There have been a ton of posts from the wonderful people who attended the Blogger’s Bash in London in early June. Since Hubs and I were off wandering Europe for three weeks after that, I was guaranteed to be the very last person to post on the Bash. Huge thanks to Sasha, Ali, Hugh, Geoff and all the other organizers who took so much of their precious time to organize the Bash and ensure that all of us had lots of time to meet, mingle and chat. I loved it! I got a chance to meet some long time, long-distance friends and to make new ones. What can I say – it was a blogger’s blast! One more thing before the rogue’s gallery. I was honored to earn second place in the Bollger’s Bash writing contest on the subject of Connection. If I could figure out how to download it (I’m digitally impaired), I’d show you my badge! Here are some of my pictures – one or two complete with a finger. I’m only sorry I didn’t get more but Hugh did such a fantastic job videoing everyone that it doesn’t matter – except maybe for the finger! 0 0
I was tickled ‘peach’ with Diana’s review of Death by Pumpkin: Death by Pumpkin was my second read in Granger’s Rhe Brewster series and a pure joy ride. Rhe is a single mom, ER nurse, and police department consultant in the small Maine town of Pequod. She, once again, takes an active role in a police department investigation when the pumpkin-drop at a local festival reveals a murder. She rapidly goes from investigator to target as an old nemesis is determined to make her and those she cares for suffer. The book is fast-paced and well-researched. The scene in the small plane was particularly riveting and highlighted Granger’s attention to detail. Other than the villain, the characters are all beautifully three-dimensional and full of quirky personality. I thoroughly enjoyed the interplay in the authentic relationships. In addition to the murder investigation, romantic and political subplots add interest and tension. A perfect read for anyone who enjoys cozy mysteries with plenty of thrills. Thank you, Diana! 0 0
I had many new followers appear while I was away. I’d like to recognize some of them: Free Soul – A flawed human, a seeker of truth, enjoying my journey on this earth. Willeke-Maya at https://irelandms.com gjseth converseit scskillman Warwick, UK fellow writer Lance Greenfield at lancegreenfield.wordpress.com Anjali Singh at https://sabakuchsocial.wordpress.com/ Poornima M Reddy at https://purnisfoodblog.wordpress.com Ruth at https://imageandword.wordpress.com/t Jessica Norrie – writer, linguist, teacher, mother at https://jessicanorrie.wordpress.com/ Professional Child Wrangler at https://confessionsofanurseryassistant.wordpress.com Ellen Best at https://ellenbest24.wordpress.com Helen Jones at https://journeytoambeth.com https://freeandvibrantlife.wordpress.com https://overresearch.wordpress.com thewebbhomestead Lab Works blog at https://labworksweb.wordpress.com Prajahma Cruces at https://intrepidiamcom.wordpress.com/ Antonio Tarnawiecki at https://tarnawieckisart.wordpress.com I appreciate your interest! 0 0
Yes, I am back, travel worn, jet lagged but hopefully compos mente. Hubs and I did a huge circuit, starting in London with the Blogger’s Bash (amazing), then the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, and France before returning to Schiphol for the flight to Heathrow and home. I’ll be posting on all the things we did and saw over the next few weeks, but first… My ten reasons for not choosing the summer to tour Europe People – hordes and hordes and hordes of people, many of them clustered in crowds around someone holding a flag. Masses moving like lemmings. Long lines to get in to see various things – wait time so long we sometimes gave up (coupled with #5). Two lane roads. Two lane roads with huge trucks. So much merchandise moves by truck in Europe. The only fun was guessing the origination of the truck (hint: there is a one or two letter designation on the license). Heat. We had more than a week of heat in the 90s. Ennervating. Hotel rooms with no A/C. I slept sans clothes that whole week. One night it was so bad we considered sleeping in the car, which did have A/C. BMW drivers. Good grief, they never drove by us at a speed any less than 20 km over the limit, and we stuck to the speed limit. Plus they were rude, flashing their lights and beeping their horns and moving in and out of traffic. (Sorry to any of you who drive a BMW – I’m sure this is not you!) Road construction on long stretches of major highways, with the attendant parking lots. Incredibly sticky insects. Our windshield was a testimony to their lives and required a lot of elbow grease each time we stopped for gas. Countries which are part of the EU but don’t use Euros (England, the Czech Republic, and Austria), necessitating changing money. We’ve decided that the best time to tackle our next adventure in Europe will be November or March. The downside is you have to bring warm clothes. And the roads could have snow. Did we have fun? YES. and stay tuned for that! 0 0
My husband and I spent the weekend at our lake house with some friends we’ve known for more than 40 years. We rented a condo from them when we lived in California and had so many adventures taking weekend vacations together – lots of camping and shared meals. They’ve moved back and forth across the country over the years, as have we, but always kept in touch and saw each other from time to time. As we’ve aged, we’ve shared each other’s worries about our children, work, and now the daunting process of growing old. Which got me to thinking about the nature of friendship. How many truly close friends do you have? Not casual relationships, but people who would travel hours to see you if you were sick or needed help. People who truly know you, and accept you, warts and all, who know your life’s history and can mark the anniversaries. Not many, I’d bet. In this day of texting, “friending” on Facebook, tweeting, and other ways of communicating without face to face time, how many true friends will our children have? How much less rich will their lives be, how much less solid with the knowledge that there are people outside your family who really care about you? I’d welcome your thoughts! 0 0
Since learning of my Irish ancestry and figuring that my family, which came from Maine, was probably descended from the Irish who immigrated there during The Great (Potato) Famine, I decided to do some research. I’ll consider the view from Ireland first. During the summer of 1845, a blight devastated Ireland’s potato crop, the basic staple in the Irish diet. The blight was Phytophthora infestans, a fungus-like microorganism. When infected with this organism, potatoes will, a few days after being dug from the ground, begin to turn into a slimy, decaying, blackish mass. The fungus had traveled from Mexico to Ireland. What is different about this famine is that it was a product of social causes. Under British rule, Irish Catholics were prohibited from entering the professions or even purchasing land. Instead, most Catholics rented small plots of land (half under 5 acres) from absentee British Protestant landlords. Since Catholics made up 80% of the population, the bulk of the population lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity, with no chance for opportunity and innovation. According to historians, the landlords regarded the land as a source of income from which to extract as much money as possible. The rents from their Irish tenants were enormous, an estimated £6,000,000 in 1842 alone. Landlords seldom if ever visited their properties, which generated enormous resentment. The potato was introduced to Ireland as a garden crop, with the main diet of the 17th century still consisting of butter, milk and grain products, with potatoes as a supplementary food. In the early 18th century, potatoes became the food for the poor, especially in winter. Furthermore, most of the potatoes grown in Ireland were of a single variety. The dependency for food on a single crop and its lack of genetic variability were the two main reasons why the potato blight has such a devastating effect. Without the primary food staple, famine and its associated diseases (cholera, dysentery, scurvy, typhus) spread through the poor of the Irish countryside. Observers reported seeing children crying with pain and looking like skeletons, little more than bones. Mass graves were everywhere. But even during the Famine, wheat, oats, barley and other crops were still grown on landlords’ farms; these were shipped abroad while the people starved. To add to the misery, landlords, who were responsible for paying taxes for every tenant who paid less than £4 in yearly rent, evicted tenants who couldn’t pay their rents and let the land in larger plots to reduce their costs. With the Famine in full gear, a great mass of evictions came in 1847. Britain adopted measures to try to cope with the famine. The Corn Laws were repealed; these had been enacted to protect British grain producers from Irish competition. The repeal failed to end the crisis since the Irish lacked sufficient money to purchase foreign grain, and corn proved to be a poor dietary substitute for potatoes. Then they set up soup kitchens and devised programs of emergency work relief, many of which ended when a banking crisis hit Britain. Finally, in the end, a system of work houses, originally established in 1838, took in the poor and the starving. These grim institutions had never been intended to deal with a crisis of such enormity. Some 2.6 million Irish entered overcrowded workhouses, and more than 200,000 people died there. During the famine, approximately two million Irish left their homeland for Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. Within five years, the Irish population was reduced by a quarter. Whole families did not migrate but sent their younger members, and unlike similar emigrations throughout the world, women emigrated just as often and in the same numbers as men. The emigrants started new lives in a new land, which was not always friendly to them, but sent money home in amounts approaching £1,404,000 by 1851. The Famine also had some long-lasting effects. It changed the already strained relations between Ireland and England, with many Irish blaming England for genocide. These intense feelings led to the rise of Irish republicanism and eventually to Irish Independence. 0 0
Leonard Elmore, a popular and prolific western and crime fiction writer, died recently. A friend of mine sent me his ten rules for good writing, which have been around for some time (guessed I missed them): 1. Never open a book with weather. 2. Avoid prologues. 3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. 4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely. 5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. 6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.” 7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. 9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things. 10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. At first, I thought how could I take umbrage at any of them? After all, he is a famous writer, beloved and admired by everyone who’s read his books. I’m never going to be famous or idolized as he is; I’m just an amateur writer. Who do I think I am to criticize? Still, I’m not sure you can reduce good writing to 10 rules. Are these are a result of his economical style of writing? I’ve opened some of my stories with some weather to set the scene. Not “It was a dark and stormy night” type of scene-setting, but I guess I need to work on that. My first book has a prologue, as does the one I am working on. I used the prologues to describe action that led to the opening of the book. Should I forget about prologues? I can’t imagine only using the word ‘said” in conversations, especially where you have three or more people and you have to identify them. That and never using an adverb to modify a verb would make any conversation unbelievably monotonous. However, having read some of Elmore’s writing, he doesn’t indulge in a lot of conversation. Maybe I should try to be more economical with my conversations? Avoid detailed descriptions of characters? I guess it would depend on what Elmore meant by ‘detailed.’ He nevertheless does a good job of describing his characters, and I sort of agree with him because something should be left to the imagination of the reader. Same with greatly detailed descriptions of places and things; you can overkill to the point of deadly dullness. As for leaving out the part that readers tend to skip, if you write something and in the rereading find it tedious, leave it out. He’s right! What do you think of these rules? 0 0
I spent the last week or so in Maine. How wonderful it was to step out of the heat and humidity of North Carolina, if only for a short while, and enjoy the rugged coast of this northern state that was once part of Massachusetts. My family and I sailed there several summers when I was young, and I remember the cold water and the great lobster! My true purpose for the trip was to gather background information for my next book, which is already underway, so we visited a number of harbor towns for descriptions, the peat bog and the University of Maine in Orono, and I interviewed both a lobsterman and a sail maker. We stayed in my favorite harbor town, Boothbay Harbor, for most of the week, and I learned that Damariscove Island, which lies outside of Boothbay and was first settled in 1604 as a commericial enterprise, was where the Pilgrims came in the spring of 1622, asking for assistance. They were provided with a boatload of cod. The interview with the lobsterman, Captain Clive Farrin, was on his boat and I got to see firsthand the retrieval of lobster traps, the culling of lobsters by size and sex, and the baiting and return of the traps to the seabed. Lobstermen are true conservationists, and perhaps that is why the lobster haul has increased each year. Maine now provides over 50% of all the lobsters caught in the US. Fascinating stuff, but even better was the description of lobster economics, all of which I intend to put into an article. My interview with the sail maker was another highlight. Nathaniel Wilson has been making sails the old fashioned way – by hand and not computer – since 1975 and stepping into his loft was like a trip back in time. Many of his sails are made for old square riggers and historical boats – the USS Constellation, the Eagle, and the Mayflower II, to name a few. His work is a combination of science and art and it was clear from talking to him that he is an artist with few rivals. So now I need to get back to work and you are left to guess what will be in my next book about Rhe Brewster. PS If any of you have now read my books, you know where these interviews show up! 0 0
I am off with Hubs to Europe for three weeks! Some of you I will see at the Blogger’s Bash in London, my first time attending. While I am gone, I am re-posting some of my early contributions to this blog. You may read or not as you wish – I just wanted to stay in contact. I won’t have time to post comments on your blog posts, and for that, I apologize. We are visiting friends in three countries, then off on our own to three more, much like the old movie: If This Is Tuesday It Must Be Belgium. I promise to have pictures of our adventures on my return – should be fodder for many posts! 0 0
Just a brief word to all of the members of the Armed Forces, many of whom are no longer among us, who engaged in the battle that changed the course of WWII in Europe: Thank you! Seventy three years ago today, allied troops stormed the beaches at Normandy and turned the course of the war against Hitler and Germany. Your sacrifice and bravery are not forgotten. 0 0
