Bookstores hold a special interest for writers and readers everywhere. They are the stuff of an important part of life.

While in France during the second half of October 2015 I must have seen a few dozen, especially in Paris where they are so very specialized. Two in Alsace piqued my curiosity more than usual. One in Ribeauville had a lighthearted exterior, where the illustration of the little boy seems to be standing on the boîtes à lettres. The other was in Strasbourg, down a dark alley that had more than average vegetation. The shop was all but hidden, with an inconspicuous sign announcing that it sold Livres. Old books, that is, if and when the shop owner was there to open the door.

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I received an email this week about a book club that had chosen to read Thomas, A Secret Life but was having some trouble finding copies of the book.

I know copies of the book are not in all bookstores. However, for those who have an e-reader, all of my novels and some of my history books are just a click away.

Here below are the links one can copy and paste to download the book on either Indigo ($8.99 for Thomas, A Secret Life) or Amazon ($7.99 for Thomas, A Secret Life).

Indigo     https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/thomas-a-secret-life-a/9781897009895-item.html?ref=item_page%3avariation

Amazon  http://www.amazon.ca/Thomas-Secret-Life-J-B-Johnston-ebook/dp/B00CFM6K9Q/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1446296925&sr=8-1&keywords=Thomas%2C+A+Secret+Life

As I said above, all of my fiction and some of my history are similarly available in digital form.

The other day I posted a photo I had taken of Joe and Melanie Ballard proudly pointing at Onslow on the Colchester County road map that is now on the floor of the entrance to the updated Historeum in Truro, NS. Work is continuing by Camus Productions in other areas on the ground floor as I write this. Today I share a photo taken yesterday by JP Camus of the main room on the ground floor.

It gives a good idea as to how things are moving along. Camus Productions is getting closer every day to the full installation. The interpretive banners, when hung, will change the look of the room again, and carry the story of the county. Then there are the artifact cases and the sound environment and the media corner. We think it’ll be a captivating package to tell a rich story in innovative ways, and encourage people to return time and again.

I hope this early peek will encourage many of you to check out the dramatically revitalized Colchester Historeum in the days and weeks to come.

The photo I am posting this morning is of Katharine McLennan, who as a young woman served as a nursing assistant in hospitals in France during the First World War. Like her father, industrialist-turned-historian-turned-Canadian-Senator J.S. McLennan, Katharine would later go on to play an important role at historic Louisbourg.

After writing three Thomas Pichon novels in four years, I’ve decided to take a break (so to speak) before I turn to the writing of the fourth and final novel in that series. I am currently going back to and greatly improving a manuscript I wrote before I wrote Thomas, A Secret Life. It’s a novel that has a fictionalized Katharine McLennan as its focus. I think I now know a lot more about writing immersive fiction, thanks to the Thomas Pichon experience, and I want to see if I can breathe life into Katharine in her novel. Needless to say, the themes, tone and voice for her story bear little or no relationship to that of Thomas in his three books.

Once I have finished my re-writing of this novel set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries I’ll be getting back to the 18th century and the final chapter in my Thomas Pichon quartet.

Here’s a link to the CBC Mainstreet Cape Breton show where Wendy Bergfeldt and I talk about the Thomas Pichon Novels.

http://www.cbc.ca/mainstreetcb/blog/2015/09/11/crossings-a-thomas-pichon-novel/

What a difference a single person can make.

We know this from countless examples in all of our lives, and yesterday in a ceremony at the Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island we were reminded of that truth yet again. I was not there, but wish I could have been, for it was an event to honour publisher and story-collector Ron Caplan. This time the honour was the Katharine McLennan Award. Previously, he had been made an member of the Order of Canada, and there have been other honours bestowed on him as well.

Ron Caplan came to Canada from the USA during a tumultuous time, when thousands of Americans were heading north to continue their young lives in what they hoped would be a better (and more peaceful) place. Canada was enriched by the mass migration of so many creative, thoughtful and hard-working souls. In Ron’s case, he chose Cape Breton Island. Over the decades that followed, first through Cape Breton’s Magazine and then with Breton Books, he has published a wealth of material about the Island and its people. All of us with a connection to Cape Breton are in his debt. Yes, he had help, he did not do everything by himself. But the vision was his. So, thanks Ron Caplan for an untold number of stories, recollections, tall tales, images, novels and histories. Thanks to you, they were not lost but presented to a wider world. A single person, a single life, and so much accomplished.