The Depth of Water is being featured on the Digital Book Spot Today! Check it out!
Hours after her father drowns, Liesel Drummond sees him in a vision. In it, her father touches the child within her womb and vanishes.
Years later, Liesel’s son, Owen, is haunted by an inexplicable fear of water. When he falls into a pool at the tender age of eight, something shifts within him. Owen is plagued by horrific night terrors, clawing at the air as if trying to swim to safety, gasping for air, coughing up water, reaching for an unseen lifeline, and choking on phantom waves. As Liesel witnesses her son’s mental and physical well-being deteriorate, her anxiety mounts, but it reaches a breaking point when Owen starts recounting memories of being the parent when Liesel was the child. Convinced her father’s soul has been reincarnated within Owen, Liesel embarks on a desperate quest for answers.
Liesel’s mother’s health is failing, and their relationship is strained at the best of times, adding another layer of complexity to her life. With nowhere else to turn, Liesel seeks out Carson Knox, an expert in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, but discovering that Owen has indeed been reincarnated is only the beginning. The true challenge lies in freeing her father’s soul from her son’s, forcing Liesel to confront the unfathomable depths of water, both literal and metaphorical.
The Depth of Water will transport you to a world where the past and present intertwine, exploring themes of family, loss, and the power of love. Prepare to embark on a suspenseful journey that will leave you questioning the boundaries of life and the ties that bind us all.
My latest book is The Pen and the Pixel: Your Guide to Ethical and Efficient Writing with AI.
Though AI comes up short when it comes to creating page-turning fiction and interesting non-fiction, you can use the power of AI to your advantage. Learn how to partner up with AI to help plan and polish your writing. Here’s how:
Unlock the secrets of using AI ethically and effectively to supercharge your writing.
Feeling overwhelmed by the blank page? AI writing assistants could be your secret weapon! This book dives deep into the world of AI writing assistants, showing you how to harness their power while keeping your human touch.
Get ready to:
Create on Demand: Overcome writer’s block and generate fresh ideas with the help of AI.
Boost Productivity: Streamline your writing process and write faster without sacrificing quality.
Elevate Your Craft: Sharpen your grammar, sentence structure, and overall writing style with AI’s guidance.
Maintain Artistic Control: Learn how to personalize AI-generated content to ensure it reflects your unique voice and vision.
Write with Integrity: Understand ethical AI use to avoid plagiarism and ensure your work is always authentically your own.
Whether you’re a seasoned writer or just starting your writing journey, AI is poised to become one of your most valuable tools. Embrace the power of collaboration and let AI spark your creativity, streamline your workflow, and elevate your writing to new heights. With this book as your guide, you can harness the potential of AI writing assistants and confidently navigate the exciting future of human-machine collaboration.
Don’t just write; write smarter. Get ready to start your AI writing journey today!
The above definition was “written” by the ChatGPT interface, an artificial intelligence.
I had the idea to use AI after reading a book on how to generate passive income. I played with it a bit and decided to see if I could do what the book suggested, let AI generate a year’s worth of blog posts in a week to free up some of my time. I soon learned that this was easier said than done.
There is a pattern to the way AI—and ChatGPT in particular—formulates its blog posts. For example, the structure of most posts it generates is the same, beginning with an introduction, providing a list of three to five items complete with subtitles, and ending with a conclusion that says virtually the same thing as the introduction. If you don’t like what the AI produces for you, it can be regenerated, but there is no guarantee the new content will be significantly different.
It took me close to two weeks to generate enough content for 52 blog posts for my sister site, largely because I had to rewrite, revise, and pad most of the blog posts. Rumour has it that Google won’t index blogs it thinks use AI, so I had to do some heavy editing to make the text sound more like me than directly copied and pasted from the AI interface. I did, however, do a few plagiarism checks using Grammarly, but there was no indication that the AI had written anything that might be considered plagiarized.
From generating blog posts, I switched focus to having the AI generate an entire book for me. I decided to create a writing journal-type book with 365 writing prompts. I call it 365-Day Writing Challenge: A Year of Writing Prompts. This took me three weeks to generate enough unique and doable prompts. I learned that AI likes fantasy. Both ChatGPT and Boo.ai sites seemed to default to prompts about people time travelling, losing their memories, inheriting haunted places, travelling to alternate realities, or writing from the point of inanimate objects, which was frustrating. I witnessed the machine learning aspect of AI firsthand when, after more than a week and getting prompts close to what I was looking for, I cleared the list of questions I had asked ChatGPT, and it stopped giving me answers I liked. It took a few days to re-train it to give me get good results again.
As for the question of whether AI lives up to the hype? The jury is hung on this one. It is a great tool for writing blog posts and outlines or getting ideas when you have writer’s block (it can outline whole novels for you if you ask it to and work with it long enough). It’s also good for writing advertising copy after a good revision and edit.
Could students use AI to outline their essays for them? Probably. Will they be good enough to pass teacher scrutiny? Not likely. AI writing tends to be superficial at best. For example, when I asked it to write advertising copy for this website, it took keywords I used in my last few posts and extrapolated that to write the blurb. According to it, I have written all sorts of books in genres I have never attempted (like romance). It also lists book titles I have never written and states that one of my books is a series when it is a standalone book.
In my opinion, the kind of text written by AI is limited. It cannot generate unique ideas, but it can repackage old ones. If you use AI to assist you in outlining your book, it might help you to get started on your writing journey, but if you plan to use it to flesh out your book in its entirety? I will let ChatGPT answer that question for you:
AI-generated writing is typically based on patterns and algorithms that the machine has learned from a large amount of input data. This means that the output is often formulaic and lacks the creativity and originality of human writing. Additionally, AI may not be able to capture the nuances and complexities of human emotions and experiences that are often the hallmark of great fiction.
Moreover, using AI to write an entire fiction novel raises ethical questions around intellectual property and authorship. It is unclear who would own the rights to an AI-generated novel, and whether it would be considered original work or plagiarism.
Mahjong is a centuries-old Chinese game with tiles, usually with four players (and a fifth so players can rotate out and have a break), with the goal of making up hands containing sets and runs. I grew up with my mother playing Mahj every Wednesday. Once every four or five weeks, her weekly game was held at our house, and we were confined to the upstairs from seven o’clock until bedtime. That didn’t stop us from hearing the click of the tiles and their voices calling out the values of the discarded tiles (“One bam.” “Five crack.” “Soap.” “Flower.”). The best part of Mahj night was around 8:30 or so when the ladies took a snack break in which we were allowed to participate. We always tried to persuade my mother to order pizza for break time at our house. That’s also where I learned my appreciation for anchovies and tomatoes on pizzas, something I still enjoy today.
As an adult, my mother always suggested that she teach me, my sister-in-law and my daughters how to play so we could have a regular game of our own. We thought there would always be time for that, and one day she would teach us, but then she took sick and lived out the last four or five years of her life in and out of hospitals and the last three years of her life in the hospital. She passed away nine months ago, and her dream of teaching us never came to fruition.
After she died, I inherited her Mahjong set, and it seemed a shame to let it sit around and continue to collect dust as it had the previous twenty years or so. My sister-in-law and I mentioned this to our cousins and their Majh group, who graciously agreed to teach us how to play. Later, we taught my daughters and began playing semi-regular games, sometimes with my mother’s set.
There’s something about playing the game, especially when we use my mother’s set, that feels as if I am honouring her with every click of a tile and every call of a discarded tile. Playing evokes a warm nostalgia hearkening back to one Wednesday a month in my childhood when my mother and her friends (all of which have now passed) used to play, tinged though it might be with regret that she wasn’t the one to teach us.
I went shopping this week and picked up the most gorgeous berries I’ve ever seen. The blueberries were at least a centimetre in diameter and the blackberries were at least two centimetres long. Not only did they look phenominal, but they tasted better than any berries I’d had in a long time. I knew I had to do something special with them.
That “something special” was berry cheesecake waffles. This recipe combines my standard pancake and waffle recipe with a slightly sweet cheesecake topping that makes this an over-the-top yet keto-friendly meal. My mouth watered so strongly while photographing it, I almost couldn’t wait. And the flavours and texture did not dissapoint.
Without further ado, here is my berry cheesecake waffle recipe along with approximate carb counts.
The Recipe
For the waffles:
2 large eggs (1 net carb)
2 tablespoons almond flour (1 net carb)
0.5 teaspoons coconut flour (<1 net carb)
0.5 teaspoons psyllium husk fibre (<1 net carb)
0.5 teaspoon baking powder
0.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
pinch of salt
For the topping:
2 tablespoons cream cheese at room temperature (2 net carbs)
1 tablespoon butter at room temperature (0 net carbs)
1 tablespoon Swerve confectioner’s sugar (0 net carbs)
0.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon Tutti graham style crumbs (~1 net carb?
6 blackberries (1 net carb)
8 blueberries (1 net carb)
Instructions:
Mix waffle ingredients well and allow to sit a few minutes while waffle maker heats up. Pour batter into waffle maker and wait until preferred doneness.
While cooking, use a whisk to beat topping ingredients minus the graham style crumbs and berries. The consistency should resemble melted marshmallows when ready.
When waffle is done, top with berries. Drizzle cream cheese topping over berries and waffle. Sprinkle graham style crumbs over top.
As an English teacher, my favourite course to teach was Writer’s Craft, as it gave me the opportunity to inspire and coach young writers along their writing journeys. It was always my goal to publish my lessons and/or create a series of online courses, and that day has finally come.
Announcing: THE SHAPE OF STORIES: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE FOR FICTION WRITERS.
Designed with new and aspiring authors in mind, this book is suitable for use as an independent, self-taught course or as a textbook in a course. This book is chock full of writing tips and tools, prompts, exercises, and mentor texts to use as examples on your quest to unleash the writer inside you.
From the back cover blurb:
In the magnum opus of her teaching career, seasoned English teachers , author, editor, and publisher Elise Abram curates a collection of lesson plans and techniques related to the craft of writing.
Abram’s method uses mentor texts to demonstrate elements of the art of storytelling, including crafting believable characters, gripping plots, and finding your author’s voice. Each lesson includes a number of writing exercises, exemplars, and self-assessment checklists to help you assess your progress as you complete the assigned tasks, building upon previous lessons as you hone your writing chaps.
Use mentor texts to read like a writer
Practice showing and not telling
Construct believable characters
Pen plots that keep the reader turning pages
Experiment with different points of view
Blog and journal about your experience
Self-edit your work
Learn about the elements of storytelling from past and present masters of fiction as you study their techniques and apply what you learn to your own writing. Discover your writing style as you complete the activities in this course as you learn how to shape stories worthy of publication.
THE SHAPE OF WRITING: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE FOR FICTION WRITERS is available on Amazon.
In Canada, June is Indigenous Peoples History Month, and today is National Indigenous Peoples Day. The day to celebrate Indigenous peoples was instituted in 2017, but this is the first time in my recollection that I’ve heard it publicized (like so many other things Indigenous, this seems to have been swept under the rug for so long).
According to Trudeau, “No relationship is more important to Canada than the relationship with Indigenous Peoples. Our Government is working together with Indigenous Peoples to build a nation-to-nation, Inuit-Crown, government-to-government relationship – one based on respect, partnership, and recognition of rights.
“We are determined to make a real difference in the lives of Indigenous Peoples – by closing socio-economic gaps, supporting greater self-determination, and establishing opportunities to work together on shared priorities. We are also reviewing all federal laws and policies that concern Indigenous Peoples and making progress on the Calls to Action outlined in the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”
On this day, we honour and celebrate Indigenous people with a number of ceremonies and events taking place across the country. Don’t get me wrong: this is a positive thing as a day of remembrance, but for the other 364 days (or at least the other 11 months of the year), many of us will return to shaking our heads in disbelief as the government appoints more (white) people to oversee things such as “ensur[ing] the proper treatment and protection of residential school grave sites,” even as they pledge to continue to search for more school burials.
Rather than set aside a single day (or month) to bring Indigenous peoples to the fore, the government should be setting aside time to do more and be better where the First Nations are concerned. Though I realize that we can’t turn back the clock and what’s done cannot be undone, it seems to me that some real action could be taken to offset all of the lip service we hear in the media. Case in point: when I was doing research to write this post, most of the websites that turned up in my Google search were composed of Government of Canada propaganda sites, extolling the initiatives in store to make truth and reconciliation a reality and very little with respect to what still needs to be done or actual things that have been done.
I will celebrate National Indigenous Peoples day this year with a wish and a prayer that on this day next year I can mark some serious, meaningful strides that actually make a difference when it comes to treating First Nations people as the full-blown, original Canadians they are instead of as second-class citizens.
Today, I retired my best-selling book, a novella entitled Throwaway Child, and here’s why.
I wrote Throwaway Child in 2012 as an attempt to bring awareness of the Canadian Native residential “schools” to the fore. At the time, I was still reeling from the fact that this travesty was left out of most history courses. I had not learned of this dark chapter in Canadian history until I took a course on Native education in university in the late 80s, and I was shocked, to say the least.
If you have not read it, Throwaway Child follows the case of a child’s skeleton found in the basement of a building that was once used as a Native residential “school.” It follows forensic anthropologist Palmer Richardson, archaeologist Molly McBride, and police detective Michael Crestwood (also featured in The Mummy Wore Combat Boots and Phase Shift) as they investigate what led to the child’s death and burial. It has been in publication for nearly ten years and has sold the most copies out of any of my other books, but given the fact that the murderer proves to be another Indigenous child at the school, and in light of recent events, I have decided to retire the story.
You see, the children interred at the residential schools were the victims of such abuse that to make the murderer (accidental though it may be) Indigenous and a child no longer seems fitting. This is particularly true in the wake of the discovery of so many unmarked graves of Indigenous children who lost their lives while inmates at these “schools.” I cannot justify turning an innocent victim of systemic genocide, cultural or otherwise, into the perpetrator of the very crime being visited on so many others like her. I also cannot help but wonder if the story wouldn’t have been more satisfying if I’d put Palmer in charge of excavating one of the mass grave sites to determine the abuse that had been visited on the untold numbers of children who never left the “schools.” Imagine how much more satisfying the story would have been had it climaxed in handcuffing an administration-level official who had either participated in the travesty or turned a blind eye to the abuse.
It is for these reasons that I have decided to unpublish Throwaway Child with my apologies for falling short of accomplishing the very goal I set out to meet with it’s publication.
Yesterday marked the third mass, unmarked grave found in association with Native residential “schools.”
For the uneducated, Native residential “schools” were a ploy by Canada’s early government to facilitate the “civilization” and Europeanization of Canada’s Native population. In existence in Canada from about 1880 through 1996 (yes! 1996!), these so-called schools were nothing short of concentration camps into which all Native children were shunted as a matter of law. This was a joint endeavour between “Christian churches and the Canadian government as an attempt to both educate and convert Indigenous youth and to assimilate them into Canadian society.” The net result of this horrific practice was the cultural genocide of generations of Native people, and as recently discovered, the actual genocide of (among others) innocent Native children.
I hesitate to call these places schools. School is supposed to be a place of learning and enlightenment where people leave better off than when they arrived. I doubt there are many (if any) Indigenous people who would claim this describes their experience there. Those of us who knew of the existence of these institutions have long suspected there were many children who entered their doors never to exit. That statement is mind-boggling enough, but now that the sheer number that is the body count shaping Canada’s shame is coming to light, we, as Canadians, should be shocked, sickened, and mortified.
In the last month alone, the remains of 215 individuals in Kamloops, 751 in Saskachewan, and 182 in Cranbook, B.C. There were 130 of these places in operation in Canada over the approximately 100 years of their existence. Do the math: if we take an average of the three known mass graves thus far uncovered, we are looking at approximately 50,000 children slaughtered and buried in unmarked, mass graves. Disposed of in the same way as trash before organized garbage collection. This is not okay (to say the least).
Today is Canada Day, a celebration of Canada’s confederation on this day in 1867. Residential “schools” came into existence barely 10 years after that. Lighting fireworks at bar-b-ques in celebration of Canada as a country has been the way we’ve always celebrated, but not this year. Anyone lighting fireworks and cooking meat over an open flame in honour of Canada’s confederation this year should be ashamed. I will be marking this dark day in history by lighting a memorial candle in memory of all those who perished at the hands of our government. We should never forget the human toll paid so Canada could be established as a country. Do not celebrate the bloodshed and bodies felled; mourn them instead. Mark the existence of Canada Day, not with celebration but with sorrow, honouring those whose way of life and actual lives were unceremoniously taken so that we might live here.
Elise Abram 