home of Canada's next great mystery writer

Rachel Greenaway (aka Zoe) is a Canadian writer. (But we won’t hold that against her.) She’s actually become a treasured writing partner. I talked her into joining an online workshop and by the end of the summer only Rachel and I were left standing. Everyone else had bailed out.

Rachel is even-tempered, kind, and also has a good sense of humor. She’s generous with her praise and thorough and constructive in her critiques. She’s been writing police procedurals for ten years now and has a whole passel of them completed–I’m in awe. So yes, I certainly have learned from Rachel that there’s no substitute for effort or perseverance.

But the thing I want to talk about in this post is Rachel’s fresh figurative language. She pairs verbs with nouns, often personifying inanimate objects in novel and appealing ways. Let me share some of her phrasing with you, to illustrate:

• “For the third time Holden cranked the key and pumped the gas.  The car rumbled awake again…”
• “Dion gazed from his capsule outward, at fields alive with bugs and birds, a broad sky hazy with heat and dust, a lot of frothy silver-green trees in the far distance, slowly swelling.”
• “She sat still, hands on the wheel, looking up at stark poplar branches chopping the clouded sky into dark grey wedges.”
• “Evangline lounged on the sofa in a gauzy, pastel-green dress shot through with metallic threads.”

Every chapter evidences this kind of care and ingenuity in description. It’s just one of the things that makes her writing a pleasure to read.

And she’s set the bar high in terms of freshness that I’m working harder to even come close. You can read more about Rachel and her work at her nifty writer’s website, Mystery North.