed, sometimes I switch to the other style. I outline my plot and discovery-write my characters,’ is a common phrase.”

Fablehenge supports the full spectrum of writing styles, whether a plotter begins from the start with an outline, or discovery writers who’d rather begin right in the main document. “Who just start writing…the most pantsiest way to do it,” he laughs.

But eventually, even pantsers need to get organized. “We’ve made it very easy to split your existing document into scenes, and this is the basic unit where Fablehenge is really helpful. It allows you to attach—we call them tags, like a tag in a social network – to each scene.”

Using these tags, you can easily see all scenes that a character inhabits, or the scenes connected to a subplot, etc. And you can tag characters to a scene before the scene has even been written.

Instead of character sheets, writers have the option to freestyle it or ask themselves some prefilled prompts, so that they can be referred to as the writing progresses. Everything is designed to not interrupt the writer’s productivity. “If you stop in mid-sentence and wonder, ‘what colour was this person’s eyes again?’ that information can be quickly located without having to switch to a different screen or anything.” More detailed information is only a couple of clicks away.

“We also have drag and drop reordering, to make it easy to move your scenes around either before or after. We didn’t want to completely emulate the Scrivener card cube because it’s a little bit too complicated, so we went for something simpler.”

Dusty and Jen launched the “alpha” version (first days of software testing) in 2021, and with some dedicated user feedback, continued to develop this subscription product until its production release in June 2024. Since then, they’ve been ramping up marketing and are continuing to refine the product. You can sign up for a free version just to try it out, and if you’re sold on it, there are a couple of paid subscription packages that offer a few more features.

The user list so far is modest but growing, and it’s exciting for them to notice when an anonymous account switches to a logged in account. They have local users, but there are also pockets of users in the U.S. and Australia.

New features they’ve just started working on include a writing group concept – where users can share scenes and chat about them.  The application is not fully internationalized yet, so they haven’t been able to support French speaking or other language users, but that is a priority.

So for now, Fablehenge is looking for dedicated authors who will try out the application and talk about it. “Our ambition would be that someone would say in the acknowledgement section of their bestseller that we helped contribute to that,” Dusty says. “That would be a delightful thing to read. I would pay for that book, whatever it was about!”