Disasters Lead to Children by Katherine Pym

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One of the sources for my 17^th century novels is Pepys’ diary. He wrote of his daily existence for the period of 10 years, from 1660-1669. His thoughts of what he saw include the king’s restoration and his coronation, which Pepys missed due to having to use the facilities, but he was in the nose bleed section and couldn’t see a lot anyway. He fitted the naval fleet for the 2^nd Anglo/Dutch War and other journeys. He was in and about London during the plague and watched the great fire burn most of London’s inner city to the ground.

Samuel Pepys (older)

I’ve seen comments that Pepys was a pervert because he was unfaithful to his wife, but more importantly, he was insatiable during the plague. 

I don’t want to defend Pepys’ actions, and I don’t approve of them, but after seeing hurricane Ike in full swing where everything in its path was lost, the philosophical of going through a crisis such this will bring a response to human survival. 

No one remembers Hurricane Ike (Sept 2008) because on the heels of its fury and destruction, the stock market crashed. Banks closed. The car industry’s back broke and all but Ford’s CEO’s begged the US Government for a bailout. 

Hurricane Ike

Ike had made a swath of destruction that almost equaled Katrina. Bolivar Island, near Galveston was all but flattened. The storm battered Galveston Bay and produced storm surges. They swept ashore, engulfing houses and sweeping them off their foundations. Bodies are still missing. 

I have a friend who had fled Ike as so many fled the plague in 1665. Thousands died of the pestilence. As Pepys went about Navy business, he saw death on all sides: 

“14 Sept 1665 – My meeting of a dead corpse of the plague, carried to be buried at noonday... –to see a person sick of the sores carried close by me... my finding the Angel Tavern at the lower end of Tower Hill shut up; and more than that, the alehouses at the Tower Stairs: and more than that, that the person was then dying of the plague when I was last there, a little while ago at night, to write a short letter there, and I overheard the mistress of the house sadly saying to her husband somebody was very ill, but did not think it was of the plague – to hear that poor Payne my waterman hath buried a child and is dying himself – to hear that a laborer I sent... to know how they did there is dead of the plague...”

Hauling away the dead

After seeing this, Pepys found hilarity with others who still lived. He drank and cavorted. He had sex with as many women as would have him. It seems, whether or not he understood it, his natural inclination was to continue the species as a virulent pestilence tried to end it. If he weren’t sterile, several Pepys’ babies would have been born 9 months later. 

In the aftermath of Ike, fishing boats, and yachts were strewn along the highway. Houses were in shreds. Families slept in their cars and tried to contact FEMA in the middle of the night. 

Men and women found each other and had sex. 9 months later, more than the usual babies were born. Catastrophes, horrible as they are, seem to keep our species alive and well. As everyone dies around them, they come together and attempt to preserve the human race. 

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Many thanks to:

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, VI, 1665 Edited by Robert Latham & William Matthews, HarperCollins, UK 1995

Wikicommons, Public Domain, the Houston Chronicle, & www.gettyimages.com

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To "Dracula" from Priscilla Brown - Many Deadly Returns

This is my latest contemporary romance, which has nothing to do with vampires.

 Find it on the links below.

In Bram Stoker's Gothic thriller, Count Dracula was 400 years old; the story was published 120 years ago, in May 1897, and still scares readers in 44 languages. Over the years, surmising Stoker's sources for both Dracula the character and for his castle has caused vampire enthusiasts to go batty, and two areas of Britain have fangs bared over British inspirations for the bloodsucking count.

In 1890, Stoker visited Whitby in northeast Yorkshire, making notes on a supernatural tale he had heard of the living dead. In his story, he wrote of Dracula coming ashore there, functioning from the grave of a suicide, and attacking his first English victim. But Cruden Bay, a village on the coast north of Aberdeen, Scotland, boasts Dracula legends to get your teeth into. Even some lampposts carry Dracula effigies.

Stoker discovered the area while on a walking holiday along the arduous cliff track. The isolated dramatic North Sea coastline, turbulent seascape and ferocious weather awed him; it is this area which, legend has it, provided the inspiration for writing about the Dracula character. And it even had a suitable castle. Stoker set Dracula's castle in the east of Transylvania, where, to the best of knowledge, he never visited. According to local lore, Slains Castle, now a spectacular range of roofless ruins clinging precariously to a headland, influenced Stoker's conception of the vampire's eerie fortress. In the author's day, Slains was an intact large mansion; its construction over 340 years resulted in a conglomeration of styles and building materials, some of which can be discerned today.
 
On a chilly autumn afternoon, I and my travelling companion, Australians exploring northeast Scotland, optimistically judged the weather fit for a visit to Slains before the clouds racing across the pale blue sky turned sinister. We trudged along the muddy track to poke around the gaunt remains. At the castle, we trod warily trough the knee-high clumps of dank weeds and over sharp-edged masonry.

Investigating this labyrinth of an edifice with its narrow passageways, outlines of small and large rooms, shadowy corners, archways, staircases, window spaces of all shapes and sizes, we speculated at what each room may have been used for, and at the kind of lifestyles enjoyed by its occupants over the centuries. We clutched each other tightly as we stood rather unwisely too near to crumbling walls on the brink of plunging onto the wave-battered rocks (the walls, not us)...and then the fog blew in! The temperature dropped even lower,while tendrils of the infamous "haa" eddied around the spooky ruins. Wait! Was this only mist? Or Dracula himself? Shivering, we could almost imagine another manifestation of the vampire as a great black bat crawling through the window spaces.

We retreated to the welcome warmth of the historic local pub, where Bram Stoker wrote the first chapters of the book. Over coffee with a whisky chaser, we heard the story of how, after he'd eaten one helping too many of the local crab, his nightmare revealed a master vampire!

Warm wishes from Priscilla

http://bookswelove.net/authors/Priscilla_Brown

https://priscillabrownauthor.com

Tracking details in the Historical Novel, by Kathy Fischer-Brown

cover photo © by Janice Lang

Over the years I’ve read about how different authors construct their novels, and I’ve tried some of their methods. I’ve used index cards and index cards in multiple colors (each character was assigned his or her color). I even downloaded computer programs that claim to be “everything you need in one application to plan, plot, write, edit, keep track of characters (complete with bios and photos), convert into any number of formats, write your synopsis, and on and on. (I don’t recall if they went so far as submitting for you, but I imagine that’s not a far-fetched concept.) But for some reason, they just weren't for me.

Every author who’s ever written a book has his or her own method of constructing their stories. In many ways, all share as many similarities as they do variances. In the end, all that matters is getting from point A to where you want to be by the time you type “The End.”

But what about writing historical novels, which present a unique and often frustrating set of conditions? You have characters who have made themselves known—often by keeping you awake night after night while they babble on and on about their lives, loves, and aspirations; distracted by their prattle while you drive to the supermarket; offering brilliant scenes and dialogue while your dog endlessly sniffs around posts and mailboxes for messages before taking that last whiz of the night; or those genius bits of dialogue while you’re in the shower. And, even if you retain half of that of that inspired magnificence, none of it ever translates onto the page.

So, there you have your characters…dressed and accoutered in authentic garb with tidbits of their surroundings and everyday details to flesh out their lives…while actual history is happening around them. You want them to cross paths with the army sweeping down from the north, or be in a particular locale where history happened, or interact at a dinner with some luminary from the past.

How do you do it?

When writing my very first ever historical novel, I stumbled upon a

method that has worked for me ever since: I use a calendar. Back in the days before computers, I discovered through a particular diary I’d been reading for research that a certain day of the week in 1777 fell on a Tuesday. I was then able to create a blank calendar by hand for that month and drop in the dates. Later on, I figured out how to use the macro feature in an early DOS version of WordPerfect to quickly design and print out calendars for the year in which my book took place. Today, there are plenty of sites (here’s one that I like: http://www.calendarhome.com) that give you the option of generating calendars for any year you want. In the eons since, I have found lunar and solar calendars (here’s one of my favorites: http://www.rodurago.net/en/index.php?site=details&link=calendar) that contribute to creating scenes where the moon was full (and what time it rose and set). Through diaries and other references from the period, I found when the weather was fine or rainy or anything in between, and I popped that information into the calendar for a particular date, along with the historical events (each with different colored ink). So, if I wanted a character to make a trek to visit an actual historical personage at a particular place on a rainy day evening during a new moon, I had that information right there on the calendar.

covers © by Michelle Lee

Of course, sometimes, you need to “fudge” the facts to coincide with the events of the book, as well as for dramatic effect. For example, in The Partisan’s Wife (book 3, "Serpent's Tooth" trilogy), I had envisioned a scene with Anne (the heroine) and her husband Peter riding in a carriage north along Bowery Lane in New York as a full moon rose over the East River. The scene was amazing to write, since, due to the number of modern high rise apartments and other buildings on the East Side of New York, I doubt many on the ground on the Bowery today have seen a sun or moon rise over the East River in over a hundred years. And anyway, the moon rise on that particular date was at around 4:00 in the afternoon, when the daylight was still in full swing.

This post is reprinted from the April 13, 2017 Canadian Historical Brides blog.

~*~

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 Books We Love Author page or visit her website. All of Kathy’s books are available in e-book and in paperback from Amazon, Kobo, and other online retailers.