Lessons from the ER: How Melissa Yi Balances Writing and Medicine


SF Canada member Melissa Yi, an emergency room physician and author, discusses how she balances being a writer and part-time doctor on the latest Kobo Writing Life Podcast . She discusses how her work experiences have made their way into her Hope Sze Medical Mystery Series and she shares some of her favourite emergency room stories.

The Kobo Writing Life Podcast shares free insights and inspiration for self-published writers. It features interviews with bestselling authors and industry experts, who share practical writing advice.

Melissa Yi is an award-winning writer. In her newest crime novel, Death Flight, Dr. Hope Sze boards an airplane with the love of her life—and a secret murderer. Human Remains, the previous Hope Sze thriller, was recommended by The Globe and Mail, CBC Books, and The Next Chapter as one of the best Canadian suspense novels. Yi was shortlisted for the Derringer Award for the world’s best short mystery fiction. Under the name Melissa Yuan-Innes, she also writes medical humour and has won speculative fiction awards.

Find Lesson #169 on the Kobo Writing Life Podcast and find Melissa’s books here.

Women in Horror Month with Colleen Anderson

SF Canada member Colleen Anderson‘s blog features a female horror writer/actor/storyteller every day this month to celebrate Women in Horror Month. Interviewees hail from all over the world including the Netherlands, South Africa, and Ireland. Topics range from tropes to characterization to vampires in the age of #MeToo.

SF Canada member Pat Flewwelling discusses why women write horror: Maybe women horror writers add that supernatural element in order to create a monster they can actually see, define, and conquer. A monster we’re allowed to attack, encouraged to destroy. In a story like that, we can become the Mama Bear you just don’t want to mess with.

The Canadian launch of Colleen’s fiction collection, A Body of Work, will take place Saturday, Feb. 23 from 3-5pm at The Heatley. 696 E Hastings, Vancouver, BC. Colleen will read from her collection and books will be for sale. Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1213177788858210/

A review of Colleen’s collection (plus other works) can be found here: https://tomjohnstone.wordpress.com/2019/02/14/2018-in-fiction/

Find an entire month of blog posts about Women In Horror, and more about Colleen’s many activities and publications, on Colleen’s website.

New podcast, The Worldshapers

SF Canada member Edward Willett hosts a new podcast featuring interviews with science fiction and fantasy authors about their creative processes.

All writers, when they set pen to paper or post pixel to page, are shaping a world: their own private world, created from their own thoughts and imagination, joys and sorrows, hopes and heartbreaks, triumphs and fears.

It is a kind of miracle, and very writer performs it in his or her own way. In The Worldshapers, Edward Willett, himself an award-winning writer of science fiction and fantasy, delves into the creative process with science fiction and fantasy writers of every kind, seeking to better understand this magical, mystical skill…the skill of worldshaping.

Find interesting and enlightening conversations with such high-profile writers as Julie Czerneda, Tanya Huff, John Scalzi, and Robert Sawyer at The Worldshapers.

“Our Villains, Ourselves: On SF, Villainy, and… Margaret Atwood?”

SF Canada Member Greg Bechtel’s semi-autobiographical essay on Margaret Atwood, Sad/Rabid Puppies, and villainy appears in Issue 5 of the grad student journal The Word Hoard. The essay examines SF writers’ sense of ourselves as noble “outsiders” to mainstream culture and literature, and how our aggrieved frustration with this perceived outsider-ness–while not entirely imaginary–may also reveal something about us as both SF writers and an SF community. In it, he argues that our choice of imaginary villains (and how we respond to them), may reveal more about us than we might like to admit, and that it may be productive–even necessary–to recognize the ways that even our “real world” villains are often largely imaginary.

You can download the .pdf of Greg’s essay at this link.

To download and read other articles or the entirety of this issue of The Word Hoard, visit the website here.

Greg is currently busy reviewing submissions for Tesseracts Twenty-One with co-editor Rhonda Parrish. You can find his website at http://gregbechtel.ca/.

Interview with Sherry D. Ramsey

Sherry-sm-cropAn interview with SF Canada member and Nova Scotia author Sherry D. Ramsey, “Author Spotlight – Sherry D. Ramsey, Builder of Worlds,” is currently online at Nine Day Wonder. Sherry answers questions about her new novel, One’s Aspect to the Sun, as well as world-building, science in science fiction, and the role of associations like SF Canada and their benefits for writers, among other things. http://www.ninedaywonder.com/2013/author-spotlight-sherry-d-ramsey-builder-of-worlds