Yahoo!

For more information about Susan Calder's books, or to purchase, please visit Books We Love Author Page.  

My hometown of Calgary is in the midst of its annual 10-day festival, billed as The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth--The Calgary Stampede. Local stores are decorated with bales of hay. Bank tellers sport cowboy hats and bandanas. Every day, you can have your pick of a dozen pancake breakfasts sponsored by retail malls, companies, churches and politicians.   

It's a city-wide party, comparable to the carnivals in Venice, New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro. I'm told that Calgary's birthrate always spikes in April, nine months from now. 

The week before this summer's Stampede, I participated in a reading and discussion with three other authors of books featuring the Stampede and/or Calgary's western heritage. About eighty people attended our event titled Side-saddled: Local Writers Take on the Stampede, which shows how much Calgarians like to talk and read about themselves.   

Part of our goal for the night was to look beneath the hoopla to some of the controversies surrounding the Stampede. One that we couldn't neglect was animal rights. Every year, horses and cattle die during training or at the rodeo or chuckwagon races, often from a heart attack or a broken leg that requires they be put down. Animal rights activists stage protests, calling for the abolition of these grueling competitions.   

Chuckwagon - a modern day Chariot race

In my novel, Ten Days in Summer, set against a backdrop of the Stampede, I touch on this issue through my protagonist Paula's daughter, Erin, aged twenty-two and an animal lover.   

        A small safety pin remained pinned to Erin’s pants, beneath two other black ribbons.
        "Is that a new style?" Paula asked.  

“It's to honour the animals who’ve died at this year’s Stampede—so far,” Erin said.  

 Paula, too, felt sad when she read about a horse having a heart attack or crashing in a chuckwagon race. Unlike Erin, though, she didn’t think animal deaths were a reason to abolish the rodeo and chuckwagon events at the Stampede. Did humans treat animals better elsewhere? Paula had once made the mistake of joking to Erin that cattle participation in roping and wrestling competitions was better than their alternate career path: meat. Erin wouldn’t talk to her for days.

During the discussion, our panel tended to agree with Paula. Author Aritha van Herk, who researched the Stampede for her book Stampede and the Westness of the West, noted that deaths of chuckwagon horses were usually due to the genetic weaknesses of these thoroughbreds. If they couldn't be chuckwagon racers they would go to Europe as horse meat. 

The Stampede's macho culture also came up in our discussion. Aritha mentioned that during the festival's early years, almost 100 years ago, women competed in the rodeo events with considerable success. Now they are banned from both the chuckwagon races and rodeo, aside from the lower status barrel racing.

Side-saddle riding tricks in the Stampede's early days 

Young women can become a Stampede Queen or Princess, subject to the usual beauty pageant requirements. Except, instead of a bathing suit contest, they must be able to ride a horse. Our current mayor of Calgary also learned to ride for the two hour downtown Stampede parade. A Calgary mayor would be scorned if he or she refrained from riding without a very good reason. 

To lighten the mood, our emcee Shaun Hunter inserted occasional fun questions. 

Which do you prefer? Cowboy hat or boots?  I was the only one who chose the hat, which I find comfortable as well as practical for shade and bad hair days. 

What was the name of the first horse you rode? The others gave their answers right away: Starburst. Sunshine. I was stumped. Being a city girl, I have only been on a horse twice, when my youthful friends dragged me to a riding stable in the country. I was more focused on not falling off than relating to my horse, which no doubt contributed to my riding difficulties.   

At the evening's end, Shaun asked the audience to vote for their favourite Stampede cheer by shouting along with her. 

Yahoo! She shouted with enthusiastic audience members. 

Yeehaw!

 The winner? Yaaaaaahoooooo!

    

  

TO SEQUEL OR NOT TO SEQUEL--THAT IS THE QUESTION by Karla Stover

 Whether or not to write a sequel isn't an easy decision. Consider Dean Koontz who said, "Too many sequels diminish the original." or John Updike's pithy remark, "I suppose sequels are inevitable for writers of a certain."

 

Ouch!

 

One danger of writing a series is, how well you like your characters. Many writers grew to hate the people (or animals) they created. A. A. Milne was one. Milne wrote 3 novels, four plays and 18 screenplays but Winnie the Pooh outshined them all. "I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next," Milne said, but he grew to hate the "eclipsing fame of his beloved children's books."

 

It's pretty well-known tat Sir Author Conan Doyle had a love-hate relationship with Sherlock Holmes. Doyle tried to kill off Holmes in 1893 and  resisted readers' outrage for 8 years before bringing him back. Here, in Tacoma, where I live, Doyle spoke at the Scottish Hall but refused to discuss Holmes. According to  The Guinness Book of World Records, more than 70 actors have portrayed Holmes, making him the most portrayed movie character. Doyle undoubtedly would have recoiled in horror.

 

I was never a Hercule Poirot fan and, after a while, neither was Agatha Christie. She called him a douche, saying, "As much as I love the Poirot stories, one cannot deny the fact that he loved himself even more. He knew that he was always the smartest person in the room and acted accordingly." Christie killed him off and it seems no one protested much.

 

Most Little Women readers probably know that the author, Louisa May Alcott, based the character, Jo, on herself. They may not know that her own three sisters were the prototypes for Meg, Amy, and Beth. Readers may also not know that Alcott didn't want to write the book. She wanted to write literature and pulp fiction. When the editor at Roberts Brothers Publishing Company, Thomas Niles, tried to interest her in writing a book for girls, she said she wasn't interested in writing "moral pap for the young." Only after Niles offered a contract to her father did Alcott give in--writing Little Women in 10 weeks. According to http://intestinalbookworms.blogspot.com by at the end of three-book series, "Alcott literally wanted to blow up the boy's school in which her main character lived and worked."

 

And consider this: Bella Swan and Edward Cullen of The Twilight series regularly feature on lists of fiction's most disliked characters. Not that it hurt sales, but still . . . Also on the lists are Holden Caulfield, Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler, Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, Hamlet, and Beth March.

 

Hmmm, perhaps it's best to remember what Kingsley Amis said, "If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."

 

 



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The Sequel to my best seller! How I had to create one.

Diane Scott Lewis was born in California, wrote her first novel at five (with her mother's help), and published short-stories and poems in school magazines. She had a short-story submitted by my High School to a literary festival when she was seventeen. She joined the navy at nineteen. Married her navy husband in Greece, had two sons. She now lives in Western Pennsylvania.
  
She had her first novel published in 2010. That novel is now the reworked Escape the Revolution.
But today we discuss the sequel, Hostage to the Revolution, due out July 19th.

What do you do when a book grows too big?                        

When I started writing, I had no idea there were word count restrictions. I'd read huge, lumbering books numerous times. But the fiction world had changed, especially for a new author.

The answer to this problem is you cut the story in half, or in this case, the last third, which was the perfect place to break the flow. When I wrote this first novel, originally titled The False Light, renamed Betrayed Countess, and now Escape the Revolution, it grew to nearly 700 pages. I suppose I didn’t want the adventure to end, but the novel was unwieldy, and out of control.

I had to shave off the last third, plump up that part of the story, and create a sequel: Hostage to the Revolution.

Below is the blurb to explain the first book ESCAPE THE REVOLUTION:

Forced from France on the eve of the French Revolution, Countess Bettina Jonquiere must deliver an important package to further the royalist cause. In England, she discovers the package is full of blank papers, the address false and she’s penniless. Bettina toils in a bawdy tavern and falls in love with a man who may have murdered his wife. Tracked by ruthless revolutionaries, she must uncover the truth about her father’s murder—and her lover’s guilt—while her life is threatened.

The Historical Novel Society called it: "Simply brilliant."

For the reviewers who lamented that this novel has no Happily Ever After, that’s because you need to read the sequel for the true ending. For those who haven’t read the first book, I hope you’ll download both novels.

Here’s the blurb for HOSTAGE TO THE REVOLUTION:

Sequel to Escape the Revolution. In 1796, ruined countess Bettina Jonquiere leaves England after the reported drowning of her lover, Everett.  In New Orleans she struggles to establish a new life for her children. Soon a ruthless Frenchman demands the money stolen by her father at the start of the French Revolution. Bettina is forced on a dangerous mission to France to recover the funds. She unravels dark family secrets, but will she find the man she lost as well?

This last book on Bettina’s story will be available July 19^th.

I hope fans will enjoy both of these novels. I think readers will be satisfied with this surprise ending.

For more on my books, please visit my BWL Author page

Or my website: dianescottlewis.org