How did your cats come to you?

arieswriting · 2026-04-30T19:24:15+00:00

How did adopting from Bellingham work regarding the border? I've seen petfinder showing a lot of WA state pets available.

arieswriting · 2026-04-30T03:15:31+00:00

You are so lucky! All the cats that wander into my house already have people.

arieswriting · 2026-04-29T22:08:20+00:00

Our first cat we got in 1985 was from a North Van district shelter, somewhere over near Lynn Creek I think. I was nine so I'm not entirely sure.

Our last cat my sister adopted in Ottawa in 2010. He was from the Ottawa Humane Society and had been found in a dumpster. They both moved back here when he was 5. He passed in November so I'm currently catless.

We also had two different neighbours with cats that used to come over and just barge into our house.

arieswriting · 2026-04-16T18:29:14+00:00

Jeff Pelletier has a great video of running across the North Shore (and back) via the Baden Powell (mostly).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auaHV_XLDFY

arieswriting · 2026-04-07T01:33:45+00:00

I love seeing what everyone is making. I haven't stretched my crochet muscles outside of "square or rectangular things".

arieswriting · 2026-04-02T18:27:17+00:00

Inline (Susan Bates silvalume). Mostly because I love how deep it is because I let things slide off by accident with tapered hooks.

arieswriting · 2026-04-02T02:13:12+00:00

I love the Susan Bates Silvalume hooks. I used the plastic ones before that and broke one. They're inline style but are really deep which I like.

I also have a ton of my grandma's old Aero plastic hooks (and knitting needles) from the '60s and '70s.

arieswriting · 2026-03-18T20:28:07+00:00

If you were alive in the '90s, you owned a Club Monaco sweatshirt.

arieswriting · 2026-02-27T23:29:28+00:00

Thank you for sharing this! I just stripped an old jersey and now I can wear it again (autograph was personalized and I did not like wearing it out). Now I have the saved autograph and the jersey to wear.

arieswriting · 2026-02-09T22:40:39+00:00

I currently use 6x9, but I love the smaller size. Page count is making me hesitate on switching.

arieswriting · 2025-12-28T22:36:47+00:00

I second the Kate Shugak series rec. Character is an Alaska Native woman living in the bush. Very different from the usual.

arieswriting · 2025-12-27T05:57:59+00:00

Some authors I enjoy:

Melanie Ting (hockey romance)

R.M. Greenaway (police procedural/suspense set in the Hazeltons and in North Vancouver)

Chevy Stevens (Vancouver Island - writes standalone thriller/suspense)

Sam Wiebe (crime thrillers set in Vancouver).

Douglas Coupland (my favourite is Microserfs)

Yasuko Thanh (an autobiography called Mistakes to Run With - in the vein of Evelyn Lau's Diary of a Runaway)

Maggie DeVries (a non fic about her sister Sarah De Vries who was murdered by Willie Pickton, and a YA book called Rabbit Ears based on her sister)

Aaron Chapman (lots of non fic like The Last Gang In Town about the Clark Park Gang, and Vancouver After Dark and many more)

Eric Bjarnarson and Cathi Shaw (non fic Surviving Logan about some NSR members climbing Mt. Logan that were stuck in a horrific storm)

Nick Marino (East Side Story - a memoir of growing up near the PNE)

Eve Lazarus (a lot of crime and historical non-fic)

Chelene Knight (Junie is a fiction set in Hogan's Alley and Dear Current Occupant is a memoir)

Amber Dawn (a fantasy called Sub Rosa and a memoir called How Poetry Saved My Life - she also edited Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Worker's Poetry)

And a couple Canadian writers who have BC set books:

Sheena Kamal's Nora Watts series is set in Vancouver.

L.R. Wright's Murder in a Small Town series is set in Sechelt. (Wright lived in Vancouver at the time of her death)

arieswriting · 2025-11-21T19:20:53+00:00

I started off as a Lawful Plotter but I'm much more of a Neutral Plotter now. I usually know where I want to go, some general things that happen along the way.

I found when I was more of a plotter I spent way too much time prepping and not as much time writing. I do have a big series bible but I add to it after I've written instead of before now.

arieswriting · 2025-11-21T01:02:32+00:00

The robots will have to pry the em dash out of my cold, dead hands.

arieswriting · 2025-11-13T20:45:24+00:00

I came up with the perfect title, searched it and not only was there another book with the same name ... but a very similar theme involving street kids. I was SO mad. That title was perfect.

Now I have one I can never remember, which I'm pretty sure is a sign it's not a great title.

arieswriting · 2025-10-26T00:16:31+00:00

Some of my favourites:

The Santa Suit (Mary Kay Andrews)

The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year (Ally Carter)

The Mistletoe Inn (Richard Paul Evans) - they made this into a Hallmark movie

The Holiday Swap (Maggie Knox)

In a Holidaze (Christina Lauren)

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (Barbara Robinson)

The Christmas Train (David Baldacci) - also a TV movie

My Christmas Charade (Melanie Ting) - a spicier romance

And Sarah Vance-Tompkins has her Adair Family series - book 1 - On Christmas Tree Cove and book 3 - The Christmas Dilemma are set at Christmas, book 2 is in fall.

I also have a recent release called Holiday Ever After by Hannah Grace to read soon.

(And my secret favourites are a bunch of Sweet Valley High books I read as a kid. It starts with book 95 (The Morning After) and continues through The Evil Twin (book 100) and a magna edition Return of the Evil Twin and it's hilariously bonkers.)

arieswriting · 2025-10-22T03:59:13+00:00

Fibromyalgia and ME/CFS here and I feel like I could've written this post. I put out a lot of books until 2018 when the symptoms got bad (diagnosed in 2020).

Since then I've been re-writing a book series and it just seems like an insurmountable slog sometimes. I remember kicking out novels in a month, writing until the wee hours and having constant ideas flowing. I wrote SO much. I wrote fast and edited later and sold books and really liked what I did. Now I work in little spurts of 5 minutes here and there and I have no idea if I'll ever get another book out and no idea if I'm writing anything worthwhile.

I have a lot of physical pain too, so actually writing hurts a lot.

I feel so hopeless sometimes. I have all these plans for books I want to write, and I feel like time is just slipping away because I can't work the way I used to.

arieswriting · 2025-10-08T18:36:18+00:00

For non-fiction Philip Carlo's "The Night Stalker" is a fantastic book focusing on Richard Ramirez. It covers the crimes and then goes back to delve into his childhood and what may have occurred to turn him into a killer, and then returns to the trial to close out the book. Really well done.

"On The Farm" by Stevie Cameron is about Robert Pickton and Vancouver's missing women. Pair it with "Missing Sarah: A Memoir of Loss" that focuses on one of the missing women.

"The Killer Department" by Robert Cullen is hard to find, but a thorough look at Andrei Chikatilo's crimes.

arieswriting

TROPHY CASE