Make Believe World by Roseanne Dowell

I live in a make-believe world. Okay, not literally, but vicariously through my characters.  I decide where they live, name their towns, or sometimes I let them live in a real city/town.  I prefer small towns, maybe because I’ve always wanted to live in one. I especially like towns with Victorian houses and apparently so do my characters, because I use them a lot.  I often say I must have lived during the Victorian area, probably as a mean old nanny. I’m sure I wasn’t the lady of the house, and by house, I mean mansion. Queen Anne Victorian homes are my favorite. I love the round turrets, all the gingerbread, and wrap-around porches. It was always my dream to buy one and restore it. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be and I’m past the point of wanting one now.  

Back to my make-believe world. I’d like to say I choose my characters, but truthfully, they choose me.  Sometimes I even get to name them, but if they don’t like the name, well, believe me, they misbehave until I change it. And, yes, that’s happened several times. Just because I like a name doesn’t mean they do. The last time it happened it wasn’t even a main character. She was only in the story for a short time, but boy was she stubborn. She refused to talk to me and anything I wrote was garbage, better known as dreck in the writing world.  

As I’ve said previously, I write many different genres, from Women’s Fiction to Romance to Mystery and even Paranormal. Most of my books are a combination of romance and another genre. As a reader, I’ve always favored mystery and romance, so it only made sense to combine them.  Mine would be classified as cozy mysteries; the gory stuff takes place off-scene. 

 I also love ghost stories – not evil mean ghosts though. One such story is Shadows in the Attic and another Time to Love Again. I’ve always been fascinated by ESP, hence my story Entangled Minds – previously published as Connection of the Minds.  

My character’s ages range from their mid-twenties to middle age and into their seventies. Yes, seniors need love, too. Geriatric Rebels is a favorite.  It’s fun working with different characters, and I especially like when they add a bit of humor. I really form an attachment to them. Once a character chooses me, I make a character worksheet so I know everything about them, not just what they look like.  

I love creating my characters, picking their careers, anything from housewives, authors, teachers, floral designers, and interior designers. Sometimes their careers play a part in the story, sometimes not. The character in my work in progress (WIP in the writer’s world) is a former teacher. It’s not a big part of the story, but it’s something I needed to know. She’s a real character in the true sense of the word. She came into being in a previous story, All in the Family. It started out with her having a small part, but Aunt Beatrice Lulu (ABLL) grew into a big part of the story. Once I finished that book, she popped up again and demanded her own book. Problem is, she takes fits and goes into hiding every so often, which is where she’s at right now and has been for some time. Sometimes she pops up for days of writing. Other times, I get a paragraph or two. I’ve never had a character do that before.  Oh, I’ve had writer’s block a time or two, but once I’m over it the writing flows. Not so with ABLL.

  

  It’s also fun describing my characters, their hair and eye color, height, even their weight. I’m often asked if I’m a plotter or punster. I tried plotting once and ended up blocked for almost two years. For me, plotting doesn’t work. I usually know the beginning and end of my stories. What happens in the middle is as much a surprise to me as it is to my readers. ABLL is full of surprises. What that woman doesn’t get into. So even though she goes into hiding, it’s generally worth it when she reappears. I’m not sure where she came from, but I’m sure enjoying working with her. Okay, I’ll be honest, a little bit of her is me, a little bit my sisters, and even my mother. She’s a combination of all the people I love and it’s so much fun living in her make-believe world.  I've enjoyed working with her in three books of the Family Affair Series. Now she's hiding in the fourth book, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished or Live And Learn - working titles. I won't know until the book is finished what the title will be. I hope she reappears soon so I can finish the book.  Here's the first paragraph: 

"You think you're so smart! I'm warning you Ethel Mae Capony, don't do it. If you do, I'll never speak to you again." Beatrice Lulu slammed the door, stomped down the steps, and slammed her car door so hard, I'm surprised the window didn't break.  The car screeched out of the driveway.  I'd never seen her so angry. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had our differences, even arguments, but we’ve always gotten over them. This time was different.  

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		FREE NOVEL DOWNLOAD FOR JULY from https://bookswelove.net PIZZA FOR TWO by Genevieve Montcombroux   Pizza for Two is Piers’ journey. How tragedy transforms a somewhat dissolute youth into a responsible man when Nicole hires him as a delivery person for the flagging pizzeria she runs. Piers’ privileged background has not prepared him to live with no job, hunger and the specter of living on the street. Nicole, who has secrets of her own, is desperate to find a worker and hires Piers deliberately not asking for references. While Piers takes on the task of developing a successful business, Nicole’s heart leads her on the rocky road of love. When Piers helps her find the child that was forcibly taken away from her, happiness is in sight.

Aiden in Africa by Eden Monroe

 

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Pinch me I’m in Africa, or I was. So was Aiden Briggs of Just Before Sunset and that’s where the story begins, on the site of a large work camp in Kenya.

 

Swahili is the official language of Kenya, among other African countries, and Aiden would have to know a bit of it or use an interpreter, or both, like me, but a few of the basics include hujambo or just jambo: hello;  lala salama: goodnight or sleep well; sawa sawa: okay, alright; Habari: what’s new (information)? The Swahili phrase that has become iconic is hakuna matata which means: No problem! No worries! I heard that a lot when I was there; Aiden would have too I’m sure.

 

An engineer, it was Aiden’s second trip to the African continent in a professional capacity, and before travelling to East Africa he would have required several vaccinations and also carry antibiotics with him there as a precautionary measure.

 

Not far away from where Aiden and his men were working on a huge development project, lie the expansive grasslands of the Maasai Mara (sometimes spelled Masai Mara), one of the most biologically diverse places on earth. Encompassing 1,510 square kilometres of national reserve, punctuated at intervals by escarpments, rivers and several varieties of acacia trees, The Mara, as it’s more commonly called, is home to thundering herds of wildebeest and zebras, towering giraffes, the majesty of lions, leopards and cheetahs, hyenas, elephants, cavorting bands of monkeys and baboons, strutting ostrich and the occasional stylishly-plumed secretary birds. It is a land where sunsets are spectacular but brief, being so close to the equator, and an enormous hushed cathedral at sunrise.

 

In addition to side trips to Nairobi from where he called home to Suzanne every month, you can bet Aiden would have spent any other free time venturing into this magnificent wilderness that was so close at hand.  A massive expanse of golden grass, often tall enough to block the view from the safari van window, he likely would have embarked onto the savannah during these brief sojourns from any one of several beautiful lodges located high on the slopes of the Oloolaimutia Hills. I guarantee you, he wouldn’t have missed it.

 

He also no doubt visited with the Maasai tribe, because most foreign nationals do when they’re in the area. Known as the lion jumpers – the Maasai are one of the world’s last great warrior cultures. Their manner of dress is a symphony of bright colours in both garment and beadwork – crimson, lime green, deep sapphire, tangerine and sunbeam yellow. The women wear the rainbow, well, and the men are dazzling in their red shukas, believing that colour scares away lions. They are a fascinating indigenous people, and while I was there I received an invitation from the chief, to stay. I asked him for how long? He said forever, I want you to be my wife. He told me that Maasai chiefs can take several wives, and apparently there was a vacancy. I politely declined. Western women are popular there, and consequently marriage proposals were easy to come by.

 

Like me, when Aiden visited the Maasai village he would have seen tribal warriors such as those pictured above – one a young man, the other middle-aged; an elder following the Olng’eshere ceremony, one of three male rites of passage. Both carried the traditional cattle herding sticks of the Maasai herdsman. Tall, pencil-thin and able to jump as high as thirty-one inches off the ground in their adumu (jumping) dance, they struck an accommodating pose against the backdrop of the far-flung Maasai Mara – perhaps thinking of a different world that routinely sends curious tourists to their village. Celebrating their pastoral way of life, the Maasai are content and at perfect peace with the land. Visitors on the other hand, while deeply appreciating the incomparable spectacles of East Africa, are only passing through.

 

Aiden’s eight months in Kenya are coming to a close as the Just Before Sunset story begins, although as it turns out, his is an inglorious, explosive farewell to the magnificent dark continent. Once recovered sufficiently from the ordeal, he begins his long journey home to his own slice of heaven on the Kennebecasis River in beautiful New Brunswick, but he is completely unprepared for the bombshell that awaits him there. Just as his final hours in Kenya are life altering, so is his return home to the Kingston Peninsula.

 

Writing Just Before Sunset was an emotional yet gratifying experience, an opportunity to visit Africa again, this time through Aiden’s eyes, if only briefly, and I’m looking forward to sharing this heartfelt book with my readers.

 

Amani na upendo niwe nawe (peace and love be with you)

 

Kamloops & Fly Away Snow Goose

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Two hundred and fifteen small bodies were "discovered" in May at Kamloops. I use brackets because everyone in the 1st Nations already knew what would be found in that field near the site of the old residential school.  

When children fell sick at these residential schools, they often died. There were many reasons for this mortality, which can be summed up in two way: inadequate diet and poor living conditions.  (Another surely must be the cruelly severed connection between them and the family that loved them.) Some died in accidents like fires, as it was customary practice to lock the children inside their dormitories at night. 

Some children were even subjected to experiments. 

In one cruel instance, supplements necessary to maintain good health--vitamin C and calcium--on the limited residential school diet were given to some, but not all  children. One group received bread made with whole flour, others were given only white.   These children, left in the care of Church and State, were being used as human subjects, guinea pigs to provide data for nutritional scientists.The children didn't understand what was happening to them and certainly their parents were never told. 

In these schools there was, besides a lack of food, a daily ration of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. The survivor stories I've read are not for the faint of heart. 

The part that remains most incredible to me is that the parents of these little children were not told what had happened to those they'd never see again. Instead they were lied to by people who made a great show of their religion. Parents were often told only the their children "had run away." It seems unimaginable, that the Church was eagerly assisting the government in their campaign to destroy the history and traditions of an entire People.

There are more, always more of these stories, as haunted survivors come forward. It all sounds like something out of the Middle Ages, not an an evil perpetrated here in North America in the 20th Century. From what I've learned, the residential schools in the US weren't better.

Now, First Nation's People are walking, across Canada, one group marching the 1200 miles from White Horse in the Yukon to Kamloops in B.C., in order to honor the memory of those children who did not survive. One image said it all--a young woman, a daughter of a survivor and her child, holding a heart-shaped sign in memory of her mother's little sister, Denise Boucher, aged seven, who died at the school to which the girls had been taken. 

Shoes and toys at a memorial for the lost children.

In this excerpt from Fly Away Snow Goose. Sascho, the young hero, has hunted all day without much to show for it. He encounters an Esker, a long snaking glacial deposit of gravel. By a grave site for a family who perished here, he remembers once making ceremony in this place with his teacher, his Uncle John. He thinks about the kwet’ı̨ı̨̀, the white people who are so busy changing the land and killing the animals, always taking and taking, and never giving thanks for the bounty of the land.

Sascho had seen the northern mines when he’d gone with his Uncles two winters ago on a journey to Sahtı̀, The Great Bear Lake, which lay at the border of Tłı̨chǫ land. His elders had shown him disturbed and ruined earth from which the spirits had fled. They’d explained how the water too, and the fish in these places, had been poisoned by kwet’ı̨ı̨̀ diggings. The creatures that had once made Sahtı̀ a rich hunting ground had grown few and wary. Even the caribou had changed their ancient paths in order to avoid these places.

Would his people succumb to kwet’ı̨ı̨̀ ways? Some already had. These men disrespected and ignored their elders, abused their wives and neglected their children, drank and stole, and brought shame—and the Ekw'ahtı (RCMP) —into their camps. Others, like his family, had tried to stay as far away from the kwet’ı̨ı̨̀ as possible. They, like the caribou, sought new paths. They learned to avoid the fouled ponds where the poor beaver lost his hair and the fish were filled with horrible ulcers...

~But where could we go, if we are forced to leave?

His Uncles sometimes spoke of this. Now, Sascho tried to push this unhappy future away. To leave the Tłı̨chǫ Dèè was unimaginable.

~We are part of this place, woven into the land like quills ornamenting a pair of moccasins. We are like the moose, the lynx, the beaver, the muskrat, the wolf and the raven, and all our brothers and sisters who live here.

Linked to the earth through the soles of his feet, Sascho’s spirit rose up and poured out in prayer to the blue immensity of heaven...

When John Wisdomkeeper and I wrote Fly Away Snow Goose, it was to honor John's personal journey. He was spared the horrors of the orphanage or the residential school, but only because he was part of the "sixties scoop" a decade when First Nation's children were removed from their homes and given to European adoptive parents.  He has searched in vain for his birth mother, who may have been forced to relinquish him. He has spent a lifetime finding his way home to the traditions of his People.

~~Juliet Waldron

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Two recent sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/world/canada/indigenous-residential-schools-grave.html

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/whitehorse-kamloops-residential-school-walk-1.6081975

It's Heat Wave Time--But I'm Revisiting Fall by Connie Vines

 I apologize for the late post to BWL Author Insider Blog.  Here in southern California, as well as all of the Pacific Northwest, we are experiencing power outages, record-breaking temperatures, and wildfires.  We also have flex-alerts, a preventative measure to ward off rolling blackouts. 

Today, I decided to write about my idea of a perfect Autumn date...as in a romantic endeavor. 

My (or perhaps, the heroine of my WIP) favorite Autumn date: an early morning 45-minute drive to Oak Glenn, California in the San Bernardino Mountains for apple picking.  A thermos of hot coffee is a must bring along.  I love stopping along the way to experience a beautiful sunrise.  There's a sharp chill in the air and it's, a bit windy--the leaves of the trees sing, and pebbles and bit's of sand dance along the edge of the highway.

Breakfast fortifying breakfast at Apple Annie's then off to the orchard.  A stroll among the trees while making small talk with your special someone. Then, suddenly, you discover the perfect tree!  Standing on tip-toes to reach the best apples in the orchard, with your date leaning on the high branch a bit, so the lush apple dip within your reach. 

All-too-soon, you find your basket is overflowing.  Laughing you both reach for the apple at the top of the basket. After all, you must try just one.

Ladies, first, he says, offering you the first bite.

Tart and crisp a bit of the juice rolls your chin.

He smiles while gently brushing away the moisture.  You office him the apple, and he gently removes it from your fingertips to take a manly bite or two!

Afterward, it's a short drive to the pumpkin patch in Yucaipa for a couple stand-in-photo as Mr. and Mrs. Frankenstin Monster before playtime with the goats at the petting livestock area.

If my date joins in the fun--he may just be a keeper!

The links lead to the perfect Oak Glen experience :-)

Oak Glen

Fun YouTube Video of the Petting Zoo

My Pumpkin!

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→→.      Current Release :-)

Happy Reading,

Connie Vines