Ah sweet love! —Tricia McGill

 

Find this and all my other books on my BWL Author page

While going back over long forgotten posts I came across one I wrote ages ago. Because I write Romances and am a glutton for happy ever after endings, of course I tend to look at life through those rose-tinted specs, even though I know that in real life only a small percentage of love affairs end in that happy ever after. 

Love comes in many guises of course. In my life I’ve known all about abiding love. The kind that comes with having a loving family around you—and the kind that comes with having true and trusted friends. Most importantly, the kind that comes with having a long and contented marriage with a steady, dependable man. My late husband was my best friend. He knew things about me no one else did, even my family—it was he who encouraged me to follow my dreams when I began to write. Each form of love brings a certain amount of heartache of course and has varying degrees of laughter and tears attached. I know I’ve been blessed, as some people know no love at all in their entire barren lifetime.

Let’s face it, love as sung about in most songs, is a fleeting and fragile thing. Where would Country or Pop singers have enough to write about without the heartache brought on by losing a lover. I likely chose romance as my choice of genre because of my smugness in having known such enduring love. True love as experienced by two people of whatever gender is a wonderful thing. Fate, Destiny, my Guardian Angel, call her what you will, has been more than kind to me. She’s always guided me to take the best and most rewarding fork in the road as I meander through these pathways of life. 

   

As for friends, I’ve been so lucky in my life as I’ve always had friends around me that I can depend on. I have friends back in England that I only hear from now and then, and some have been steady for many years. Friends have come and gone in different stages of my life. I have long-time friends who live interstate or up country that I catch up with rarely these days, but they still remain firm friends.

Some cynics say there is no such thing as a platonic friendship between a man and woman, but I personally think this not entirely true. Some of my best friends over the years have been male, and truth be told I have always liked the company of these platonic ones. I like how men’s minds work (well the part that is understandable to a mere female). They have such a different way of looking at life to us females—more uncomplicated I always feel. And they take such pleasure in the simple things—such as absconding to their shed or workroom to potter about for hours doing who knows what. They don’t care if the dishes are left in the sink or if the bed is unmade at three in the afternoon, there’s more important things in life.

Then there’s my super cyber friends—some of whom live in far flung corners of the world and I will never get to meet them face to face. But they are also constant, some having been a guide in helping me through varying parts of my writing career, providing assistance and advice that helped me on the way to becoming better at my craft. I’ve always considered myself a simple story-teller, following my heart rather than my head, but without the advice gained via this wonderful world of the internet where would any of us be today.

Canadian Lakes by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

https://books2read.com/Romancing-the-Klondike

 https://books2read.com/Rushing-the-Klondike

 https://www.bookswelove.com/donaldson-yarmey-joan/

Canadian Lakes

 I am a Canadian and all my mystery, historical, romance, and young adult novels are set in Canada. Canada is the second largest country in the world and has about 20% of the world’s freshwater. It also shares the world’s largest body of freshwater-the Great Lakes-with the United States. Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, are divided by the border while Lake Michigan is totally in the United States.

Nearly 14% of the world’s lakes over 500 sq km (193.05 sq mi) are within Canada’s borders. The largest lake totally within the country is Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. It is the 4^th largest in North America and the 9^th largest in the world. The name comes from the Chipewyan word satudene which means ‘grizzly bear water people’.

Great Slave Lake, also in the Northwest Territories is the second largest freshwater lake in Canada and the 10^th largest on the Earth. With a depth of 614 metres (2,014 ft) it is the deepest lake in North America. It was named for the Dene, the first nation’s people who were called Slavey by the Cree first nations.

Lake Winnipeg, in Manitoba, is Canada’s third largest freshwater lake and has the largest watershed (the rivers that drain into a lake plus all the land with streams that drain into those rivers) in Canada. Its watershed is about 982,900 square kilometres (379,500 square miles) which is about 40 times its size. This ratio is the biggest of any other large lake in the world. Waters flow into Lake Winnipeg from the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario and from the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Montana making it the 11^th largest freshwater lake in the world.

Lake Athabasca sits on the northern border of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan with 26% in Alberta and 74% in Saskatchewan. It is the fourth largest lake totally in Canada and waters from it flow northward through the Slave and Mackenzie river systems to the Arctic Ocean.

It is estimated that there are about 2 million lakes of various sizes in Canada and they make up about 9% of the country’s mass. This means that 891,163 square kilometres (344,080 sq mi) of Canada’s total area of 9.985 million square kilometres (3.8 million sq mi) is covered by freshwater.

 

Releasing and Promoting a Book by Victoria Chatham

AVAILABLE HERE

A major part of releasing a book is to promote it and then promote it more. I was happy to recently showcase Brides of Banff Springs and the Canadian Historical Brides Collection at Olds Municipal Library. When I contacted the Librarian about a booking, she was excited to offer me a date, which we arranged over the phone. We decided to have a meet and greet in the afternoon for people who might not be able to attend the evening reading and book signing session. This worked out very well as a lovely lady called Catherine came to meet me and told me that her mother had been the head housekeeper at Banff Springs Hotel. It was her job to open it up every spring along with the hotels at Lake Louise and Fairmount. I can't even begin to imagine how big a job that would have been. This lady also met King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the late Queen's mother) when they visited Canada in 1939 and received a commemorative silver powder compact. I would love to have seen it, but I understood why Catherine wanted to keep it safe at home. Another young lady, who had already read the book, said her first job was in housekeeping at the hotel, and she could easily identify with Tilly, the heroine.

My table for the afternoon session was just inside the main entrance, so it was easy to talk to people as they came and went. Just in case a little extra is needed, a bowl of candies or quality chocolate is a good way to get people talking, and many admired the gift basket. The framed poster listing all the Historical Bride books also drew a lot of attention, with many visitors saying they did not know much of Canada's early history.

Nicole Peers, the Librarian, was not sure of numbers for the evening reading, but as people began to arrive, she quickly found more chairs to seat them. Before I started the reading, I presented Nicole with the gift basket, a thank-you to her and the staff for hosting me.

 

My author tagline is History, Mystery, and Love, so I picked three appropriate passages and read a bit of the history of Banff, the beginning of the mystery concerning the ghost bride and finally, the scene where the hero asks the heroine to marry him. The audience response was encouraging, with still more people wanting to talk afterwards about their experiences with Banff, having lived or worked there or been constant visitors. The funding from the Government of Canada helped make this a fun, exciting evening. Nicole said it was one of the best author evenings the Library had hosted, and I was only too happy to have been a part of it.

The first two images are from the author's collection.

The last two images are courtesy of  Ayesha Clough, Red Barn Books.

Victoria Chatham

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Skunks and aliens

 Readers familiar with my Whistling Pines cozy series know that quirky people and situations are regular plot components. I'm always on the hunt for a new plot or twist, and there's never a shortage of material. With a 2023 plot about arson in the works, I've been trying to keep the whirling ideas from congealing. Yes, my head is a swirling mass of plots, characters, and facts that mesh into a book. My tuba-playing friend and consultant, Brian, calls me billiard ball brain because he feels that the inside of my head must resemble a billiard table after the break, with ideas bouncing off each other like billiard balls until they come to rest in some pattern that becomes a plot.

It's wonderful to have tons of ideas, and a stream of plots coming from friends, readers, and the news. On the other hand, it's infuriating to be drafting a book when the billiard balls come to rest, demanding that I start a book outline and an opening chapter.

That happened today.

I'm about 75% though a first draft of Taxed to Death, a 2023 Pine County mystery, and my attention NEEDS to be on those final few chapters. 

My writing was interrupted when my wife pointed out hundreds of small holes (1" diameter) that had randomly dug in our yard. It was our personal mystery. Who, or what, had excavated the holes? They looked like a random aeration of the turf. There were no footprints. There was no indication of what had been removed. It was stuck in my mind. That new billiard ball started rolling.

I tried to ignore it, but I mentioned it to some friends during lunch and there was consensus that a family of skunks had been digging up grubs (larval June bugs), which are apparently a skunk delicacy.

Finding that solution plausible, I fired off an email to a number of people, hoping to find someone who would volunteer for skunk removal/relocation duty. My fist response was from an old friend who suggested that it was more likely that the holes had been dug by an alien lawn aerator. I replied that having weighed the probabilities (yes, I have taken a couple statistics courses) of skunks vs. aliens, I'd determined that the likelihood of the holes being created by aliens was somewhat more remote than my odds of winning the Powerball. His response was brief, "I can't reply. My aluminum foil hat is interfering with my WiFi reception."

A new billiard ball was in motion; a vision of people wearing foil-wrapped baseball caps to ward off the effects of cosmic rays. I know these ideas will come to rest and weave themselves together with some other craziness that will become a future Whistling Pines plot.

In the meanwhile, I suggest that you read Whistling Artist so that you're familiar with my protagonist Peter Rogers, the recreation director of the Whistling Pines Senior Residence, and the cast of colorful supporting characters from that series.

Hovey, Dean - BWL Publishing Inc. (bookswelove.com)

The Highs and Lows and Pina coladas of 2022, by Diane Scott Lewis

 

To purchase my novels, please click HERE

The year started out terrible with the loss of fellow BWL author, Kathy Pym. We were cyber friends for several years. I miss her gallows humor and good advice, her kindness, and for being the person I could talk to about anything. I was blessed to have her for my friend.

Shortly after that, still in January, I had to go for cataract surgery. My husband had to drive for nearly two hours to the doctor's surgery center, in the middle of nowhere. Now my right eye doesn't read as close-up as it used to. I need reading glasses. But as my oldest granddaughter sagely said. "Because you're a grandma."

Fast-forward to June, we drove to Nashville for a Nea Makri Greece reunion. My husband was stationed there from 1971-75; me from 1974-75. We married there in May of 1975. How young we look!

The heat in Nashville was sweltering, and we were camping. You couldn't even sit outside, the internet went bonkers, and sight-seeing was debatable. One of our RV connections melted. We bought portable, hand-held coolers for next time. We're prepared! 

Rafina, Greece harbor, just below Nea Makri

And it was great to meet up with former shipmates, or basemates. We even went to an air-conditioned winery with one lady and had a ball.

The following month, we had a small family reunion at hubby's niece's camp in Gettysburg. Again, the heat was sweltering. But we enjoyed the company. And hubs made his famous pina coladas. Yum.

In August, my oldest friend, we met at six and eight, came to visit for two weeks. An excuse to make hubs take us somewhere! A book festival, a wine concert, the Flight 93 memorial, beer tasting, wine tasting. We visited Old Economy Village near Pittsburgh, a village founded on strict and celibate behavior, waiting for the Rapture. No wonder they died out.

That's the tour guide with my husband.

 I loved to have Candy with me. My bestie forever.

The year started badly, but ended up much better. Of course in the world around me there were wars, and the turmoil of my own divisive country. I hope we can come together and heal most of the wounds. Happy 2023.

Diane lives in Western Pennsylvania with her husband and one naughty dachshund.

To find out more about her books: DianeScottLewis