Canadian Authors Past and Present by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey--Prince Edward Island

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

 Prince Edward Island

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton, now New London, Prince Edward Island on November 30, 1874. Her mother died of tuberculosis two months before Lucy’s second birthday. Lucy was put in the custody of her maternal grandparents in Cavendish by her father who later moved to Prince Albert in what is now Saskatchewan.

     This was a very lonely time for Lucy. She spent much of her childhood alone so she created imaginary friends and worlds. Lucy kept a diary and when she was thirteen years-of-age, she wrote that she had early dreams of future fame. After completing her education Lucy moved to Prince Albert and spent a year with her father and step-mother. While there she had two poems published in The Daily Patriot, the Charlottetown newspaper.

     Lucy returned to Cavendish and obtained her teacher’s license, completing the two year course in one year. She went on to study literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She worked as a teacher which gave her time to write. From 1897 to 1907 she had over one hundred stories published in magazines and newspapers.

     Lucy had a number of suitors over the years and turned down two marriage proposals, one because he was narrow-minded, the other because he was just a good friend. She finally accepted a proposal from Edwin Simpson in 1897 but came to dislike him. She found herself in love with another man, Herman Leard. She refused to have sex with him but they did become quite passionate in their kissing and petting. She finally stopped seeing Herman in 1898 and was upset when he died of influenza in 1899. She also broke off her engagement to Edwin Simpson.

     Ms. Montgomery moved back to Cavendish to look after her ailing grandmother and began writing novels. Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, was published in June of 1908 under the name L.M. Montgomery and was an instant success, going through nine printings by November of 1909. Lucy stayed in Cavendish until her grandmother’s death in March 1911 and shortly after she married Ewen (Ewan) Macdonald. Ewen was a Presbyterian minister and they moved to Leaskdale in present-day Uxbridge Township in Ontario where he took the position of minister at St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church. The lived in the Leaskdale manse and she wrote her next eleven books while there.

     Lucy and Ewen had three children, the second one being stillborn. Lucy’s second book, Anne of Avonlea was published in 1909 and The Story Girl, came out in 1911. She went through several periods of depression and suffered from migraine headaches while her husband had attacks of a major depressive order and his health suffered. She almost died from the Spanish flu in 1918, spending ten days in bed. She began an Emily trilogy with Emily of New Moon in 1923.

When Ewen retired in 1935, they bought a house in Swansea, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto which she named Journey's End.

     On April 24, 1942, Lucy Maud Montgomery was found dead in her bed in her Toronto home. The primary cause of death recorded on her death certificate was coronary thrombosis. Montgomery was buried at the Cavendish Community Cemetery in Cavendish. In 2008, Lucy’s granddaughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, said that because of her depression she may have taken her own life through a drug overdose.  

     Writing was Lucy’s comfort and besides the nine books of the Anne series she wrote twelve other novels and had four short story collections published. Nineteen of her books were set in Prince Edward Island and she immortalized the small province with her descriptions of the people and community. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world, come to Prince Edward Island to see the place that Lucy loved so much, and to visit Green Gables, the house and farm where ‘Anne grew up.’

     Lucy Maud Montgomery was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by King George V in 1935. She was given a special medal, which she could only wear out in public in the presence of the King or one of his representatives such as the Governor-General. Montgomery was named a National Historic Person in 1943 by the Canadian Federal government. On May 15, 1975, the Canadian Post issued a stamp to Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables. The Leaskdale Manse was designated a National Historic Site in 1997. Green Gables, was formally recognized as "L. M. Montgomery's Cavendish National Historic Site" in 2004.

     In terms of sales, both in her lifetime and since, Montgomery is the most successful Canadian author of all time.

Milton James Rhode Acorn was born in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, on March 30, 1923. At the age of eighteen, he joined the armed forces and was stationed mainly in England. On an ocean crossing, he was injured as a result of depth charges. He returned home and received a disability pension. He moved to Montreal in 1956 where he self-published a chapbook of his poems titled, In Love and Anger. His poetry was also published in New Frontiers, a political magazine, and in Canadian Forum magazine.

     Milton moved to Vancouver in the mid-1960s and helped found the ‘underground’ newspaper, Georgia Straight, in 1967. The newspaper is still in publication. His collection of poetry I’ve Tasted My Blood, was published in 1969 and he received the Canadian Poets Award in 1970. He wrote three more books of poetry and in 1976 received the Governor General’s Award for The Island Means Minago.

     Acorn liked to be a man of mystery. He disguised and altered his background so that biographers and anyone wanting to find out more about him did not learn anything that he did not want uncovered. Because of the many different versions he told of his life it is difficult to know where reality ended and fiction began. He was also considered to be a hostile and quarrelsome man. However, Milton Acorn was deemed to be one of Canada most well-known poets by the early 1970s. Thirteen collections of poetry were published before his death and five more were published posthumously.

     Three documentaries were made about Milton Acorn: Milton Acorn: The People’s Poet (1971; In Love and Anger: Milton Acorn-Poet (1984); and A Wake for Milton (1988).

Milton suffered diabetes and moved back to Prince Edward Island in 1981. He had a heart attack in July 1986 and died on August 20, due to complications from the diabetes and his heart attack.

     Milton Acorn was known as the ‘People’s Poet’. The Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award was established in his memory in 1987. It consists of $500 and a medallion and is given to an exceptional ‘People’s Poet.’

Book 11 of the Canadian Historical Brides Series:  Envy the Wind (Prince Edward Island) - Anita Davison and Victoria Chatham - May 2018

Victoria (Vicki) Chatham was born in Bristol, England and now lives near Calgary, Alberta. She grew up in an area rife with the elegance of Regency architecture. This, along with the novels of Georgette Heyer, engendered in her an abiding interest in the period with its style and manners and is one where she feels most at home.

     Vicki mostly writes historical novels but now and again will tinker with contemporary romance. Her stories are laced with a little mystery to keep her characters on their toes and, of course, in the end love has to conquer all. Cold Gold (2012), On Borrowed Time (2014) and Shell Shocked (2014) are the three books in her Buxton Chronicles series set in the early 1900s. She switched time eras for her next book Loving That Cowboy (2015) which is a contemporary novel that takes place in Calgary during the Calgary Stampede.

     Apart from her writing, Victoria is an avid reader of anything that catches her interest, but especially Regency romance. She also teaches introductory creative writing. Her love of horses gets her away from her computer to volunteer at Spruce Meadows, a world class equestrian centre near Calgary. She goes to movies often and visits her family in England when she can.

     She is a long time member of Romance Writers of America and her local RWA chapter, CaRWA, the Calgary Association of Romance Writers of America.

http://www.bookswelove.com/canadian-historical-brides-collection/

http://victoriachatham.blogspot.com/

Anita Davison was born in London, England and she connected with the history of that city at a young age. While the rest of the students on a school trip were throwing the contents of their lunch boxes at each other, Anita imagined men in high white wigs, flared long coats, and heeled shoes coming out of coffee houses, climbing into sedan chairs on the cobbles in Paternoster Row, where Christopher Wren was lowered down the outside of St Paul's Cathedral in a basket.

     Her first historical fiction novel was about a 17th Century West Country family during the Monmouth Rebellion. By the time she submitted the manuscript to publishers, historical family sagas were no longer in fashion. Historical fiction, however, still had a following and she wrote the Rebels Daughter (2014) and The Goldsmith’s Wife (2017) the two books of The Woulfes of Loxsbeare.

     Anita has also written an Edwardian Cozy Mysteries series set in early 20th Century London and Cheltenham.

http://www.bookswelove.com/canadian-historical-brides-collection/

https://www.anitadavison.co.uk/new-release

The Bay of Fundy by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan

I started my writing career as a travel writer, researching and writing seven travel books about the attractions, sites, and history along the backroads of Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. While working on them I realized what a beautiful country I live in. Since then I have switched to writing fiction but I still love to travel. 2017 was Canada’s 150^th birthday and to celebrate it my husband, Mike, and I travelled in a motorhome from our home on Vancouver Island on the Pacific Ocean to Newfoundland on the Atlantic Ocean. The round trip took us nine weeks and we were only able to see about half of the sites and attractions along the roads.

Today I’d like to describe our stop at the Bay of Fundy situated between the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The Bay has the highest tides in the world and was formally designated one of North America’s seven wonders of nature in February, 2014. (The others are Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, Mount McKinley, the Everglades, and Yosemite National Park).

 

 

 

 

 

       From Moncton, NB, we drove south on Route 114 to Hopewell Cape and the Hopewell Rocks arriving in the afternoon. It was low tide so after we paid, Mike accepted the cart ride offered while I decided to walk the trail to the Rocks. I arrived at a viewpoint overlooking the ocean floor and the reddish rock structures.  Mike and I took the stairway down to the floor and wandered out among the tall formations. The ground was surprisingly solid with a few muddy areas.

       The Hopewell Rocks were originally a massive mountain range that was older than the Appalachians and bigger than the Rocky Mountains in Canada. Over millions of years the range wore down and after the retreat of the glaciers during the last ice age, water seeping through cracks in the cliffs eroded the sedimentary and sandstone and separated the Rocks from the cliffs. The incoming and outgoing tides have eroded the base of the rocks at a faster rate than the tops and that has caused their unusual shapes. Those shapes and the vegetation growing on top have given the formations their nickname of the Flower Pot Rocks.

 

 

 

       Due to the tides the Rocks are covered in water twice a day. Some visitors are able to see the high and low tides in one day but since the next high tide would be at night, Mike and I found a place to camp and returned to the Rocks the next morning. There is approximately six hours between low and high tide and the entrance fee covers a return visit to enable visitors to see the Rocks during both tides.

       Again, Mike took his ride and I walked. I reached the viewpoint and the change was astonishing. Just the tops of some of the rocks showed, the rest being under water. The tides can reach a height of 16 metres (52ft), which is as high as a four story building, twice a day. I walked down part of the stairs but the rest was blocked off to the public because they were under water. High tide is a good time to take a kayak tour and three kayakers were paddling around the formations.

 

 

       Seeing all the water and the partial formations, it was hard to believe that just the day before I had walked on the floor of the bay. It was an amazing experience.

Anachronism by J. S. Marlo

J. S. Marlo BWL Author Page

Who hasn't watched the movie Braveheart? It stars Mel Gibson as 13th-century Scottish freedom fighter William Wallace. In the movie, Wallace wears a kilt, Scotland’s most iconic piece of clothing. The only problem is: the kilt wasn't invented until the 18th-century. Ooops!

When I started writing my current novel, a historical/paranormal romantic suspense, I knew I would need to do more research than usual. Don't take me wrong, I love research...I love it too much. Discovering new facts is fascinating, and more often than none, I spend too much time searching details I don't need. Still, I'm trying to avoid the obvious and not-so-obvious "ooops".

My story takes place in 1941 during the war. Rationing wasn't enforced till 1942 in Canada, so I don't need to worry about food stamps. I discovered that less than one on four Canadian own a refrigerator, less than half use an electric or gas stove, and more than a third didn't have running water in their house back then. Needless to say, my heroine doesn't own a dishwasher, and when she injured herself, she didn't have access to antibiotics, but she could spend the night in a motel room for $3, which she didn't have. No credit cards.

All of the above were facts I knew I would need to research, but I didn't expect I would start questioning many of the words and expressions I take for granted. I'm constantly asking myself: Did they use that word in 1941? Did that expression existed back then? You could become very angry in 1941, but nobody went ballistic until decades later.

As a result, writing this story is fun and interesting, but it takes twice as much time than I had anticipated. I'm happy to report I crossed the halfway mark, but it won't be finished by Easter, not unless I lock myself in a hotel room at $150/night, which I can't afford either.

The challenges I encounter are giving me an even greater appreciation and renewed admiration for my fellow historical writers. I've read three books of the Canadian Historical Brides Series so far--nine more to read--and I bow to the talents of these writers. They researched every aspect of their story, in some instances every single sentence, and created compelling and accurate historical tales. Well done, ladies!!!
JS

 J. S. Marlo's Website

Women Actually Took Part in the Klondike Gold Rush by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

I had been to the Yukon twice and hiked the Chilkoot Trail in 1997, the hundredth anniversary of the Klondike Gold Rush, so I knew some history of the area before I started my research for my novel Romancing the Klondike. But I didn’t know anything about the north prior to gold being discovered on Rabbit Creek. When I began my reading I learned that there were good sized towns such as Circle City in Alaska and Fortymile in the Northwest Territories (the Yukon Territory was not formed until 1898) with theatres, libraries, schools, stores, and medical doctors. One little known fact, though, was that while most of the residents in the north before the gold rush era were men, there were also many women who lived there with their prospector husbands or who came as nurses, teachers, cooks, dance hall girls, and ladies of the evening.

       One such woman was Ethel Berry who made the trek from California as a newlywed with her husband, Clarence, in 1896. When they heard about gold being found on Rabbit Creek (later named Bonanza Creek) Clarence staked a claim on Eldorado Creek, a tributary, and the couple set up camp in a 12X16 foot long cabin. There was only a dirt floor and a window that was covered with a flour sack. The winter was cold and Ethel spent her time keeping the wood stove going and cooking and cleaning. Clarence’s claim proved to be one of the richest claims in the Klondike and when they returned to Seattle with two hundred thousand dollar’s worth of gold in the summer of 1897, Ethel was dubbed the Bride of the Klondike by the newspapers. In 1898, they crossed over the Chilkoot Pass with thousands of hopeful millionaires and went back to their claim again.

       Another woman who struck it rich in the Klondike was Belinda Mulrooney. She was raised in Pennsylvania and left home at twenty-one. She worked in Chicago and then San Francisco before heading to Juneau, Alaska, in 1896. When she heard about the gold strike in the Klondike she decided to go there. She bought the necessities she would need but she also thought ahead and purchased silk underwear, bolts of cotton cloth, and hot water bottles. These she carried with her over the Chilkoot Pass in the winter of 1896.

       When the ice melted on the Lindeman and Bennett lakes and Yukon River she floated down the river to the new town of Dawson City, reaching in it June of 1987. According to Belinda Mulrooney herself, when she finally reached Dawson and the gold fields after many months of hardship, she tossed a 25-cent piece, her very last coin, into the Yukon River for luck. She was 26 years old and full of confidence. And rightly so for she sold her silk underwear, bolts of cloth, and hot water bottles for six times what she had paid for them.

       With this success, Belinda turned her attention to the prospectors in gold fields. She set up a lunch counter to feed the single men and then added a bunkhouse for those who didn’t have a cabin to stay in. Eventually she built the two story Grand Forks Hotel and Restaurant, with multiple bunk beds on the second floor, at the junction of the Eldorado and Bonanza creeks. The hotel also acted as a trading post, a gold storage, and sometimes as a church. In the back were kennels for the husky dogs used to pull the sleds which were the main transportation in the winter.

       Being the smart woman that she was, Belinda had the floor swept every evening and those sweepings run through a sluice box. This earned her as much as $100 a day from the gold dust that fell from miner’s pockets and clothing. And she began to delve into the gold claims themselves, owning or co-owning fiving mining claims by the end of 1897.

       Belinda turned her entrepreneurial skills to Dawson and bought a lot on the corner of Princess Street and First Avenue. She sold Grand Forks for $24,000 and used her profits to construct the three-story high Fair View Hotel which opened to enthusiastic and impressive reviews on July 27, 1898. This was the most impressive building in Dawson and held thirty guest rooms and a restaurant.

       Impressed by her strong business sense, a local bank asked Belinda to pull the Gold Run Mining Company out of the red. She had the company in the black in 18 months.

       Belinda married and divorced and eventually moved to eastern Washington State and built herself a castle. She and her siblings lived there until her fortune ran out and she began to rent out the castle. She died in Seattle in 1967 at the age of 95.

        These are just two examples of the many women who lived in the north, who took part in the Klondike gold rush, and who are not included in most of the books written.

http://bookswelove.net/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

 

In the Name of Love by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan/


Family love stories

#1

My husband and I lived on an acreage and my husband work in the country for an oil company. Therefore he didn’t make it into town to buy me a Valentine’s card. So early Valentine’s morning he went outside and packed some snow into a pile. He got a can of red spray paint and painted a heart with an arrow through it on the snow. He also printed Be My Valentine on it. I could see the pile of snow from the kitchen window for months as it was the last snow to melt in the spring.

#2

My mother had moved from Alberta to B.C. to pick fruit and then got a job at a store in Vancouver. Mom’s parents, my grandparents sold their farm in Alberta and bought an acreage near Vancouver. My father was in World War II and was repatriated to Vancouver when it was over.

When dad left the army he got a job and began to look for a place to buy. My grandfather’s health was bad and so they decided to sell their acreage. One of mom’s friends was my dad’s sister and my dad found out about it through his sister. He bought my grandparents acreage and met my mother. They married seven months after meeting and were married for fifty-four years.

The way dad put it: He bought the acreage and got the daughter for free.

His Brother's Bride is now available in French ~ Nancy M Bell

I am excited to announce the release of His Brother's Bride in the French edition. This is the first title of mine to be translated and released in another language, so I'm a little chuffed. You can click on the cover to see it.

This has been a busy year with His Brother's Bride releasing in March of 2017 and then I was asked to take over the creation of the Manitoba book for this collection. I partnered with Margaret Kyle as my research assistant and go to source of all things Mennonite in southern Manitoba. Landmark Roses is the result of that collaboration and the title released in November of 2017.

Click on the cover for the buy link.

Elsie Nuefeld loves to sit on her porch and watch the children grow in the Mennonite community near Landmark, MB. Returning to the area after moving to Paraguay for a time, Elsie is happy to be living on the wild rose dotted prairie of south-eastern Manitoba. Her granddaughters are growing up and getting married, it's an exciting time. Secure in her long standing marriage to Ike, Elsie is content to observe the community from the sidelines and rejoice in the joys of the young ones. She often walks with her daughters and granddaughters through the graveyard abloom with wild roses and shares the stories of the ancestors sleeping there. It’s important, she feels, for the younger generation to feel connected to those who went before. Elsie hopes when she joins those resting beneath the Landmark roses the tradition of honouring the memory of the forebearers continues.

Then I also had a hand in the New Brunswick title, On A Stormy Primeval Shore. Partnered with Diane Scott Lewis, I served as research assistant and alpha reader for this title. It was a wonderful experience and everyone I contacted for obscure information was very helpful. We are hoping to do some events in New Brunswick this June. On A Stormy Primeval Shore just released on January 1, 2018.

Click on the cover for the buy link.

In 1784, Englishwoman Amelia Latimer sails to the new colony of New Brunswick in faraway Canada. She’s to marry a man chosen by her soldier father. Amelia is repulsed by her betrothed, refuses to marry, then meets the handsome Acadian trader, Gilbert, a man beneath her in status. Gilbert must protect his mother who was attacked by an English soldier. He fights to hold on to their property, to keep it from the Loyalists who have flooded the colony, desperate men chased from the south after the American Revolution. In a land fraught with hardship, Amelia and Gilbert struggle to overcome prejudice, political upheaval, while forging a life in a remote country where events seek to destroy their love and lives.

All the titles in this series have been well received and garnered excellent reviews.

And to top it all off, my very first translated work!

until next post, stay well, stay happy, stay healthy

Would I Redo by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

http://bookswelove.net/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan/
 

When I was in school, I wanted to travel and my dream job was to be a stewardess as they were called back then. I studied French, German, and Russian so that I would know some other languages for when I landed and maybe stayed over in another country. In my last year a job show was held at my high school and I went to talk with the representatives from an airline. She was dressed in her uniform and was very nice.

     I explained that I wanted to be a stewardess and asked for information. She told me that I had to be a certain height and weight, which I was. She said that all stewardesses had to wear a girdle even though their figures might be perfect. I was okay with that. Then she told me that anyone who wore glasses could not be a stewardess. I was devastated, since I needed prescription glasses but seldom wore them. I went to an optometrist to get contact lenses. This was when they were still made of hard material and my eyes could not adjust to them.

     So I gave up my dream of being a stewardess. However, I married, had wonderful children who have given me wonderful grandchildren and went on to become a writer. I travelled extensively through British Columbia, Alberta, the Yukon and Alaska, when writing my non-fiction backroads series.

     I belong to a dragon boat team and I have taken part in international festivals in Caloundra Queensland Australia (spent four week visiting the sites of Queensland and New South Wales then a week in Fiji) Sarasota Florida USA, (my husband and I travelled through two provinces and nineteen states on our way there and back home) and will be going to Florence Italy in 2018. While there I hope to visit many other European countries. I’ve also been to Japan and China. So not being a stewardess has not stopped me from doing the travelling that I wanted to do when I was younger.

     Just a note: my sister owned the Canadian Tourism College in Vancouver for many years. One of my granddaughters took her course and is now a flight attendant. She doesn’t need to wear a girdle and, while she doesn’t wear glasses, today it wouldn’t matter if she did.

The Arc of the Story..."Where the River Narrows"

Billie Burke as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North

“It’s always best to start at the beginning.” Wise words from the Good Witch of the North in one of my all-time favorite movies, The Wizard of Oz.

Then again, I doubt old Glinda ever wrote a novel or she probably would have come up something a bit less confusing. Unlike Dorothy, I would have asked, “What is the beginning?”

Okay, in the context of the movie, this is pretty much self-explanatory: If you’re heading from Munchkin Land to the Emerald City, you start out on the Yellow Brick Road and keep going until you reach the big gate with the broken door bell. But with a novel, it ain’t that easy. You can start in media res (in the middle of the action) or at square one, as in Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding, with the lead character as a baby. You can start at the end and work backwards, or with a prologue…. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Today’s readers are not so forgiving as Mr. Fielding’s in the middle of the 18^th century, or Charles Dickens’s in the 19^th  or even Margaret Mitchell’s in the early 20^th century. They want something more fast-paced. They want to jump into a book without the long preambles and slow development our pre-multimedia-consuming ancestors found so appealing. Gone are the days of the family sitting around the fire, by candle- or lamplight after supper on a long winter night, reading aloud as the sole form of entertainment.

The fact that I write historicals places certain restrictions on how I approach the arc of a book. The characters are vital to the plot, and the setting has nearly equal weight when planning how the book will be structured. I like the deep third person point of view that allows the reader to see through the eyes of more than one character, and I try to include just enough details of time and place without them being overwhelming.

In Where the River Narrows (with fellow BWL author Ron Ady Crouch, to be published

cover photo © Janice Lang

         cover photo © Janice Lang

by in July 2018), I’ve chosen to begin the book at a what I consider to be a logical start-off point. The Exposition introduces the characters (Elisabeth Van Alen, her family, servants and neighbors, and Gerrit Bosch, the groom-to-be in this “Brides” story) without a lot of preamble. The goal is to show them going about their normal lives while painting in the features and subtleties of the era as a natural offshoot of their daily activities. But to simply present a bunch of people running around in costumes performing out-dated tasks would be boring without a hint of something about to happen. Something is brewing that will upset this idyllic scene and have far-reaching consequences.

Before the proverbial cart is overturned, relationships between the characters are established, the groundwork laid for the “bride” aspect of the book, and the external conflicts put in place that are responsible not only for capsizing the wagon but for trampling its contents under foot.

Following the “Exposition,” we move on to the “Rising Action.” After the inciting incident (the event that sets the wheels turning), the story takes on an entirely different feel. What had been normal and comfortable no longer is so. War does this, and war, in the form of the American Revolution, has dire consequences for Elisabeth and Gerrit. There are losses and separations. Loved ones die, confidences are betrayed, and the survivors are forced to carry on amid harsh and forbidding circumstances. In this part of the book, Elisabeth and the remnants of her family and servants make a perilous trek to Canada where they hope to seek asylum among the British troops and loyalists to wait out the conclusion of the war. On the way, they meet up with an assortment of colorful characters based on historical accounts from a variety of sources. Once they arrive in Quebec Province, they need to survive further hardship and privation.

The Climax, Falling Action, and Denouement haven’t been written yet. (Neither, for that matter, has much of the Rising Action). But the arc of this story plays out nightly in my mind before I fall asleep. Even though I do not “plot” per se, this book is already as indelible as it could be. There is room for change…but not much. That depends on the research materials I continue to pore over. As anyone who’s ever written a historical novel will tell you, there are gold nuggets waiting to be mined from some dusty old tome that can put a new spin on even those story elements that today seem untouchable.

We shall see….

~*~

Kathy Fischer Brown is a BWL author of historical novels, Winter Fire, Lord Esterleigh’s Daughter, Courting the Devil, The Partisan’s Wife, and The Return of Tachlanad,  an epic fantasy adventure for young adult and adult readers. Check out her BWL Author page for more information and links to order, or visit her website. All of Kathy’s books are available in e-book from a variey of online retailers, and in paperback.