The Past was a different place...by Sheila Claydon

Hello from Tenerife.
While the UK suffers from low temperatures and biting winds I’m spending time in the sunny Canary Islands where a cloudy day is an event to be commented upon.  In the past I’ve always thought of the islands as a place to truly relax and recharge one’s batteries but my goodness how things have changed. When I first visited this part of the Tenerife coast, more than 25 years ago, it was a tiny fishing village with a couple of weathered shacks on the dusty road opposite the shingle beach. Sitting on rickety chairs we enjoyed meals of grilled squid and salty Canarian potatoes or a paella full of mussels and prawns, all washed down with a light wine or, more often, with Sangria, the true flavour of  these islands. In front of us would be upturned boats spread with drying fishing nets, while across from us sunburned fishermen would smoke and drink before taking to the seas again.

We reached the village by climbing up and over a long hill of scrub interspersed with spiny cacti and tiny pink flowers whose name I never learned, and by the time we sank gratefully into those rickety chairs our sandals would be thick with the yellow dust of the roadside. Now, to get there, we have to drive on smooth black roads through a convoluted mass of one way systems, roundabouts and traffic signals and then circle endlessly looking for somewhere to park our car. There isn’t a single space in the row upon row of parked cars at every kerbside but we eventually find an underground carpark. It leads up into a mall full of shops with the designer names that can be seen in every town, city and airport in most parts of the world.

Eventually we find the sea and the imported yellow sands that now cover the small expanse of shingle from yesteryear and spread out far beyond it. The weathered shacks have long gone of course, and in their place is a long promenade lined with every sort of eaterie, each offering a plethora of choices. Tapas, steak and fries, pizza, full English breakfast, pasta, hot dogs, beef burgers, ice cream, pastries, beer , wine.....food and drink from many cultures and to suit many tastes. Only the sangria remains a constant. And the sunhats we buy from a stall run by a smiling islander have the inevitable ‘made in China’ label.

When we finally choose a place to eat it isn’t so bad. Our table is on a sheltered terrace with a view of the sea and here they still serve grilled squid although not as we remember it. Less succulent with few vegetables it is nevertheless a taste from the past as are the tiny wrinkled potatoes. There is nothing else left of the past though, and as we look up at the hotels and holiday apartments rising in tier upon tier above us up the steep cliffs of the island, we wonder. Is this the price of success...people crowded out of their own villages as more and more tourists fly to the sunshine. We have met people from Germany, France, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland,  Belgium, Ireland,Wales, Scotland, every part of England, Australia, Vietnam and America, all in the space of a few days, on a tiny rock of an islaand 600 miles off the coast of Morocco.  It’s enough to make the head whirl!

Is it a good thing, this development of sun soaked islands for the mass of tourists who want the sun?Is it right that a tiny, barely inhabited village has been turned into a centre of holiday hedonism?Who am I to say because, while I far prefer the tiny village and the roadside shack, maybe the residents don’t. They may well feel that with tourism making more than a 60% contribution to the island’s economy it’s a change worth making. I certainly hope so.

Before Books We Love began to publish my books I wrote another one that was based in Tenerife...a Tenerife halfway between what it once was and what it is now. It was my first attempt at writing about places I’d visited and it’s success led me to do it again, and again. Reluctant Date is one of those books, set in a tiny Key in the Gulf of Mexico, one of my favourite places in all the world, and one I’m afraid to visit again in case it too has changed.

Lucy Maud Montgomery and Prince Edward Island by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

 

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan

 
I started my writing career as a travel writer, researching and writing seven travel books about the attractions, sites, and history along the backroads of Alberta, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. While working on them I realized what a beautiful country I live in. Since then I have switched to writing fiction but I still love to travel. 2017 was Canada’s 150^th birthday and to celebrate it my husband and I travelled in a motorhome from our home on Vancouver Island on the Pacific Ocean to Newfoundland on the Atlantic Ocean. The round trip took us nine weeks and we were only able to see about half of the sites and attractions along the roads.
       I have decided to write about the scenery, attractions, and history of my country. This post is about Lucy Maud Montgomery.

The Confederation Bridge connects Borden-Carlton, Prince Edward Island, with the rest of Canada at Cape Jourimain, New Brunswick. It is the longest bridge in the world that crosses ice-covered water and was completed in 1997 at a cost of $840 million.

 

 

 

     We paid our toll and drove the bridge over the 12.9 kilometre wide Northumberland Strait. We headed to Green Gables in Cavendish in the Prince Edward Island National Park. One of the most famous writers in the world was from Prince Edward Island. Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on November 30, 1874 in New London, PEI. Her ancestors came from Scotland in the 1770s and her grandfathers were members of the provincial legislature for years. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Lucy was 2 and Lucy spent a much of her childhood with her maternal grandparents on the Macneill homestead in Cavendish. Her father moved west in 1887 and remarried. Lucy joined him but felt out of place and soon returned to PEI and her grandparents. She also spent time with her extended family on her mother’s side and her paternal grandfather.
     However, her grandparents weren’t very affectionate and Lucy felt lonely and isolated. This led her to reading an abundant number of books and using her imagination to write her own stories. She started with poetry and journals when she was nine years old and had her first poem, On Cape Le Force, published in the Charlottetown Patriot in November 1890. She started writing short stories in her mid-teens. She first published them in local newspapers then sold them to magazines throughout Canada and the United States.
     Lucy studied to be a teacher and began teaching in a village school in the late 1890s. She was also writing and selling her works so that when her grandfather died in 1898, she was able to leave her teaching position and move in with her grandmother. Between then and 1911 she wrote and sold poems and stories and also worked in the post office on her grandmother’s homestead.
    Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, was published in 1908 and was an instant bestseller. She got her idea from other novels written by women like Little Women and from a story she read about a couple who had arranged to adopt a boy but were sent a girl. The book sold more than 19,000 copies in the first five months and was reprinted ten times in the first year. It is still in print after more than a century. Lucy wrote two sequels, Anne of Green Gables: Anne of Avonlea (1909) and Anne of the Island (1915) plus five more Anne books over her lifetime. She had a total of twenty books, over five hundred short stories, and one book of poetry published before she died in 1942.
     In her private life,  Lucy had many suitors over the years and became secretly engaged to a distant cousin named Edwin Simpson in 1897. This ended with she began a romance with a farmer named Hermann Leard. Leard died in 1899 from influenza and Lucy threw herself into her writing. Lucy married a minister, Ewen Macdonald, after her grandmother died in 1911 and they moved to Ontario where Ewen had a parish. They had two sons, Chester and Stuart, and a third one who was stillborn. They moved to another village in 1926 and then, after Ewen was admitted to a sanatorium in 1934 and he resigned his parish, they moved to Toronto in 1935. Ewen died in 1943.
     The Green Gables House has been restored to match the descriptions in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books. I toured through the historic site, seeing the exhibits in the Green Gables house and strolling the Haunted Woods and Balsam Hollow trails that were mentioned in her books.

     Prince Edward Island also boasts have Canada’s smallest library. It is one room with shelves of books along the walls and a table and chairs in the centre.

Never Say Never

Click this link for story details and purchase information.

Twenty-five years ago, I finished my first novel manuscript. While I often have trouble coming up with titles, this title, To Catch a Fox, appeared on the first page. It came from a mystery novel, The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie. Toward the end of the book, Detective Hercule Poirot compares the killer's act of framing someone else for the crime to a fox hunt. “The cruelty that condemned an innocent man to a living death. To catch a fox and put him in a box and never let him go.” My protagonist, Julie Fox, was a woman chased and trapped by a former boyfriend and her own demons.

The Fox Hunt by Alexandre-Francois Desportes

I worked on To Catch a Fox for six years, in the midst of moving from Montreal to Calgary and raising a family. When the manuscript didn't find a publisher, I tucked it away a drawer. It was my practice-novel, I told myself, my learning-to-write process. I was certain the Fox was put to rest for good and was okay with this, I thought.  

The red fox is the main quarry in European and American fox hunts - Julie Fox has long, red hair

I turned my attention to short stories, which require less time to complete than a novel, with the goal of getting something published for my efforts. The plan worked, although the publishing part took  longer than I'd expected. About once a year, I'd get a story accepted by a magazine or anthology or, in one case, for a radio broadcast, the news often arriving at a point when I felt discouraged about writing. In addition to the encouragement and growing publishing resume, I found the short stories useful for experimenting with writing styles, themes and characters. My first attempt at suspense was a short story about a woman on the run to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. 

I wrote my suspense story, Zona Romantica, during a holiday in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Another short story, Adjusting the Ashes, inspired my mystery series sleuth, Paula Savard. Like Paula, Ashes heroine, Carol, is an insurance adjuster with two grown up daughters, a broken marriage, and a longing for excitement. In her story, Carol investigates an insurance claim in the Calgary neighbourhood of Ramsay, where Paula lives. Adjusting the Ashes segued into my next writing phase, murder mystery novels. I wrote my first Paula novel, Deadly Fall, revised it, and sent queries to publishers and agents. A few expressed interest, but what would I write while waiting for their decisions? 

Insurance adjusters investigate claims, some of which are suspicious

Out of the blue, a fresh concept for To Catch a Fox leapt from my subconscious mind. Same title, same protagonist Julie Fox, same quest - to search for her mother. But almost everything else changed. The new story would have a suspense structure, with five viewpoint characters, plus a whole new cast of supporting players. Rather than Vancouver and Oregon settings, this story would take place in Calgary and California. Julie no longer travelled alone; she'd have a sidekick, her stepsister with whom she has prickly relationship. The plot and what Julie discovers in the end would be totally different. I wrote the story and revised the first draft before getting a publisher's acceptance for Deadly Fall and continued working on To Catch a Fox during breaks in writing mysteries.    

Who knew the Fox buried in the drawer still had life? If you'd told me fifteen years ago that To Catch a Fox would be published this year, I'd have said, "Impossible!" Strangely, I feel the title suits the new version better than the original, since darker demons and characters now hunt Julie and trap her more ruthlessly. You'd almost think it was meant to be.    

It shows that you can never say never in writing, as in life.