Jennifer lives in the mountains of
British Columbia where she can be found writing, hiking, skiing, borrowing
dogs, and evading bears. She also works as a climate change researcher,
evaluator and strategic planner. She has wanted to be a writer since she first
read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and didn’t want to come out of
the wardrobe.
Jennifer writes science fiction,
romance and dystopian fiction for children and adults, including In the Shadows of the Mosquito Constellation
and A Pair of Docks, which was a
bestseller in children's time travel fiction. She has also contributed to
several anthologies, most notably Synchronic:
13 Tales of Time Travel, which hit #16 in the Kindle Store.
You can subscribe to her blog for writing
tips, industry insights, and two free short stories at www.jenniferellis.ca,
and check out her writing on Amazon at: http://bit.ly/jenniferellis.
She tweets about writing, cats, and teenagers at @jenniferlellis.
Blog Excerpt
I’m once again participating in the 12 Blogs of Christmas
with eleven other writers, organized by Martin Crosbie. As part of the event,
we are to write about—not surprisingly—Christmas. Many of the other eleven
bloggers have written about fond or funny memories of Christmas. Last year, I
wrote about my fraught relationship with Christmas—acknowledging the magic of
Christmas but also the busy-ness, commercial aspects, and guilt associated with
Christmas (we have so much, and so many people have so little). So I can’t do
that again. Most of my stories about Christmas go something like… we got too
much, ate too much, spent too much (even though we don’t spend that much),
stressed about a turkey, and were really happy to be able to go skiing and eat
leftovers on Boxing Day.
I exaggerate. I’m sure I’ve had some nice Christmases, but since I’m often
up to my elbows in a turkey, and have not had any famous disasters, they are
not the stuff of stories. Then again, my memory is famously poor—all that
living half the time in another world. This year I’ll be sure to burn the
turkey, so I have something to tell you about next year (Hmm, I’m getting a
strong turkey vibe here. It might be time to start serving Christmas steak).
To me, Christmas is about gratitude and reflection on a year gone by. In an
effort to dredge up some Christmas spirit (and not seem like cross between
Eeyore and the Grinch—I promise I’m actually not—Christmas commercials make me
cry), I decided to do a post on the 12 writing things I’m most grateful
for this Christmas. That’s not to imply that there are not a lot of
non-writing things I am grateful for (there are so many of those things), but
this is a writing blog (and I think this sentence is a triple-negative) so…
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