Why Have Animals As Characters? by Victoria Chatham

 

AVAILABLE HERE

I love all animals. Even little critters, like frogs. They give me the creeps, but I find them fascinating. By far my favourite animals are horses and dogs, and more recently, cats. Animals have long had their place in literature.

Think Bolingbroke’s horse Barbary from Shakespeare’s King Richard II or grey Capilet in Twelfth Night. There is, of course, the ubiquitous Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Don Quixote’s Rocinante, and Marguerite Henry’s Sham from her book King of the Wind. Zane Grey named many of the horses in his western novels, as did Louis L’Amour. Smoky, Ginger, Merrylegs, Artax, The Black, Joey are names that I have known and love from the stories in which they appeared.

Who can forget Buck from Call of the Wild, or Bulls Eye, Bill Sikes’ dog from Oliver Twist, and didn’t we all love Perdita and Pongo, the Dalmatians from 101 Dalmatians? Stephen King’s Cujo might have given some of us nightmares, as did The Hound of the Baskervilles, but I don’t mind betting cute little Peg from Lady and the Tramp had you smiling again. Cats, albeit to a lesser degree, also have their place in literature, such as Crookshanks from the Harry Potter tales, Tab from Watership Down and all those marvellous cat characters from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Old Deuteronomy, Rumpleteazer, Rum Tum Tugger all appeared in the musical Cats.

Lennard

I write historical and contemporary western romance novels, so it's almost impossible for me not to include animal characters. In my cozy mystery series, my amateur sleuth, Winnie Hatherall, has a lovable big mixed-breed dog named Lennard. How did my Regency Lord get from his London residence to his country estate? He either drove his team himself or was driven by his coachman. A team of four horses, plus a couple of park hacks in town and hunters in the country, added up to a minimum of a stable of eight horses. The better those horses were kept, the longer they were of service, so would all have been named and known as individuals.

What I try to bring to my pages when I write horses into my novels is how that particular animal impacts my hero or heroine. They usually have a part to play in showing off my characters’ skills, as they do for Emmaline in His Dark Enchantress. In Shell Shocked, set at the end of World War 1, the dog, Bella, helps her master recuperate from his experiences at the front. In my contemporary western romances, what cowboy does not have a horse, and often a dog, both for work and company?

Animals, real or imagined, help ground us humans with their sense of immediacy, of being in the here and now. Animals add so much to my life, and I want that for my characters, too.

Victoria Chatham

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The Art of Critiquing by Victoria Chatham

 

AVAILABLE HERE

Oh, that dreaded word, critique. I well remember finishing my first book, His Dark Enchantress, with a sense of doom hovering over my head. This was my baby, my first Regency romance. After carefully nursing it through the process from a barely formed premise to writing The End, I now had to run the gauntlet of another pair of eyes before I could consider submitting it anywhere.

My hesitation to pass it on stemmed from a one-off experience in a critique class – one in which the presenter showed no interest in reining in two women who jumped on everyone’s work and shredded it. One person in the class walked out, and another emailed the organizer to say they would not be back. Stubbornly, I hung on, determined to learn what not to do and to be as supportive as I could to the rest of the class, even to the two naysayers, who thought they had carte blanche to strip another’s work to the bones.

I entrusted my baby to two author friends, one who wrote Regency romance and the other, at the time, who was writing western historical romance. I breathed a sigh of relief when those first critiques came back to me. They both had many comments, and where their comments aligned, I knew I had work to do. One picked me up on some of my Regency accuracy. At the same time, the other asked questions about the era's terminology and customs, quickly eroding my blithe supposition that everyone would understand it. I wanted my readers (if there were any) to enjoy what they were reading without being tripped up by either situation, and I quickly learned that writing The End was, in fact, only the beginning.

Since then, I have worked with a handful of writer friends who critique my work, and I return the favour. The choice of reader depends on the genre I’m writing in. If it’s a historical novel, I ask someone who writes contemporary fiction to critique my work, as well as someone who writes historicals. Thankfully, I have that mix in my close critique group. We know each other well enough that none of us takes umbrage at the results, but some authors are very thin-skinned. Learning to take an honest, fair critique is part of the process.

courtesy img.freepik.com

When I am asked to give a critique, I’m looking for rounded characters and well-thought-out plots. If I come across awkwardly worded sentences, I will suggest an alternative – this is not for the author to use  – more to give them an idea of how to frame that sentence in their own voice. I will pick up on word choice, repetition, misplaced modifiers, and run-on sentences.

That first draft is essential to commit the story to the page in the first place. Subsequent drafts are for improvement all around, and I know I couldn’t do that without input from my ‘Dream Team.’ Personally, I read my manuscript aloud when I think it is finished and still catch problems, usually with syntax, which a text-to-speech program would likely miss. Once that is done, I put it aside for a few days, read it again, and if I’m happy with it, I submit it to my publisher. Having done all that, it still amazes me that when I have my print copy in hand, I will usually find an error or two.

As much as writing is a skill, so is critiquing. It is not helpful to a budding or a seasoned author to give their work to a family member or friend who will probably say they love it and haven’t you done well to write a whole book! An author needs another author, or a very perceptive reader’s critical eye, to see a problem, address it constructively, and together build a better book.

Victoria Chatham

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The Things We Keep by Victoria Chatham

ON PRE-RELEASE HERE

As my grandmother once pointed out, we all have a shelf life, and I’ve reached the stage in life when it’s time to take stock. You know the sort of thing. Is the will written? Are insurance policies in place, and is the paperwork easy to find? Have you appointed an executor? I don’t want anyone to think I’m ready to go yet. I’m not. Thankfully, I’m still hale and hearty, but I don’t do things as fast as I once did. With all that in mind, this winter I decided to sort out my many, many photographs, something I’ve threatened to do for at least the last five winters.

Some might look at what I have and call me a hoarder. I prefer packrat, a condition I came by honestly. As a child of a military family, we moved constantly from one fully furnished married quarters address to another. Of our personal belongings, what didn’t fit into one of our four big tea chests, the old-fashioned kind with riveted metal edges and lined with aluminium foil, and a couple of suitcases, didn’t move with us.

Image from pinterest.com

As an adult, I kept everything I could. From boxes of all shapes and sizes, you know the ones I mean - that little jewellery box that’s been in the corner of a drawer for ages, just in case, until the time comes when, unused and apparently unwanted, you get rid of it. And immediately need a box of exactly the same size. Then there are books, magazines, and what could be politely termed bric-a-brac or, more accurately, junk.

But now this piper is looking at paying the price. I don’t want my executor to have to do more than necessary when the time comes, so out came my two five-gallon Rubbermaid tubs loaded with photographs, plus two more boxes packed with albums. This may not seem like much to many of you, but to me, it is a lot.

But oh, the memories. My parents' wedding photographs. Me as a baby and a five-year-old. My children as babies and toddlers. Weddings and christenings, vacations and holidays, indicated by everything from daffodils at Easter to cards hanging from oak beams at Christmas. There are photographs of places I don’t remember visiting, and of people whose faces are unfamiliar, and whose names, if ever known, are long forgotten. I have photos of a Pekinese called Bocky, but no idea whose dog he was or where the photos were taken.

Two large albums contain a photographic record of my month-long trip to New Zealand in 1985. We flew in relative luxury with Singapore Airlines, when even tourist class had plenty of legroom. No vacuum-packed meals here. Good hot food was served on china plates, with proper cutlery and glassware appropriate to your beverage choice. Here is the printed menu, depicting Singapore’s first St. Andrew’s Church, drawn in 1837,

 and a page showing the fare available on the Singapore - Abu Dhabi leg of the flight, all 7 hours and 15 minutes of it, but in all a twenty-nine-hour flight from Auckland to Heathrow.

 

After several days of looking at them, my collection of photographs is now reduced to one box. That will still need sorting into some sort of personal history, but it can wait until next Winter. The rest of the photographs? Shredded without a qualm because they no longer serve a purpose. It might not be much, but it’s a beginning, and now that the job is done, it’s time to start plotting Book 3 in my Sixpenny Cross Cosy Murder Mysteries, A Corpse in the Canal.

Victoria Chatham

AT BWL PUBLISHING INC

 ON FACEBOOK

 MY WEBSITE