The Joy of writing a Romance Novel

June 2, 2022

I am not alone, being a retired ex-journalist, political hanger on and PR guy, in that writing has been the backbone of my career.

How the tools of the trade have changed. I am old enough that my days writing various screeds go back to handwritten essays tapping on a portable Olivetti, to old Underwoods at the first paper I worked at, to the queen of mechanical typewriters the IBM Electric, to clunky desktops with Word Perfect to a series of laptops to my present HP Zbook. Always hunting and pecking I hate to admit.


Writing, writing, and more writing

But the output! Ponderous, overly wordy University essays, then local stories for the late Guelph Mercury under the inspiring tutelage of my Scottish city editor Vick who scrubbed my prose clean of all unnecessary blandishments, to scripts for TV shows at CBC and CTV, speeches for Pierre Juneau at the CRTC, to notes for Prime Minister Trudeau and press releases at the PMO, to talking notes and news releases  for Ambassador Alan Gotlieb in Washington, to my first published political commentaries for the Star and Ottawa papers when I returned to Ottawa. Then to endless materials and news releases, speeches and coaching lessons for executives, and other material for clients when I ran my own PR firm. I admit some of this stuff bordered on fiction since PR firms, while defending reputations, are really in the good news business. But I learned about convincing prose and the impact the spoken word can have. I did write deliberate short punchy quotes bound to make it into TV clips.


Meaningful Diaries

Then my wife and I had a child and I decided this was such a major event that I started writing a diary a few days after she was born – a full literary work which described the early days of her life, the Gatineau countryside where we lived for several years, our dogs and friends. My daughter, now a successful career woman over 50, loves to hear the account of the harrowing trip in a snowstorm to the hospital for her birth.  It will be her treasure. Then, every Saturday in Ottawa while I was at the PMO I followed the advice of a good friend who had told me to write a diary when I worked in the PMO. So, I spent a couple of hours handwriting as good a description of what had happened that week as I could. When I returned to Toronto I told an editor friend of mine about it and asked him to look at parts I’d typed up. He allowed, as there was a book in it, and I found a publisher and away we went. Close to the Charisma (McClelland and Stewart, 1986) was well-received and I made enough money from it to buy a fine French-Canadian armoire with some to spare. 


A New Venture

My first venture into real fiction took me from 1994 to 1996 to unravel what I hoped was a thoughtful series of yarns about a good man, an Anglican priest, Father Pat, as he deals with the world, the flesh and the devil in a very secular world. In a way I was writing about a life I almost had since I was to be a priest, went to seminary for a year and left it to be a journalist feeling my voice would be heard more effectively in that pursuit.  The Father Pat Stories (Dundurn 1997) came out when I was President of my PR company. My Rogers client threw a fine party. But neither I nor the family was thrilled with this fairly self-indulgent work. 


Retired, and felt I had to try another book. I certainly had time. It struck me during my daily walks with other dog people through a wonderful woodlot in South Aurora (yes, I had become a suburbanite) that this might be a great location and theme for a romantic novel. Something so full of love, dogs and positive emotions that it would be a real tonic to distract from the horrors of the daily news and Donald Trump. Almost no politics, the cast of my book would be vaguely leftish, but it would never come up. Loving sex only. Lots of dog stories and interaction. Cottage life where everyone is happy and there are no rules. This was inspired by the neat caring people with dogs I met daily in the woods. I even have dogs walking up the aisle with my two main characters who fall in love walking their dogs and get married. 


Good Therapy

Just think about pecking away at happy stories for days on end. New wife of a widowed man with a grown-up daughter becoming best friends with her. I highly recommend it as a life affirming activity. And if what ends up between covers is not much more than a Hallmark movie, so be it. Watching them makes millions of people feel better.  There is an end story which sets this book apart from regular romance novel fare. I discovered that alpha Wolves mate for life and that there are documented stories of one losing a mate and like elephants suffering real bereavement and showing it with pitiful howling. Hollie, the book’s chief character is a book illustrator and reads an Ernest Thomson Seaton book about a wolf called Lobo who dies of a broken heart when his mate Bianca is killed. She finds an Algonquin Park naturalist study of the Algonquin wolf who has written about a similar scene. That’s it. She decides to go to the park and spend time watching wolves and photographing them to be the basis for her own drawings for a story that follows a fictional pair who lose a mate. Love never dies becomes a theme, and the subsequent wolf story proves it for wolves and characters in the book. Slow Love which I self-published turned out to be the most satisfying piece of writing I have ever done. Try it. Best therapy ever. Write and imagine good things happening to your characters. What a thought! A total change from a lifetime of writing more “meaningful” stuff.


Patrick Gossage Insider Political Views

Well-meaning Assault Weapons Ban and Buyback victim of poor timing and major opposition

By Patrick Gossage • April 14, 2026
In contrast to US inaction after almost weekly mass killings, it took one horrible shooting rampage at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, in 1980, to start the drive for public policy changes around gun control. But years delays between the mass shooting outrage and actual policy to rid the country of assault rifles doomed the eventual gun buyback program. The polytechnique horror was huge news in our relatively massacre-free nation. That December day, 25-year-old Marc Lépine stalked the hallways and classrooms of the École Polytechnique de Montréal with a semi-automatic rifle and murdered 14 women and injured another 13 people before killing himself. A year later, the Coalition for Gun Control was formed to push for stricter gun laws, led by survivors of the Montreal massacre. Later that year, the federal government passed Bill C-17, which imposed safety training and a mandatory waiting period to get a firearms licence-- not an effective means of controlling automatic rifles. Much later, in1996, Parliament passed the Firearms Act, Bill C-68, driven in part by a push for stricter gun laws following the Montreal massacre. The act created a national firearms registry and imposed new rules for obtaining a gun licence, including background checks. The former Conservative government, under prime minister Stephen Harper, abolished the long-gun registry, which it said placed an unnecessary burden on law-abiding gun owners. Quebec subsequently created its own provincial registry to replace it. It took another horrific killing nine years later in Nova Scotia to force Ottawa to take real action on miliary-style guns. On April 18 and 19, 2020, 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman committed multiple shootings and set fires at 16 locations, killing 22 people before he was killed by the RCMP. On May 1, 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, following through on a 2019 campaign promise, announced an immediate ban on some 1,500 makes and models of assault weapons.. The Canadian government sought to follow New Zealand's lead when at the same time it announced the ban it promised a plan to force gun owners to surrender military-style firearms. But while New Zealand acted quickly, in 2019, Ottawa only launched a long awaited buyback program in 2026. In contrast, the government of then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda announced its firearms buyback program shortly after a white supremacist killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch in March, 2019. In order to move quickly, New Zealand set up mobile units where firearm owners could get refunds in exchange for their firearms. They worked hard to get co-operation from gun owners. Meanwhile, here, the firearms industry and individual gun owners vigorously opposed the project, and it was delayed for years. The program was finally initiated this year with little of the sense of urgency it could have had right after the Nova Scotia killings. It has not been going well. In April, the federal public safety minister's office said more than 67,000 assault-style firearms have been declared by 37,869 firearm owners across Canada. That's just under half of the 136,000 firearms the government had budgeted for when it set aside aside $248.6 million for the program. The precise number of banned firearms in Canada is unknown due to the end of the long-gun registry in 2012. There are other deeper problems. Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have indicated they will not assist with the program, meaning police are not co-operating as in New Zealand. Conservative MPs and firearm owners say the buyback is a wasteful exercise that targets law-abiding citizens. The original gun-control advocacy group, PolySeSouvient, blames “weak political leadership” for what it calls “poor participation” in the compensation program. It looks like Ottawa - to put it mildly - has blown the opportunity to really reduce the number of people-killing guns in this country.

Two Opposites – Mark Carney and Donald Trump

By Patrick Gossage • March 12, 2026
One of the major differences between these two men is that Carney understands the value of well-thought-out strategy, abundantly clear in his Davos speech, which laid out one for middle powers to deal with the end of a rules-based international order and the rise of hegemony. Trump's lack of strategic understanding is clear in his bumbling attempts to justify the billion-dollar-a-day Iran war. His overall tactic of “flooding the zone” – mounting a new initiative or major announcement every day, or even several times a day to ensure press and opposition can never catch up. This tactic has served him well – confusing the world and his would-be opponents into submission under a valley of activity and harsh opinions from the leader of the world. Contrast this approach to leadership from Carney. He is systematically building a nation less dependent on US trade by travelling the world building new alliances and trading partners. And in the scare of Australia giving substance to his idea of alliances with middle powers. All laid out in the Davos speech. It is instructive to appreciate how much Trump was irritated by the Davos speech. Carney got a standing ovation; Trump’s rambling lengthy diatribe did not. He won’t soon forget being so upstaged. He surely recognized an intellectual power he could never match. Carney is a realist and pragmatic when he stated recently “We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” He is dealing with the world that is being reshaped by an irrational power-mad president, a world the powerful Stephen Miller said “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” Does Carney sometimes err on the side of supporting Trump likely to ensure that critical talks on free trade and tariffs have some chance of finding a sympathetic ear? Yes; first he seemed to fully support Trump’s war with Iran. He later made his support more nuanced, saying Trump’s actions were against the rules-based international order. He now says we will not get involved unless a NATO ally is threatened. But generally, Carney is highly rational in contrast to Trump’s self-centered irrationality. Take Trump’s bizarre ill-informed letter to the Prime Minister of Norway, who had no role in deciding if he got the Nobel Peace Prize: “I no longer feel obligated to think purely of Peace (he subsequently engaged in an ever expanding war against Iran). He then reiterated his demand for “complete and Total Control, of Greenland. Thank you!”. His late-night rants, complete with caps, on social media show a mind out of control. Thay are dutifully reported on US news media and often astonish with their non sequiturs and nastiness. One of his more unpresidential quotes came as he fingered White House drapes: “I chose these myself. I always liked gold." The big question for Canadians who are more and more disillusioned with the antics of the President: could these two opposite ever sit down and do a deal that works for Canada. The two do text, and Carney has admitted that in private Trump does listen. But there is also evidence that the trade people in the White House do not like Canada, and as Trump has said, we owe our very existence to the US. And we are “difficult”. They have said that the current trade deal is not good for the US and could be trashed entirely and -deals with Mexico and Canada could be separate and the current trilateral deal may be dead.  Canada was at the brink of reducing the heavy sectoral tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber when Premier Ford’s unfortunate ads during the Rose Bowl that featured President Reagan speaking against the usefulness of Tariffs led To Trump suspending talks. They only recently resumed. So can our world-renowned businessman and banker hope to sit down with the unpredictable and unstable President and cut a deal? Some hope that if we extend talks, the President, weakened by the midterms, the bad economic fallout from an unpopular war, and the fragmentation of the MAGA movement may be easier to deal with. On the other hand he may badly need a “win,” bullying big concessions out of Canada and reaping so-cabled benefits from a weaker free trade deal. There is a scenario where Trump gets a black eye if Carney simply walks away with the conviction, perhaps easily shared with an increasingly nationalistic and confident Canada that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” In any case, what a decisive and challenging future we face with Canada at play. Can Carney win for Canada against his opposite by losing a deal?"
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