Hard pants, by J.C. Kavanagh

The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends 

Book 2 of the award-winning Twisted Climb series

In a world where there seems to be less and less humour and more and more hardship, the English language has - how would you say it - blown up. Indeed, it seems that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to life a linguistic creativity that unites us all. There are so many new terms / words developed in the last six months, and in many ways, these terms have broadened the way we live and cope through these troubling times.

I'd like to promote more humour so I've compiled a few terms I've made up, together with some I've learned and others researched on the web.

Hard Pants: when you have to leave the house and replace your sweat pants or flannel pyjamas (soft pants), with jeans. I have to wear my hard pants to the store. They're sooo tight.

Cornteen: the intentional misspelling of quarantine. I'm getting so fat during this cornteen.

Covidiot: a person who disregards social distancing and safety guidelines. Look at those people on the beach. Bunch of covidiots.

Moronavirus: another term/form of quarantine shaming for those not following health and safety guidelines. He speaks so moistly and without a face mask! What a moronavirus.

Quarantini: a slang term for day-drinking while under quarantine. It's after 2... time for a quarantini anyone?

WFH: the acronym for Working From Home. WTF, I can't take anymore of this WFH.

CovKilos: the weight gained during COVID-19 gym closures/restrictions and WFH. These CovKilos are making it impossible to wear my hard pants. Pour me another quarantini.

Coronials: They're on their way. A reference to the generation of children conceived during the pandemic. Yeah, I'm a coronial. Want my autograph?

Skunk-Stripe: the natural, un-tinted white stripe at the top of your head and hairline. I'm desperate for my hairdresser! This skunk-stripe is making me look like a granny. 

Sheepdog: a person's hairstyle after four months without a hairdresser/barber. Hey sheepdog! You'd win a sheep-shearing contest with that hairdo.

Stay safe everyone. This too, shall pass. And, I do have a great suggestion to pass the time at home - read my award-winning books. If you like action / adventure / suspense / drama and a dash of paranormal, then The Twisted Climb books will take you to all those places. Enjoy!

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)

The Inimitable Josephine Baker

Josephine Freda MacDonald was born in St. Louis, Missouri on June 3, 1906, to Carrie MacDonald, a part-black and part-Native-American woman, and Eddie Carson, of black and Spanish ancestry. When her father abandoned them, the family was left destitute. Josephine, at the age of eight, had to work cleaning houses and babysitting for wealthy white families.

She ran away from home at the age of thirteen and found work as a waitress in a club. There, at the same age, she met and married her first husband, whom she divorced soon after. 

Young Josephine had always loved dancing and performing, so when the opportunity to join a travelling band arose, she quickly accepted the offer, though she was considered too young and skinny to be a chorus girl and often had to take non-performing parts. At the age of fourteen, she married William Howard Baker, whose last name she kept, though their marriage dissolved after four years.

Her big break came in 1925, in France, during the explosion of interest in American Jazz on the European continent. She opened in the “La Revue Negre” at the Theatre des Champs- Elysee and became a huge hit, famous for her uninhibited performances and scanty costumes. Her fame grew and among her fans were Christian Dior, Grace Kelly, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 She returned to America in 1936, but was not well-received. Infuriated by the racial discrimination she encountered, such as being barred from hotels and refused service in clubs and restaurants, she returned to Paris after renouncing her American citizenship.

The Second World War opened the most interesting period of her life. She used her fame as a cover to gather intelligence for the French underground. She carried sensitive documents and messages to neutral countries, sometimes using invisible ink on sheet music. She rose to the rank of lieutenant in the Free French Air Force and, after the war, was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the Légion d’Honneur and the Rosette de la Résistance.

Her personal life was also out of the ordinary. Men fell madly in love with her and she received approximately 1,500 marriage proposals. She married four times, but had no children of her own. Rather, she adopted twelve orphans, from different parts of the world, whom she called her ‘Rainbow Tribe,’ to show that children of different colors and nationalities could live together.

In the Fifties and Sixties, Baker frequently returned to the United States to fight racism. She participated in demonstrations and boycotts of segregated clubs and concert venues. In 1963, she joined Martin Luther King Jr. in the famous March on Washington, and became one of the notable speakers at the event. In honor of her efforts, the NAACP eventually named May 20th “Josephine Baker Day.”

In 1973, she performed at Carnegie Hall, after decades of rejection and racism. Greeted with a standing ovation, she openly wept in front of the audience. The success of the event marked her comeback on the stage. 

On April 12, 1975, Baker died in her sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was 68. More than 20,000 people lined the streets of Paris to witness the funeral procession and the French government honored her with a 21-gun salute, making Josephine Baker the first American woman to be buried in France with military honors.

Mohan Ashtakala (www.mohanashtakala.com) is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy, and "Karma Nation," a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)

Unexpected Consequences...by Sheila Claydon

Click here for my books at Books We Love

In my last blog I talked about Shakespeare and the pandemic that affected him all of his life, starting with a fifth of the people of Stratford dying the year he was born. It was, of course, the bubonic plague, and it rampaged around the world for several hundred years, coming and going seemingly randomly until its cause, the fleas in rats, was discovered. Even that plague had its positives though, and in Shakespeare's case it gave him time, while he isolated himself and his family during the worst outbreaks, to write much of his best work.  

The Coronavirus that at the moment is affecting countries around the world also has some surprising upsides. I know businesses that are unexpectedly thriving because, with the closure of many shops, people are turning more and more to online shopping. The same with take-away meals and the many smaller restaurants that previously only offered table service are now barely able to keep up with requests for meals to be delivered.  And there are new local delivery services too where, for example, local farmers have seen a gap in the market and started delivering their fruit and vegetables directly, while family run butchers do the same with their meat.

Of course there are many, many people who are suffering, people who are wondering if their jobs are safe, people living in overcrowded conditions where the virus is more likely to run rife, people with barely enough to eat, but there are many, many more who are enjoying the unexpected freedom that has come with being paid to stay at home until the worst is over. This has led to family time, new hobbies, DIY house upgrades, healthier meals being cooked from scratch, more exercise, more fresh air...the list goes on. Although we live near a beach it is a bit off the beaten track, so we tend to recognise most of the people who park near us and set off through the woods and sand-hills to the sea. In the recent warm weather, however, we have seen so many new families visiting and enjoying themselves, and so many strangers exercising, that we doubt whether life here will ever be the same again. 

And that brings me to our own unexpected consequences. Three days ago we had coffee in Sydney. Yesterday we had lunch in Hong Kong. This evening we are having a drink with friends on the south coast of England and we will be meeting up with more friends in the Midlands on Tuesday. There are plans to see cousins in San Diego and we have already walked around a friend's garden in New Zealand and admired their burgeoning fruit trees and newly planted flower beds.

When I started writing I needed a strap line and at the time it was that my books were a 'ticket to romance' because many of them were set in places I've visited over the years. The fact that all that travelling is continuing virtually is the wonderful unexpected consequence of how Coronavirus is affecting us.  Where we used to exchange emails and maybe meet up once or twice a year, or only every few years if the distance was great, now we are very active Internet friends, talking weekly in many cases. With so many social platforms available it is so easy, and with practice has become almost as pleasurable as seeing one another face to face. We all have so much to say that we quickly forget about the screen between us as we lift our glasses to one another or excuse ourselves for a couple of minutes while we make another coffee. Why it has taken a pandemic to set up such an enjoyable online network of weekly contacts I can't fathom. We could have started doing this years ago instead of just limiting online calls to our granddaughter in Hong Kong. Everyone says the same and I think, when live gets back to whatever normal is going to, be this is an unexpected and very enjoyable consequence that will continue.

Cheers everyone!

Footnotes

More about me and my books

"The history books you read sanitized slavery, disregarded indigenous stories, minimized wars, 

and dismissed the narratives of immigrants, poor, and working people."

-- Humanity Archive

I have a profound appreciation of those who have come before, who have made my life possible.  Some of our ancestors have been left out…people of color, immigrants, women.  I cherish their lives. I want to find their stories, even if it means combing through the footnotes, finding obscure archives for articles, paintings, drawings, photographs.  Here's one I came across recently... Who would not want to tell this woman's story?

O-o-dee of the Kiowa, 1896

Sometimes I am lucky enough to find some scholarship just when I need it, like Charles Swain's book, helping me discover how brave African American families survived and thrived in the north of a country divided. This informed my knowledge of life in New York, often called City of Sedition because of its economic ties to the South, and the horrible carnage of the Draft riots there in 1863, featured in Mercies of the Fallen, the second of my American Civil War Brides series:

The culture of the Diné (Navajo) is seen through the eyes of a woman in:

You can be sure this informed my Code Talker Chronicles series.  I loved the thought of Luke Kayenta being raised by women like this one!

I hope you enjoy my novels and see history from a different perspective though them!

I Can't Write the Future Anymore

                           Please click this link for author and book purchase information

On March 10th, I began the third draft of my novel-in-progress, Winter's Rage. Unlike my two previous mystery novels, this story shifts between three viewpoint narrators and two time periods. For reading ease, I placed a header at the start of each chapter with the narrator's name and the story month and year. For the main storyline, the date was January, 2020. But this March I thought, since the book won't be published until next year, why not reset it in 2021 to make the novel more contemporary? Later, I could insert any minimal changes needed or specifics to highlight that future date. I had done this easily for my earlier books to help bridge the time gap between starting a novel and its publication. In fact, draft #2 of Winter's Rage was written months before January 2020.

So I changed the headers for my first few chapters to January 2021, started revising, and realized I couldn't do this. In March, the effects of COVID-19 hit Canada with full impact. International travel shut down. Empty shelves, lineups and changed protocols appeared in grocery stores. Museums, restaurants and group activities closed. Each day brought a new development that I hadn't considered the day before. I couldn't predict what my world would be like the next week, never mind ten months in the future.

Even now, three months later, I don't know what daily life in January 2021 will be like in Calgary, my home city and the setting for my mystery novels. Will we have a vaccine or cure for COVID-19 by then? Probably not, but if I assume this and a miracle happens I'd have to significantly change any story I'd write now. And if COVID-19 is still with us, what rules, guidelines and customs will Calgarians experience in January 2021? Will schools be open, or will students continue to study online? Will we all be wearing masks? In lockdown or moving about fairly freely, keeping our social distance? What percentage of people will be working from home, or be unemployed? Will our economy have collapsed, flattened or revived with a renewed flourish? Will national and international travel be open? Will Canadian snowbirds travel south, as usual, to warm, sunny destinations or hibernate at home?

We can all make guesses, but no one is sure enough about life in Calgary next winter for me to portray it in the novel I'm in the process of finishing now.

I returned to the first chapters of Winter's Rage and reset the date to January 2020, when I and many others lived in the old normal, oblivious to what lay a month or two ahead. As I revised my manuscript, ordinary behaviours I'd included struck me as strange in our current time. Characters shake hands when they meet for business. Some touch people who don't live in their own households. I'm sure they often stand closer to each other than two metres (6.5 feet or, in Canadian terms, about the length of a hockey stick).

Paula, my insurance adjuster sleuth, visits insurance claimants in their homes. No one thinks twice about inviting her into their living room. In an early scene, Paula helps a claimant prepare hot chocolate in his kitchen.  The man is 85, recovering from heart surgery and at high risk for serious complications from COVID-19. He and Paula pass each other mugs, utensils and the can of chocolate powder without hesitation. In these details, my novel and others set at the start of 2020 will chronicle our society immediately before everything changed.

Too close

Winter's Rage is book three of my murder mystery series. Since the first and second novels were set in fall and summer, the one thing I know about book four is that it will take place in spring, to complete the Calgary seasons. Since it won't be published for a couple of years, I'd expected to set the story next year or later. Then I thought, with no travel on the horizon, I might have time to start the first draft this summer, writing by hand on my back yard patio. The novel could take place this spring, while we're experiencing the height of COVID-19 restrictions. Why not portray this unique time in a fictional murder mystery story? The current social mood even fits what I have in mind for Paula at this point her life. Uncertainty. Fears. Isolation from loved ones.

But how can I have dramatic interactions between Paula and suspect strangers when everyone with something to hide has the perfect excuse to tell her, "Stay away, I won't talk to you in person?" How does an insurance adjuster/detective do her job without meeting people face to face? I'd better start researching this before life returns to a new normal and people forget the details of this peculiar time we're living through.

Social distancing on Hunchback Hills, Alberta. In the past, my hiking club would squeeze together for a group photo.