Wednesday, July 12, 2023
Brontë Land
Wednesday, March 29, 2023
The Night the Moon Sang
https://bookswelove.net/waldron-juliet/
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My husband, two little boys and I had driven 7 hours north through snow and ice from Connecticut to Maine to see his favorite cousin, Susan. She and her family were house-sitting in a large, lovely 18th Century sea-captain’s home whose sloping lawn stretched down to an inlet of the sea.
The whole world was electric blue in the twilight when we piled out of the VW and waded the last few feet of their driveway. We stomped our feet to get rid of snow in the unheated mud room. The kitchen was wood-fire-piecemeal hot, and Susan was belatedly beginning to work on a sink full of dishes.
The family lived for the winter in a few downstairs rooms, and kept the pipes warm for the owners, who were off sailing in the tropics, a life-style unimaginable to us. Sue’s husband was a potter, and while he made beautiful things, from dinner services to exotic display pieces, they were not exactly flush with cash. Beans or spaghetti and homemade bread were probably supper that night; I don’t remember. It was Susan’s birthday, so she’d made a delicious, heavy, scratch chocolate cake, and I’d brought up Grandma Carol’s family famous “Cowboy Cookies.”
Night grew deeper. Finally, the kids and cousins were extinguished; the adults were all talked out. We retired to couches and sleeping bags. It was cold as the hinges of the 9th Circle of Hell in any room not heated by a woodstove, an utterly clear and magnificently dark sky starry night—at least, until the full moon got up over the tall black pines. Then it was like day out-of-doors, the moon balefully glittering down on those crisp, fresh pillows of snow.
Susan and I had agreed to wake up later, because we’d consulted the almanac and learned that there was to be a lunar eclipse around 1 a.m. It was the night between our birthdays—mine would be tomorrow. We were a kindred pair of magical-mystery-tour women, both Pisces in the cusp. We were not about to miss such a grand celestial side-show.
Exhausted from carbohydrates and driving , I’d fallen into a deep sleep, but in what seemed only a few minutes, I heard Susan's voice in my ear.
“Juliet! Get up! Get Up!”
I sat up groggily. I could see her quite well with the moonlight pouring in the windows; it was amazingly bright.
“Get your boots and get downstairs—quick—quick--hurry!”
I did as she asked, for she sounded almost desperate, as if something was terribly wrong. Not only that, but she enforced the idea by rushing out of the room as soon as she finished speaking. I heard her feet going down the stairs rapidly. I got my boots on and followed, fast as I could. When I reached the kitchen, there she was, my coat in hand.
“Is it the eclipse? What’s happening?”
“Come on—quick--hurry! You have to hear this! It’s crazy!”
I threw the coat on and followed her out the door. The first breath, as we stood on the back steps, froze my nose and made me choke. It must have been zero—or lower. She gestured upward toward the moon, sailing high over the forbidding, snow robed pines.
As we stood there, trembling, it acquired a halo of dull red for the eclipse had begun. The snow-weighted branches randomly cracked in the cold. I had an odd feeling inside my head; I seemed to be looking up through water. Next came a kind of hum, a low tone that reverberated through the scene, and then I heard sweet tones, like a flute or an electronic instrument, ring across the sleeping, snow-shrouded land and out across the icy ocean which could be seen--and heard--at the bottom of the slope.
The veiled moon grew redder; the haunting tune repeated. Susan grabbed me by the shoulder.
“Do you hear it? Do you?”
“Yes! Yes! What …?” I kept looking up and down and side to side to see if anything was different or if anyone else was nearby, but I couldn't see any human-made light, shape, or motion. We were alone and shivering with the snot freezing air and the sheer weirdness of the snow-bound scene under that muted, dire moonlight.
“Thank God!” Nervously, Susan giggled. “I thought I’d completely lost it.”
She was cheered now that we had both "completely lost it." ;)
The tones were beautiful, melodic –and almost, in some peculiar way, perfectly normal.
Well, when the “music” stopped, we went back inside and attempted to awaken our respective spouses, but that was hopeless. Neither of them wanted to leave the warm cacoon of their beds—besides, they believed their Pisces women were engaged in some weird, flipped out folie à deux.
Now, if you are thinking about “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” go right ahead. Our trip into The Uncanny Valley happened in 1973, four years before Spielberg’s blockbuster. In fact, when I heard those tones in the movie all that time later, the hair on the back of my neck stood up and a cold chill ran down my spine.
I'd remembered that frigid night in Maine when a blood red moon sang to Susan and me.
~~ Juliet Waldron
Monday, November 28, 2022
Keeping Track of All the Books You Read By Connie Vines #WritingTips, #BWLAuthorBlog, #Tips for Readers
If you are like me, you read so many books/ebooks during the year.
Fiction, nonfiction, cookbooks, craft books, and in my case, manuals and instructional materials.
I struggle to recall what print books are shelved in bookcases and what paperback novels I have scattered around the house.
How difficult can it be, you scoff.
The closet in my office is a bookcase. Floor-to-ceiling, which takes up one entire wall of the room. Plus, the 4 additional standing bookcases in numerous other rooms.
And then there are the eBooks. I own a Kindle, a Nook, and an Apple tablet, which house the works of my favorite fiction authors, and sample reads.
You can see where this is leading....how many times have I re-purchased a book?
I'll give you an example. There is a western novelist (who shall remain nameless); books have always been must-reads for me.
There was one novel (I can't recall the title, which was part of the problem 😉). I purchased the original hardbound via a book club, then a paperback version. A few years later, the book was republished with an updated cover (paperback and hardbound).
Yep. I bought them all. (remember, this is only one case in point.) since the books were new, my father received a hardbound copy on his birthday, and several paperbacks were given prizes at the local library fund-raiser event.
Lists, log books, etc., were a real pain and never foolproof.
📚
It was quite by accident that I located a free app. Book Buddy.
The reviews were glowing, so I decided to give it a try.
I paid a small fee for additional storage because I was uploading so books.
Why do I love this app?
I can track who I've loaned a book to, my reading status on each book, my next read,
Favorites, Series Titles, books I've donated (my personal tracking addition),
You simply scan the ISBN, and all the info uploads.
If it's without the current 13-digit ISBN, you snap a picture of the cover and add some information.
It's also available on my phone. This will be a great help when I'm Christmas shopping this year!
Remember to check out all of BWL's November and December new releases! Get those stocking stuffers early--there are only 26 shopping days...📅 🎅🎄
BWL has a BIG sale on Smashwords: Connie Vines.
.
Connie's BWL Author Page: https://bookswelove.net/vines-connie/
Happy Reading!
Connie
Wednesday, October 12, 2022
Ageism in Writing
Look closely to see a group of seniors hiking - they're specs on the landscape |
Sunday, May 29, 2022
Period Detail or: The Writer's Dilemna
https://www.amazon.com/Roan-Rose-Juliet-Waldron-ebook/dp/B00FKKAN98/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490904741&sr=1-1&keywords=Roan+Rose
Writing popular historical fiction always leads to a dilemna--how much period detail can you "get away with" without alienating the casual reader? The audience for historical fiction is broad and it's difficult to find the correct niche, the readers you want to reach and entertain. My own problem as a writer who hoped to make a few dollars from this "hobby" was exactly this.
Who was I writing for? Where was my "market"?
In the beginning, I naively hoped to bring more realism into the world of romance--or rather into my imagined new brand of romantic-historical fiction. Much to the dismay of editors, I could not leave out the flies or the fleas or the dirt, or the endless lugging of water, or the everyday sheer drudgery of an ordinary woman's life in the past. Her hair had to be hidden and her head covered, and her mouth must remain closed.
Escaping into a dreamworld of history, usually with privileged protagonists who have servants (or slaves) laboring in the background over laundry and cooking and child care, did not particularly call to me. Trips to the backhouse in the winter, housekeeping, and women's cultural and gynecological issues--for example, Constanze Mozart's repeated near-death experiences while bearing six babies in nine years- interested me more.
Relationships are the key to any storytelling success, but if these are not placed in the context of historical period, I, as a reader, can't take a story seriously. I sincerely try to make my own stories as authentic as I am able by doing research, by attending re-enactments and spending time with the experts there. They, like me, truly want to walk back into another time and place, immersing themselves not only with the pleasures, but the pains and discomforts, of the times in which our ancestors lived.
Beyond the consequences of living in a world ignorant of germ theory or human anatomy, the second class "weaker sex"status of women was established and enforced by religion, by law and by custom. Women had very few legal rights, no contraception, no protection from abuse by spouses or intimate partners. There were strict rules for dress and deportment which applied to every social class and in every culture. China bound aristocratic women's feet so that girls grew up while enduring excruciating pain and became fit for little but sex, smoking opium and perhaps penning poetry. Victorians forced their girls into binding corsets that produced high-fashion "beauty," but deformed internal organs and shortened their lives.
Such battles appear to be still going on for women globally. Even here in the West, where, I'll admit, things are somewhat better in 2022 than in the world of 150 years ago when we couldn't vote and could be committed to life in an asylum on the say-so of a controlling father or bored spouse. We generally still don't get paid or promoted like our brothers.
These and other reflections about the dues paid by creators, brings me to The Northman, a film by Robert Eggers, now exiting movie theaters, a film which I caught just at the end of it's less than glorious run. What happened to this brilliant historical movie at the box office is, in my opinion, a tragedy, but a not unexpected one. (Set this movie beside the 1958 The Vikings and you will see what a long way historical accuracy has come in big-budget Hollywood films.)
Scholarly research, breath-taking reproductions of weaponry, of clothing, of ships and towns, beautiful photography and settings, an all-star cast who acted their hearts out, a great depiction of Norse/Icelandic magic and an epic love-and-revenge story, it has is a financial "flop." Not even those warrior scenes and buckets and buckets of blood could not attract the same folks who appear to love the two Netflix Vikings series, one I could not watch.
The reality is there is little that is admirable about Vikings. The Northman showed us why. Plainly depicted is a society powered by toxic masculinity and a violent proto-Capitalism which involved stealing from everybody else they encountered and either murdering or enslaving the rest. It is based upon an Icelandic saga, the one which became the inspiration for Hamlet.
The hero, Amleth, is from a ruling class who are supported by campaigns of murderous ferocity, their wealth and life style supported by robbery and slaving. When his father, a local king, is murdered by his uncle and his mother is (apparently) abducted, Amleth, a mere pre-teen, must run for his life, vowing vengeance as he goes. We have no idea how he survives, but when we next see him, he is grown, a mercenary for Viking slavers in the lands of the Rus. He is now a full-grown berserker warrior, a ripped killing machine who has suppressed every human feeling. Maybe "anti-hero" is a better designation for this character, although, naturally, that would not be the case for the original hearers of the tale.
I know something about Norse/Icelandic mythology, so I put my--meaningless--stamp of approval ;) on the mythic content of the movie. Those many magical episodes made perfect sense in that context. The mix of grim reality and the numinous and terrifying world in which the characters dwell brought the story to life for me. Here, and, and fairly successfully I think, is portrayed the Viking mind-set.
Women's magic--sorcery was very real and much feared by the people of this time--was also powerfully conveyed. Before the Aesir gods of Asgard, were the mysterious, primordial Vanir gods. Among these survivals of earlier times was Freya, goddess of sex and sorcery, one of the few truly powerful female figures in Norse mythology.
This same kind of Feminine Power is also exercised in other cultures. Olga of the Birch Trees, a Slavic witch enslaved by Amleth's band of mercenaries during one of those atrocity-filled Viking raids is introduced. Although I tend to resist love stories in such settings, I got into this character. Amleth on his way to revenge (and given a kick-start by his encounter with another Slavic sorceress) naturally responds to Olga's ferocity and she assists him with her knowledge of potions. Additionally tasty was the addition of Icelandic legends concerning their island's clever Blue Foxes. And who could find fault with the Valkyrie carrying the slain-by-the sword warriors to Valhalla, those ritual markings carved into her teeth, howling like a demonic wolf, riding her winged white horse across the stormy sky?
--Juliet Waldron
http://www.julietwaldron.com
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004HIX4GS
Thursday, April 7, 2022
Show Your Library Some Love by Eileen O'Finlan
Friday, February 12, 2021
Happy Galentine's Day!
with my daughters Abby and Marya |
my pals…writing sisters, school chums, fellow women’s club members, library boards and other fellow servers in our community.
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