Showing posts with label #Yukon River. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #Yukon River. Show all posts

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.

Friday, February 24, 2023

Canada's Coastline by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

 

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


 

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

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

 

Canada’s Coastline

I am a Canadian and all my mystery, historical, romance, and young adult novels are set in Canada. Canada is the second largest country in the world and has the world’s longest coastline. It is 243,792 km (151,485.326 mi in length and borders on the North Pacific, Arctic, and North Atlantic Oceans and includes the coasts of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and Cape Breton island, as well as, thousands of off-shore islands. The next closest country is Indonesia with 54,716 km (33,999 mi). The sovereign country of Monaco has 5.6 km (3.5 mi) of coastline.

Part of Canada’s coastline encompasses Hudson Bay which, even though it is saltwater, is sometimes considered a marginal sea of the Arctic Ocean. While politically it is considered part of Nunavut, it borders on Ontario, Manitoba, Quebec, and Nunavut. Hudson Bay is famous for the fur trade between Europeans and Indigenous peoples from the 1600s to the 1900s.

Canada has ten provinces and three territories. Two of the provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, are land locked. The others plus the territories all have some part of their coast on saltwater. The province of British Columbia has the most with 25,725 km (15,985 mi) on the Pacific Ocean, while the Yukon Territory has only 343 km (213 mi) along the Arctic Ocean.

The government of Canada has set aside five key ecosystems of Canada’s coastline as Large Ocean Management Areas (LOMA) for conservation, planning, and management. The Pacific North Coast comprises one-quarter of the Canadian Pacific ocean waters. This area is home to sea lions, dolphins, seals, porpoises, and twenty-seven different whale species. It is also the habitat of 80% of the global population of Cassin’s Auklet plus a number of other seabirds. The glass sponge reef along the coast dates back 9,000 years.

The people around the Eastern Scotian shelf rely on fishing and petroleum exploration for their livelihood to the detriment of the region and the number of marine animals that live there. LOMA is trying to improve the area. Although, shore around the Placentia Bay area off the coast of Newfound and Labrador  is degrading due to economic development, it is still the habitat for 49 bird species, 14 marine animal species, and 23 fish species. There are also a number of plant species.

The Beaufort Sea is a marginal sea (a division of water separated from an ocean by islands, peninsulas, or archipelagos) in the Arctic Ocean off the shore of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. This LOMA is a complex a marine system because of the short summer free of ice, the freshwater flowing into the sea during the spring and summer and the increased dropping of sediment. It has been an important area for humans who have hunted and fished for centuries. Six communities oversea the management of the LOMA and by doing so are able to pass on their harvesting skills to future generations.

The fifth LOMA protected area is the Gulf of St Lawrence which sits at the mouth of the St Lawrence River and covers 155,000 sq km (60,000 sq mi). Some of the species that inhabit the waters are Greenland shark, the St. Lawrence beluga, giant whales, seals, tiny pink crustaceans called krill that are near the bottom of the food chain, sea ducks, and geese. It is a very productive and diverse estuary along the coasts of Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfound land and Labrador.

 

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