Showing posts with label #Klondike gold rush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #Klondike gold rush. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Are There Rule For Writing by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 


 https://books2read.com/Sleuthing-the-Klondike

https://bwlpublishing.ca/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

 

Are There Rules to Writing?

Some new writers believe there is a formula for writing, that something should happen by a certain page in the manuscript and another thing so many pages further. In some genres, like romance, that may be the case but for most it isn’t. And even some of those who write romance say they just present the story. For mystery stories, some believe it should start out with the murder, or disappearance, or some sort of mysterious or secretive action while others begin their story with the characters and setting. And remember there are all sorts of sub-genres with every genre and for each one of them the story can be started according to the author’s taste.

So, if there are no rules for writing are there rules for being a writer? Maybe. It depends on who you listen to. Some writers follow a set pattern of writing, such as outlining, using a certain software, or doing their first draft with pen and paper. But there are more dimensions to writing other than putting words on paper.

Don’t try to write like a famous author you admire. You have your own way of writing that is your style and voice. Stay with it.

Before a manuscript is sent to an editor, agent, publisher, or beta reader, it should be free of mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and in the story line—make sure there is no change to a character’s hair colour or what a character did when in the story. Don’t have a character talk about something before they’ve even experience it or witnessed it.

Once their manuscript is complete some writers look for beta readers to give them feedback on the story. It is important to remember that not everyone will like the same story. Even famous writers can’t please their readers all of the time. So don’t be angry or hurt if someone doesn’t like yours. Take what they have to say about your manuscript and see if it needs changing. Bottom line, though, is that it is your work so your opinion comes first. And to add further, there are a lot of people who will resent your success. Ignore their cutting remarks.

Don’t sit back after you’ve sent your manuscript away. Start your next book, compose a short story, keep writing. And if you find that the writing of a story isn’t going well, feel free to set the manuscript aside and start another. You can pick the first one up again at a later time.

And after having said all that, here are some of my quirks about my writing. I have a set way of developing the story before I start to write it depending of the genre. If it’s historical I will do a lot of research to get to know the era, the clothing, the hairdos, etc, before starting and continue researching as the story advances to make sure I get all the facts right. If it’s a mystery then I decide on the death or disappearance then add the characters and let them tell the story. A lot of the time I don’t know who did it until part way through or even at the end of the manuscript. If it’s a romance, then I start with the characters and the setting and see what happens.

I say that I am a pantser writer in that I don’t use an outline but once the story progresses then I will plot out scenes that will be coming next so I do a bit of outlining.

Bottom line about writing: do what works best for you and ignore the rest.

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Pantser Writing by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike


https://books2read.com/Rushing-the-Klondike


https://books2read.com/Sleuthing-the-Klondike

 

 Pantser Writing 

If I had to chose between being called a plotter or a pantser writer I am definitely a pantser. I have never worked with a solid outline or arc for my novels, whether they are mystery, historical, romance, or young adult. And this is mainly because I find that my characters seldom end up the way I first pictured them and the plot never takes the route I thought it would.

I either start with an idea or a character and decide the setting and then start writing. I do begin the story with a character in his/her everyday life so the reader can get to know them then I put in the trigger that is out of the control of my main character or starts the mystery. This puts the main character on his/her quest for a solution.

I do have scenes pictured where characters are going to have a certain conversation or be at a certain place but unexpected conversations or character twists surface as I am writing the story. Some of these are surprises or mishaps or problems that get in the way of my character’s quest. I strive not to make these predictable nor so far out that they don’t make sense to the story. They should leave the reader with the thought that (s)he should have figured that would happen. I find that it is no fun to read a book where you can foresee where the story line is headed and what is going to happen before it does.
 
Sometimes, part way through my story, I have to go back and add chapters at the beginning because one of my characters has decided to say to do something unexpected. I have even had characters try to hijack my story and make it about them. An example is in Sleuthing the Klondike. I had two main characters Helen and Baxter and decided that Helen needed an lady's maid. I introduced Mattie who was supposed to be a very minor character but she suddenly began telling her story and almost took over as the main female character.

For the climax of my stories my character goes through the action of resolving the problem or solving the mystery. This has to be fast paced and sometimes at a risk to the character. By this time the reader should be rooting for the main character and wanting him/her to succeed without injury. Hopefully, too, this is where the surprise comes in, where the reader goes. “Wow, I didn’t see that coming." or "I never thought it would be that person.” I have even been surprised or saddened or happy by the ending of my novels and have said that.
 
I believe that if my emotions are rocked by the ending so, too, should those of the readers.

Monday, July 24, 2023

My Yukon Historical Novels by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 


https://books2read.com/Sleuthing-the-Klondike

https://books2read.com/Rushing-the-Klondike


https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike

BWL Publishing Inc. published twelve books of the Canadian Historical Brides Collection in 2017, Canada's 150th birthday. Each book was set in one of the ten provinces or two territories (Northwest Territories and Nunavut were combined). Because I had travelled to the Yukon twice and had hiked the Chilkoot Trail on the hundredth anniversary of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1997, I chose the Yukon of 1896/97 to write about. My novel, Romancing the Klondike, was published as a hard copy and ebook in 2017 with an audible version being released in 2022. It follows the lives of two young women who travel from Halifax to Fortymile on the Yukon River in 1896.

Pearl Owens is commissioned to write articles about the north for her hometown newspaper. She is accompanied by her cousin, Emma, and they plan on meeting up with Emma’s brother who has been in the north with two friends for five years.  Gold is discovered on Rabbit Creek just as they arrive. Emma marries one of Sam’s friends and returns to Halifax while Pearl remains in the newly established Dawson.

I wrote a sequel to that book, Rushing the Klondike which was published in October of 2022. Although it is not part of the Canadian Historical Brides Collection, it is a continuation of the original Romancing the Klondike story.

This year BWL, Inc has begun releasing the Canadian Historical Mysteries Collection, which includes twelve mystery novels set in each of the Canadian provinces and territories. My novel, Sleuthing the Klondike, was published in April, 2023 and also takes place in the summer of 1898. Helen Castrel arrives in Victoria, B.C after a long journey from London, England and hires Detective Baxter Davenport to go with her to Dawson City to find her brother. David Castrel is a remittance man who hasn’t been heard from for a year. While the main characters are different from my other two books, their lives become intertwined with the characters of the first Klondike books during their investigation.

The following is a brief history of the Yukon
The name Yukon is derived from the Loucheux first nations word Yukunah which means `big river'. The land was mainly occupied by the Tagish and Tlingit native people for centuries before the non-native explorers arrived in the 1820s. In the 1840s fur traders set up a few Hudson's Bay Company posts along the Yukon River. When the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, there wasn’t a clear border between Alaska and the Northwest Territories, as the land was known then. In 1887-88 William Ogilvie, a Canadian surveyor, surveyed the area making the 141st meridian the western boundary with Alaska and the 60th parallel the southern border with British Columbia. Hence the phrase North of 60.

     Prospectors went north looking for gold in the 1880s and there was a gold strike along the Fortymile River, which drains into the Yukon River, in 1886. There were other smaller strikes until 1896 when gold was discovered on Rabbit Creek later renamed Bonanza Creek. A town named Dawson sprang up on the Yukon River at the mouth of the Klondike River. When word of the gold discovery reached the outside world in the summer of 1897, thousands of men, women and children hurried to Dawson during the winter of 1897-1898 hoping to find their fortune.

     Because of the rush Dawson grew quickly to be the largest city north of San Francisco and it became known as the `Paris of the North'. It had hotels, dance halls, daily newspapers and saloons for its 30,000 inhabitants. Fresh eggs were brought by raft on the Yukon River; whiskey came in by the boatload before freeze-up; gambling made rich men out of some and paupers out of others; dance hall girls charged $5 dollars in gold for each minute they danced with a miner; the janitors made up to $50 dollars a night when they panned out the sawdust from the barroom floors. Due to the influx of people, the region officially entered into the confederation of Canada and was designated as the Yukon Territory on June 13, 1898. Dawson became the capital. Eventually the word `territory' was dropped and it was called The Yukon.

     A Territorial Administration Building was constructed in 1901 for the territorial seat of government and Dawson was the centre for the government administration until 1953 when the capital was moved to Whitehorse.

     The Klondike gold rush ended in 1899 when word of a gold discovery in Nome, Alaska, reached the prospectors and they headed further north. However, over the next few decades gold companies were formed and continued to mine the creeks, this time using dredges to dig up the creek bottom. They left behind huge piles of gravel called tailings. The dredging lasted until 1960 when gold prices declined making the operation uneconomical. Today, mining is done with big trucks, huge sluices, and back hoes.

     The north is known as the Land of the Midnight Sun after the words in Robert W. Service’s poem The Cremation of Sam McGee:

                    There are strange things done in the midnight sun

                      By the men who moil for gold.

     The Arctic Circle is the most northerly of the five major circles of latitude of the Earth. It is an imaginary line that marks the southern edge of the Arctic at 66 degrees 30' north latitude in the Yukon and Northwest Territories of Canada, and in Alaska, Scandinavia and Russia. The land north of the Arctic Circle gets 24 hours of sunlight on the longest day of the year, June 21st. The further north of the circle you go the more days of total sunlight in the summer you will get. This is because the North Pole is tilted towards the sun and gets direct sunlight from March 20 to September 22 as the earth rotates. Conversely, on the shortest day, December 21st, the land north of the Arctic Circle gets 24 hours of darkness because the North Pole is tilted away from the sun.

     The Yukon is a great place to view the aurora borealis or northern lights. These are bright dancing lights that are really collisions between the gaseous particles of the Earth’s atmosphere and the electrically charged particles from the sun that enter the earth’s atmosphere. The most common colours are pink and pale green produced by oxygen molecules about sixty miles above the earth.  Silver, blue, green, yellow and violet also appear in the display. Red auroras are rare and produced at high altitudes of about 200 miles. The lights are best seen in the winter and the further north you are the better they appear.

     The Yukon has the smallest desert in the world, the Carcross Desert, near the town of Carcross. It is an area that was once covered by a glacial lake. As the glaciers melted the level of the lake lowered until just the sandy bottom was left. Winds off Lake Bennett keep the sand moving and prevent most plants and trees from taking root on this.

     During the late Wisconsin ice age (10,000 to 70,000 years ago) an arid section of the northern hemisphere was not glaciated because of the lack of moisture to support the expansion of the glaciers. The area, called Beringia after the Bering Strait which is near the centre of the region, encompassed parts of present-day eastern Siberia, Alaska, The Yukon, and ended at the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories. The growth of continental glaciers sucked up moisture which led to the sea level dropping by up to 106 metres (350 feet). As a result, a land bridge was formed between northwest North America and northeast Asia.

     It is believed that parts of western Beringia (eastern Siberia today) were occupied by man 35,000 years ago. The forming of the Bering Land Bridge allowed the first humans to travel from Asia to North America. There is evidence that the history of man in North America goes back 25,000 years ago.

     Some of the animals that survived for thousands of years in this arid land surrounded by glaciers were the North American horse and camel, the steppe bison, the giant beaver that weighed up to 181 kilograms (400 pounds), the Mastodon, the woolly mammoth, the giant short-faced bear, the scimitar cat, the American lion, and the giant ground sloth. All of these are extinct.

     The territory of The Yukon was founded on gold mining, but there has been coal and silver mining in the territory also. It is now a favourite destination for tourists.

Wednesday, May 24, 2023

From Big to Little by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 




https://www.bookswelove.com/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike

https://books2read.com/Rushing-the-Klondike

https://www.bookswelove.com/authors/canadian-historical-mysteries/

I am a Canadian writer and all my mystery, historical, romance, and young adult novels are set in Canada. Canada is the second largest country in the world and home to a wide variety of rocks, plants, and animals. Here are some of the oldest, largest, and smallest examples.

Canada’s largest tree is a western red cedar called the Cheewhat Giant. It is in the Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island. It is 56m (182 ft) tall and has trunk diameter of 6m (20ft). The Cheewhat Giant is also the biggest western red cedar in the world.

Canada’s tallest tree is a Sitka spruce in the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island. It stands 95m (312ft) high.

Canada has the oldest exposed bedrock on earth and it is the oldest section of our planet’s early crust. It is known as the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt and is in Northern Quebec on the eastern shore of the Hudson Bay. It has been analyzed by geologists and they have determined that the rock samples range from 3.8 to 4.28 billion years old. The earth its 4.6 billion years old and there are very few remnants of its early crust, since most of it has been rotated back into the Earth’s interior by the movement of the large tectonic plates over billions of years.

 The Banff Springs Snail isn’t the smallest snail in the world; that is held by the Augustopila psammion species found in a cave in Vietnam and four of them fit inside a grain of sand. However, the only place in the world where the Banff Springs Snail is found is in a handful of thermal springs in Banff National Park in the province of Alberta. The snail was first discovered in 1926 and the largest of the snails are about the size of a small fingernail.

The world’s largest colony of Lesser Snow Geese can be found on the Great Plain of the Koukdjuak on the western side of Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut, Canada. Beginning in late May as many as two million snow geese migrate there to breed and when the young hatch, they and their parents go further inland to feed. By early September the young are large enough to head south for the winter.

Monday, April 24, 2023

Writing Historical Novels by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 




https://www.bookswelove.com/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike

https://books2read.com/Rushing-the-Klondike

https://www.bookswelove.com/authors/canadian-historical-mysteries/ 

As a historical writer it is important to make sure that you use the words of the period you have set your book in. For example if your story is set in the 1500s you could use the word hugger-mugger when talking about a sneaky person who is acting in a secretive way and elflocks to describe messy hair. Jargoyles meant that a person was puzzled about something in the 1600s while in the 1700s a person who was out of sorts was grumpish. In the 1800s people would have felt curglaff when they jumped into cold water and a man going for a post dinner walk while smoking his pipe was lunting. In the early 1900s a person who was drunk was referred to as being fuzzled.

Of course, it is important when using those words that the writer somehow explains what they mean such as, if a man said he was going for an after lunch lunt, the person he was talking to could reply. “I don’t have my pipe and tobacco with me today.” I feel that writers who use terminology from a different era or words or phrases from a different language without clarification are trying to impress the reader with their vocabulary and intellect. Speaking as a reader, for me what they are really doing is making me angry and interrupting the flow of the story. I am jolted out of the lives of the characters and into my life as I try to process the meaning of what was written.

As a writer you want the reader to be so caught up in the story that they don’t want to put the book down, you don’t want them to throw the book across the room because they don’t understand what has been said or done.

Another important aspect of writing historical novels or even novels set in past decades is to make sure that you do have the characters using devices that hadn’t been invented yet.

The ball point pen came into use in the 1940’s so you can’t have someone signing papers with it in the 1920s. The Charleston dance was introduced in a movie in 1923 and caught on after that, so a story set before that time could not have party-goers dancing it. While the computer was invented during World War II, it didn’t come into commercial use until the 1950/60s and personal use until the 1970/80s. Don’t have a person make a phone call before March 7, 1876, which is when Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone and don’t have someone send a text on a mobile phone in the 1970s.

It is important to do your research when writing a novel set in the past, no matter what the year.

More historical words:

In the 1590s beef-witted described something as being brainless or stupid.

In the 1640s callipygian described a beautifully shaped butt.

In the 1650s sluberdegullion meant an unkempt, drooling person.

In the 1950s two people making out in the back seat of a car were doing the back seat bingo.

 

Friday, March 24, 2023

Sable island by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

 

 



 https://www.bookswelove.com/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

https://books2read.com/Rushing-the-Klondike

https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike

Sable Island

I am a Canadian writer and all my mystery, historical, romance, and young adult novels are set in Canada. According to Statistics Canada, Canada has 52,455 islands and ranks fourth in the world for number of islands. However, it is a long ways behind Sweden that has 267,570 islands, Norway with its 239,057 islands, and Finland with 178,947.

Canada has three of the top ten largest islands in the world and all are in the northern territory of Nunavut. Baffin is Canada’s largest island at 507,451 sq km (195,928 sq mi) and the world’s fifth largest. Victoria comes in second in Canada at 217,291 sq km (83,897 sq mi). It is the world’s eighth largest. Ellesmere is third in Canada and tenth in the world at 196,236 sq km (75,767 sq mi). It is slightly smaller than Great Britain.

Canada also has the world’s largest fresh water island. Manitoulin Island is located within the boundaries of the province of Ontario on Lake Huron, one of the Five Great Lakes. The island is so large that it has over one hundred lakes on it.

One of the most famous Canadian islands is the crescent-shaped Sable Island, off the southeast coast of the province of Nova Scotia. It is believed to have been discovered by Portuguese explorer Joao Alvares Fagundes in 1520-1521. In 1598, a French nobleman, Troilus de la Roche de Mesgouz, tried to colonize the new world with convicts but they mutinied and, in punishment were put on the tree-less, stone-less Sable Island. A few managed to survive in mud huts until 1603, when they were returned to France.

Sable Island has over 350 bird species and 190 different plants but it is best known for its feral horses. The ancestors of the present day horses were seized by the British from the Acadians, a French-speaking group who settled in the New France colony of Arcadia. They were expelled between 1755 and 1764 after the English took over the colony. Their horses were purchased and some were taken to Sable Island in 1760 for grazing.

The Sable Island horses number between 400 and 550 and due to limited food supply on the island are small and stocky in stature. Although in the past, some of them were rounded up and taken to Nova Scotia for sale, today they are unmanaged and left to live their lives as wild animals.

In 2008, the Sable Island Horse became the official horse of Nova Scotia and in 2011, the Sable Island National park reserve was created to protect the horses and the island.

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