Laughter is the best tonic---Tricia McGill

Find all my books here on my Books We Love Author page

When I look back at old family photographs, one thing stands out. We were always smiling. I grew up in a happy household with brothers who, although sensible, were also prone to silliness. They enjoyed a good laugh. This rings true to me today. I much prefer to watch a comedy on the TV. Sorry if I upset anyone but no one can produce comedy quite like the British. Even before TV came along in our household all the comedy shows on the radio were listened to and laughed along with by members of my family. My youngest brother was the prankster and his all-time favourites were The Goon Show and Hancock’s Half Hour. There were many others but these stand out when I recall him roaring with laughter at the complete madness of the Goons. He could impersonate every character and memorise every punchline. 

Shows like these were forerunners of other excellent shows we watched avidly once TV entered our lives. Shows like Porridge with masters of British comedy like Ronnie Barker playing Fletcher. Another favourite was Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, the springboard for Michael Crawford into an amazing career in Movies and Theatre. And how can I leave out Faulty Towers?

I love paid TV as it has enabled me to catch up with old favourites such as One Foot in The Grave with grumpy old Victor Meldew and his long suffering wife. Or ‘Allo ‘Allo, and less ridiculous shows like To The Manor Born which when you boil it down had the makings of a good old love story. Poor Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton is forced to sell her stately home and we have a feeling all along that she is going to end up with the charming and handsome new owner of the manor.

Anyone remember The Good Life, where Tom Good and his lovely wife decide to leave the hectic world of the rat race in the city and settle in suburbia where they can grow their own vegies and even keep a pig or two.

I envy the children of today who have such a large variety of shows to watch aimed specifically at them. I have a few personal favourites that I wouldn’t miss for the world and often wish I was 40 years or more younger so that I could be a part of the world of animation. I admire the creators immensely. They breathe life into plasticine characters such as Wallace and Gromit. When one of my family members acquired a TV in the 50s with a screen not much bigger than a small laptop or tablet, we would all crowd around to watch shows like Muffin The Mule, The Flower Pot Men and of course there was Lassie where we could also sometimes shed a tear. All in black and white of course.

Things have moved on at a rapid rate and our TV tastes have obviously changed. I doubt my tastes have altered a lot though as I still watch shows like The IT Crowd and Miranda. You’ve probably guessed by now that I prefer comedy shows produced in the UK. Must be my inbuilt British sense of humour. 

Comedy helps us through the worst times in our lives and believe me I have lived through some dark days of loss and sorrow, as we all have to. But laughter is without doubt the best medicine of all, and it helps if we can laugh at ourselves.

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Small Town Travel

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Driving. I’m not a fan. With one exception. I very much enjoy driving on secondary highways through picturesque small cities and towns and stumbling upon small parks.

When we lived in western Canada the number of these slow-moving adventures were almost endless. One time, we took the Crowsnest Pass from Calgary to Vancouver, and then home to Victoria. I’ll grant you, I have never seen so many curves on a highway. With a highlighter we kept track or out progress on a map. Yes, this was before smartphones. Of course making five or six stops along the way limited progress. However, at this end of each day we seemed to only move five percent of the way from Pincher Creek to Vancouver. Of course, we were there in fruit season. The roadside stops were irresistible.

On the prairies we would “wing it.” There were dozens of smaller highways to zig-zag. Heck, we sometimes wouldn’t even check a map. One favourite spot was Kindersley Saskatchewan. I adore “cool” arenas and baseball fields. This small city had an amazing ballpark called Flanagan Field. Spectacular place in perfect conditions. Over two thousand seats. I think they love their baseball.

On that same trip we stumbled upon the neat little town of Indian Head Saskatchewan. This cute town has a century-old experimental farm. Little Mosque on the Prairie was shot there.

Now we are comfortably settled in at the heart of Toronto. While we have a Car, It is difficult to enjoy the unique rural roads and parks. Not from lack of temptation. It is simply the major headache of leaving and returning. It takes a very long time in very heavy traffic to do that trek. However, once there we find tempting mom-and-pop coffee shops, terrific towns with historic main streets, and great parks.

Cheers! A Little Taste of Wine's History

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/carlson-s-l-ya-fantasy/

Cheers! A Little Taste of Wine's History by S. L. Carlson
(Disclaimer: Too much of any good thing is always bad. Drink responsibly.)

Customs with wine-making and wine-drinking varies with cultures and times.
Here are a few interesting historical wine facts:

* Greek grape stompers were usually slaves, who crushed the fruit to live music
* Ancient wine was used as both beverage and medicine
* Alcohol is mentioned 165 times in the Bible, usually favorably
* Wine was often mixed with water, 1:3
* Additives were common, like cinnamon, violets, larkspur, parched bread, etc.
* Parched bread = toast (Cheers!)
* Cheers came from the Latin for face, but later came to mean gladness
* Before cork was so available, pitch, oil, or clay was used to seal the wine
* The host poured off the first of the wine to taste to make sure no clay or oil lingered
* By drinking first, the host also assured his friends it was safe for them to drink
* Romans sometimes sweetened old wine with sugar of lead (lead acetate), and after simmering in a lead pot, it was served in lead goblets
* During medieval times, people were afraid the devil would enter them through drink, so they clinked their wooden or clay goblets together to scare off evil. Other earlier cultures, also made noises before drinking to scare off ghosts or demons


Working IX to V by Vicki Leon
How Did it Begin by Dr. R. & L. Brasch
https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/22/messages/526.html

Although wine does not come into my stories much, please enjoy a glass of your favorite beverage as you read one of my books from:

http://www.bookswelove.com/authors/carlson-sandy-young-adult/

A Cover Story by Victoria Chatham

My new cover!

AVAILABLE HERE

We all know the adage that you don’t judge a book by its cover. I have, especially in my early days of purchasing e-books, done exactly that and then been hugely disappointed when the quality of the content failed to match the quality of the cover. These days I look at the cover and then click on the ‘Look Inside’ button and read the excerpt before I decide whether to purchase or not.

I must admit that the last thing I thought about when I started writing my first Regency romance was the cover. It was a tough enough job to get the words flowing without having the angst of considering how those words would all be wrapped up in a neat package. I was totally ignorant of fonts, colors, and layout and had no idea how to create an attractive, appealing cover. Thank goodness for cover designers and, in particular, Books We Love’s own cover designer, Michelle Lee.

First e-book cover

I was so pleased with the first cover because it contained all the elements I thought I needed. My heroine, Emmaline Devereux, had long black hair, so the image of the girl was bang on. I needed a horse because she loved horses, and the old house in the background depicting her family home was so reminiscent of a house I had loved and lived in for more than ten years. But then my daughter made the comment that the image of Emmaline looked more like a schoolgirl than a clever spy capable of surviving the Peninsula War 1807 - 1814 when Napolean clashed with the Spanish Empire. Oh, oh. One burst bubble as I reconsidered what the image was actually portraying. 

Thanks to Books We Love, I had the opportunity for a new cover design when the book went into print. Again, Michelle Lee pulled in all the elements I requested on my Cover Art Form.

First print cover

The result, as you can see, is a more adult female image. I still had to have a horse to convey her love of horses, plus my hero. A similar female image graced the cover of His Ocean Vixen, Book 2 in the series but with the third book, His Unexpected Muse, coming in February 2019, I thought a new look all round might better pull the series together.

By now a little more savvy about cover design, I looked at the covers of the Regency romance best sellers on Amazon and noticed that invariably there was just a female image against an attractive background. Publisher Jude Pittman was again in agreement with the update and I spent most of one Sunday scrolling through images until I found a few that I thought worked. I am now totally happy with the image and feel that, finally, His Dark Enchantress has grown up.

After I revealed it on my Facebook author page, I had quite a few people contact me to tell me how much they liked it, most much more so than the previous two. I'm now looking forward to the update for His Ocean Vixen and next year for His Unexpected Muse. 

Visit Victoria Chatham here:

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The Scales of Justice And Time Are So Finicky

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Some people are known by monikers that do them justice and others not so. Oddly enough, this blog is about British Columbia’s first Chief justice, Matthew Baillie Begbie who, after his death, became known as The Hanging Judge.  I was going to portray him as a bad guy in the new novel, The Joining that I’m editing, due to his little known reputation, however he was anything but that once I looked into his history and what he had done. 

He left his law practise in 1858 in Cambridge, England, and came to the fledgling territory of Vancouver Island. He formed many of the early legislations and founding acts to make BC the province in Canada it is today.

Begbie travelled up and down Vancouver Island and the mainland, before and after the two colonies joined to become British Columbia, sometimes travelling as many as 3,500 miles a year, and twice he walked over 350 miles, in order to bring law and order to all parts of the province. He would then show up for the court case, whether it was on a stump in a field or in a barn, dressed in his wig and judicial robes, instilling the awe and respect of the Justice Department to many a backwoods miner or small-town crowd.  Obviously a man of intense vigor and stamina, he would astound many with his decisions and lawful will.

He garnered more respect from the native populations than any of the few scattered white populations doing unheard of things like speaking several native languages and making fair and just decisions, which were unheard of at the time. He was also known for allowing people on the witness stand to swear on their own highly religious objects instead of the Bible. Begbie was one of the first judges to try a white man for accosting a First Nations person, and find him guilty. Many First Nations tribes called him Big Chief for the respect he garnered among them. He even brought in legislation that when a white man died without a will, his common law native wife was entitled to the estate.

He also shot down many highly biased laws, like the one proposing a heavy tax on the length of pigtailed hair among Chinese launderers or the one proposing a head tax on Orientals.

He stood for and upheld the notion of “equality of all men before the law.”

The man was a paradox, a staunch Victorian, even knighted by the Queen herself. He hated hypocrisy, was friends with many American Republicans, and, while fond of women’s company, he never married.

An accomplished artist, Begbie would draw many witnesses in the court room and what he saw on his journeys, could sing, and acted in many play productions. At the age of sixty-one he canoed up the Stikine river to northern BC for a court case.

Many of the newspapers hated the man for his stance on the minorities of the province and wrote articles blasting his views. Perhaps that is where he got the disrespectful moniker The Hanging Judge that people only remember him by, when in those days most sentences were death by hanging.

After all the years of serving this province in a fair and just manner, I’m sure he’d be turning over in his grave at the injustice of his nickname.

For a teaser of my upcomimg novel, check out the video link below.

https://youtu.be/4Yr2LuvKZos

Frank Talaber’s Writing Style? He usually responds with: Mix Dan Millman (Way of The Peaceful Warrior) with Charles De Lint (Moonheart) and throw in a mad scattering of Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues). 

PS: He’s better looking than Stephen King (Carrie, The Stand, It, The Shining) and his romantic stuff will have you gasping quicker than Robert James Waller (Bridges Of Madison County).

Or as is often said: You don’t have to be mad to be a writer, but it sure helps.

My novels on Amazon are at:  https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Talaber/e/B00UC407R0

https://www.facebook.com/FrankTalaber/

https://www.facebook.com/franktalaberpublishedauthor/ (My facebook short story page)

Learning to Grow Lettuce Plants in Water by J.Q. Rose

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Terror on Sunshine Boulevard by J.Q. Rose

Mystery, paranormal

Click here to find mysteries by JQ Rose at BWL Publishing

Learning to Grow Lettuce Plants in Water by J.Q. Rose

My husband and I were in the floral and greenhouse business for nearly twenty years, so I was familiar with the term, hydroponics. According to Dictionary.com, hydroponics is "the cultivation of plants by placing the roots in liquid nutrient solutions rather than in soil." 
In the spring of 2017, hydroponics became very real to me when Gardener Ted decided to try growing lettuce and a few other plants by building a system of pipes to grow plants in water. 

He has grown lots of vegetable and annual plants as well as foliage plants, mums, glads, and Easter lilies in our commercial greenhouses, and he plants a vegetable garden which produces delicious food all summer for our family in Michigan and a small garden in winter in Florida for us. Yes, he gardens twelve months out of the year. A dream come true for him.

Lettuce and other plants growing in Gardener Ted's  hydroponic system
Photo by J.Q. Rose

He's always experimenting with new plants and new ways of raising them. But learning how to grow healthy plants in water is definitely not like raising plants in soil! Figuring out how to move the water through the pipes, adding nutrients to the water, and keeping the pH at the right level led to huge challenges for him. He soon learned the weather conditions affected the nutrients in the water. Warm, cold, wind, humidity, etc.affected the growth of the plants. Gardener Ted knew how to deal with weather conditions when plants grew in soil, but figuring out what to do to keep his plants healthy when their roots were only in water was a puzzle, at times frustrating. But he triumphed over the unknown and developed a working growing chamber which produced healthy plants.

Delicious speckled lettuce grown using the hydroponics system
Photo by J.Q. Rose

He followed through on producing lots of lettuce grown hydroponically, but the garden lettuce seemed to grow faster. I liked the hydro lettuce because it was clean when he cut it, whereas the garden lettuce had sand and soil on the leaves. 

This spring of 2018 he made improvements to his system and his plants are growing beautifully. We are enjoying a delicious, as well as, a pretty salad every day. And one other perk when gardening, he enjoys sharing his harvest with neighbors, friends and family.

Are you a gardener? Do you have experience with hydroponic growing? 

Click here to connect online with J.Q. Rose

Adventures in the Amazon: Motokar Madness! by Stuart R. West

I flew 3, 265 miles to Iquitos, Peru, and all I have to show for it is a case of diarrhea! I kid, I kid (not really). 

Actually, I learned quite a bit from our trip to the Amazon, both about myself and the untapped, vast unexplored world around us. The adventures my wife and I shared will surely inform my future books and writing. Over the next several months, I'll be sharing some of my voyages into the jungle. So strap in, folks, it's gonna be a wild ride.

My wife and I all touristy in a motokar death-trap!

But I survived! Barely. My first time out of the United States and man, did I go big.

Day one of our journey to Peru actually took a day-and-a-half, all of it travel. Three flights, three airports, three rounds of security and customs and trauma. Anyone who knows me knows I'm a sucktacular traveler: "Are we there yet?" "I'm bored." "Can't we just be there?" "He's looking at me funny!" (My poor suffering wife.)

At 6', 2", weighing in at 225 pounds, flight engineers clearly didn't have me in mind when they created their flying crackerboxes. Our overnight flight to Lima was a contortionist's nightmare. At midnight, the flight attendants fed us dinner, then hurriedly shut out the lights, their intention to have us sleep for eight hours so they wouldn't have to deal with us. Sure, uh-huh, right. It's like trying to sleep in a bookcase.

When we finally landed at the Lima, Peru airport, I desperately found myself wishing I'd paid attention to my two years of high school and two years of college Spanish. Honestly, the local people in the airport put me to shame, most of them able to speak passable English. And here I am--ugly American--stomping around, adding "O's" onto the end of English words. ("Luggage-o?")

The Peruvian people were very helpful, even if all of them had different advice. Out of pure luck, we finally realized we had to reclaim our luggage and check it again. Total fish-out-of-water moment.

But once we hit the Iquitos airport, I was a whale-out-of-water, a (not so) Great White. The departure area was pretty much the size of a living room, hotter than asphalt on a Summer day, a crowded, sweaty hub of humanity.

Okay, about Iquitos... Hardly the touristy, exotic getaway locale I expected (man, I really should've done some research), Iquitos is over-populated, full of political corruption (citizens are forced to vote by law and bribed to swing a vote for the equivalence of twenty bucks), trash-strewn, crime-ridden, humid, terrifying, and absolutely exhilarating and thrilling in a roller-coaster, pants-wetting kinda way. Like an island, Iquitos is only reachable by boat or airplane.

History lesson! Years ago, Iquitos's citizens came out of the jungle and adapted civilization as they knew it (learned from TV) in their new city. Literally hundreds of tin shanties can be seen right next door to the few wealthy residents. Up to four families share the small, ramshackle dwellings. 

Yet even the worst tin shacks--holes and all--have direct TV dishes mounted on the roofs. Things exploded about six years ago when the former jungle dwellers discovered the internet and smart phones. Welcome to civilization.

The amazing Armando, motokar driver extraordinaire!

Unfortunately, as an adjunct to "civilization," unemployment (the rubber industry--Iquito's past major source of jobs and income--dried up, leaving people jobless) prospered.

Unless you're a motokar driver.

We've all been in white-knuckled cab rides before. Now imagine that multiplied by 200,000 unleashed motokars.

What's a motokar, I hear you asking? Why, it's a three-wheeled motorcycle of sorts. Unprotected, the driver sits in front while the terrified passengers are sardined into a tiny cabin behind him. Different designs adorn the tarp (Spiderman, Scooby-Doo, appropriate flames of Hell), the driver's number posted on back.

It's the primary vehicle of choice (cars are a rarity) and a new source of income, drivers eking out enough soleils for a day's worth of beans and rice.

And driving laws? Heh, don't be silly. Someone told us, "In Iquitos, there are no rules, no lanes, no lines, and no laws." (Check out the video below if you don't believe me.)

On our trip from the airport to the hotel, I thought we were going to die (and here I figured the jungle would get me). Two-laned streets turned into five and six, hundreds of motokars jockeying for front position like a vicious roller-derby. Near misses were common, no sweat to the crazed, undoubtedly caffeine-infused drivers. From the left, hundreds more swarmed. On the right, a small dirt road unleashed another couple hundred. They fused together like a massive swarm of bees, all of them chasing the honey at the end of their furious flight.  They swerved, cut others off, bounced back and forth like pinballs. The song, "Ride of the Valkyries" played out in my head as I held on for dear, sweet life.

Miraculously, we arrived at the hotel unscathed. There we met the gracious organizer of our trip, our "Jungle Momma" and her husband. 

Then we slept.

The next morning, cocky and sure of myself, I proclaimed, "Hey, nothing to it! I survived my first day. Got this by the cajones! What could possibly go wrong?"

As it turns out, kismet's got it out for me badly.

For a different kinda trip, come on down to Peculiar County, a lovely little day-trip away. Just make sure you're home before dark and lock those doors.

Click here for a scenic tour of beautiful Peculiar County!