Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Walking Tour of Erin's Children Neighborhood by Eileen O'Finlan
Monday, June 6, 2022
New releases from BWL Publishing Inc. for June 2022
NEW RELEASES FOR JUNE 2022
Now available from your favorite booksellers - click the book cover to purchase
The Simper Augustus, most famous tulip in history may or may not have actually existed, but to the industry in Holland it is legend worth exploring and to Professor Jacob Dirksen it is worth recreating. Once he has the correct hybrid, he takes the information to the largest tulip growing area outside Holland to sell it. When he is found dead in a tulip field, several agencies from the Dutch and US government get involved. Max Maxwell is given the mission of tracking the professor from the day he arrived until his death. He finds the good professor may have more than tulips on his mind when he came to Seattle, WA.
Sunday, June 5, 2022
Writing Historical Fiction by Rosemary Morris
Writing Historical Fiction
There is a hypothesis that there are only
seven basic plots. This should not deter novelists, who can devise their own
special twists in the tale and write from the heart.
What is Historical Fiction? The
Historical Novel Society’s definition is: ‘The novel must have been written at
least fifty years after the event, described, or written by someone who was not
alive at the time, and who therefore only approached them by research.’
I think novelists, who set their books in
times past, are under an obligation to readers to transport them into another
time based on fact. My characters, other than historical figures, are
imaginary. To ground my novels, I weave real events into my plots and themes.
To recreate days gone by, I study non-fiction and, before covid, visited places
of historical interest, including museums.
There are many excellent novelists who
write, historical fiction and genre historical romance, etc. Unfortunately,
there are others who cause me, and, presumably, other readers, to suspend
belief. I was torn between shock and hysterical laughter when I read a medieval
romance in which, the hero, a knight in full armour, galloped to a castle to
rescue a proverbial maiden in distress. Without putting aside his shield and
weapons, he flung himself off his horse and scaled stone walls with no
handholds or footholds. He then climbed through a window - impossible as a
castle in that era only had narrow apertures. When he gained access through the
mythical window, not affected by her ideal the fair heroine asked: ‘Would you
like some eggs and bacon and a nice cup of tea,’ as though she were offering
him a modern-day English breakfast. The sense of the ridiculous overcame me. I
lost faith in the author and did not read on.
Of course, the above is an extreme
example from a novel accepted by a mainstream publisher. However, I am
frequently disappointed by 21st characters dressed in costume, who have little
in common with those who lived in previous eras. Over the centuries, emotions,
anger, hate, jealousy, love etc., have not changed, but attitudes, clothes, the
way of life and speech has. A historical novelist should study these and do
their best to verify the facts.
Misnamed characters also make me pause
when reading. The first pages of a medieval novel held my attention until I
reached the part when the heroine’s name was Wendy, which, J. M. Barry invented
for his novel Peter Pan. I daresay I’m not the only historical novelist, who agonises
over characters’ names. I recommend The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian
Names, an invaluable resource.
In conclusion, a skilful historical
novelist should hold the readers’ attention from the first page to the last and
take them into the realm of fiction on an accurate, enjoyable journey.
http;//bwlpublishing.ca/morris-rosemary
Saturday, June 4, 2022
The River, Waterfalls, and the Writing Life by S. L. Carlson
The River, Waterfalls, and the Writing Life by S. L.
Carlson
I am S. L. Carlson, a proud and grateful BWL Publishing
Inc. author. My books can be viewed and purchased by visiting https://www.bookswelove.net/carlson-s-l
Part I:
Waterfalls in northern Wisconsin flow
best in May, when most of the snow has melted and the rains have begun filling
the rivers. May is also a time before mosquitoes, thick enough to carry off a
human, start to immerge, and before tourists start crowding in. It was an
adventure.
Locating waterfalls was mostly tentative. I had two paper maps open on my lap, as well as a sightseeing book of Wisconsin, as well as a brochure on waterfalls in two counties. Even so, directions were not always clear, and our time limited. Finding a waterfall was all a matter of trust: my husband trusting me to get us into the approximate area; me trusting maps and books which sometimes contradicted; trusting signs with no further directions of where to go, but having to take our best guesses. Sometimes, physical signs to reach it were antiquated and/or vague.
Sometimes, physical signs to reach it were antiquated and/or vague.
The river above the more major falls
often runs deep, swift, and silent. Then comes the continuous tumble of water.
(Earplugs were recommended for one.) After the churning and bubbling ceases below
the falls, the river once again runs quietly.
Part II:
My writing life, writing a novel, is
like a river. It can start with an idea, like a spring bubbling up in a high meadow.
As the idea develops, the story-stream widens into a river with more characters,
action and plot, running deeper and faster. I start writing faster as I feel
the story coming to life. I must admit that there are times when I write blind,
not sure where the river is going. Sometimes a tributary leads me to backwater
or a still pond. Do I block it off or ignore it, or is it interesting enough to
keep in? Always, though, I must backtrack to return to the writing river, to the
essence of the story.
My river tumbles as whitewater over rocks with various conflicts in the story.
There are twists and turns in the
river I can’t always see around. I mean…which the reader can’t see around. There
are areas with towering cliffs on each side, evidence of erosion from the many authors
before me, carving the way for me to follow. Then comes the climax, the rushing,
tumbling, crashing to below. But follow the river downstream, and it continues
on, silent and calm.
From the bubbling beginnings of a story
idea, my novels develop into the deep and silent river flow, gathering more and
more speed, to the sound and expectation and excitement of the dramatic climax,
the waterfall, finally concluding with the quiet, satisfactory story ending.
May each book you read follow to
the thrill of the river and waterfall adventure.
S. L. Carlson Blog & Website: https://authorslcarlson.wordpress.com
BWL Inc. Publisher Author Page: https://www.bookswelove.net/carlson-s-l
Friday, June 3, 2022
Mystery Writers Unite! A peek into the Maple Leaf Mystery Conference by Diane Bator
The week of May 24 to May 28, I had the honor and priviledge to be a part of the Maple Leaf Mystery Conference! I'm happy to say it was all online because we had mystery writers not only from all over Canada, but from around the world! Panels that discussed True Crime, Cozy Mystery, Comedy in Mystery, Romance in Mystery, Thrillers, Short Mystery Stories... Sixteen sessions in all! WHEW!
AND everyone who registered got a great Murder She Tote bag. How cute is that?
We got to hear one on one
interviews with accomplished mystery writers Maureen Jennings, Ian Rankin, Rick
Mofina, Iona Whishaw, and Vicki Delaney. We were also introduced to new novels
by Mike Martin (one of the organizers) as well as Mary Jane Maffini. Each had excerpts read by friends of theirs Robert Way and Terri Tomchyshyn.
Here is the link from this past
conference should you want to take a peek! https://writers-first.com/maple-leaf-mystery-conference/
I was a part of the Cozy Corner
Panel and found it interesting when our moderator, Lynn McPherson, read a
definition of mysteries condensed from the Bookends Literary Agency blog https://bookendsliterary.com/cozy-mysteries-v-traditional-mysteries/ :
Cozy mysteries can be
defined by the word used to describe them. They are cozy and everything that
word conjures in your mind. Think of warm tea, comfy chairs, cuddly pets, a
soft newly knitted blanket and warm, freshly baked pasteries. That's a cozy.
When you read one, you feel like you're being embraced by a world you want to
be in. A cozy is almost always and amateur sleuth, but an amateur sleuth isn't
always cozy.
In an Amateur sleuth, a
regular citizen (non-professional detective) decides to find the real killer
(the hallmark of any good amateur sleuth.)
Traditional mysteries
probably have the broadest definition. They can be amateur sleuths or official
investigators, they can be a little darker or light and funny. What they aren't
is suspense or cozy. They tend to fall somewhere in between. Typically and
amateur sleuth who is not cozy will fall into the area of traditional mystery.
In traditional mystery, you'll also see a faster pace and maybe a little more
blood and guts, but nothing that would compare to what a suspense might offer.
By definition, my Wild
Blue Mysteries walk the line between cozies and more traditional
mystery. While there are detectives involved, it's usually the amateur detectives
(Katie and Lucy) who dig in to help solve the mysteries.
Crime
Writers of Canada (CWC) also announced the winners for the 2022 Crime Writers
of Canada Awards of Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing. Started in 1984, the
annual Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence, then known as the Arthur
Ellis Awards, recognizes the best in mystery, crime, and suspense fiction, and
crime nonfiction by Canadian authors. The presentation of the
winners can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjSQew_DnnA
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Stitching a Story by Priscilla Brown
https://books2read/Sealing-the-Deal
Instead, I eventually managed the layout. Fingers hypothetically crossed, breath held, I cut the fabric. This challenge successfully accomplished without any damage, I stitched it all together by machine, with neat seams securely fastened on and off.
Monday, May 30, 2022
Hidden in the Hills by Eden Monroe
Visit Eden Monroe's BWL author page to view or purchase
Think of a pristine, whitewashed village set against a backdrop of mysterious mountains, a land of wood and water that boasts more than its fair share of natural beauty.
A settler from Yorkshire, England was the first to tame this once wild place, hewing a life from the dense forest that surrounded him. More settlers followed and so the community of Elgin, New Brunswick was created, a welcome setting for my romantic suspense, Dangerous Getaway.
Standing in the heart of the village now, generations after that first axe blow struck giant timber, there is the usual fare of a post office, volunteer fire department, meeting hall, church, restaurant, convenience store and the like, but mere remnants of what it was in its heyday. Not far away stands a sizeable graveyard, awash in granite, where the remains of those who once called this idyllic corner of the province home lie in rest.
Many carved out farms and homes far above the bottomland, but today much of that higher terrain remains uninhabited and pristine. Cast your eyes to these heavily forested mountains that rise around you and imagine darker possibilities, a different story. Let yourself wonder what goes on up in those hills after dark, or maybe right now as you gaze to the horizon in the full light of day. Ask yourself, as your imagination continues to take flight, do we ever really know our neighbours? All of them? Any of them? When we look to those mountains, this time with a more inspired eye and see them reaching as far as they dare into a fading blue sky, we might think about what could be tucked away up there. The unknown…. Sometimes secrets are revealed over time, reality leaking out when least expected, but it seems the wife is always the last to know. In Dangerous Getaway, she cannot be spared the inevitable nightmare.
These are foreboding thoughts, especially with darkness waiting ominously to draw the curtain closed around us. It’s only a short way off although the sun remains defiant, but steadily sinking. Soon it will shine its waning light upon neatly kept flowerbeds, tidy lawns and chimney tops. So before dusk steals full upon us let’s continue on our way, straight ahead, up a hill, around a bend or two, where the countryside has already been overtaken by deep shadow. Here waits a bolder brush with the Pollett River, spartan cottages clinging to the steep bank that hugs the narrow busy road.
During summer and fall the Pollett sparkles in well-behaved silence for the most part, save for the occasional mutinous tumble as it steadily drops in elevation. Here it meanders over craggy bedrock, resting it seems from the chicanery of spring when, drunk with freedom, it rushes in a furious white water surge that challenges boats and homemade floating devices of every description in a mad dash called the Pollett River Run.
Everything is calm now, the last light of day snuffed out with not a breath of wind to stir the trees as nature prepares to settle down for the night, the resonance of birdsong slowly dying away. Again there are those mountains, modest peaks in the Appalachian range, ancient and eroded, tempting, luring, offering the perfect getaway for those seeking sweet respite from the proverbial rat race here below. Nestled away up there somewhere is the fictional Birch Shadow of Dangerous Getaway, and oh how I enjoyed telling that story. And what better fun than to entertain a madman in the process? My apologies here to Elginites one and all because he was not drawn from local ranks, but rather emerged straight from the vagaries of my imagination. Shaw Garland of Dangerous Getaway solicits guests to his picturesque hideaway in those hills, and what happens after that is … well… unforgettable.
Sunday, May 29, 2022
Period Detail or: The Writer's Dilemna
https://www.amazon.com/Roan-Rose-Juliet-Waldron-ebook/dp/B00FKKAN98/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490904741&sr=1-1&keywords=Roan+Rose
Writing popular historical fiction always leads to a dilemna--how much period detail can you "get away with" without alienating the casual reader? The audience for historical fiction is broad and it's difficult to find the correct niche, the readers you want to reach and entertain. My own problem as a writer who hoped to make a few dollars from this "hobby" was exactly this.
Who was I writing for? Where was my "market"?
In the beginning, I naively hoped to bring more realism into the world of romance--or rather into my imagined new brand of romantic-historical fiction. Much to the dismay of editors, I could not leave out the flies or the fleas or the dirt, or the endless lugging of water, or the everyday sheer drudgery of an ordinary woman's life in the past. Her hair had to be hidden and her head covered, and her mouth must remain closed.
Escaping into a dreamworld of history, usually with privileged protagonists who have servants (or slaves) laboring in the background over laundry and cooking and child care, did not particularly call to me. Trips to the backhouse in the winter, housekeeping, and women's cultural and gynecological issues--for example, Constanze Mozart's repeated near-death experiences while bearing six babies in nine years- interested me more.
Relationships are the key to any storytelling success, but if these are not placed in the context of historical period, I, as a reader, can't take a story seriously. I sincerely try to make my own stories as authentic as I am able by doing research, by attending re-enactments and spending time with the experts there. They, like me, truly want to walk back into another time and place, immersing themselves not only with the pleasures, but the pains and discomforts, of the times in which our ancestors lived.
Beyond the consequences of living in a world ignorant of germ theory or human anatomy, the second class "weaker sex"status of women was established and enforced by religion, by law and by custom. Women had very few legal rights, no contraception, no protection from abuse by spouses or intimate partners. There were strict rules for dress and deportment which applied to every social class and in every culture. China bound aristocratic women's feet so that girls grew up while enduring excruciating pain and became fit for little but sex, smoking opium and perhaps penning poetry. Victorians forced their girls into binding corsets that produced high-fashion "beauty," but deformed internal organs and shortened their lives.
Such battles appear to be still going on for women globally. Even here in the West, where, I'll admit, things are somewhat better in 2022 than in the world of 150 years ago when we couldn't vote and could be committed to life in an asylum on the say-so of a controlling father or bored spouse. We generally still don't get paid or promoted like our brothers.
These and other reflections about the dues paid by creators, brings me to The Northman, a film by Robert Eggers, now exiting movie theaters, a film which I caught just at the end of it's less than glorious run. What happened to this brilliant historical movie at the box office is, in my opinion, a tragedy, but a not unexpected one. (Set this movie beside the 1958 The Vikings and you will see what a long way historical accuracy has come in big-budget Hollywood films.)
Scholarly research, breath-taking reproductions of weaponry, of clothing, of ships and towns, beautiful photography and settings, an all-star cast who acted their hearts out, a great depiction of Norse/Icelandic magic and an epic love-and-revenge story, it has is a financial "flop." Not even those warrior scenes and buckets and buckets of blood could not attract the same folks who appear to love the two Netflix Vikings series, one I could not watch.
The reality is there is little that is admirable about Vikings. The Northman showed us why. Plainly depicted is a society powered by toxic masculinity and a violent proto-Capitalism which involved stealing from everybody else they encountered and either murdering or enslaving the rest. It is based upon an Icelandic saga, the one which became the inspiration for Hamlet.
The hero, Amleth, is from a ruling class who are supported by campaigns of murderous ferocity, their wealth and life style supported by robbery and slaving. When his father, a local king, is murdered by his uncle and his mother is (apparently) abducted, Amleth, a mere pre-teen, must run for his life, vowing vengeance as he goes. We have no idea how he survives, but when we next see him, he is grown, a mercenary for Viking slavers in the lands of the Rus. He is now a full-grown berserker warrior, a ripped killing machine who has suppressed every human feeling. Maybe "anti-hero" is a better designation for this character, although, naturally, that would not be the case for the original hearers of the tale.
I know something about Norse/Icelandic mythology, so I put my--meaningless--stamp of approval ;) on the mythic content of the movie. Those many magical episodes made perfect sense in that context. The mix of grim reality and the numinous and terrifying world in which the characters dwell brought the story to life for me. Here, and, and fairly successfully I think, is portrayed the Viking mind-set.
Women's magic--sorcery was very real and much feared by the people of this time--was also powerfully conveyed. Before the Aesir gods of Asgard, were the mysterious, primordial Vanir gods. Among these survivals of earlier times was Freya, goddess of sex and sorcery, one of the few truly powerful female figures in Norse mythology.
This same kind of Feminine Power is also exercised in other cultures. Olga of the Birch Trees, a Slavic witch enslaved by Amleth's band of mercenaries during one of those atrocity-filled Viking raids is introduced. Although I tend to resist love stories in such settings, I got into this character. Amleth on his way to revenge (and given a kick-start by his encounter with another Slavic sorceress) naturally responds to Olga's ferocity and she assists him with her knowledge of potions. Additionally tasty was the addition of Icelandic legends concerning their island's clever Blue Foxes. And who could find fault with the Valkyrie carrying the slain-by-the sword warriors to Valhalla, those ritual markings carved into her teeth, howling like a demonic wolf, riding her winged white horse across the stormy sky?
--Juliet Waldron
http://www.julietwaldron.com
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004HIX4GS
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