Books We Love Insider Blog

Sunday, November 23, 2025

Round Up Time by Victoria Chatham

FOR RELEASE IN FEBRUARY 2026

About this time every year, I look at the calendar and, along with many, many others, think: where has this year gone? What have I done with my time? I write nearly every day, whether it's a work in progress, blogs, or just jottings for the next book, but here's a look back at my highlights for 2025.

January. I took a winter break in Puerto Vallarta. The highlight of that trip was a day of whale watching. We had only just left the harbour when a humpback breached close to the boat. There were several moms and calves, one mom and calf breaching again and again, which was an absolute delight to see.

Humpback breaching, Banderas Bay, PV, Mexico

February. We celebrated a friend's seventieth birthday in fine style at a local restaurant, which kindly opened two hours early for a drop-in , say-hello, happy-birthday kind of event. There was a great deal of mirth and merriment.

March. Shih Tzu month! First, pet sitting for a fun and sometimes naughty pair of sisters. The next client was a single dog, but equally fun.

April. My daughter and eldest son visited from England. I was happy to tour them around. Apart from places like the Royal Tyrrell Dinosaur Museum, Banff, and Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump, we had a walking tour of Calgary, which took us to parts of downtown that I had never been to, so I learnt something new about my city.

My daughter and eldest son, Banff

Later in the day, we visited the Chinese Cultural Temple in Calgary's Chinatown, and then returned to the Calgary Tower for supper in the revolving restaurant. The day was clear, so it was easy to point out landmarks. One of the things that so impressed them was the length of the train passing beneath us through Calgary. Just when they thought the last of the cars were coming around a bend, my daughter's excited, "There's more!" left the couple at the table adjacent to ours laughing. We had a wonderful ten days, and it all ended too soon.

May. House and pet sitting and a visit with a friend in Victoria, British Columbia. I love being on the coast, but I still haven't seen all the sights Victoria has to offer. Highlights of that trip were lunch and a tour at the Legislature Building, a textiles exhibition at the Royal BC Museum, but I have to say I loved the quirky teacup tree.

The Teacup Tree, Victoria, BC

June. House and pet sitting in various locations with a variety of pets. Plus a milestone in my life - I parted company with my last pair of high-heeled shoes. My 80+ knees no longer appreciate them!

July. House and pet sitting again, with a splash of research on breweries at The Establishment, a brewhouse in Calgary, courtesy of fellow author A.M. Westerling's son. Of course, we had to taste a brew or two and have lunch on the outside patio in the sunshine. What could be better?

August. Wonders never cease. I spent the whole month at home.

Sitting beneath our shade tree.

September. The release of my first cozy mystery novel, A Murder in the Meadow and a book launch at The Purple Platypus in Castor, Alberta, with many thanks to Lynn for being such a wonderful host, and author Nancy Bell for accommodating me for a couple of days.

October. Mostly at home writing, and then away with writer friends on our annual retreat. This time at Sylvan Lake, Alberta, in glorious weather.

Sylvan Lake

November. Two house sits this month, and a lot more writing. One of the exciting aspects of a new book is seeing your cover for the first time, and I love what BWL's artistic director, Michelle Lee, has produced for my second cozy mystery, A Body in the Brewery, shown at the head of this blog. I hope you agree.

December is just around the corner. I have one more short house sit with old faithfuls Brandy the greyhound and Ghillie the Scottish Deerhound, and then it will be Christmas. Again.

Victoria Chatham

AT BWL PUBLISHING INC

All images in this blog are from the author's collection.

Friday, May 23, 2025

Ivy Cottage by Victoria Chatham

Many years ago, on a bright April day with cotton wool clouds whisked across a clear blue sky by a strong breeze, I first saw Ivy Cottage. I stood at the entrance of the driveway leading into the garden, where daffodils danced at the feet of a row of cordoned apple trees covered in blossoms. The lady of the house sat on the lawn in the sunshine, engrossed with her spinning wheel, and I felt as though I had wandered through a time-travel portal.

The term 'cottage' was quite misleading, as this three-hundred-year-old Cotswold stone and brick property was actually a five-bedroom house. We made an offer, which the vendor accepted, and in August of that year, we moved in. The garden had to take care of itself that autumn and winter, but as it began to thrive the following spring, I discovered many intriguing things growing spontaneously.

Aside from the fruit trees, there was a large vegetable patch, a raspberry patch, and my favourite—a sprawling wild garden I never touched. Rabbits hid there, foxes used a regular trail through it, and a hedgehog raised her babies there for several years in a row. Bees loved the foxgloves and honeysuckle, while butterflies were drawn to the lilacs and buddleia. Each year, appearing unannounced in a different part of the garden, were poppies, ox-eye daisies, and the delicate and shy fritillaries.

rhsplants.co.uk

Another annual visitor was the teasel, which appeared in various parts of the garden each year. Known since before Tudor times for its woollen production, the mills in our area purchased locally grown teasels.

thompsonmorgan.com

The teasels were dried, and their spiky heads were then used to raise the nap on the fabric. This process was known as ‘teasing.’ In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, locally grown commercially harvested teasel crops became a thing of the past due to cheap imported teasels from Spain. My teasels attracted not only pollinators when they came into flower, but once they went to seed, they provided a feast for various birds, particularly goldfinches.

a-z-animals.com

The goldfinches weren’t the only birds inhabiting the garden. We had a noisy wren nesting in an old wall and a robin in the potting shed. Chaffinches and bullfinches, lovely as it was to see them, became spring pests once the fruit blossoms appeared. House and hedge sparrows, blackbirds, and thrushes all came and went, alongside an infrequent woodpecker and an occasional blue jay.

Being a single working mum meant I often didn’t tend to the garden as much as I would have liked. When the grass grew too long, I borrowed a neighbour’s goats to trim it. The only issue with this was that they had to be tethered to a ground peg, resulting in various odd-looking crop circles. It was either that or have the garden completely stripped.

During the ten years we lived in that house, the vegetable and raspberry patches were expanded, and I cultivated various herbs in reclaimed clay chimney pots acquired from a local demolition yard.

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However, none of this brought me the same satisfaction as my wild garden and all its inhabitants, both flora and fauna.

Victoria Chatham

Thursday, March 28, 2024

While You Were Reading (Behind the Curtain AKA an Author's Life) By Connie Vines #insider Author Blog,

Those Who Watched Murder She Wrote (television), As Good As It Gets (1997 movie), or Misery (1990)

Discovered how exciting, unpredictable, and dangerous an author's life can be.

Snort.

Chuckle.

Eye-Roll.

I must confess that after an all-night writing binge, I do resemble Jack Nickleson's portrayal of an obsessive-compulsive author: wild-eyed, questionable hairstyle, and talking semi-coherently to myself.

I have also inadvertently sat on one of my pups, who claimed my seat when I refilled my mug with coffee. Thus, a snarling match was triggered to save me, which resulted in my baptism with semi-hot coffee.

I encountered a "fan" during a meet-the-author event. She was upset when I asked her name and touched her book. I then proceeded to explain how a book signing event worked. It was touch-and-go for a few seconds but ended well for me. I learned later she'd purchased a second book. (I was autographing paperback copies. And yes, I'd have given her the second book if I'd known she'd desired a pristine copy.)

How does the author's life relate to the story?

When authors write, they are influenced by their past. Gender, race, and socioeconomic status also significantly impact their writing. Therefore, the more you know about the author, the better you can understand the messages central to their work.

We write what we know.

We write about personal issues that happen in our lives. Everything an author has encountered, from personal relationships to world events, can influence how they present a story.

Questions for the reader:

📌Are your favorite authors like you? Or, are their stories completely opposite to what is familiar?

📌Do you prefer a particular genre? Or will you cross into different genres with your favorite author?

📌Have you ever attended an in-person/ online author event?

📌And lastly, when and where is your favorite time and place to read?

I read in the late afternoon, before dinner time. I'm seated on the living room sofa, snuggled under an afghan in winter, with a snoring pup beneath each elbow.

Happy Reading,

Connie

My links:

https://connievines-author.com/

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorConnieVines/

https://bookswelove.net/vines-connie/

Thursday, November 23, 2023

For the Love of Animals by Victoria Chatham

Anyone who knows me knows I love animals. Even the little critters that give me the creeps - hello, frogs - fascinate me, but my favourite animals are horses, dogs, and cats.

SimonandSchuster.net

Animals have long had their place in literature. Think Bolingbroke’s horse Barbary from Shakespeare’s King Richard II or the grey Capilet in Twelfth Night. There is 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, and Joey are names 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 also have their place in literature, such as Tab from Watership Down and all those marvellous cat characters, Old Deuteronomy, Rumpleteazer, Grizabella, and Macavity from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

I write historical and Western novels, so it becomes almost impossible not to have animal characters. How did my Regency Lord get from his London residence to his country estate? He either drove his team himself or may have had a coachman. Even in the Regency era, a horse was relatively no less expensive than it is today. Stabling, feeding, shoes, and harnesses all took a toll on the pocket. The more animals there were, the more significant the expense. 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.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

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, and 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. I not only write but also house and pet sit. Whether I’m checking on horses, walking a dog, or corralling cats, they will always carry over into my writing. Animals add so much to my life that I can’t imagine not having animals in my characters’ lives.

Victoria Chatham

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

The Baddies in My Books by Victoria Chatham

I always have trouble creating evil characters. I would say that most have mine have been flawed in some way rather than truly evil. Except for, maybe, Sir Peregrine Styles in my first Regency romance, His Dark Enchantress. Sir Peregrine was very much a depraved character, particularly in the satisfaction he derived from causing pain or trouble to others. He was a narcissist, manipulator, and opportunist all rolled into one character but none of that was greatly surprising given the era and strata of society he grew up in.

People being people, and our characters are people if only in our minds and books, good and bad can

come from anywhere. The best of families could have one bad apple. A family in the poorest area of town may have a dad with a heart of gold and a mum who will do anything for her children first and her neighbours after that.

People can and do change and here Rose of Sharon in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath springs to mind. Circumstances can mould a person. Disappointment after disappointment may eventually turn a happy, positive person bitter and cause them to seek revenge against those he or she believes responsible. Being brought up in an abusive household may produce another abuser or someone who would never lift a finger against another person.

As authors, building the backstory for a flawed or evil character is as intriguing and circuitous as those of our main characters and, dare I say, might take a bit more of a psychological twist. Writing historical fiction means dipping into the social history of the era whether, in my case, it is the Regency or Edwardian eras. The class structure was pretty much adhered to. People ‘knew their place.’ But within that structure, the mores of the Regency became stricter through the Victorian era and began to ease again in the Edwardian era, especially the La Belle Epoch era in Europe which dated from the early 1870s up until the outbreak of World War 1.

Regency characters who held ambitions to rise above their place in society might be referred to as ‘mushrooms.’ The term ‘nabob,’ originally denoting an official under the Mughal Empire, came to be used somewhat derisively for a pretentious person, especially one growing his own wealth rather than inheriting it.

My current ‘baddie’ is one Ruby Baker in Phoebe Fisher, the third book in my series Those Regency Belles. Ruby is a barmaid with took my hero’s promises to heart. In a drunken moment as an eighteen-year-old and about to embark on his first voyage, Andrew promised to bring her jewels from India. Ten years later, Ruby arrives on his doorstep to collect them. However, now Andrew has inherited a title and gained a wife. What will Ruby do? I’m still working on that.

Victoria Chatham

Friday, July 23, 2021

What's in a Name by Victoria Chatham

All novels are populated by characters and those characters need names. With writing historical novels, or novels set in other countries, characters' names require a little more attention. Are the names appropriate for their era or country?

As an author of historical romance, I have most of my work done for me as all I need do is Google the popular male and female names for any given year and go from there. Please note: Google is a starting point, not the be-all and end-all for any type of research. Visiting cemeteries, especially historic ones like Highgate Cemetary in London, the final resting place of Karl Marx and George Michael, can be fascinating. Visiting a country churchyard is always a voyage of discovery, especially you wander amongst the older headstones.

Image courtesy Pixabay.com

I have also used parish records like this one from my own family history.

Because my settings are mostly English, I can pinpoint the county my characters populate and run a list of names for that area. My next Regency romance, Charlotte Gray, is set mostly in the New Forest in the county of Hampshire, England, so I researched both first names and surnames from that area in the early 1800s.

Once I have a list of names, I consider how easy those names are to pronounce and if the first and second names not only fit together but also suit my characters. Into that mix, I must consider the intricacies of the British peerage if I include lords and ladies in my books. Burke’s Peerage is an invaluable resource for this.

People were often named for the trade in which they were skilled like the English surnames Smith, Baker, Archer, and Tyler, or after the towns or countries from where they originated like York, Hamilton, or French.

First names were often handed down from father to son, mother to daughter, which could get confusing if you had a long line of Edwards or Marys and even more so if, like the boxer George Foreman, all his five sons were named George. Today it seems anyone can name a child anything and sometimes seems more by fancy than reason.

What I find frustrating is when I come across a name in a book and have no knowledge of how to pronounce it. Here again, the internet is a useful resource, especially www.howtopronounce.com. Type the name in the search field ‘and listen to the result. If you are using an invented name it is only fair to your reader to qualify it in some way for the reader to easily understand it.

Names, whether real or imagined, need to be a solid anchor for readers to identify with characters and, hopefully, come to know and love them.

Victoria Chatham

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

For the Love of Chocolate by Victoria Chatham

If you read Regency romance, you will probably be familiar with the hot chocolate our heroines enjoy. We still like our hot chocolate today, whether flavored or topped with whipped cream or both. Opening a can of cocoa powder or an individual serving sachet is so much easier for us to make than it was for the Regency maid or cook. Ours is practically instant, and theirs took a good thirty minutes of work to produce a cup of silky rich hot chocolate. But from where did this fascination of ours for chocolate in all its guises come?

Anybody who likes chocolate in any form is probably familiar with the term 'food of the gods,' which reverts to chocolate's Aztec and Mayan origins when only the rich and powerful drank it. Cocoa comes

Cocoa pod and beans

from the beans, or seeds, of the cocoa tree pod. The beans could be given as a wedding gift or used as currency to buy a pig or a slave or used in official and religious ceremonies. An illustration in the Codex Tudela shows the traditional method of creating the froth the drink was famed for by pouring the liquid from one cup to another with a considerable gap between them. When the Spaniards arrived, they couldn't quite get the hang of this method, so they invented the molinillo, a type of whisk still used today.

Cocoa beans were first imported from Mexico to Seville by the conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1585. By the 17th Century, chocolate was a popular drink in France. In England, the first chocolate house was opened by a Frenchman in the Queen's Head Alley near Bishopsgate in London in 1657. Chocolate houses were the then equivalent of our coffee shops today and were a club of sorts for wealthy and elite all-male clients. White's Club, the haunt of gentlemen of the ton in many a Regency tale, was originally a chocolate house. Opened in 1693 by an Italian, Francesco Bianco, alias Frances White, the house was described by Jonathan Swift as 'the bane of the English nobility.' Such was chocolate houses' reputation for being hotbeds of gossip amongst social climbers and ambitious politicians that Charles II tried to ban them in 1675.

Ladies, of course, could not step foot in such establishments, so they drank their hot chocolate in the comfort of their own home. Not such a comfortable job, though, for the staff who had to prepare these drinks. Purchased in hard blocks about four inches wide and one or two inches thick and packed in a linen bag, in this form, chocolate would keep for about a year.

First, the chocolate was grated into a powder and placed in a pan with milk or water, maybe with a little wine or brandy in it, or even a flavoring of cinnamon, nutmeg, or flowered waters like orange blossom or rose. Then the pan was put on the stove, and the contents were brought to the boil. Constant stirring prevented the mixture from scorching. When it had boiled, the pan was removed from the heat. The contents were then whisked to blend the mixture with a chocolate mill, known in France as a molinet, and in Spain as a molinilla. Eggs, sugar, and thickening agents such as flour, corn starch or sometimes bread were then added to the pan. The cook would spin the chocolate mill between her hands, like rubbing two sticks to start a fire, further mixing the ingredients. Once that was done, the pot was put back on the heat and again brought to the boil, being stirred all the time by the cook, who must have had a strong arm. A little cream might be added, and then another good whisking would be required to produce the essential froth without which hot chocolate was not considered fit to be served.

Nothing but the best silver or porcelain would do for this beverage to be served from for the upper classes. Chocolate pots were tall and slim and often had an elegant swan-necked spout. They might even have a finial of polished wood or ivory on top of the lid. Some had a hole in which the handle of the whisk

Trembleuse

could be inserted so the chocolate mixture could be spun again to produce that all-important froth before pouring. Chocolate cups often had a holder in the centre of the saucer and were known as a trembleuse in France and a mancerina in Spain. When the habit of drinking hot chocolate spread to the rest of society, pots were made of sturdier materials such as pewter and pottery.

The history of chocolate is as deep and rich as the end product. Dark chocolate is reputed to have excellent qualities, from improving blood flow and lowering blood pressure to being rich in antioxidants. It can improve your mood and improve brain function. Amongst its nutritional qualities, it contains Vitamins A, C, D, B-6, and calcium, magnesium and potassium. In fact, in ratios per 100 grams, chocolate is richer in potassium than a banana. There is so much more to this marvelous treat that it should be a food group on its own. So, from the food of the gods to being feared by some religious bodies as exotic and decadent, to whether you like large or small marshmallows in your hot chocolate, we enjoy it in all its forms.

Victoria Chatham