Well, I guess it was nine days, or even ten, but the period just over was pretty packed. It kicked off on Oct. 15 at Voglers Cove, NS, with a full house at the community hall being as interested in hearing about Thomas and The Maze as any author could ever want an audience to be in his or her work. Then there were the many close to final revisions made to the text of what will be published by Nimbus next spring as Grand Pré, Landscape for the World, co-authored with Ronnie-Gilles LeBlanc. In the meantime, I had to prepare detailed review comments for Scholastic Press for a forthcoming YA book on Louisbourg, and put together a PowerPoint to go alone with my discussions to be offered at the University of New Brunswick and Mount Allison University on Oct. 22/23. In both venues, and at bookstore events, I could not have had a more engaged rooms of students and faculty. It seems my transition from historian to novelist, and how that came about via my experiences at the Fortress of Louisbourg, strikes a responsive chord. I’ll be giving something like that same presentation — it is ad-libbed using some images to keep me on track — at St. Mary’s University in Halifax in about three weeks and then at Cape Breton University in mid-January 2015. (And maybe something similar at Acadia University in Feb. 2015).

The three recent speaking events impressed on me yet again how diverse readers’ interests are. We are snowflakes, I guess: no two alike. We all look for and find what it is that interests us when stories come alive as we turn the pages in the books that we read. I really like these events, meeting readers and other writers and exchanging views on history, fiction or whatever they like.

A portion of the tenth day, yesterday, was well spent in Truro at the Colchester Historeum. I’m part of the Camus Productions team that is working with the Historeum exhibit group to develop an eye-opening exhibit that will present itself to the world in August or September 2015.