CANADA (February 11, 2026) — The Canadian Book Club Awards (CBCA), the country’s largest readers’ choice award, today announced that Chaos Calling: Book I of The Xenthian Cycle by E. M. Williams has won the award in the SCI-FI/Fantasy category for 2025. “This afternoon, I found out how it would feel to win gold for […]
In December 2022, Chaos Calling got a Kirkus Review. It’s my first review from an industry trade publication as a published author. It’s a huge milestone for me and the series! You can read the full review on the Kirkus website. What, what is a Kirkus Review? The three trade publications that cover books are […]
I’d be lying through my teeth if I told you that my decision to re-write Nintendo’s Fire Emblem: Three Houses (FE3H) as a novel-length, golden route, romantasy action story was fully intentional. Back in 2024, I hit a challenging roadblock in my work on The Xenthian Cycle and needed a break. Enter Into the Fishpond, […]
Jess Joyce, one of the co-hosts for the New Growth Show podcast, invited me on to talk about indie author marketing and my creative journey. The episode aired on December 17, 2025, but I was in a holiday crunch mode so I’m late posting about it. You can also listen to the episode on Spotify. […]
Thanks to @cbcradiocanada for inviting me to be a guest on last Sunday’s episode of Cross-Country Checkup (which aired November 30, 2025). Show host Ian Hanomansing was away, so I spoke with Rebecca Sandbergen. Listen to Cross-Country Checkup’s transit episode. I’m the first interview at the 2:25 mark. The episode focused on a recent original investigative CBC report. They […]
CANADA (November 20, 2025) — The Canadian Book Club Awards (CBCA), the country’s largest readers’ choice award, is pleased to announce the finalists for its 2025 awards. Eighteen books competed in the fantasy category this year. Chaos Calling: Book I of The Xenthian Cycle, by E. M. Williams, is among the three fantasy finalists advancing […]
While writing Into the Fishpond, a novel-length fan fiction story set in the “Fire Emblem: Three Houses” universe (FE3H), I built a growth model for tracking my readers’ engagement. The story is long: forty-seven chapters, and over 200,000 words. When I finished the initial story in August 2024, I copied my model and populated it with a […]
The holiday season is a busy one, and I have a couple upcoming November events to tell you about. ESA 26th Annual Holiday Market, Craft Fair, and Silent Auction First up, I will be at the Etobicoke School for the Arts’ Holiday Market this Saturday, November 12, from 10 am to 4 pm. I’ve donated […]
Meeting your writing heroes can be a fraught exercise. It’s easy to put people on a pedestal and meet your idea of the presence rather than the person. Luckily, by the time I crossed paths with the late Ursula K. Le Guin in 2005, she was adroit at managing her public persona. I suspect she […]
The first time I read Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic, I was finishing Chaos Calling’s first draft (which turned out to be a skeletal draft of the whole Xenthian Cycle). I’d seen Gilbert’s Tedx talks about creativity and working through her phenomenal writing success after Eat, Pray, Love. When I learned she was publishing a non-fiction […]
Chaotic loss gets baked into the bones of many creative projects. My writing projects are no exception. From the outset of a new manuscript, I begin with a vision for what I want to achieve. Inevitably, as the draft gets longer, my ideas about what I’m doing shift. Sometimes, it’s because: That’s part of the […]