CaitlinDBurnside

THE blank page stares back at me, a silent, patient companion. For over forty years, this has been my therapy, my sanctuary. The clack of the keyboard is a steady heartbeat, a rhythm that orders the chaos of my own mind. It calms me, focuses the whirlwind into a single, flowing stream. THERE was a time, after the losses that hollowed me out, when the page remained blank for months. The words had dried up, buried under a weight too heavy for sentences to lift. Grief is a poor muse. YET recently, the world has felt… strange. An odd pressure in the air, a collective unease I can’t quite name. It’s in these darker, unsettled days that I’ve returned to my oldest friends: my characters. Not for a blog, or a vlog, or a journal for anyone else to see. For the pure, private act of it. Like a parent retelling a favourite bedtime story, I revisit their lives. THEY live in a world Centuries old, their Histories intricate and sprawling. I don’t force it. I simply sit with them. Some...

My Dearest Readers, I am writing to you today with a heart full of nervous excitement and a mind buzzing with the whispers of ancient oaks and bygone paths. You see, I’ve made a decision — one that feels both monumental and utterly necessary. I am rewriting The Oakwood Chronicles. It began as a simple reread, a nostalgic journey back to the story I first built from ink and imagination. Yet as I walked those familiar sites alongside Cassandra and Cayden once more, I heard it: the quiet, persistent hum of a story not yet fully told. The foundations were strong, the heart was true, but the roots… the roots wanted to dig deeper. The canopy wanted to spread wider. Therefore, I have taken a step back into the grove. The series you know, those four volumes that held our adventures, will be lovingly unbound and rewoven. From four books, the chronicle will expand to eight, maybe more... This is not merely a splitting of pages, but an expansion of soul. It is a chance to linger in the glens we r...

Yes, when you open old boxes or, in this case, check out old USBs that still work surprisingly well after so long... I was living alone with our munchkins, my husband was once again away on a work assignment for another six months. After my day was done — taking care of bills, doing kitchen chores, cleaning the house, and most importantly, homeschooling our children — and finally looking after our pets... It filled up the days with fun and laughter, helping to keep the loneliness at bay. Thank goodness for our children. They were the reason I woke up each day with a happy heart. They were my whole world, my joy, my happiness, and my love during a really tough and lonely time. To make a long story short, I started writing again, just like I did in my early days when I was a loner at school. Creative writing was my extra activity from the very beginning, and I kept doing it all through my whole education. Whenever I wrote, it was a way to get away from real life. I made up worlds far fro...