Space adventure needs a hint of romance - by Vijaya Schartz

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My love of science fiction started early, when I read DUNE by Frank Herbert. But I always found that these books were written by men and for men. They relied heavily on the technical aspect, and they portrayed male protagonists, with very few female characters. Even the new movie versions of Star Trek are still men-oriented. Star Wars made progress with the last trilogy with Rey as a female Jedi, and more females in the new Disney series. It's about time.

   

As an avid reader, I scoured the library for sci-fi and fantasy novels by female writers, like Ann McCaffrey (Dragon of Pern series), and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Then, I discovered the Dock 5 series, by Linnea Sinclair, the undisputed queen of Sci-fi with romantic elements. Linnea’s books even had cat-like animals called furzells. Her stories contained plenty of action, strong women characters as ship captains, and they navigated the stars, making no apologies. I had found my niche.

This kind of science fiction written by women does not focus on the engineering of the spaceship, or the weapons, nor does it explain how people traverse intergalactic distances. It is set in a future where space travel technology exists and is commonplace, where man has met alien cultures and spread throughout the universe... like in Star Wars or Star Trek.

So, when I decided to write, I wrote what I love, space adventure with strong women as protagonists. Of course, there are brave heroes, and often cats in my stories as well. Write what you know, right?

As for the angels in my books, they are a select group of gifted people with supernatural talents, in charge of keeping the balance of good and evil in the universe. This said, they are still people, with a body and a heart.

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The Blue Phantom glows like a beacon in black space, appears and vanishes, and never registers on scanners. Rumors say it will save the righteous, the oppressed, and the downtrodden… and slay the unworthy without mercy. The space pirates fear it. Their victims pray for it… but its help comes at a price…

Vijaya Schartz, award-winning author
Strong Heroines, Brave Heroes, cats
http://www.vijayaschartz.com
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What's this kitty cat doing on my new sci-fi cover? by Vijaya Schartz

Find the links to purchase this book and my other titles from BWL here

What is such a cutie doing on a spaceship? On the cover of a book titled BLACK DRAGON? He is neither black, nor a dragon.

Well, there is an explanation. You see, this kitty's name is Marshmallow, and he is the prized pet of the fierce Black Dragon, code name of an infamous Resistance fighter, escaped from prison, and wanted by the authoritarian regime on several star systems.

Unlike his heroic guardian, Marshmallow is quite spoiled. He loves tuna, loves the ladies, loves angels, loves blue crystal, and no one can resist petting him when he rolls on his back and rounds his blue eyes into pools of cuteness. He also has a special telepathic connection with the hero, and serves as his side-kick in undercover operations. This kitty is the best at distracting the enemy.

But although everyone loves Marshmallow, BLACK DRAGON isn't a story about a cat. It's a sweet sci-fi action romance, set on the Byzantium Space station. Book Two, AKIRA'S CHOICE, is scheduled for release in October 2019.

This space station was previously featured in the Azura Chronicles series, in ANGEL MINE, and ANGEL FIERCE. It will also figure in book 3, ANGEL BRAVE, scheduled for 2020.

 

About Byzantium:

Hovering at the edge of conquered space, in orbit around a dying star, sits an aging space station under the control of the Galactic Trade Alliance. Byzantium, once a thriving commercial hub, is turning into a den of crime, drugs, and debauchery, where anything or anyone can be bought or sold. The maximum-security penitentiary at its core, the Fortress, is a pit of despair and holds the most dangerous felons in the galaxy. For over a hundred cycles, the GTA has annexed worlds and plundered their resources. It now controls most of the galaxy, except for a few useless rocks and a small number of rebellious planets, who still manage to challenge their military might. But something is coming to upset the balance of power... something the GTA did not foresee.

BLACK DRAGON
Byzantium Book 1
June 7 release, in preorder now
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A gambler is cheating in a den of the Byzantium space station, and Lieutenant Zara Frankel intends to catch him in the act. She always gets her man, but this one could prove more than she can handle.

Captain Czerno Drake, code name Black Dragon, has come under cover to break his innocent uncle from the most secure penitentiary in the galaxy, the Fortress, on the Byzantium space station. He will stop at nothing to succeed, even enrolling the help of the lovely straight arrow GTA enforcer. 

When Zara realizes that she’s been duped by a shrewd but seductive Resistance fighter, her reaction surprises everyone, most of all herself.

Early reviews:

"I love this one by Vijaya Schartz. As always, her action-packed, well-plotted out prose kept me glued to the pages of Black Dragon from start to finish." TwoLips Reviews 5-kisses a RECOMMENDED READ

"I like the balance of humor and danger in this story, and the action kept me glued to the pages... I enjoyed watching as suspicion turned to admiration, and admiration became the first flickers of love between Czerno and Zara... Pick up a copy of Black Dragon, by Vijaya Schartz, and enter a world of adventure, romance, and a spoiled cat named Marshmallow." 4½ stars Sensual Long And Short Reviews

"Vijaya Schartz is known for her strong female characters and Zara is no exception... gives the reader lots of action and a sweet love story." Single Titles Review 4½ stars

HAPPY READING!

Vijaya Schartz, author
 Strong heroines, brave heroes, cats, romance with a kick
 http://www.vijayaschartz.com
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"August...die she must"

Credit:DavidKinghamPhotography

As summer comes to an end here in the northeastern U.S., I usually feel a sense of sadness come over me. I love summer and hate to see it go. Even this record-setting heat and humidity we’ve been experiencing for the past few weeks hasn’t put a damper on the season for me. We’ve been blessed with fresh tomatoes aplenty (three varieties), peppers, zucchinis (green and golden) and assorted herbs. And I love going shoeless in the yard :-)

The pool has been sparkling clear for my newly retired husband and Evie, our mutant springer spaniel (I don’t swim, though; don’t ask why). It’s astounding to realize that it will soon be Labor Day and schools have already reopened here. The season I wait for through the endless New England winters (which usually extend into spring) is over seemingly before it even started. 

One reason I’m feeling a bit blue is that for the umpteenth year in a row, I was unable to view the Perseid meteor showers. After a spectacular show of fireflies, the Perseid event is like the finale of a Fourth of July fireworks display. But for any number of reasons—cloudy skies for the most part, and the light pollution one experiences living close to cities—they came and went without much ado. Truly a pity since, according to astronomical forecasts, this year’s event was supposed to have been especially impressive, a “once in a decade outburst” that was seen in the southern hemisphere as well. (Read more about the Peseids here.)

I initially became excited over this phenomenon the summer I graduated

Evie, aka Dopus Dogimus, in the pool

from high school (ancient history by now), and I remember the awe and excitement of seeing them for the first time, as if I’d made some sort of unique discovery. It was a cool, mid-August night and my childhood pal, my beloved mutt Shadow, and I were sitting on one of the huge boulders at the foot of the driveway at my parents’ home in North Stamford (no light pollution there amid the trees far from city lights). We stretched out on the rock, soaking up the last warmth of the day, me on my back, Shadow in his sphinx-like doggy pose, and gazed up at the clear, starry sky. The sight was unexpected, with one “shooting star” after another, sometimes multiple streaking lights at once. Over the next few nights, Shadow and I made a point to return to our rock. On one night, I stopped counting after more than a hundred in less than an hour.

When my kids were small, I would rouse them—and my husband—from their beds at around midnight when the meteor showers were at their height. We'd lie on chaise lounges or beach blankets in the back yard and stare up at the sky and wait. But here in Central Connecticut, the sky was never quite as bright or as clear as it was in those earlier years. After much mumbling and grumbling on the part of my progeny and hubby—they were bored or tired, or both—we’d call it quits, usually without seeing a single one.

And so it’s been for the last 25-plus years. On an occasional August night, I’ve seen one or two, at most a handful, but in my back yard I have yet to see the Perseid the way I remember during that magical night when I was eighteen. (Luckily, my life hasn’t been completely bereft, as they are particularly exquisite over the Great Paconic Bay on the East End of Long Island, where my husband grew up, or along the Connecticut River east of here.)

I’ve also found a place for the meteor showers of August in my writing. Along with fireflies, which I’ve used in two books, the Perseids make an appearance in Courting the Devil, book two of “The Serpent’s Tooth” historical series, in which my heroine, Anne, experiences their awe and wonder in much the same way I did, way back when, among the trees with my old dog Shadow.

~*~

Kathy Fischer Brown is a BWL author of historical novels, Winter Fire, Lord Esterleigh's Daughter, Courting the Devil, The Partisan's Wife, and The Return of Tachlanad, her latest release, an epic fantasy adventure for young adult and adult readers. Check out her The Books We Love Author page or visit her website. All of Kathy’s books are available in e-book and in paperback from Amazon.

Eighteenth Century Women’s Fashion: A Heroine’s Journey -- Kathy Fischer-Brown

“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.”-- Virginia Woolf

Linen shift

As a child at the beginning of Lord Esterleigh’s Daughter, the heroine, Anne lives a poor existence with her mother in rural England. Her clothes are simple, made from linen and/or wool that was spun and woven at home or by the local weaver. Throughout the trilogy, her clothes change as her lot in life changes, reflecting her station in life and her views on the world and how she chooses to act.

Stays

In the 18th century, a woman’s clothes, regardless of her status, consisted of over-the-knee stockings knit from linen or wool, and held up by garters. Her basic undergarment was the linen shift, which also served as a nightgown. Stays, stiffened with whalebone or wood, provided support. Pockets were worn suspended around the waist with ribbons or cord under her petticoats, which had slits in the side for access. Skirts were worn in a varying number of layers. Some skirts were sewn or pinned to the bodice, while others were worn interchangeably with bodices or jackets. Bodices were fastened by pinning, sewing or lacing. (Women did not wear buttons until a later period, with some exceptions.) As a practical

Embroidered pocket

necessity, women also wore caps made of linen. Even the youngest children of the period dressed like miniature adults, with little girls squeezed into stays, or "jumps," and smaller versions of the clothing her mother would have worn.
 

While Anne lives with her father, Lord Esterleigh, in London and at his country estate, she wears clothes and dresses her hair in a matter befitting the daughter of a marquess in the late 1760s. Fashion of the English upper class was influenced heavily by what was worn at court. Fabrics included silks, brocades, cotton, velvet, linen, and wool. In this upper crust of society, cloth was often imported and the garment was cut and sewn by dressmakers (not ready-made, hanging on a rack in a shop).

Book Two of the trilogy, Courting the Devil, takes place in

Upper class women

upstate New York under threat of impending war as the northern British army makes its advance from Canada toward Albany. Here, Anne lives a hard life as an indentured servant. As it was in early childhood, her clothing is homemade of linen, wool, or a combination of the two called linsey-woolsey. Cotton fabric was rare in the north. 

For reasons of simple economics, her skirts, like those of many poor women of the era, are worn shorter than their wealthy counterparts. Her shift is made of unbleached linen, much coarser that the same garment she wore as a member of the English aristocracy. Outer skirts, or petticoats, and jackets (with or without sleeves) are dyed with colors found in local plants, berries and tree bark. In winter, she layers her skirts for warmth. Anne wears a linen mob cap that keeps her hair as clean as possible, especially when the weather makes it impossible to bathe. A cap is also vital in helping to keep her hair from catching fire, a common cause of serious injury or death among women of the period.

Wedding gown

Early in the third book, The Partisan’s Wife, Anne and Peter are married at the American encampment during a lull between the two battles we now refer to as Saratoga. White wedding gowns didn’t come into fashion until a much later date. During the colonial and Revolutionary Era, the gown a woman was married in would have been a practical, functional outfit, something she would wear a lot more than once. Anne’s wedding dress is blue (with white stripes), quite old, and made of fine linen. She carries a bouquet of late blooming asters and wood marigolds that would have been found in the area. To round out her bridal attire, she wears a fichu (a neck kerchief worn around the shoulders and tucked into the bodice) of an almost gossamer muslin and a borrowed cap with ribbons embroidered with forget-me-nots.

Cover art by Michelle Lee

Later in the story, while Anne and Peter are in New York, Peter commissions for her two new gowns and purchases the red hooded cloak seen on the cover of the book.

~*~

I wish to thank the good people at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield, Massachusetts for permission to use some of the photos in this article.Other photographs are courtesy of the Jas. Townsend & Son catalog.

Winter Fire -- The Story of the Story

Leslie Nielsen as "The Swamp Fox"

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by early American history. In fact, when I was ten, I wrote my first novel; it was very loosely based on the “Swamp Fox” TV series (a Disney production 1959-1960), starring Leslie Nielsen as the Revolutionary War hero, Francis Marion. I’d like to think I’ve come a long way since then.

At around this time until I was fourteen or fifteen, our family vacations involved visits to old forts, battlefields and living history sites from Montreal to St. Augustine in Florida. My father was a Civil War buff who owned an extensive collection of books on the subject, but he was eclectic enough to include sites from earlier periods in our itineraries. Strolling  through formal gardens and marveling at sumptuous bed chambers and ballrooms of Tryon Palace in North Carolina or expressing wonder over the three tiny rooms of an 18th century farmer’s house in Connecticut, I was deeply moved by the vibrations set off by the clothes, furniture and personal effects on display. Subsequent trips to Williamsburg, Virginia, and Old Sturbridge in Massachusetts, among others, provided far more insight than any high school history text could on how people in the past lived, worked and died, and with detail that struck all of my sensory nerves.

It was only natural that, when I took up writing seriously, I chose to set my fiction in the period I had come to love—the time encompassing the colonial and Revolutionary War eras in the U.S.

While searching for inspiration back in the days before the Internet, I became intrigued by “captive narratives.” In their time, and for a populace starved for the type of fabulous accounts that scream from today’s tabloids, this was an extremely popular genre depicting stories of white settlers taken in raids by Native Americans. Although all of these tales provided entertaining and informative reads (many supposedly in the teller’s own words), none was more gripping than the tale of Mary Jemison, a teenage girl who was captured by a French and Indian war party and adopted into the Seneca tribe in the area around what is now Syracuse, New York. Even as she mourned her family, Mary lived the rest of her life among the Haudenosaunee, marrying twice and giving birth to a number of children. By the time she was an old woman, Dehgewanus (as she was then called) had all but forgotten her native language and was venerated by her tribe. An equally engrossing tale is told in a more recent book. The Unredeemed Captive, by John Demos (Vintage, 1995), chronicles the efforts of a Massachusetts family in the early 1700’s to regain their daughter following a raid on Deerfield. After years of searching and countless disappointments, the father was horrified to learn that Eunice had married a Mohawk warrior and chose to remain with her captors.

By now, my story had begun to take shape, but I was still in need of a time and setting. Further research led to a campaign of 1779 during the American Revolution, which had as its target Six Nations warriors under Mohawk war chief Joseph Brandt and his Loyalist allies. (An exceptional account of this bloody chapter in American history is told in Allan Eckert’s Wilderness War.) Following a number of murderous attacks on frontier settlements and equally brutal reprisals,

George Washington dispatched Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton and their armies into Iroquois lands essentially to minimize the effectiveness of Brandt’s forces by burning their villages and crops. The resulting devastation on both sides led only to more retaliation. An unexpected by-product of this campaign was the recovery of a number of white captives and their return to “civilization.” Some went happily with the army, while others had to be forcibly removed from the burning remains of their adoptive homes.

This inspired me to ask myself, "What if...?" What if a white woman in like circumstances had been forced against her will to return to what was left of her family? 

I had read of incidents in which this had been the case, and in which these reunions, more often than not, were unpleasant (to put it mildly) for both the former captives and their relations. Many of the redeemed were scorned, shunned, and regarded with suspicion for their strange ways. After years of living among the “savages,” attempts to reintegrate into a society that was now foreign and strange ended in failure for these unfortunate people, who often ran away at first opportunity to rejoin their Indian families. Not all of these tales had a happy ending.

And so, with these accounts as its foundation, Zara Grey’s story took root in my imagination. Caught in a war pitting neighbor against neighbor, son against father, white man against “red man,” a young heiress of Dutch descent becomes both a pawn and a pariah, with murder in the bargain.

Ethan Caine, the male protagonist in this historical romance, has as his backstory a 1763 incident in eastern Pennsylvania during Pontiac’s Rebellion that polarized the region. A group of self-appointed vigilantes, the “Paxton Boys,” fed up by a lack of support by colonial forces, attacked and killed residents of a nearby village of peaceful Susquehannock. While the actual incident was unprovoked, the fictionalized account in my book involves a patchwork of accounts gleaned in my research. Young Ethan is deeply traumatized by these events and the ensuing senseless slaughter. Fifteen years later he is forced to confront his own prejudice and regrets when he rescues a young white woman dressed in clothes of Iroquoian design attempting to cross a half-frozen stream enroute to Iroquois lands.

The resulting novel,Winter Fire, a 1998 Golden Heart finalist, has as its core the inter-cultural conflicts of its time, colored by the perceptions and fears of people in the midst of war.

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