December 2025 Blog
Book Nook
This month I pay tribute to Wanda Drury (October 1952-December 2025), a blog subscriber and my dear friend for the last fifty years. Wanda was an avid reader who always kept a notebook handy. As she read, she’d make a list of unfamiliar words, which she’d later look up in a dictionary. One day several years ago she phoned me and asked if I knew the meaning of the word petrichor. I didn’t then, but I do now! It appears in the final chapter of Grounds for Murder. After a night of rain following a prolonged drought, Jeannie awakes to air “redolent with petrichor—that wonderful earthy smell of rainfall on warm, dry ground” (266). I’ve used that word many times since then and always think fondly of Wanda when I do. Rest in peace, my friend.
My big achievement in December was completing a major rewrite of A Clear-Cut Case. I cut scenes, combined scenes, reordered scenes, and added news scenes. Deleted one character. Revised the ending. And polished the prose. The resulting manuscript, I think, is much improved. Despite (or perhaps because of??) the loss of almost 12,000 words. Ouch! Now I have to complete a final reread before sending if off for a Saskatchewan Writers Guild manuscript evaluation. (Thank-you, Meredith!) Then a final round of revisions before sending it to a publisher.
In the meantime, I have much to do. My husband and I are buying an apartment condo at Wolf Willow Cohousing in Saskatoon. We will keep our farmstead for now and plan to garden there this summer, but it still feels like a radical step. I have spent most of my life on this farm and am strongly attached to both our house and our land. They are the setting for Grounds for Murder and A Clear-Cut Case. We want to re-establish ourselves in the city, however, when we are still young enough to make that task possible. Hence the transitional move this coming February.
The setting for my next novel, then, will come as no surprise. I can’t be more specific yet, but at least some of the action will take place in Saskatoon.
