Word Wenches

Tulips

Anne here, and today I’m talking about tulips.

It being spring in my corner of the word, last week I went with friends to a tulip festival up in the Dandenong Mountains, on the outskirts of Melbourne. They’re not very high mountains, but they're beautiful, with many wonderful gardens, as well as lots of gorgeous natural bushland, with tall gum trees and graceful tree ferns. They are also, it seems, the perfect place for growing tulips and other bulbs. 

Many of the tulip growers are of Dutch origin. In fact a good friend of mine came out to Australia when he was a small child, along with his tulip growing parents and many older siblings. And what did they do? They started a tulip farm in the Dandenongs. As did many other Dutch migrants. So what is it with the Dutch and tulips?

Tulips originally grew wild in Central Asia, and were first cultivated in Iran (Persia) as early as the 10th century. They became incredibly popular in Turkey in the 16th century, at the time of the Ottoman Empire, when the Sultan demanded cultivation of particular blooms for his pleasure. The name 'tulip' came from the Turkish word for turban. Tulips were treasured, and became a symbol of Ottoman power. You can see tulip images in paintings, ceramics and tiles of the time.

In the Footsteps of the Polar Explorers

Nicola here, reporting on a recent trip to Greenland and Northern Canada in which we cruised part of the North West Passage in the footsteps (or sails!) of early explorers. We flew to Iceland and from there to Greenland, where we joined our ship, the SH Vega at the port of Kangerlussuaq on the west coast. This was an "expedition cruise" but frankly from the first it was clear that we were in for a very different experience from some earlier sailors, who had run out of food and been obliged to eat their own shoes and wear the same clothes for months on end! Our ship was warm, very comfortable and with wonderful food! In addition we were blessed with fine weather for almost all the trip so there was no threat of sea-sickness, thank goodness. 

Greenland is a beautiful place; it reminded me of a bigger, colder version of Highland Scotland. With 80% of the country covered in ice, the population lives on the coastal fringe. When Eric the Red colonised the island in 985AD, the Vikings found it hard to establish their traditional farming lifestyle because only the edges were fertile land. One legend is that he named it Greenland as propaganda to attract settlers! The ancestors of the Inuit peoples who had lived in the area for thousands of years survived largely by hunting and fishing. Their lifestyle was better suited to the conditions than the western new arrivals and although the Vikings hung on there for several hundred years, eventually they left. The modern Greenland is a place of brightly-painted buildings and fascinating history which we explored at the museum in Sisimiut.

What We Are Reading!

Anne: I’ve had a wonderful reading month, with two books set in bookshops, and a new-to-me favorite historical romance author with a fabulous backlist.
 
First the bookshop books, both about young (ish) single women who work in bookshops, and both relatively content with their single lives, though in each book there is a tentative but developing romance. And both women are dealing with unexpected family connections.
 
In The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman Nina is shocked to discover the father she knew nothing about -- not even his name -- has died and left her not only something in the will, but a large extended family. The Bookish Life of Nina Hill is full of wonderful, wry and funny observations about people and life in LA and I found myself (for the first time ever) bookmarking passages I especially enjoyed. Abbi Waxman’s writing is clever and original and thoroughly enjoyable.

One Wicked Winter Night

by Mary Jo

I really enjoy writing novellas because the whole process of "Inspiration! Disillusion! Panic! Frantic finishing! then, Success!" is compressed into a much shorter time span.  It's also possible to explore story ideas that aren't complex enough for a full length novel, but will still be fun.  So I was happy when Kensington invited me to be in a Christmas anthology with two other Kensington historical authors, Madeline Hunter and Sabrina Jeffries.

Seduction on a Snowy Night was published in 2019 in a trade paper edition, and the next year in a mass market size.  Now Kensington has come up with the very fun idea of publishing each of the novellas separately as a freestanding Christmas novella. Hence my story. One Wicked Winter Night, has just been released with a lovely new cover. 

Interview with Janet Gover

Christina here and today I’m delighted to welcome Janet Gover to the blog! Janet is an Australian author who lives in the UK, but writes about her native country. She recently won the RWAust’s Romantic Book of the Year Award – for a mainstream novel with a strong romance running through it at this year’s RWA conference in Sydney with her book THE LIBRARY AT WAGTAIL RIDGE. Wench Anne was present and has kindly provided some photos of the occasion (thank you Anne!)

Janet and Anne

Welcome to the blog, Janet! It’s lovely to have you here. First of all, huge congratulations on winning the award! How did it feel when they announced your name and what does this award mean to you?

This was such a thrill. My journey to being an author started at a RWAust conference in Sydney in 199…  Oh dear. That does make me sound old. Nora Roberts was the guest speaker at that conference. I have always been such a fan of her work. I confess I did have a bit of a fan girl melt-down over her, which was so embarrassing. Meeting so many writers at the conference was such an inspiration. And now, to receive this award from the same organisation really is an honour.

The Accidental Wedding is &1.99

Anne, here, popping in to tell you that the e-book of THE ACCIDENTAL WEDDING is currently $1.99 until September 29, 2023.

All About Romance gave it a Desert Island Keeper rating.  
Season For Romance — Rating: 10 Top Pick
Night Owl Reviews — Top Pick

To read some of the reviews it received, click here:

To buy it, here’s a universal link that will take you to your preferred e-book retailer:  

 

The Scottish Bride & The Rhymer

Susan here, with a first look at my upcoming book, The Scottish Bride, to be released in Spring 2024. I just finished revisions and the book is now in production--it's always a relief to reach this phase with a book, when the writing is done and I can relax a little before jumping to the next book. I’ve just seen the gorgeous cover draft, and I'm sharing a sneak peek here (once the cover is finalized, I'll share the entire beautiful thing!). Here's a slice or two of the cover, above and below.  

Read on for a little background info . .  The Scottish Bride is the first book in my “Highland Secrets” trilogy (and The Forest Bride and The Guardian’s Bride will be released late next year, all from Dragonblade Publishing). The books are so new we don't have links yet! More to come.

In Robert Bruce’s Scotland, three sisters inherit gifts from their kinsman, the soothsayer Thomas the Rhymer, and must protect his legend and legacy—but each sister encounters a Scottish warrior intent on taking the treasure and thwarting the game.

Lady Tamsin Keith escapes a castle tower to avoid marriage—and literally falls into the arms of a mysterious Scottish knight. Sir William Seton, sent by King Edward I to demand the girl's grandfather’s book of prophecies, soon discovers that beautiful Tamsin is a gifted seer, a tad too truthful—and the most stubborn woman he has ever met. His forfeited lands, his wolfhounds, his very life depend on bringing the Rhymer’s book to the enemy king, yet Tamsin is unwilling to trust the knight who begins to thrill her lonely heart. Liam has a secret plan for her bothersome book, even as he falls for the lady’s headstrong charm...but first he and Tamsin must find the missing prophecies—and face a powerful foe who would tear down all they treasure.

The Scottish Bride is set in 1306, the year that Robert Bruce claimed the throne of Scotland and became a renegade king, hunted by Edward I’s troops even as he gathered a rebel faction for the cause of Scotland. By that time, Thomas the Rhymer was widely known, one of those intriguing legendary figures from
history who actually lived. His presence as an off-stage character in The Scottish Bride mingles fact, legend, and a fictional spin. What a privilege, and what fun, to put my own spin on True Thomas’s tale.

What's wrong with happy endings?

Anne here, having a bit of a rant. There's a strange thing about happy endings — a lot of people think they're rubbish. Not serious. Not real. Unrealistic. Not worth reading. Or watching.

Me, I love happy endings in books and movies. And I get grumpy when I think books or movies are needlessly miserable at the end. Most of my comments below should be preceded by Spoiler Alerts. I'll highlight the book or film titles in bold so you can be warned.

The belief seems to be that tragic or unhappy endings are “real” and therefore “worthy” while happy endings are an easy cop-out. As I writer I can say that it’s a LOT easier to write a story where you make people care about a character, and then kill them off for dramatic effect, leaving the reader gutted. It’s much harder (in my view) to craft a believable happy ending. Nevertheless, the attitude that tragic is better, nobler, cleverer persists.

I remember when I was a kid reading Henry Treece's The Children's Crusade. Boy, was that ever a sad ending. It was a story about the religious crusade made by children in 1212,  where hundreds of children left their homes to join a crusade, believing they were sent by Jesus, and that their innocence and righteousness would convert the Muslims. It ended very badly. Many of the children starved and died along the way, some (the lucky ones) returned home, and others were sold into slavery, believing the ships they sailed in were taking them to the Holy Land, instead of which they went straight to the slave markets.

I could cope with that kind of a tragic ending — it was history, after all — and there were important lessons to be learned, though for years I fretted about those children.

But there's a lot of fiction where people die and bad things happen for effect, and a book or a film ends badly simply because the writer thinks it will make for a better, more dramatic ending. Or they think it's "more realistic" — as if happy endings are unrealistic. I say, who needs gloomy so-called "realism"? There's plenty of that in the world we live in, but there's also a lot of happy stuff, and I want us to celebrate that, not push it under the carpet and call it mindless fluff. As people so often do.

Hundred Days of Story Telling

Pat here, deep in writing mode and frantically trying to finish a draft before taking off for the jungles of South America.

Finishing a book would be much simpler if I could just plan ahead—especially if I could plan six books ahead. But I can’t plot even one book in advance. And so here I am at Book #4 of the Gravesyde Priory Regency mystery series and oddly enough, history is messing with me.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ve written enough Regencies to know when events take place, but there’s that planning thing that doesn’t happen. When I started the series, I knew how the first book needed to begin. I wasn’t thinking timelines. I just needed to have my heroine raising her  orphaned nephew six years after a riot in Egypt. So I simply checked when Napoleon’s troops left and dropped the story into 1815.

As my heroine reads the letter about her strange inheritance, Napoleon is escaping Elba. When she sets out for rural Staffordshire in March, she’s unaware that Louis XVIII has fled Paris. I knew it, but it didn’t matter to the story.

Just as we worry about putting gas in our cars, food in our pantries, and buying school clothes while we’re possibly on the brink of World War III, my heroine was worrying about her nephew, not Napoleon. We can’t do anything about it, so we stick to what we can control.

Ask A Wench —about storytelling

Anne here, and today the wenches are responding to the question: Where did your love of books/storytelling/reading/writing/etc. come from?

Pat said:  In my case, I must accept that I was simply born with a love of books and writing. I can’t even say it’s in the genes because from what little I know of my family, my Great-Aunt Norma was the only one who wrote. She was a librarian and vanity-published a book of poems. She might possibly be the reason I love books, although that’s hard to say. For birthdays and holidays, she would sometimes send books the library didn’t want, even though they were inevitably much too old for a toddler who couldn’t read. So I’d pore over the wonderful pictures of lands far away and attempt to puzzle out what the words might say. To this day, I remember being appalled at a news announcer talking about an i-land when it was so obvious that he was talking about land surrounded by a body of water which. . . is land.

I can also remember a really old book of children’s poetry that I marked up with crayons as I sounded out the words. I don’t know how old I was at that point, but I apparently knew my letters and sounds but didn’t know better than to draw on books.

I have no memory of anyone ever reading to me, although I do remember the stories in the Little Golden Books (remember Pokey Little Puppy and the Little Engine That Could?   and kicking up a fuss until a book got tossed into the cart. Someone must have read the books to me at some point so I could follow the story later, when I tried to read it on my own.

All I really know was that I devoured every book in the house, reading and re-reading since my selection was limited. We had no library. By the time I was in fourth grade, I was buying classical English literature from the Scholastic bookfair with my tiny allowance. And since I never had enough to read, I wrote my own, filling notebooks full of stories.