writing – Patricia J. Parsons

The Book I Was Probably Always Supposed to Write

Posted on 12 Nov 2025 by Patricia J. Parsons

One thing I’ve always considered to be important for writers is to be able to use their previous knowledge and skills in their writing. For me, that began with transferring my nonfiction research skills to historical fiction. Over the years, however, I’ve followed my bliss more or less and written whatever story crept into my mind. My new book is no different in that respect, but it has an added element of past knowledge, namely, my background in ethics. (Bet you didn’t see that one coming!)

When my novel We Came From Away was named a finalist for the 2025 Stephen Leacock Medal for Literary Humour earlier this year, some of my former students probably thought it was a clerical error. After decades of teaching ethics and corporate communication, I was about as funny as a midterm exam.

My new novel, though? This is the book they always suspected was hiding in me.

Edgy, baffling, intellectually unsettling, my new novel, His Second Mistake, challenges everything you ever thought you believed about what is good, what is evil and whether good is right and evil is bad.

The story:

Rachel Underwood has it all—wealth, influence, and a gleaming reputation as one of Toronto’s most admired crisis managers and philanthropists. But beneath the charm lies a lethal secret. Driven by her abiding sense of justice, Rachel is also a killer, methodically hunting men who abuse women and evade accountability.

Detective Hannah Novak, eager to prove herself in homicide, finds her own sense of justice tested when a string of suspicious deaths points to a woman’s hand—and to someone dangerously close to her.

What follows is a tense and deeply personal game of cat and mouse between two women bound by friendship, loyalty, and lies. As the truth edges closer, each must decide how far she’s willing to go—and what price she’s willing to pay—for justice.

His Second Mistake is a gripping, disquieting exploration of power, betrayal, and the ethics of vengeance—where right and wrong blur, and friendship may be the deadliest weapon of all.

Book promotion, Writing, Writing books

What I’ve Learned About Writing Humour

Posted on 28 Jul 202528 Jul 2025 by Patricia J. Parsons

I had a surreal experience recently. My book, We Came From Away, was a 2025 finalist for one of the most coveted literary awards in Canada. It’s the Stephen Leacock Award for Literary Humour. If you don’t know who Leacock was, then you probably should.

He was only the best-known humourist in the world between 1915 and 1925.

British by birth, Leacock settled in Canada, where he first worked as a professor of economics at McGill University in Montreal and later relocated to a small town two hours north of Toronto. And it was to this town, Orillia (also the hometown of another Canadian great, Gordon Lightfoot, BTW), that he settled, and it was there that the Leacock Medal originated three years after he died in 1944.

So, as a finalist, I spent the weekend hobnobbing with some of Canada’s finest humorists: Wayne Johnston, Cathal Kelly, Terry Fallis. They were all there because they are all past winners. Anyway, at one point in the weekend, when someone said that we write humour because we’re all funny people, I almost swallowed my tongue. I am not funny. Not funny at all.

Here we are…the three finalists, cutting a cake that features the covers of all three short-listed books. (I think this photo is courtesy of Leacock Associates, https://tinyurl.com/2k58vj2n, but there are so many similar ones…)

And most of my writing isn’t funny—unless it is. Clearly, since my book was chosen as one of the three best humour books of the year, I must have done something right. The truth is that I don’t set out to write humour. Humour creeps in through my characters and their experiences. So, I thought I’d share some tips about injecting humour into your writing.

Okay, maybe I’m a bit funny when required to do a dreaded book signing. (photo credit: CG Production Company, via https://tinyurl.com/2k58vj2n)

Of course, there is nothing funny about much of what we write these days. If you’re an unfunny writer, you probably wonder why you’d even think about such a ludicrous idea. Well, there may be reasons you haven’t even thought about. I never set out to write humour, either.

I first thought about why one might even consider injecting humour into one’s writing. Here are some reasons.

Humour can make your writing more engaging.
Humour can help you build rapport with your readers.
Humour can sometimes provide contrast to the darker moments, heightening emotional impact.
Humour sharpens insight.
It can also help to light your own mood.

So, what have I learned about writing humour?

First, I learned that humour comes best when the writer first finds the truth and then exaggerates it.

Much of the best humour comes from seeing everyday truths in a sharper, exaggerated light. Take something relatable and then push it a little further into the absurd, the awkward, or the ironic.

I also learned that it’s essential to keep an eye on your audience’s sense of humour.

Not everything is funny to everyone, and in these days where so many people choose to take offence at just about anything, you sometimes have to tread carefully. I have an ongoing funny focus on vegans in this book—one of the characters is a vegan and she bears the brunt of the other character’s slightly off-kilter opinions on veganism and its dubious place in their lives. Sorry, not sorry if anyone is offended. It’s humour.

I also know this to be true: less is funnier. There is no need to over-explain the joke or pile on too many punchlines at once. I learned to trust my readers to “get it.” Often, one well-placed witty line or ironic observation is far funnier than paragraphs trying too hard.

Characters are the foundation of humour in any scene. Humour really shines when it grows organically out of your characters’ personalities or flaws. A character’s inappropriate observations ( my characters are the queens of the inappropriate). Even their deadpan reactions to events can be hilarious—and believable. It’s not about making the scene funny. It’s about following your character’s actions and reactions.

Overall, as I was writing We Came From Away and its sequel Meet Me in Miami, I realized that there’s a difference between writing comedy and writing humour. Comedy writers are going for the gags. Going for the laughs. Humour writers know that there is humour in the mundane. It’s all about how you see it.

Not all my writing is funny, and that’s great for my humour writing because when the characters and situations are funny, it just happens.

Now, when I’m not writing stories that make people laugh, I’m writing mysteries and thrillers. A genre change, you say? Why, yes. Why not?

Backstory, Writing books

Writing a Book Series: What No One Else Will Tell You

Posted on 13 Apr 2025 by Patricia J. Parsons

It seems that everywhere you look these days, writers are being told to write a series of books—often before they’ve even written the first one! As far as I’m concerned, this is the dumbest way to write a series or even a book. The thinking seems to be that if you can hook a reader on one book, that reader will buy another one that continues the story or theme.

And this can be either fiction or nonfiction. Bestselling writers like David Baldacci and Michael Connelly are the masters of the book series, so much so that readers lie in waiting for their favourite characters to reappear. But it’s not just for fiction.

If you’re a travel writer, for example, you might write a series of books on a variety of places. The same goes for a health or food writer. Regardless of the topic you’re searching for these days, you can find a series.

There is a lot of advice on writing a book series, and most of it is the same. Most of it starts with the admonition to plan out your series. I’m going to turn that advice on its head because my advice is 180 degrees in the opposite direction from the conventional wisdom. (Although, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure anyone who’s written that advice has ever really written a series).

Here’s what no one else will tell you: Do not, under any circumstances, think of your book as a series until you’ve written the last sentence of the last chapter and the book tells you there’s another one.

Now, I’m going to tell you why and what else you might consider.

What is a book series?

Let’s start by ensuring we’re all thinking about a book series in the same way.

First, a series is not just a number of books written by the same author. In fact, many bestselling series authors have penned several different series. David Baldacci has written something in the vicinity of ten distinct series.

There are also different kinds of series (even publishers can group books by various authors and call them a series―one of my nonfiction books is part of just such a publisher’s series), but I’m talking about a specific type of series.

The definition of a series we’ll use today is this…

“…a sequential group of books by the same author that share specific characteristics…”

My unconventional advice

First—and this is key—do not set out to write a series. No matter what anyone tells you, write one book and see how you feel about it at the end of the process. Could it be the beginning of a series? If it could, the book will tell you.

When I wrote The Year I Made 12 Dresses, I had absolutely no notion of writing a series. But Charlie Hudson, the main character, simply wouldn’t let go of me. She forced me to tell her mother’s secrets, and Kat’s Kosmic Blues was born―and even that wasn’t the last one. She just kept talking.

My second piece of advice is that each book should stand on its own outside the series. Not all readers will find your first book and then proceed sequentially through the series. So, you need to tell enough of the backstory but not too much.

For example, when I wrote book three of the “almost-but-not-quite-true stories,” a reader had to be able to become immersed in The Inscrutable Life of Frannie Phillips without having read Kat’s story. However, the reader also had to be able to think that he or she might like to go back and read the previous two books.

I also recommend that you keep meticulous notes on backstory—characters, places, events, etc.

If you’re writing a nonfiction series, keep a carefully crafted style guide. If it’s fiction, you need a notebook that contains the complete backstory of every character who might reappear. It also needs details on recurring settings, etc.

As you write the first book, let the process become organic. Let one book lead you into the next one. Each well-crafted paragraph in a book contains a transition into the next one. Each well-crafted chapter transitions into the next. It should be the same from one book to the next―even if you have to go back and rewrite the ending of the first book when the character tells you there’s another one that needs to be written.

Finally, think abt your readers. They always need something new, so keep the material fresh by introducing something new in each book,

When I wrote Kat’s Kosmic Blues, the main character was the through-line from one book to another, and the events were sequential. But in this book, although my use of point of view was the same as in the first one, this book came with a Spotify playlist―where each chapter was named for a song from the 60s and 70s, the years in which the book was primarily set.

Of course, there are different kinds of series: ones that have an overarching plot, ones where there is only one plot per book and the anthology kind where the individual books are only loosely tied together by a setting, perhaps. For me, that’s stretching the series definition, but it does exist.

I once saw it written that a series is the meal they keep coming back for. Maybe. But in my view, a series is at least as much a feast for the writer!