Nature can be so cruel, by J.C. Kavanagh

  

The Twisted Climb - DarknessDescends 

Book 2 of the award-winning Twisted Climb series

The animal kingdom often reveals that life is a test of survival of the fittest. Or sometimes, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Case in point: my neighbour has a mini-farm housing a good variety of birds. She's got Guinea Hens (think bread box with a clown face), swans, chickens, geese and a pen full of peacocks. All these birds make noise. And eggs. Lots of eggs. Who doesn't love fresh eggs, straight from the chicken? Actually, what doesn't like eggs is more the question. Weasels love eggs, fishers love eggs, racoons love eggs, snakes love eggs, and so does the sly fox.

Clown-faced bread box aka the Guinea Hen

My neighbour's geese occasionally come to visit

Newest adult male peacock visiting my home. I call him Turkwise.

Percy, the one-year-old male peacock, shaking his booty.
Note the still-developing tail feathers.

Percy and his brother, Snickety. 

My Ian feeding the peacock brothers

Percy and Snickety are peacock brothers, approximately one year old in the pictures above, which were taken a couple of weeks ago. Their 'human,' my neighbour, gives them free rein of her property and since her Guinea Hens come to visit me, the peacock brothers have decided that our home is also worthy of a daily visit. The young peacocks are quite domesticated and will run to me the moment I'm in view. If I'm inside, they'll peck on the windows for my attention and my endless supply of bread.

Alas, this is the part where nature can be cruel.

A fox has been seen wandering about our properties. It has a lame front paw and is often seen during the day. My neighbour notices that chicken eggs and goose eggs are disappearing. She reinforces the metal fencing surrounding the pens, ensuring an animal cannot easily dig its way in. Then she lets the peacock brothers out of their pen - the parents and one sibling prefer to stay in the pen but the brothers love their freedom. Out they go and are immediately joined by the newest peacock, a blue and white new fellow who came out of the woods and adopted them. I named him Turkwise, due to his turquoise colour and the fact that my granddaughter pronounces the colour as 'Turkwise.'
Shortly after they are released, the sound of shrieking peacocks fill the air. Peacock feathers drift down. My neighbour runs out in time to see a fox slinking away with one of the peacocks in its mouth. She chases it to one of her outbuildings where she discovers two young fox kits. Mother fox has caught their dinner.

Nature giveth and nature taketh away. Poor Percy.

Stay safe everyone.

J.C. Kavanagh, author of

The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends (Book 2)

voted BEST Young Adult Book 2018, Critters Readers Poll and Best YA Book FINALIST at The Word Guild, Canada

AND

The Twisted Climb,

voted BEST Young Adult Book 2016, P&E Readers Poll

Novels for teens, young adults and adults young at heart

Email: author.j.c.kavanagh@gmail.com

www.facebook.com/J.C.Kavanagh

www.amazon.com/author/jckavanagh

Twitter @JCKavanagh1 (Author J.C. Kavanagh)

Using TikTok to promote your book

“Another platform for book promotion? Aren’t we swamped already?”

Good question.

TikTok is not for every author, but for some, it could really help in book promotion. To understand how, let us look at TikTok first.

TikTok is the newest and fastest growing social media platform of 2019 and the trend is continuing. It started in China and is the visual equivalent of Twitter. Where Twitter posts are composed of short written prose, TikTok posts are composed of short videos. Users can create videos of fifteen seconds (or string togehter videos into posts of sixty seconds each.) Most users create videos on their phones, edit it using the easy-to-use but professional tools, add music, and download it on to TikTok. Most users use the platform on their mobile devices.

Is TikTok worth it? It depends on the audience for your book. Sixty percent of TikTok users in America are between sixteen to twenty-four years of age. For a young adult title, this is the perfect demographic and can help in author-branding. It is also extremely popular in places like China and India, with five hundred million monthly users in China while about the same number of Indians download TikTok videos every month. Targeting these geographic areas specifically is an option.

By its nature, TikTok is visually driven. Graphic novels are prime candidates for TikTok promotion. . Large companies such as Guess jeans and Chipotle have used TikTok with great success and many more are joining the trend. TikTok is a fun and visually-appealing platform. It doesn’t lend itself to serious topics and is not a place for making sales pitches.

TikTok has made available several marketing tools available. The videos can be linked to websites and the social engagements (likes, impressions, clicks, etc) are measured, allowing a marketer to know how well a campaign is doing. Use of hashtags, games and challenges allow for viral promotion.

TikTok is very easy to use and understand. It is this ease of entry that is its main drawing card. It is not for everyone, but for a product or book with a good fit, it can work well.

Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper" a fantasy and "Karma Nation" a 

Literary Romance. (www.mohanashtakala.com)

He is published by Books We Love Ltd. (www.bookswelove.com)

A surprising thing about Shakespeare...by Sheila Claydon

Click here for my books at Books We Love

A heroine whose problems are far distant from what the whole world is coping with today...but if you want a happy ending, this is the book to give you one while distracting you from real life!

I know we are all fed up with hearing about Covid19. After all, we are living with it, so we know how it is affecting our lives and the lives of our loved ones, so thinking about something different would be a good thing...except.  Because we are going to have to live with it for a long time to come, maybe now is the time to get a few things into perspective, literary wise.

Did you know, for example, how much of William Shakespeare's writing is peppered with references to the bubonic plague, which was the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries equivalent of what we are living with today. A disease which started with animals (rats and fleas in this case) and which had no known cure. Nor, in those far distant times, any hope of finding one.

Think of Romeo and Juliet, when Mercutio, mortally wounded in the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, called out 'a plague on both your houses.'  Or when King Lear tells his daughter Goneril, 'Thou art a boil. A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle.' Then, less malevolently, Olivia, in Twelfth Night, marvelling at the speed with which she has fallen in love, says, 'How now? Even so quickly may one catch the plague? 

There are many more such instances but the one that stands out the most is, again, in Romeo and Juliet, when the friar who was asked to deliver a crucial message to Romeo about the drug that will make it look as if Juliet has died when, in fact, she will only be sleeping, fails to carry out his task. In those far off days, friars had to travel in pairs. Unfortunately the friar's travelling companion was visiting the sick when he went to look for him. This meant that the public-health officers (the searchers of the town), suspecting them both of having been exposed to the plague, put them in quarantine by nailing the doors of the house shut! By the time the quarantine ended it was too late...'I could not send it - here it is again - Nor get a messenger to bring it to thee, so fearful were they of infection.'

It wasn't the plague that did for Romeo and Juliet but the dreadful social disruption it brought, which led to Romeo thinking she was dead, and so committing suicide, only to be copied by Juliet when she heard of his death.

In the year Shakespeare was born the plague killed a fifth of the townspeople of Stratford on Avon while sparing the Shakespeare family, and the fear of plague was something he had to live with throughout his life as it waxed and waned, disappearing for a while and then reappearing without any warning. History tells of the innumerable preventive measures that were used, most of which were useless (Fake News at its best!)

• Although bubonic plague was caused by the fleas on rats, dogs and cats were killed. Possibly the fleas transferred to them although this is not clear.
• Dried rosemary, frankincense, or bay leaves were burned in a dish as it was believed that the smoke would clear infection from the air.
• If there were no herbs available the doctors' favoured replacement was to burn old shoes!
• In the streets people pressed oranges stuffed with cloves against their noses, which was the closest they got to a medieval mask.

Even in the sixteenth century it was recognised  that the rate of infection was far higher in densely populated cities, so the wealthy people with country retreats would escape to their second homes, much as many people are doing today. In addition, civic officials took measures to introduce social distancing when they realised that crowds heightened contagion.  They also collected data from parish registers so they could track weekly plague-related deaths. When those deaths surpassed 30 they banned assemblies, feasts, sports and any other form of mass gatherings.

As it was considered impossible to become infected during the act of worship, churches were kept open, although anyone suspected of being ill was banned from entering. What was closed, time and time again, however, were theatres, which was economically devastating to Shakespeare, who was not only an actor and a playwright but also a shareholder. It is thought that during the severe outbreaks of bubonic plague that infected the country between 1606 and 1610, Shakespeare, frequently in lockdown, wrote and produced some of his greatest plays. During this time the London playhouses were unlikely to have been open for more than a total of nine months, but somehow he made what must have been a fearful and difficult time work for him.

The only time Shakespeare wrote directly about the plague was in Macbeth. Mostly he merely  referenced it in his writing as an accepted part of everyday life, something to be lived with, feared, but hopefully kept at bay by social distancing, quarantine, and the equivalent of using a mask.

The challenge to us twenty-first century writers is to copy him by putting our own quarantined, socially distanced selves to work, even though we can't hope to emulate his success. And while we are doing that, stay safe.