The variety of authors and books on 49th Shelf continues to expand. You may not have had the chance to follow the blog as often as we're publishing on it, so here's a sampling of excerpts taken from guest contributors' posts from the last little while to catch you up. Click on a link for the full post ...

*****

“Love is a pleasure, a privilege, a reason for getting out of bed in the morning. It's also a test, a carrying of (a sometimes unbearable) responsibility.”

—Andrew Pyper, author of The Demonologist

"So there's the question: Are we free if we think we are? Or is freedom an objective absolute? I guess I started the novel thinking freedom is something everyone craves. Then I had to ask myself: what is it?"

—Lisa Moore, author of Caught

"I love the notion of laughter as tonic. Something wet and consumable and physical. It’s hot yoga for your mental and emotional junk drawer."

—Ali Bryan, author of Roost

“The books that you love—that transport you, that allow you even to momentarily forget about awkward flashbacks or jarring adverbs or your own woeful inadequacies as an artist—are a gift. There are so many books I’m so grateful not to have written.”

—Saleema Nawaz, author of Bone and Bread

“The original literary Bad Dad, was, I suppose, God. He had a temper, let His son die, abandoned the mother. But He was entertaining and creative and had, apparently, a Plan. So we forgave Him.”

—Don Gillmor, author of Mount Pleasant

“I have no time for self-indulgence and if any of my characters developed an idiosyncrasy, I would damn well beat it out of them during the editing process.”

—Peter Kirby, author of The Dead of Winter

“YouTube and social media in general are of course very powerful and can be tremendously useful as disseminators of information and for the maintaining of contacts with family and community. The problem is that there is no curatorial process involved, so that YouTube is to public broadcasting what a flea market is to a museum or art gallery, or what a used book store is to a university library. Both are fun, and both perform useful functions—but we’d be crazy to get rid of the curated resources.”

—Wade Rowland, author of Saving the CBC

“Magic! Here in my homeland—it had been there in the writing all along. I finished Not Wanted on the Voyage in two days and suddenly found myself thinking: well. Maybe writing about fairies and angry gods and angels (who weren’t remotely angelic) wasn’t that bad after all. Maybe it could even be CanLit.”

—Amanda Leduc, author of The Miracles of Ordinary Men

“Back when my youngest was still innocent, when she still wanted three hugs a day and loved to snuggle while being read to or reading to me, when she offered up her secrets and her sorrows and we were not distinct and separate beings, I had warned her. “Soon,” I said, banking on humour to uproot the worst of it, “you’ll go over to the dark side. You won’t be able to stand the sight of us. Much less the smell. Do try and be kind.”

—Dede Crane, author of Every Happy Family

“Sometimes I am suspicious of my attraction to myth, and wonder if it’s something I should cut down on, like salt. Probably if I were a more serious person, I would read only austere, searing realism, trafficking exclusively in accuracy of detail. But then I think there must be a lie in realism too, that it’s only another kind of myth about what life is and how it feels.”

—Rebecca Silver Slayter, author of In the Land of Birdfishes

"On another level, this book is my proof of what Heather and Calamity Jane together revealed to me: that hero stories can be about the masses and not about the rarity of exceptional people."

—Natalee Caple, author of In Calamity's Wake