It’s been almost a century since a ship exploded in Halifax Harbour, killing 2,000 people and injuring thousands more.
Not until Grade 4 or 5 did I learn the Halifax Explosion was real. I thought it was just a story in a book I picked up in the school library.
Flash forward to high school. The movie Titanic came out around the same time I decided to write a novel centred around the disaster. It was my second attempt at a novel. And probably one of my best ones to date. When I submitted it to the annual writing competition at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, the judges considered it publishable (they just disliked my ending, as did I).
Needless to say, as a result of my research into the disaster, and my fictionalizing the human aspect of it, I am quite moved by December 6 every year.
This year is the 95th year of this huge event in Halifax History. The Public Archives of Nova Scotia (which is an awesome building of history) is active on Twitter. And today, they are combining history and Twitter in a neat way.
PANS will collect Tweets containing the hashtag #hfxex1917 for posterity. (Hashtags are the little words or phrases following the # sign on Twitter, in case you think hashtags are something belonging to the Trailer Park Boys.) If you’d like more information on this venture, click here or visit the PANS website.
To read more on the explosion, go back in time to my little blog posting on the miraculous survival of Ashpan Annie.
You never know, maybe by the 100th anniversary, you’ll finally be able to read my novel on the explosion.
I did change the ending. And one of these days I do mean to get around sending it off again. I’ll keep you posted, Dear Reader.
The Daily Hodgepodge 
The Halifax Explosion plays a big role in the second part of my novel-in-progress. Such a sad event.
It is so sad 😦