Showing posts with label Joan Donaldson-Yarmey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joan Donaldson-Yarmey. 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.

Monday, February 29, 2016

Books We Love's Tantalizing Talent ~ Author Joan Donaldson-Yarmey


       I was born in New Westminster, B.C., Canada, and raised in Edmonton, Alberta. While raising my own family, over the years I also worked as a bartender, hotel maid, cashier, bank teller, bookkeeper, printing press operator, meat wrapper, gold prospector, warehouse shipper, house renovator and nursing attendant. I also began my writing career. But I don't write in just one genre. Sometimes I have a story idea, write the manuscript and then decide what genre it fits. My past writing has consisted of historical and travel articles, seven travel books, four mystery novels, and two science fiction novels.
       I was taught in school that Canada doesn't really have an exciting history. Right now I am trying to dispel that myth by writing Canadian historical for young adults/adults, the first two of which are: West to the Bay and West to Grande Portage.

       My mystery novels are Illegally Dead, The Only Shadow In The House, and Whistler's Murder all in The Travelling Detective Series (boxed set), and the stand alone novel Gold Fever. My science fiction novels are The Criminal Streak and Betrayed in my Cry of the Guilty-Silence of the Innocent series.

       I love change so I have moved over thirty times in my life, living in various places throughout Alberta and B.C. I now reside on an acreage on Vancouver Island with my husband and three cats.



West to the Bay
Amazon

In 1750, Thomas Gunn, along with three friends, join the Hudson's Bay Company and sail from Stromness on the Orkney Islands of northern Scotland to York Factory fort on Hudson's Bay. They believe they are starting a new and exciting life in what is called Rupert's Land, but tragedy follows them, striking for the first time on the ship. At the fort Thomas finds his older brother, Edward, who had joined four years earlier. He also meets Little Bird, sister of Edward's wife, and her family.

During the first year Thomas takes part in the goose and duck hunts, the fishing, the woodcutting, Guy Fawkes Day, the Christmas celebrations, and the burial of a friend. He also deals with the snowfall, the cold, the boredom, and a suicide, and learns how to survive in the lonely and sometimes inhospitable land.

Amazon

West to Grande Portage
On his sixteenth birthday Phillippe Chabot is told that his brother-in-law has hired him to be a voyageur. He will be paddling west from Montreal to Grade Portage to trade supplies with the Indians for furs. He is overjoyed and receives all the appropriate clothing from his family as birthday gifts, even a tobacco pouch.

As the loaded canoe brigade gets ready to leave, his cousin, Jeanne, accepts the proposal of marriage yelled at her by the clerk who is going along to keep track of the trading.

Unfortunately, disaster strikes the brigade as the men paddle the rivers, make their portages, and get onto the sometimes violent and unforgiving Lake Superior. In Montreal, the city is ravished by a fire and many residents perish before it is extinguished.


Joan Donaldson-Yarmey




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