Fireworks, yum cha and vodka by Sheila Claydon

I'm living in Sydney, Australia for a few months. The deal is a winter in the sun in exchange for caring for my nine month old baby granddaughter on the days when both her parents are working. 

So what is it like living in a small city apartment instead of a sprawling house in a village on the northwest coast of England? Well on a daily basis it's not so different. There are still chores to be done and meals to be prepared. True the garden has shrunk to a few pots and a raised bed on the balcony, but there is still greenery, and the wind that whistles up from the harbour is every bit as blustery as the wind back home. The view is very different though. Instead of trees and fields I have a bird's eye view of the city skyline. I also have the added benefit of a pool and a spa and, of course,  the endless warmth that is Australia. No jackets needed, nor shoes really except to be polite. Instead, suncream, dark glasses, a hat and bottled water are de rigueur when leaving the apartment.

The other differences are more interesting though. My daughter-in-law is Chinese and my son has a Russian boss. This means that as well as Australians and Tasmanians they have many friends in the immigrant community, so over Christmas and the New Year I met American lawyers and chemical engineers, a Chinese tea importer and a Russian who owns several diamond mines, Chinese, South American and English bankers, a Phillipino nurse, accountants and financial analysts from China, property investors from Japan, China and Tasmania, an Australian clothes importer, a retired Australian TV producer,  IT specialists from India, the UK and Japan, and other immigrants from Singapore, France, Vietnam and Spain as well as a whole lot of children with the blood of two nations in their genes. It was an eclectic and fascinating mix and everyone of them without exception was friendly, outgoing and full of confidence. Inevitably this rainbow nation has given me a whole lot of ideas for future books, so many in fact that it's unlikely I'll ever be able to use them all.

More importantly, I've learned a lot about the traditions of other cultures. Although it's obviously a generalisation, I've discovered that many Asian parents co-sleep with their children in the early years. The mothers also follow their toddlers from room to room with a bowl of food or a drink in order to spoon a morsel into their mouths whenever they can. Despite having a well paid and successful career some of the brightest women succumb to their ancestral traditions, another of which includes being confined to bed for a month after giving birth while their mother takes care of the baby. Fortunately, from my perspective, my highly educated daughter-in-law refused to comply when her own daughter was born and my granddaughter is fast becoming a robust Australian who sits happily in her high chair, eats everything offered and  sleeps 7 - 7, alone, in her own bed. 

I've learned that manners vary enormously too and so do eating habits. On the whole the Chinese eschew anything sweet, never drink wine with rice, eat enormous amounts of vegetables and are very health conscious, whereas Europeans, Australians and Americans prefer BBQs with large quantities of meat and fish, rarely refuse the fries, and are happy to drink wine or beer with everything. 

Dress is very casual too. Shorts, t-shirts and thongs are the order of the day whether it's a BBQ, a shopping trip, or a day at the beach, and every Friday is 'Dress Down Friday' at work. The only exception is a party and even then it's mostly the women who turn on the glamour. And how the people of Sydney party. Celebrations started at the beginning of December and carried on until well after the New Year. Now they are enjoying a short hiatus before Australia Day and then it will be the Chinese New Year. 

The thing I've noticed more than anything though, is how young the population is. Everywhere I go there are young people enjoying themselves and pregnant women and babies of all nationalities, shapes and sizes. In the city as well as at the tourist spots there are fathers pushing strollers, tiny babies in carriers, toddlers tripping over their own feet, and older children, brown as berries, dancing along in thongs and shorts. Of course with all this youth comes technology and on the train the other day my husband and I were amused to discover we were the only people actually conversing. Everyone else in the very crowded carriage was plugged into a device be it an iPod, a cell phone or an electronic reader. 

Best of of all, however, was my meeting with an Anglo Indian from London who is married to an American lawyer and lives in New York. She was visiting her brother and his Chinese wife for the festive season - the ethic mix in Australia is truly mind blowing. Discovering that I am a writer  she not only downloaded Mending Jodie's Heart, the first book of my When Paths Meet trilogy, while she was talking to me, she also told me she was taking it to her book club as soon as she returned to the States. She did, however, check with me first that the heroine was feisty and independent. If not then the book was an absolute no no! As if I would ever write anything else.....

And lastly and most intriguingly I met Lady Sippington but you'll have to wait until next month's post to discover her story.

Many of my books can be found on the Books We Love website at  http://bookswelove.net/authors/sheila-claydon/

Facing Rejection by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

Facing Rejection

Rejection: the act of rejecting; the state of being rejected; a thing rejected.

Rejection slip: a note from a publisher rejecting the accompanying returned manuscript.
Like most writers I have received form rejection slips and form rejection emails telling me politely that the publishing house is unable to accept my manuscript. An example: Thank you for considering ECW. Unfortunately, Controling (sic) Her Death is not right for us. I wish you every success in finding a home for your book.
However, I have also received emails and letters giving me more details about the rejection and adding a few encouraging words about my manuscript.

 Dear Joan,

Thanks for submitting Controlling Her Death: My Mother's Date With Suicide to Coach House Books. Our editors noted that there's both an immediacy and a poignancy to the prose that draws the reader in from the first page.
Sadly, however, we can't offer to take it on for Coach House. We can publish only a few novels each year, and we have a surfeit of exceptional manuscripts. This leaves us in the unfortunate position of being unable to house many of the fine manuscripts we receive. We’re sorry to say that we aren’t able to fit your work on our list.
We wish you all the very best in finding a good home for it.
Sincerely,
Coach House Books

 Dear Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

Thank you for submitting your manuscript The Nursery to Ronsdale Press for possible publication. Our readers have now made their reports, and I am sorry to inform you that they have recommended against publication.
After reading your excerpt our principal editor noted, "This is well written and has a great opening, but I find that it moves too slowly and that her memories-at least at the beginning-are the sort of thing that has been often written about. There is little sense of excitement or the strange. The Stone Angel does something similar, but with more verve.
We wish you well in finding a publisher for your manuscript.
Yours sincerely
Cheyanne Turions
Publishing Assistant.

 But a rejection, however nicely worded, is still a rejection and it is hard to accept. In the beginning of my writing career I went through a three day grieving process each time I received a rejection letter.

On the first day I would feel totally depressed. I would question why I was writing, who did I think I was trying to write a novel? I would decided that this would be the last day that I wrote anything. I would wallow in self-pity, shed a tear in frustration, and even kick a door.
Day two would bring anger. Anger at the publisher for rejecting my manuscript. Anger at the months it had taken me to write the seventy-five thousand words. Anger at myself for not having written a publishable novel. I would try to figure out how to change it to make it better.
Day three brought a realization that maybe a different publisher might like it. There is the saying: right idea, right publisher, right day. With a renewed enthusiasm I would send it out again and again. I would decide that no one could take away the fact that I had written a manuscript, that I had had the nerve to send it to a publisher.
We writers are supposed develop thick skins. We are supposed to detach ourselves from our work. We are supposed to realize that we are not being judged, that our intelligence, our sense of humour, our sex appeal, and our character are not on the line. What is being judged is just that one piece of writing we have done. But it is a piece of writing that we have written, that we have spent hours at producing. Sometimes, it is tough not to take a publisher's rejection personally.
But the point is to carry on. With multiple submissions being allowed if one publisher rejects my manuscript I have the two or three others to look forward to hearing from. Sometimes I can have two manuscripts and two or three short stories out in the 'please publish me' world at one time. And when I finish one novel, I start another so I am engrossed in it to spend much time worring about the previous one.
The difference between being a success or being a failure is quitting too soon. And we all know of famous writers whose works were rejected many times before being accepted and becoming best sellers. Here are a few of the rejections letters:
"We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell."
Stephen Kings first published novel, Carrie, was rejected so many times that King collected the letters on a spike in his bedroom. When finally published in 1974, 30,000 copies were printed. A year later the paperback version sold over a million copies in 12 months.
"You’re welcome to le Carré – he hasn’t got any future."
One publisher sent this to a colleague after turning down The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
"For your own sake, do not publish this book."
A publisher wrote to DH Lawrence about his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Maybe rejection letters make us better writers, maybe they make us better people, or maybe they just annoy us. Whatever our reaction we have to remember that, with publishers receiving thousands of manuscripts each year, being rejected is just one part of the whole writing process.

http://thetravellingdetectiveseries.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook.com/writingsbyjoan
https://www.amazon.com/author/joandonaldsonyarmey

 

Gold Fever

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PEOSJR8
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PEOSJR8
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PEOSJR8
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PEOSJRhttp://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PEOSJR8

 

Books of The Travelling Detective Series boxed set:
Illegally Dead
The Only Shadow In The House
Whistler's Murder
http://amzn.com/B00KF07FQM

Who inspires you? By Rita Karnopp

Recently I read through some interviews I did way back when – and I found these three questions and answers worth sharing.

If you were to start your writing career over tomorrow, what would you do differently?  Wow… I would have taken my first book to two published writers, or paid an editor, to go through it and tell me what needed to be changed.  I would have learned from those mistakes rewritten that first book, before starting my second book.  Then I would have repeated the process.  Why?  I wrote ten books before an editor touched my work.  I could have saved myself a lot of work had I learned early on what mistakes I was making, so I didn’t repeat them in each book.

What authors -you know personally- have inspired your writing? I must say Kat Martin has been and incredible inspiration and support.  She believed in me and my writing.  Stella Cameron has given me sound advice as well as been a great source of inspiration and support.  Also writer BJ Daniels is very inspirational, a Montana author who exudes confidence and a direction in her writing career.

What authors - you don’t know personally - have inspired your writing? I drew great inspiration from Cassie Edwards and Sheryl Henke, Dean Koontz and Lisa Jackson.

When the Stock Market was 800 by Karla Stover

                                                          My Stock Market Experience

     I started working at Merrill Lynch as a B-wire (business wire) clerk on July 26, 1965. The market was 800. Of those early years, the job I most remember was retyping business news that came daily from New York via an old telegraph machine onto a silk screen, attaching the silk screen to the silkscreen machine (a messy process involving lots of India ink) running paper copies off, and distributing the info to the men. I say, “men” because though Merrill Lynch hired Washington State’s first female stock broker, that momentous occasion wasn’t until the 1980s.

     Three months after I started, I was promoted to wire operator, which meant I was entering orders. The brokers wrote up their buy and sell tickets and walked them back to me. I sat in front of a machine, typed the orders on a ticket tape, and fed the tape into the machine. One man put many of his clients into Coeur d' Alene Mining and that's how I learned to spell Coeur d' Alene. The tapes were put in a bag at the end of the day and the bag was saved for a month in case someone received a confirmation of their trade and disputed it. If I made a mistake, my office had to pay for whatever it cost to make things good. I had a couple of problems during this period in my career: one was that we were on the second floor and the bathroom was on the third and the other was that it was hard to get a potty break. Many times, I sat at the machine from 6:00, when the market opened here on the wet coast, until 3:00 when I left for the day, with no break at all.

     I also operated the switchboard which was in the reception area in an L off the
boardroom. We had approximately a dozen lines and sometimes they were all in use. When that happened and someone wanted to make a call, I waited for someone else to hang up, then leaned over the counter and shouted, “Mr. _______, I have an open line now.” And I'd plug him in.

    I was very young when I started and afraid to go into the building, take the elevator up, unlock the office door, and go in by myself, especially after mass-murderer, Richard Speck was all over
the news. My husband and I carpooled so he came in with me every morning and checked all the
closets. When I was promoted to bookkeeper and started later, I was a happy camper.

     Looking back, some of the things I experienced seem hard to believe. One morning one of the
brokers came up and asked, “If I would like to go up to the roof and help him erect something.” I
turned beet-red and he added, “Like a flagpole.” A couple of years later, he shot himself in the head at a local gun range. One of the men killed his wife; he said his gun went off when he was cleaning it. One man drank, and when he was on a binge and drinking too much he’d get arrested and held overnight. When that happened, he’d call in orders from the pokey to whomever was in the office and available to take them. I coped with everything except the lunch issue: the secretaries had an hour for lunch but we in bookkeeping were only give 30 minutes. I pitched a fit over that.

     All in all, my career at Merrill was a mixed blessing, and I was sure glad to retire. Many, many
of the people I worked with over the years left the firm and went to other brokerage houses in town. I
stuck it out so my 401k would continue to grow, but with a little imagination, you can figure out what
I did during the 30 minutes of my last day.

PS: One day in the mid-1970s, when I was the manager of the bookkeeping department, one of my employees left the office at noon and never returned. She'd met several college guys who were sailing San Francisco that afternoon and she decided to go with them.  She later called me from a ship-to-shore radio and asked if I'd hold her job open until she returned.

    

 

      

           

          

THE LURE OF THE PAST by Juliet Waldron

I love the study of history so much that I’ve always wanted to share that love with others. Like many before me, this longing leads to a desire to write historical novels, the kind which can pull the reader  into another (and often quite unfamiliar) mindset.  The first part of the job is research, a stage I often find easier than the actual work of writing, plotting and character creation. I often read all through and then around subjects, ones which are sometimes rather distant from my original focus.   A used bookstore with a stash of non-fiction can be a dangerous place for my pocketbook. My favorite finds are the sort with long bibliographies, appendices and a high reliance upon original source.

Recently, I picked up “Champlain’s Dream,” by historian David Hackett Fischer, an account of the earliest days of French Canada.  Champlain, a pragmatic, thoughtful French explorer of the early 1600’s, had emerged from the bloody violence of France’s religious wars with an open mind . He'd  made it his life’s work to induce people of varied backgrounds to cooperate for the common good. His belief in humankind, whatever their national origin or religion, allowed him to approach the Indigenous Sauvage with an attitude of respect and interest not shared by many Europeans of the time.

A dream is ordinarily an ephemeral thing. But here, because Champlain recounted his experience 400 + years ago in the forests near the lake now named for him, is one of his. With a war party of sixty Indians, he and two other Frenchmen traveled into the forbidden territory of the Iroquois, with who the Algonquins were eternally at war.  They traveled at night, and every morning, as they drew closer to the “Eastern Gate,” of the Iroquois, guarded the Mohawk, the chiefs asked Champlain “if he had dreamed about their enemies.” For many days, he did not.  Then, one morning, about 11 a.m., he awoke and called the Indians to him. At last, as they’d seemed to expect, the white captain had dreamed.

“I dreamed I saw in the lake near a mountain, our enemies, the Iroquois drowning before our eyes. I wanted to rescue them, but our Indian allies told me that we should let them all die, for they were worth nothing.”

David Hackett Fischer then adds: “The Indians recognized the place in Champlain’s dream as a site that lay just ahead, and they were much relieved…To Champlain’s Indian allies, dreams not only revealed the future. They controlled it.”

A few days later, the Mohawk encountered European firearms in battle for the first time. Surprised by the stunning sight of a man in armor and two sharpshooters wielding long-distance, deadly weapons stationed amid Algonquin ranks, they were defeated. Champlain’s dream, seen by his allies as prophecy, was a true one.

This is the sort of primary source tidbit that writers love, the kind which reveals a vital difference between the mental world of European and Amerindian. It also tells us something about Champlain.  There he was, with two white companions amid a war party upon whose goodwill their survival depended. They were moving through a gigantic, primal forest toward a dangerous objective. We learn that he stumbled into another kind of consciousness, one which transcended his usual understanding of linear time.  The chiefs were now confident of the battles before them and pleased that their new friend had dreamed so positively. Champlain, though he does not speak of it, must have been privately amazed by this rationally inexplicable experience. 

~Juliet Waldron

http://www.julietwaldron.com

Books We Love
http://bookswelove.net/authors/juliet-waldron/#

Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/jwhistfic

Coming Soon from Kat Attalla, Jamie Hill, and Books We Love

The Prince and The Working Woman
The Desert Prince Series, Book 1 by Kat Attalla

THE ROYAL PRINCE OF TOUZAR BELIEVES EVERY WOMAN HAS A PRICE…
Prince Hamid Khalid is not looking for love. Since coming of age he has watched a carnival-like parade of women vie for his attention. But they are more interested in his title and bank account than his sardonic personality.
 

...UNTIL HE MEETS A WOMAN WHO CAN’T BE BOUGHT
Amanda Wilkes, abuse survivor and hard-core feminist isn’t looking for love either. Especially not with a sexy chauvinist like the prince. Opening an international community center under his direction in the exotic Middle Eastern country, however is a job of a lifetime.
 

While working in close proximity an attraction develops. The two decide to share a purely physical, unemotional, relationship. The affair works well until the unthinkable happened.
CAN TWO STUBBORN LONERS ADMIT TO THE LOVE NEITHER BELIEVES EXISTS?

Available Jan. 31, 2015. Pre-order your copy now!

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RQR9V0A 

Time To Kill
Witness Security, Book 2 by Jamie Hill

US Marshal Jordan Burke is happy for her partner when he takes a month off for paternity leave, but she's not happy about her substitute partner. Nick Pierce worked for the Topeka Witsec office years ago and left under less than the best of circumstances. When he’s asked to fill in he hesitates, but curiosity about Jordan makes him accept the job. The minute he sees her again he doesn’t regret his decision. From Atlanta to Los Angeles, Jordan and Nick discover that danger, and help, can come from the strangest sources. While they struggle to protect their witnesses, the bigger challenge seems to be keeping each other alive. And there’s always the possibility that they might kill each other first.
 

“Ms. Hill has the gift of knowing what the reader wants and then hitting you with an ending you certainly don’t expect. Two thumbs up!” ~ Val, You Gotta Read Reviews

Available Jan. 31, 2015. Pre-order your copy now!

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RQRKB68

Outlaw In-laws by Gail Roughton

              In-laws. We all have some. And for better or worse, blessing or curse, we all are or will be somebody’s in-law.  Mother-in-laws, especially, get a bad rap. I mean, how many mother-in-law jokes have you heard in your life? So many that it’s a wonder in-laws aren’t just called out-laws in the first place.  That doesn’t apply to me, though.  My daughter found her other half very early in life.  Her husband first walked in our door when she was fifteen and he was seventeen and neither of them ever so much as seriously looked at anybody else. Even though they didn’t get married until they were twenty-two and twenty-four, they were a confirmed couple from that first meeting and everybody knew it.  I don’t even consider my son-in-law an “in-law”.  He’s a son, one of my boys.  Neither of my sons have found their other half yet, so I only have the one “in-law” I don’t even consider an “in-law”.  He’s just one of the kids. I’ve loved the boy for the last seventeen years.  Well, okay, the last sixteen.  That first year might have been kind of rocky. 

            I do, however, realize he probably cringes when he sees my name pop up on his cell phone as a call or text message.  And there’s a reason for that.  Most son-in-laws could expect their mother-in-law to text something like “Remember tomorrow’s Becca’s birthday!” Or I suppose they do, though in fact, I don’t really know because now that I think about it, most telephone communication between the two would probably be through their common link, the daughter-wife.

            Us though?  All bets are off.  My son-in-law’s a Deputy Sheriff who’s worked his way up the ranks from jail duty to patrol duty and beyond. He’s cut suicides down from a rope, he’s worked accidents that would make a blood and guts horror movie fan turn pale, he’s pulled alligators off county roads running near the local swamps. At present, he’s a K-9 drug interdiction officer specially trained to target drug traffic on the interstate.  I’ve been a paralegal for a few months shy of forty years now, so we have that “legal bond” thing going on wherein we can discuss the finer points of law and legal procedure in depth, something we can’t do with too many folks not members of those respective professions.  But even more than that, I’m a writer. Who writes suspense thrillers.  Can you say “marriage made in heaven”? An actual in-house source, as it were, for law enforcement procedures, particularly in a rural county big in area and small on population. 

            It never really struck me until the other day just how strange our text conversations would seem to someone who had nothing better to do than snoop into our phones (not that anybody’s doing that, of course, I just mean if anybody did they might wish they hadn’t). My son-in-law was invaluable to me during the writing of Country Justice.  I picked his brain mercilessly on such things as guns and what caliber bullets went with which, what type of damage each would do, how an experienced and trained driver would react to a sabotaged brake line to come out of a dead-man’s curve alive and what sabotage would have been used in the first place, what procedure would be utilized in accessing the evidence locker,  the average size of a drug shipment, ad infinitem on and on and on until it’s a miracle the boy would even talk to me.  Country Justice is dedicated to him, in fact, and nobody ever earned a dedication more.

            Well, guess what? I’ve got a current work-in-progress (that’s WIP in writer shorthand) and the merciless brain-picking has commenced.  The text messages are flying. How’d you like to get this text (reproduced with grammatical correctness rather than copied in text shorthand form for your reading convenience) from your mother-in-law?

      “Question. If the Department found a cadaver in the woods about two months old, no missing persons report, how would it be handled?  Would y’all just call the county Coroner who would transport to the nearest GBI crime lab or would one of their teams be called to the scene right then and take over?  And if there was suspicion these remains might be connected to an old cold case and y’all requested a priority, would the crime lab give it some kind of priority or just put it in line? Don’t you just love having me as your mother-in-law?”

            The response came in a few hours.  Bless his heart. He didn’t turn a hair. Or even try to arrest me.

            “First the coroner would get the body and would do the autopsy but the GBI and possibly even the FBI would be on the case from start to finish to oversee the local law. And yes they would check everything with priority because the person died under suspicious and unknown circumstances.  Sorry it took me so long, didn’t see I had a text.”

            I’ve got a resident expert and I’m going to complain about the length of time it took to get an answer? I think not.

            “No problem.  This is in a rural county where the mortician is the coroner and not an MD.  Do they do autopsies or call in an adjoining bigger county where the coroner’s an actual pathologist?”

            Yeah, I guess I am kind of single-minded when I’m in process on a work-in-progress, huh?

            “The local guy would do it with maybe the GBI or FBI present but other small agencies do ask bigger departments to help, like here if the City Police had that scenario they’d call us in  to work the case. And yes, they will sometimes send the body to a bigger city to be autopsied.

            “Got it! Thanks a million.  Title is Black Turkey Walk.” (Nice I finally threw in it was for a book, don’t you think?  Not that he didn’t know that from the start, of course.)

            “Sounds cool and very interesting.”

            A good son-in-law’s value is beyond rubies. It’s plot material.  Lord love you, darlin’, ‘cause I sure do!  To check out the results of this priceless in-house informant’s knowledge, click on my Books We Love Author's Page.  And coming Spring, 2015 – Black Turkey Walk.