Showing posts with label #amwriting #BWLpublishing #strongwomen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #amwriting #BWLpublishing #strongwomen. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

Brontë Land



In May my husband Will and I spent a delightful day in Haworth, West Yorkshire, UK. We visited the home of the famous Brontë writing family, followed in the footsteps of siblings Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne, and enjoyed lunch and snacks in cafés with views of the picturesque dales.

Curators of the Brontë Parsonage Museum say the village of Haworth and the surrounding countryside would be recognized by the Brontës today. We took the train and bus from Leeds and walked up the steep high street to the centre of Haworth village. 



Our first stop was the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which is full of artifacts and descriptions of the family's history and the sisters' writing. As children, the girls and their brother Branwell loved making up stories for his toy soldiers and creating imaginary worlds and adventures for their characters. Charlotte named her favourite soldier after the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the year before Charlotte's birth. The siblings would walk around the dining table developing their tales, which speaks well for the value of writing groups and walking as stimulation. As they grew older, they acquired portable writing desks so they could write in different parts of the house. 

                                           Emily's portable writing desk                                                  

The family history was a sad one. Maria Branwell Brontë died the year after her youngest child, Anne, was born. Four years later her two oldest daughters died, probably of tuberculosis contracted at boarding school. Her son Branwell became a painter and struggled with addiction. He died at age thirty-one. Emily died three months later, at age thirty, and Anne died the following year, age twenty-nine. Charlotte married her father's curate and lived to age thirty-eight, when she died of complications from pregnancy. Her husband remained in the house with her father, Patrick, who died at age eighty-four, having survived his wife and six children. All except Anne are buried in the neighbouring church, where Patrick served as rector for forty-one years. Anne died while recuperating from tuberculosis in coastal Scarborough. Charlotte had her buried there to spare her father yet another funeral. 

                              Brontë burial site in St Michael and All Angel's Church, Haworth 

After the museum, we boosted our mood with lunch on a café patio overlooking the Yorkshire dales. Then we walked up to the moor behind the Brontë home and followed a favourite path of the siblings. We didn't mind that it wasn't Brontë-esque rainy, windy, and cold. Actually, one museum display featured an academic's chart that shows sunshine appears in more Brontë novel scenes than readers tend to remember. 


Then it was time for an afternoon snack in another café's garden. 



The Brontë Parsonage Museum hosts talks, children's programs, and other events through the year. I wish I lived in Leeds so I could attend events like Women of the Wild, which will be held this September. I have a slight personal connection to Haworth. My aunt's family came from the village and my aunt inherited Charlotte's umbrella, which she later donated to the museum. Unfortunately for us, the museum keeps it in storage along with other personal items and clothing, which they only bring out for special exhibits. But my aunt would be glad to know the umbrella was home in lovely Haworth. 
 

                Haworth village viewed from the moor. My hair suggests the day was a tad windy.   
   

        

       

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

The Night the Moon Sang

 

Click the link below for details and purchase information

https://bookswelove.net/waldron-juliet/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 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




Amazon   

Kobo

Smashwords

Barnes & Noble





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


Connie Vines's Blog and links





Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Ageism in Writing

 



Some years ago, I read an award-winning novel about intergenerational family relationships. Every character in the story over age fifty was physically or mentally decrepit, and often both. The author was in her thirties. This was a comic novel and I realized she was exaggerating the characters for laughs. As an official senior citizen, I didn't find it funny. 

Physical and mental problems do tend to creep in with age. Aching joints, dementia, type two diabetes, high blood pressure, clogged arteries, and a host of cancers strike seniors in large numbers. I know several seventy-year-olds who have broken bones from a simple fall. In their youths, they'd have escaped with a scratch, which healed quickly. I find recovery from injuries and medical procedures takes longer now and my body parts don't always completely return to their former normal. "You're only as old as you feel" would be nice, but it isn't quite true. Portraying seniors as no different from fit twenty-somethings only works in science fiction and fantasy -- my fantasy, in particular. 

But I also have many friends over age seventy-five who regularly spend full days hiking up steep hills, over rocky and rooted terrain. And don't try to put something over on my ninety-year-old uncle. He's as sharp as many people decades younger, although he needs a wheelchair.  

Look closely to see a group of seniors hiking - they're specs on the landscape

I think one trick for writing realistic older people is balance. For each character brought down by the trials of advanced age, show another senior in peak form. I wouldn't have minded that award-winning humour novel as much if one character over fifty, and preferably over seventy or eighty or ninety, climbed a mountain, clobbered a skilled opponent in chess, or published a successful humour book. 

It's not easy to avoid ageism in writing. A friend, who is a few years older than I am, once admonished me for a having character in her mid-fifties struggle to rise from sitting on the floor. I'd thought this was realistic, since most people in my seniors' gym glass hoist themselves up awkwardly from the mats. Kudos to my friend for being able to leap to her feet.  

   
My Aunt Edith mastered the internet in her nineties


Sunday, May 29, 2022

Period Detail or: The Writer's Dilemna

 

                            https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/roan-rose/id1023558994?mt=11
  
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


https://bookswelove.net/waldron-juliet/
https://books2read.com/flyawaysnowgoose


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.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0089F5X3C

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

 


I love libraries! I'll bet if you're reading this post, you love libraries, too. Libraries are like portals to a multitude of other worlds. Entering a library offers nearly limitless access to anywhere you want to go or anything you want to learn. You can even travel to other time periods, planets, alternate universes, and more. Of course, the many books in the library are the vehicles that will take you there. 

But there is more to libaries than books. Libraries connect us with technology, media, programs. They also connect us with one another, offer a community, invite us to events. Libraries are just plain awesome!

We are in the midst of National Library Week. This year's theme is "Connect With Your Library." Today, specifically, is Take Action for Libraries Day. By clicking on this link you can access the American Library Association's information on how you can tell Congress to fund libraries.

So, show your library some love today and let those hard-working librarians know how much they are appreciated!

Friday, February 12, 2021

Happy Galentine's Day!





Here’s to strong women 
May we know them 
May we be them 
May we raise them. 

What is Galentine’s Day? 

Observed on February 13, the day before Valentine's Day, Galentine's Day celebrates platonic friendships, usually among women. It was created by the character Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), on the TV series Parks and Recreation as a day exclusively for women. 

Specifically it's the day when she and her female friends leave their husbands or boyfriends or empty houses to have breakfast together and celebrate one another. 
A fake holiday? Maybe. But a fun one! As Amy says…“It’s only the best day of the year!” 

So, who will you celebrate with? Who is the wind beneath your wings? 

Tops for me: 

My 101 year old mom Kitty… kind, generous, hard-working and my model in all things baby-taming! 

my friend Maria with my mom Kitty

my sisters… 2 here and 2 passed over, all ever loved 

The sisters Charbonneau

my daughters, teachers in all things that matter...

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.



 

writing pals and sisters...






school chums...


          How rich I am in tremendous women…
I hope you are too!

Popular Posts

Books We Love Insider Blog

Blog Archive