The Beetle Battle, by J.C. Kavanagh

Award-winning sequel, The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends

I often use personal experience when writing - if it's something I've heard or empathized with, or witnessed with my own eyes, my own heart, then I can write about it from my perspective. Personal experience often lends a more credible telling of the tale and hopefully lead to a closer connection with the reader. I use my home and sailing experiences in both The Twisted Climb and Darkness Descends. For example, shortly after we bought our property, we discovered 20-year-old vines twisted around many of our pine trees. They had slowly died a 'strangled' death. I used that twisted vine experience in the 'Drunk on a Slinky' chapter of Darkness Descends. Another example is from my sailing vacations. We sail to a gorgeous place called The Bad River, home to the Devil's Door Rapids, and I used these places as dream world locations in Darkness Descends.
 
My home is in a rural area surrounded by thousands of trees and nature in all its forms - birds, deer, racoons, porcupines, skunks and our neighbour's Guinea Hens, chickens and geese. So when I came home from our August sailing vacation, I was saddened to see a good number of our pine trees in distress. The needles were reddish-brown and the bark was splitting. My partner and I were walking around the property, wine glass in hand, when we stopped to listen to an unusual sound. It was a crunching sound and the source was one of the pine trees beside the man-cave/shop.
 
My heart wrenched.
 
I'd heard about this sound.


Adult pine bark beetle


This munching sound. The sound of hungry mouths chewing and chewing and destroying.
 
It was the sound of ten thousand hungry pine bark beetles.
 
These are voracious little fother-muckers that destroy swaths of trees. From Mexico all the way to British Columbia and now, Ontario, these pests are destroying pine trees wherever they fly and lay eggs.
 
We live near a provincial forest and are also surrounded by Christmas tree farms. Many of the tree farm properties have been decimated by these pests and, until now, I felt badly for them but never once thought that the trees on my property would be subject to the horrible critters. The provincial forest had a controlled burn this past spring in an attempt to halt the pests from spreading.
 
Yeah, well, that didn't help me or my trees.
 
I'm researching ways to halt the spread of these destructive insects and save the healthy trees. This is what I've learned from the 'Net:

Bark beetles kill the host tree when the adults bore holes through the tree’s outer bark and

into the inner bark layer of the tree. The adult beetles then

excavate tunnels where the female beetle lays eggs.

When the eggs hatch, the grub stage (larvae) further damages

 the inner bark layer as they construct feeding galleries.

Eventually, the combined excavation by adults and larvae will

girdle  or encircle the tree’s inner bark and cause death.

 
Further to the above, it seems that the best way to eliminate the beetle is to cut the tree down in the winter. And then 'chop and burn.'
 
My partner and I are on a new mission: Beat the Beetle. And take care of our forest.
 
This is a battle we don't want to lose. Our trees are counting on us :(

Several of the pines along our driveway are plagued with the beetle.
Note the reddish-brown needles.

My favourite twisted pine is also infested.

Looking upward, this pine tree is 'home' to thousands of the beetles.
It's where we first heard the 'munching' sound.

Note the tiny entry/exit holes in the bark. The crystalized insect (centre) appears to be a June bug.
When the tree is first attacked by the beetle, it exudes sap in a defensive effort. This June bug is a casualty.

 Mother nature...

J.C. Kavanagh

The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends (Book 2)
voted BEST Young Adult Book 2018, Critters Readers Poll and Best YA Book FINALIST at The Word Guild, Canada
AND
The Twisted Climb,
voted BEST Young Adult Book 2016, P&E Readers Poll
Novels for teens, young adults and adults young at heart
Email: author.j.c.kavanagh@gmail.com
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When Goals Come Between You and Your Passion

 

Lao Tzu

The idea for this blog came when one of my fellow authors asked me, “What are your goals for the next five years?”

This should have been an easy question to answer. In my previous profession as a business owner, I lived on a steady diet of goals: annual targets, monthly objectives and even daily goals. There was no way around it. Businesses need goals and without them, become directionless. I felt a constant need to compare myself  to my past achievements and to others in the industry. Indeed, a business without goals is one destined to die.

Several years ago, I sold the business and became a writer. Just as with a new business venture, I planned what books and how many I would write over a given time period. I tied everything together with timelines and spreadsheets. In other words, I brought exactly the wrong mentality to the writing world.

Not long into my first book, I realized that my plans were holding me back. Constantly checking back to where I was “supposed” to be became demoralizing. Worrying about plans interfered with the creative process. Ideas don’t magically appear on schedule nor does the imagination heel to spreadsheets. They take their sweet time and, in my experience, usually blossom outside the time spent at the keyboard---during evening walks or drives in the car.

I concluded that writing success should be measured by how satisfied I am by what I put on paper, rather than by writing a certain number of pages per day. The passion and engagement that I pour into my work give my story more impetus than any number of tick marks on a to-do list.

Is this an argument for anarchy? Of course not. I use planning devices to help me maintain the arc of the story or to chart the progress of my characters. But in the actual process of writing, it is better to remain in the moment and let feelings and emotions flow freely from the imagination to the page. And, if well written, the reader shares in this engagement and passion.

Lao Tzu wrote 'A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.' I find this to be the correct approach to writing: to take joy in the process. It made me a better writer.

Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy, and "Karma Nation," a literary romance. Please check him out at www.mohanashtakala.com. Published by Books We love: www.bookswelove.com.

Secrets from the past...by Sheila Claydon

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I've just read fellow BWL writer Susan Calder's blog post about near history and it took me right back to the time when I decided to research my family's past. The advent of the Internet has made this so much easier . No more trekking to city libraries or writing letters to the National Archives. Instead, information available at the click of a button, and so much of it.

I decided to start with my Father because the stories he told me as a child had always fascinated me. His own father, he said, was illegitimate, but because his very young parents were from rich families, possibly even nobility, his birth had been hushed up and he had been fostered by a Mr and Mrs Leigh, and educated until he was 14. This was at a time when most boys left school at 12 or even earlier. He was then apprenticed to a haberdasher, where he had to sleep under the shop counter at night. Of course my main aim was to find out who his parents were, and then I was going to try to track down the Leigh family. Well, what a surprise that turned out to be!

For a start I discovered that instead of being the Yorkshireman I had always thought he was, he was from Norfolk in East Anglia. So instead of my Father's northern vowels he would have spoken with what, to untuned ears, would have sounded like a rural accent.  The dialect of rural Norfolk is closely related to the accent of Eastern New England in the US, as many of the first settlers there were from Norfolk, whereas the Yorkshire accent is the closest we have to the Old Saxon language of the UK, with a good bit of Viking thrown in thanks to the Scandinavians who invaded England a very long time ago. To give you a flavour:

Standard English:  'How are you?'
Norfolk Dialect:      'Ar ya reet bor? How you gewin?' 
Yorkshire Dialect:   'How do?'

English dialects are not only fascinating but they change every twenty miles or so. Where I live on the north west coast I am assailed by up to half a dozen dialects on a daily basis, and if I travel just a few miles more I can up the count to about twenty. That, however, is a whole other story. Back to my grandfather. 

Having recovered from the shock of discovering that he was Norfolk born in the wonderfully named Little Snoring, a tiny hamlet of just a few houses, I then found out that he was brought up in Fakenham, a small town just a few miles away...by his grandparents!  Not by foster parents. And although his mother (my great-grandmother) didn't live with him because she was in service as a domestic servant, she saw him regularly. He had a brother too, older by 4 years, and also illegitimate. There is a whole other story there. Did she have a longstanding affair with a member of the local nobility? is that where part of the story came from? Was money made available for her children? I'll never know. 

What I do know, however, is that not only did my great-great grandparents bring him up but they educated him too because they could afford to on their own merits. I discovered that my great-great-grandfather owned a brick yard, and if you ever visit Norfolk and see how many old houses are built with red brick, you'll understand that he was quite well off. I've since seen the house and adjoining yard with its huge double gates, wide enough for a horse and cart laded with bricks to drive through.

Neither my grandfather's nor his brother's birth certificates named their father and despite a visit to Fakenham and to the Records Office in Norwich I failed to find any clues that might have led me to him. Nor did the Parish Chest (a repository for all sorts of documents relating to apprenticeships and other financial transactions) have anything of interest. I discovered, however, that a Drapers Apprenticeship was for 7 years and was only available to boys who could afford it, so I like to think that my great-great-grandfather stumped up the money for that too. 

I then discovered that, aged 21, my grandfather left Norfolk and travelled to London where, as a full member of the Draper's Guild, he worked in the city, and shared lodgings with a young man who worked with him. So far, so good, but the best bit was still to come.  I don't know when he met my grandmother but I do know they were married in Saint Margaret's Church, Westminster. This is in the grounds of Westminster Abbey on Parliament Square, London, and was, until the 1970s, the Anglican parish church of the British House of Commons. 

I have no idea whether you had to have important connections to be married in such an auspicious church, but I have since discovered that my Grandmother's father was a Professor of Music who had originally been in the Royal Hussars as a Band Master, so maybe it was a fancy wedding. What was more important though was the marriage certificate. By this time my great-great-grandparents were dead, as was my great-grandmother and two of her brothers, one of whom had never married. Whether he lived with his parents all his life I don't know, but I do know that he helped run the brick yard, so my grandfather would have probably seen this uncle almost daily. So what was he to do when asked to fill in his wedding certificate with the relevant details...certainly not own up to being illegitimate in front of his future father-in-law. Instead he put his uncle's name against father and next to it deceased. And under occupation owner brick yard. After all some of it was true, and everyone who knew the full truth was either dead or lived miles away, so no-one was ever going to discover his little lie. 

And then the Internet came along, and an inquisitive granddaughter! He died 15 years before I was born, but how I would love to know what made him tick. Why this stern and authoritarian Edwardian gentleman disowned his grandparents and mother, at least on paper. And how I would love to be able to tell my Father the true story too. Instead, one day I might use it as the basis of a book. In the meantime my book Remembering Rose has a different sort of hidden history...or as my writing colleague Susan Calder might say...near history. 

Inspirations

find Eileen's BWL books here

Eileen's Website

I'm happy to report that I'm deep in the world of my second American Civil War Brides novel.  Seven Aprils' bride was Tess,  Book 2: Mercies of the Fallen's bride is Ursula. 

The title is inspired by Dar Williams' hauntingly beautiful song Mercy of the Fallen which begins...

Oh my fair North Star, I have held to you dearly,

I had asked you to steer me, 

Till one cloud-scattered night, 

I got lost...

Here are some of the images that inspire me as I write.  My hero Rowan is a sergeant in a New York Zouave regiment.  I love the Zouave uniforms... finding them dashing and colorful and comfortable, being of light weight cloth and easy to move in.  Regiments of both the South and the North wore them.

Zouave soldier 

I even found a photograph of a soldier who looked like my Rowan...

...although my husband spied this Civil War era photo and proclaimed I was actually inspired by our friend Paul in his youth, what do you think?

...hmmm, separated at birth?

My hero and heroine are both lost and damaged souls.  So I am looking to a couple of people I know to inspire the creation of supporting characters to bright some lightness to the novel.  

One is my dear cousin Monique, a delightful force of nature, full of what the French call joie de vivre. She is inspiring the character of Marie Madeline, a French Canadian wonder who, along with her two sisters helped raise Rowan into the loving, generous man that he is, despite his rough start as a survivor of An Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger in Ireland.  Here's my wonderful cousin and me...

be warned: if I'm looking at you like this, you're going to end up in one of my novels!

Another relative is helping me form my heroine's brother Jonathan, who is determined to see her free and n the road to finding her happiness.  He is a goofy, impatient matchmaker and I drew from my delightful, goofy son-in-law Teddy who loves winter and takes down Christmas trees with relish!

I hope you are finding inspirations daily!

What is Near HIstory?

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When my son was at university, he took a course in Canadian History. His final essay explored the 1968 federal election, which catapulted Pierre Trudeau to prime minister. I thought, this is history? It's my life. I was a teenager at the time and vividly recall myself and much of country getting swept away by the charming, sexy intellectual who breathed fresh air into the political establishment.

Trudeaumania

Recently, I heard the term Near History, for events that happened during your own, your parents' or your grandparents' lifetime, depending on your age. Many loosely define the period as mid-twentieth century, but the time frame seems to be creeping closer to the present day. At a writing event I attended this spring, an author noted that his novels set in the 1970s were borderline historical. He joked this was good for sales, since historical fiction is a popular genre. A few weeks later, I saw a call for submissions for historical stories. The magazine defined this as anything happening before 1996.

Why 1996? I wondered, although this was an important year for me. I moved from Montreal to Calgary that summer and my family got dial-up Internet. And the Net might be why the magazine chose that cut-off year. The Internet changed the world. Even those of us who spent our younger years in pre-cyberspace can hardly imagine life without it.

What are the benefits and challenges for writers working in the relatively recent past? While most of my writing is contemporary, I've written a short story set in 1976 and attempted one set in the 1930s. 

An obvious benefit of writing history you've lived or heard about from older relatives is that it requires less research. Many facts and emotions of the time are part of your consciousness. You're more likely to get them right. Near history might even be easier to write than contemporary stories, since your heightened memories have had decades to gel and assume meaning. You'll attract older readers looking for nostalgia and insight into the pivotal time of their youths. Younger readers might be interested to learn more about their parents' and grandparents' lives. 

The challenge is to make the story fresh and relevant to readers today. There's also a real risk that a reader who lived through the time will spot a mistake that will ruin their belief in your whole story. True, a historian or other expert might notice your error about Ancient Rome, but no living Roman will catch a detail or way of thinking or feeling that has been lost to time. 

Although the benefits seem to outweigh the challenges, I'll probably stick with writing contemporary fiction, for the most part. One the other hand, I'm writing my current novel-in-progress with chapters alternating between 2020 and the early 1990s. By some people's reckoning, 1990 is history.  

Pierre Trudeau slides down a banister in 1968 - will his son experience a slide in next month's Canadian federal election? 

  

Queen in 1990 - I loved Bohemian Rhapsody, last year's movie about the rock group Queen.

Family Histories by Karla Stover

                           


I belong to the D.A.R. on both sides of my family and love family histories. Of course, mine is special. 😊 On my dad's side, one of the great grandfathers harbored Jessie James and not long after, moved to southeast Oregon. The family homesteaded Warner Valley, owned all the water rights, and spent 20 years and all their money in court fighting off owners of the MC Cattle Ranch who wanted to take over the valley. My maternal great grandmother arrived from Cornwall on the 4th of July, heard the fireworks, and thought the Indians were attacking. Whenever her daughters came to Puget Sound to visit their sister, my grandmother who had relocated, they wrote first asking if the Indians were still peaceful. Anyway, the great grandparents settled in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and had quite a few children, mostly girls. Both sides of the family survived the 1889 Johnstown flood and my grandparents talked about it often. Maternal great grandmother led her children out an attic window and rode out the flood on the roof of the house. They were lucky in that a big barn floating by got lodged somehow so the house was saved. After the flood, paternal great-grandfather was walking by the river looking for survivors when he found a little girl named Bessie Sypes. He took her back to her father who had been telling folks, "we were all saved except little Bessie." Bessie never spoke again. Lucky me, my parents wrote all the family histories down.

Now, all this is by way of a conundrum I have. I live about five miles from a lake and a little community, both called Spanaway. And living on the lake is a 90-year-old woman who has been there all her life and wants someone to write her history. I could go over with a tape recorder, listen to what she has to say, and then type it up. But I don't want to and I feel guilty. It's such a shame that parents don't take the time to do this or that their children aren't interested until it's too late. If nothing else, talking to family has told me which funky genes (heart and low iron on Dad's side and lung and Alzheimer on Mom's side) came from whom. Unless they were the result of spontaneous mutations, like Queen Victoria's hemophilia.

Stephen King: My Favorite Teacher by Joan Hall Hovey

 

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     The year was 1984, a lovely summer’s day and I was sitting in the packed, buzzed audience waiting for Stephen King to appear.  To say I was excited is an understatement. Uncool? Totally. I’d bought my hardcover copy of his book Different Seasons for him to sign.  I wouldn’t be denied. I had all his books in hardcover – Carrie, Cycle of the Werewolf, Danse Macabre, Salem’s Lot -  there would be  many more to come. He was my hero in a time when I was already much too old to be star-struck.  I’ve read that it is mainly teenagers who are addicted to Stephen King’s work, and I was hardly that.  Though probably immature.  I’m at a much more more advanced age now and that hasn’t changed, and I hope it never does.  Stephen King was  the Elvis Presley of the literary world.

     I hadn’t had a novel published yet; that was still a dream, floating somewhere above the horizon. But I’d written and published some articles and short stories, enough to make me eligible for a travel grant through the NB Arts Council to London, England to the writers workshop at Polytechnic Institution  on Marylebone Road, aptly across the street from Madam Tussauds wax museum.  Stephen King would be a panelist, along with authors P.D. James, Robert Parker and some others.  I was eager to hear all the celebrated authors, but I’d flown all this way from New Brunswick, Canada to see and hear Mr. King.  

     He came into the large room through the back door and I swear I knew the instant he did.  You couldn’t miss the rising buzz of the audience, of course, the shifting of bodies as people turned to look, but I also felt the change of energy in the air. On stage, Stephen King joked about his ‘big writing engine’ and I had heard (within my third eye – yes, it can hear) its power, its purr.   Or maybe there’s more to it.

     As he talked to us about writing, he spoke about seeing with that third eye.  The eye of the imagination.  He told us to imagine a chair.  Then he said it was a blue chair.  I saw it clearer now.  He added the detail of a paint blister on the leg of the chair.  Now I saw it close up, with my zoom lens.  We hung on his every word.  He was funny and brilliant and entertaining, and we learned. Everything he said was not necessarily something brand new, but were reminders to pay close attention to details.  To always tell the truth in our writing.  I even got to ask a couple of questions.   And his answers to all our questions were thoughtful and insightful.   I try to pass along a few of those lessons to my own students.

     Stephen King has been teaching creative writing to aspiring and even established writers for decades, long before his wonderful book On Writing came out.  Such a gift to writers that is, regardless of the genre you write in.   I am gushing.  I don’t mind. It’s true.

     I have been fortunate to have had many highlights in my life –  an anniversary trip to Niagara Falls with my wonderful husband, the births of my children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren – a trip to the Bahamas with my eldest son – my own first novel published and several more after that - and I have to say that that workshop in London, England, where Stephen King spoke to us about writing, is right up there.  Thank you, Mr. King. 

     I want to leave you with a quote from an interview with contributing writing for the Atlantic, Jessica Lahey, published in The Atlantic,  Sept  2014.  She asked him if teaching was craft or art.
“It’s both,” he said.  “The best teachers are artists.

     Stephen King is an artist on every level.   He tells the truth.  In his fiction.  And in his teachings.