Hayley Linfield - Writer

My nine-year-old son loves to draw pictures of soldiers. Currently he’s working on the Alien Defence Unit. This elite fighting force (which defends Earth from evil aliens) is comprised of six men and one woman. All seven of them have demonstrated themselves capable of being members of this elite squad. He designed their uniforms and showed me his illustrations. The men...

What qualities make a good novel?

Is it well-thought-out prose, perfectly placed words and pauses, ideally crafted sentences, a depth to the writing that can make the simplest turn of phrase seem profound?

Or is it a story line that grips the reader and pulls her in and keeps her there no matter how cliché and no matter how lazily thought out the words on ...

I have always loved Literary Fiction. If it's been nominated for the Man-Booker or the Giller Prize, chances are I'll be interested in reading it. The authors I love the most, those I turn to again and again, are the Brontës, Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, and George Eliot.

Then there are the must-reads: Truman Capote, Kurt Vonnegut, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, not to mention the great Canadian ladies: Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Alice Munro.

I’m not a grammar snob. (Not really.)

I don’t go around town to all the different store signs with a sharpie, adding apostrophes where needed and removing the ones that aren’t.

I don̵...

Very few writing tricks, habits, techniques or clichés bother me as a reader. I don’t mind flashbacks or the overly liberal use of adverbs (she wrote purposefully), and it baffles me when readers declare their “hatred” for certain tenses or voices. (It would never occur to me to care whether you write in first person present or third person omniscient past or even switch around from one section to another. I’v...

I wrote this a few years ago when the boys were smaller... Can anyone relate?

Please just stay quiet while I drink my morning coffee. I didn’t wake up on the wrong side of the bed. In fact, I’m in quite a good mood. But right now, I want to drink my coffee in peace. No, I don’t want to get you some more juice, or more rais...

The Book that Makes Kids Love to Argue!

(And I Mean That in a Good Way...)

I was in my twenties the first time someone accused me of being argumentative. It confused me, as I couldn’t see how if TWO people were arguing, that only one of those people could be considered argumentative. Didn’t it take two to argue?

But no, a third party apparently agreed that I was the one being argumentative.

Stories I’ve Loved: Beautiful Joe

I love bedtime stories with my sons and am always on the look out for novels to read with them that will be able to keep their attention. We’ve done the abridged versions of Robinson Crusoe, The Three Musketeers, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Time Machine. All of these were successes.

There is so much written about the publishing industry that I’m not sure any one opinion can be considered to be more prevalent than another: ‘Ebooks are destroying the traditional world of publishing,’ versus ‘Ebooks are transforming for the better the traditional world of publishing.’ ‘99 cent ebooks are the way to go’ versus ’99 cent ebooks are a definite no-no.’ ‘...