Shifting Gears For A Moment . . .

Okay, I don’t mean to bring anyone down, but I lost a wonderful friend last week. I debated whether to even post this, but I feel I owe it to her for every great minute she gave me.

Some of you know that the Queen of Fairview, my special cat Lucy, died last week. Rather than dwell on her last days, which were heartbreaking for me and not at all good for her, I’d like to mention what made her so fabulous.

She was smart. That Lucy, she figured out how to open the interior doors in the house except for the pocket doors to the bathrooms. You couldn’t have a private moment in there either—she’d come and pound on the door until you let her in.

She was attracted to shiny things. She’d “borrow” jewelry, hair clips, paper clips, etc., play with them for a while and then move on. I once searched for a gold ring for days before I found it under the recliner.

She loved a good high. Lucy on catnip was great fun. She wasn’t tidy about it but she always demanded and got tuna for her munchies.

She was funny. I’d be standing in the kitchen, and she’d walk in and yell at me, then run away again, daring me to chase her. I’d catch her, scoop her up into my arms and cover her face with kisses and let her go. Then she’d twine around my ankles and start the game all over again.


She never clawed the furniture. She was the first cat who ever owned me who actually used all the scratching posts I bought for her.

She kept me company. Lucy would sit in her office chair while I wrote, hour after hour, content to be with me, never bored. She’d sleep, I’d work, and didn’t mind that the dog wandered in an out.

She was so loving. Now and then she’d wake up, jump on the desk and tap my arm with her paw to give me a straight-on look of love so meaningful, I’d always stop to hug her. At night, she’d jump on the bed after I turned out the light and flop against me to let me know she’d arrived, and she’d begin her bath.

She was elegant. While the dog and my other cat Josie think the laser pen is a lot of fun, Lucy never bothered. At first I thought she might not be able to see the red dot, perhaps due to some kind of color blindness. Then I realized she could see it just fine—she’d lift her chin and look away with haughty disdain for those so easily amused.

And she was an elegant lady to her last moment. When she reached the end of her thirteen years, with shaking hands I sewed Lucy into a linen pillowcase I’d once embroidered with my initials on it. I hired the landscape guy to dig a three-foot-deep hole in the back flower bed, and some kind friends and I gathered to lay her to rest. I have lost people in my life (who hasn’t?) and losing her was every bit as hard. Aside from the consolation of knowing her all those years—still too few—I also know where she sleeps with a lovely garden angel watching over her.

Oh, but I miss her. I will miss her for a very long time.

Those Pesky Words

It’s word pet-peeve time here at the blog, and today our subject is overused words and phrases in current circulation.
Language is fluid, and words will slip into use for a while (sometimes w-a-y too long) and then be gone again. They seem to make their first appearances on TV news and in journalism. So here, in no particular order, are those that I hope will leave us soon.


1. Gone missing. This was originally a British expression, to the best of my knowledge. It works well for them—the British can use this and get away with it. Here, not so much. It sounds like some kind of odd activity or destination, and can apply to inanimate objects such as car keys and barbecue tongs, or to gravely serious subjects like children and elderly adults. Some hypothetical examples:
    “Where are you off to, honey?”
    “I’m going fishing, shopping, to get my hair highlighted. I’m just going missing.”
    —or—
    “Where’s Bambi?”
    “Oh, she’s gone missing.”
    “Did she say when she’ll be back?”
    Better still: “Kobe Bryant, you just won your fifth NBA Championship! What are you going to do now?”
    “I’m going missing!”
    How about, Bambi is missing?

2. Gone extinct. This is one of gone missing’s ugly step sisters and has some equally ugly tenses, as in go, going and went.
    “Today a report released by the EPA says the double billed walla walla, native to the coldest areas of the upper Midwest, will go extinct in the next ten years due to habitat encroachment by the single billed walla. This is the second species threatened by the walla. In 2003, the frilled loppydoozy went extinct due to the walla’s invasive behavior.”
Become/became extinct is probably more correct.

3. Albeit. Isn’t this word just too, too precious? It sounds like someone’s middle name. Ferdy Albeit Grayson. In fact, it is a real word and the usage is correct, but archaic. Albeit comes to us straight down the centuries from Middle English and has been lurking in the shadows since the 1300s. It’s a contracted form of the phrase “although it be.” Can’t we just say although?

4. Arguably/Inarguably. Major sigh. These two are from 1890 and 1925, respectively. There should be a list for the world’s worst adverbs because I’d add both of these.

That’s all for now. The next time we touch on the subject of our tortured language (at some distant date) we’ll take a look at a few of the most ghastly online communications. About ten years ago, author Nancy E. Turner wrote a wonderful historical about life in the Arizona Territories entitled, These is my Words. She might not have realized at the time that some people writing on the internet would make her protagonist’s awkward prose, indifferent spelling, and random capitalization look contemporary.

We'll Be Right Back After This Message

Right now through Sunday, June 13, visit Smashwords.com for a 15% savings on all of my titles when you enter the following coupon codes:

Harper's Bride - MT62J
A Light for My Love - BK34T
Homeward Hearts - MJ34X
Home By Morning - NA78E
The Irish Bride - XL57B
Montana Born & Bred - YT36L
A Taste of Heaven - RF32C
Allie's Moon - WA55F
The Bridal Veil - FA97G

What Goes On at Those Book Club Meetings, Anyway . . . Part 2

Oops, first one week goes by and then another, and pretty soon I realize I’ve missed my weekly installments here. And now I find myself looking forward to hosting the Book Club Babes this Friday evening. For the first time ever, we will be reading one of my books, which is somewhat daunting. At least that was the assigned title but if you’ve been reading along with me here, you know that we don’t always get around to actually discussing the book. If we do, hopefully, the Babes will be kind.

That’s one of the cringe-inducing realities of book reviews. I have read some that made careful, thoughtful, and therefore worthwhile observations about a given title. Others have the tact and manners of some primitive beast—the heavy sighs and eye-rolling of the reviewer practically leap from the screen, dripping with the same acid used in the movie Aliens. Odd, but reading one of those reviews causes my stomach to produce a nearly identical substance that can burn holes through every organ and layer of tissue without mercy.

Sometimes an idea that gleams like the sun in an author’s imagination might find disfavor among negative naysayers. It’s to be expected; readers’ tastes vary widely and what one will be enthralled with, another will savage in an online review. I’ve read a lot of them and received a few. Well, you know, it’s bound to happen. It’s just about impossible to please everyone. We have only to look at local or national politics to see that. And with the hit-and-run anonymity of the Internet, people feel pretty free to say just about anything.

I came across this on another blog and thought it was pretty interesting.
http://historicallyobsessed.blogspot.com/

The pages are also beautiful to look at.

 In the meantime, the Book Club Babes and I lift a glass to you. Keep reading and have fun!

It's Been A Long Time Coming . . .

About eight years, according to the dates on my WordPerfect files. And that doesn’t count the year or two I spent mulling the idea in my brain before I acted upon it.

I began a journey to write a book about which I felt so passionate, it demanded to be written. Because I strive for accuracy and wanted to know my subject inside and out, I bought about twenty books which I read cover to cover. I learned a lot. For example, I never knew much about World War I. There weren’t nearly as many movies made about it as World War II. I must have studied it in school but probably zoned out because the subject was presented like three-day-old unbuttered toast. I discovered that after almost a hundred years, farmers and military personnel regularly find unexploded bombs stockpiled beneath the earth in France. A couple of years ago, someone found several cases of extremely valuable Napoleon brandy within the trench works. (While wine will go sour, time apparently is a friend to brandy.) Some of the land is still unable to grow anything because of the chemicals that leached out of the various products intended to part a man’s body from his soul.

I knew only a scintilla more about what I’d heard called the Spanish Flu around my house. My grandmother had survived it as a young woman living in Constantinople. They didn’t teach this in school at all. In fact, it’s surprising how little was known about it until the rumble about H1N1 began to look like it might turn into a real problem. People just didn’t talk about it. But I didn’t grasp the magnitude of either of these events until I undertook the research myself.

So I began writing Home By Morning, the story of Jessica Layton, a female physician who goes back to her hometown for a visit and gets stuck there when the epidemic hits. There is no other doctor in town except for cranky Granny Mae Rumsteadt, a colorful café owner who also offers folk medicine to the locals, thinks aspirin is poisonous, and doesn't mind helping a farmer pull a calf or two if the need arises.

The book has a bit of everything: jealousy, treachery, broken hearts healed by the love that broke them, battle scenes, love scenes, vigilantism, character assassination, scandal, hopelessness, hope restored, and scores settled.

I hope that this book strikes a chord with readers and makes them curious enough to find out what happens in the sequel, Home By Nightfall.

The Little Book That Did

Since making my backlist available on Kindle and Smashwords.com, I’ve noticed the most amazing trend. The books that I thought would zoom to e-readers like lightning are doing very well. But one book is leaving the stratosphere: Harper’s Bride.


I wrote Harper’s Bride as a kind of anniversary tribute to the last great gold rush of our time in the Yukon Territory. That the book was released during the strike’s centennial year was mere good luck. As with all of my projects, I did a ton of research and bought so many books from Powell’s City of Books downtown, the clerk asked me if I was planning a trip up there.


I learned that J.W. Nordstrom made enough money in Dawson City to open his first shoe store in Seattle. When I was a kid, that’s what Nordstrom did—they sold only shoes. I also learned that the most dependable money was made not in mining, but in supplying the miners. Because of Dawson’s near inaccessibility, and because inflation always follows a captive audience (think popcorn at the movies or a burger TGIF’s in Times Square) prices for everything were astounding. A dozen eggs went for $18. A fairly current copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer sold for $50.


Of course, those are just facts. The story concerned Dylan Harper, a man with a shadow in his past who went to the Yukon and opened a supply store. One of his customers ran up a big bill he couldn’t pay. When Dylan pressed him, he offered his wife Melissa and their child to clear the debt. Dylan figured he was on the losing end of the proposition but his conscience made him agree to it when he saw the bruise on Melissa’s cheek.


It had a very nice cover when it was print published by Penguin, and a nice run. Readers liked the story and it received a lot of great reviews.


Now though, Harper’s Bride has a second life that’s a happy surprise to me and apparently a satisfying one to readers. I’m very pleased to have the chance to share my backlist with you.


A new title is just around the corner. I’ll be sure to let everyone know when it’s officially available. For now, though, have a seat. Do I have stories to tell you!

Hoot, Mon! Or Writing A Scottish Historical

I have a book that’s been bouncing around in my computer(s) for years now. (I say computer(s) because most of us can’t make one last longer than 3-4 years max.) It’s a Scottish historical that takes place a few years before the Reformation.

Although I’m familiar with what I’ve written, it’s a big departure from other stories I’ve done. It has battles, love scenes, 16th century castles, intrigue, betrayal, a bit of the paranormal—all the good stuff. But it’s different. The dialogue is way different. The lifestyle is much different. There are many solid reasons for why I’ve tended to stick to late 19th century American stories, one of which is that research is a lot easier. I’ve studied that era enough that I often don’t need to look things up because I know them.

I didn’t know anything about clans, chieftains, wars, etc., except for other fiction I’ve read, and that doesn’t count. There’s a certain forgiving elasticity in fiction, but some historical facts have to be correct. I have to be sure they're correct. If I said the Battle at Culloden took place in 1890, someone would certainly notice.

I think my biggest problem has been with the dialogue. Like the US or any other country for that matter, Scotland has different dialects and trying to identify the correct usage is tricky. Then there’s the matter of avoiding anachronisms. Saying “Your ride is awesome, dude!” in an American historical is obvious and easy to catch. But how about, “Fer a yung la' prob scouser yer gorra nauld edon yer shoulders la, gud look son, I think you'll do it.” Excuse me, but whaaa? This seems to have something to do with pub crawling, but I couldn’t swear to it.

Okay.

Then there’s the matter of North, Highland North, Mid, and South, with some other geographical miseries thrown in too. “Pittin the mither tongue on the wab!” Eh? I beg your pardon! This particular phrase is Ulster Scots, to confuse matters even further—north far enough but on the wrong island. And it’s contemporary besides; the wab means the web, as in Internet.

I have a great book I got on a remainders table at Barnes & Noble, The Scots Dialect Dictionary. It’s big with lots of listings, but the problem is that it lists the Scots word or phrase first and then a mostly understandable English equivalent. If I had a month with absolutely nothing else to do, I would create a database from this book so I could look up whatever I needed, in English first.

Writing any sort of dialect is a matter of careful balance. Not enough worked in and the story could be set at anyplace and any time. Too much and we’re back to “pittin the mither tongue gorra nauld edon yer shoulders la.” It will swamp the reader and overshadow the story.

Writing The Irish Bride was somewhat easier because I had great audio to listen to for cadence and arrangement of words, thanks to the late and wonderful storyteller and teacher, Frank McCourt. I have his books on tape and CD and that was a big help.

My most accessible audio reference for this book has been Groundskeeper Willie on the Simpsons, and I don’t think that’s going to do the trick.

But the story is coming along fine, thank ye verra much.