This Writing Life by Victoria Chatham

 

AVAILABLE HERE

There are so many aspects to crafting and creating a book. A good plot and memorable characters are the first things that come to mind but a good setting is also necessary. 

The importance of setting is that it anchors the reader in time and space and gives a sense of reality to the reader. I work as much at creating my setting as I do my characters’ backstories. The setting is, after all, the stage you set your characters on, whether it is contemporary, historical, science fiction - you pick your genre. 

Because my stories are mostly Regency romance, I tend to have a mix of city and rural settings. The Season, which appears as a setting in many Regencies, was aligned with when parliement was in session, with the busiest time being between Easter and July, when parliament adjourned for the summer. By then most of the aristocracy, and those who could afford it, were keen to get out of London because of the smell and took themselves off to their country estates or any of the popular spas like Cheltenham or the lesser known Harrogate.  

Country estates are lovely to create and many of my imaginary ones come from illustrations in books like Country Houses From the Air or The English Country House and the very useful Georgian and Regency Houses Explained. I have floor plans for country houses and smaller but no less impressive town houses. From these I can create my settings with a measure of accuracy and viability.

What might be included on any of these estates as far as farms and crops are concerned, are all gleaned from internet searches for letters and records of the big houses, some of them going back hundreds of years, and depend on what part of the country (being England, Scotland, or Wales) the estate is. Building styles change somewhat from county to county depending on what materials are available, or how wealthy the lord of the manor might be.

Weather, with all the light and shade that comes with it, plays a part in my settings, too. For information on a particular year I start with a visit to https://premium.weatherweb.net/weather-in-history-1800-to-1849-ad/ . To pin-point where my characters are for what special days and to create a timeline and consult https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=1818&country=9. The weather can affect so many aspects of my character’s mood. If it’s warm and sunny, then likely she is too. If it’s raining, all sorts of events can transpire from that. Think Marianne Dashwood getting soaked in the rain in Sense and Sensibility. Rain heralded my hero’s arrival in Folkestone in my book His Dark Enchantress. It fit his mood and the seriousness of the situation in which his wife, my heroine, had been abducted.

Plants and flowers play a part, too, and for this I use a Reader’s Digest book of English flora, plus Culpeper’s Complete Herbal. It pays to know what plants grow in which part of the country because someone will surely call you out if have a daffodil growing where it never would or a lark singing in central London as this is a bird that likes open countryside.

How I dress my characters also comes into play and for this I use an Illustrated Encyclopedia of

Regency muslin gown at the Costume Museum, Bath 

Costume, Fashion in Jane Austen’s London and just because, The History of Underclothes. YouTube can be particularly useful as well, especially clips like Undressing Mr. Darcy. I guess I’m a bit of a nerd because I do enjoy research and if I come across a particularly interesting snippet, it makes my day. Whether I can use it or not in a book becomes another thing altogether.

Victoria Chatham

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Canadian Authors Past and Present by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey--Alberta

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

Canadian Authors Past and Present

Canada celebrated its 150^th anniversary in 2017. To commemorate the occasion my publisher, Books We Love, Ltd (BWL) brought out the Canadian Historical Brides Series during 2017 and 2018. There are twelve books, one about each province, one about the Yukon, and one combining the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Each book was written by a BWL Canadian author or co-authored by a Canadian and an international BWL author.

Each province and territory of Canada has spawned many well-known authors and my series of posts this year will be about them-one or two from the past and one or two from the present, the present-day ones being the authors of the Brides book for the corresponding province or territory. The posts are in the order that the books were published.

Alberta

Henrietta Louise Muir was born in Montreal on December 18, 1849, into a middle class family. When she was twenty-six-years old she and her sister founded a Working Girls’ Association to provide meals, reading rooms, and study class for young women. It became one of the first Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCA) in Canada. Henrietta and her sister also published a periodical titled The Working Women of Canada. It highlighted the terrible working conditions of women in Montreal. The two young women financed these two projects from money they earned as artists.

     Henrietta married Dr. Oliver C. Edwards in 1876 and in 1883 they and their three children moved to Indian Head, Northwest Territories, now the province of Saskatchewan. She continued to advocate for women’s rights and when Dr. Edwards became ill in 1890, they moved to Ottawa, Ontario. There, Henrietta took up the cause of female prisoners. In 1893, she worked with the wife of the Governor General of Canada, Lady Aberdeen, to establish the National Council of Women of Canada. They also founded the Victoria Order of Nurses (VON) in 1897.

     Dr. Edwards was posted as the medical officer to the Blood Tribe in 1904 and they moved to Fort Macleod, Northwest Territories, now Alberta. She wrote Legal Status of Canadian Women (1908) about the legal problems she was trying to overcome for women. Near the end of the First World War, 1914-1918, when supplies and moral were low, the Government of Canada selected Henrietta Muir Edwards, as the only woman to be on an advisory committee on how to bring in stricter conservation measures. This was the first time that a woman had been appointed to review public policy with the government.

     Henrietta joined four other women’s rights activists, Louise McKinney, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, and Emily Murphy, to lobby the Alberta government for dower and matrimonial property rights for women. They became known as The Famous Five. Henrietta wrote and had her second book published, Legal Status of Women in Alberta in 1921.

     The Famous Five joined together again to fight the Persons Case in the late 1920s. Until then, women did not have the same rights as men to hold positions of political power. The case, officially known as Edwards v. A. G. of Canada, fought for the right of women to be appointed to the Senate. In 1928, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that women were not considered ‘persons’ according to the British North America Act and therefore could not be appointed to the Senate. The women took their appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, England. The council reversed the Court’s decision in 1929 and this opened the Senate to women, enabling them to work in both the House of Commons and the Upper House.

     Henrietta died on November 10, 1931 and was buried in Mount Pleasant Municipal Cemetery, Edmonton. For some reason the memorial erected in her honour lists her death as Nov 9.

William Patrick "W. P." Kinsella was born on May 25, 1935, in Edmonton, Alberta. His first ten years were spent on a homestead west of the city where he was homeschooled. His family moved into Edmonton when he was ten and he started school in the fifth grade. His first story won a YMCA contest when he was fourteen. After high school he worked at various jobs in Edmonton, then moved to Victoria in 1967 where he drove taxi and ran a pizza restaurant. Three years later he enrolled in writing courses at the University of Victoria and received his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing in 1974. He moved to Iowa and earned his Master of Fine Arts in English from the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978.

     Kinsella’s two favourite subjects for his stories were Indigenous peoples and baseball. While in Iowa, Dance Me Outside, a collection of stories as told by a young Cree boy, was published in 1977. It describes life on a native reserve in Alberta. W.P. returned to Alberta and taught English at the University of Calgary until his writing career took off. In the mid-1980’s, he moved to White Rock, B.C.

     Kinsella won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship award and the Books in Canada First Novel Award for his most famous baseball novel, Shoeless Joe (1982). It was also made into a movie titled, Field of Dreams in 1989 starring Kevin Costner. Another collection of Indigenous short stories, The Fencepost Chronicles, (1986) earned W.P. the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 1987.

     Box Socials (1991) combines baseball and life in rural Alberta in the 1940s. That same year Kinsella received an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of Victoria. In 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Kinsella's eight books of short stories about life on reserves were the basis for the 1994 movie Dance Me Outside and the CBC television series The Rez, which aired on CBC Television from 1996 to 1998.

     In 1997, W.P. Kinsella was struck by a car and suffered a head injury. He lost his ability to concentrate as well as his sense of taste and smell. Unable to write his own stories he did keep in the writing community by writing book reviews. He was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 2005 and was presented with the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.

     In March 2010, Kinsella’s unpublished manuscript, Butterfly Winter, won Winnipeg publisher, Enfield and Wizenty’, Colophon award. They published the novel in September, 2011, fourteen years after his accident.

     Kinsella spent the last years of his life in Yale, a small village along the Fraser River northeast of Vancouver. He had suffered from diabetes since the 1980s and in failing health he opted for the assisted dying provisions of Bill C-14. He passed away on Friday 16, 2016 at 12:05pm.

Book 1 of the Canadian Historical Brides Series: Brides of Banff Springs (Alberta) - Victoria Chatham - January 2017

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/

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