Crazy, Fun Summer

Crazy Fun Summer

What’s in Mrs. Hale’s Receipt for the Million in 1857?

1271. Spruce Beer– For white spruce, pour ten gallons of boiling water upon six pounds of good raw or lumps sugar, and four ounces of essence of spruce; ferment with half a pint of good yeast, put into stone bottles, corks and ite them over. For brown spruce use treacle instead of sugar. Essence of spruce is a remedy for colds, rheumatism, &c, if drunk warm at bed-time.

First Things First

I’ve been busy.

First, there was the non-stop researching and writing my first mystery for the launch of bestselling author Toby Neal‘s Lei Crime Kindle World. Saddle Road, along with seven other novellas launched on April 9. All eight jumped to the top ten in all the Kindle Worlds and have never looked back. It’s been exciting to see the ranking of my novella stay so high after several months. Needlessness to say, I’m working on another. With things so busy, however, I’m going to join the October launch. Later on this blog, I’ll show the research I’m doing for this next novella. It brings in the history of the 1946 tsunami that wiped out Hilo and the USO center on Coconut.

I also took a little family time to go celebrate my grandson’s first birthday in late April, then back to writing and preparing for the first of several conferences.

Hanging out with History

When I heard that the Historical Novel Society was holding its USA conference in Denver in June, I signed up right away. Here was a chance to meet up with writers of historical fiction writing in all eras and sub-genres like mystery, romance and time travel. Four hundred and fifty authors of fiction! Plus sword fighting for historical fiction writers and dancing. Generally, there are only a handful of historical fiction people at writing conferences. In addition to the workshops, there was also a parade of costumes. I bravely signed up as a 1907 mountaineer. In all, it was a great experience. I met up with members of HFAC, the historical fiction authors cooperative I belong to and made new friends. At the awards banquet, Tree Soldier was honored again. Mega-selling author, Diana Gabaldon, helped to present.

After that, I went on to Prescott, AZ where I stayed with my former critique partner, Heidi Thomas. Had a great time seeing new countryside and taking in the history of that area. It was good, however, to get home.

More History

In mid-July I was at the Pacific NW Writers Conference in Seattle. Another opportunity to talk about historical fiction. I was on a panel of writers who write in this genre: Dave Boling, Candace Robb, Bharti and myself. Now I’m back to writing the Lei Crime mystery and finalizing the edits on The Jossing Affair. I’ll be posing about the research for Coconut Island and any new projects.

Finally, I returned to English Camp for my 19th year demonstrating 19th century foodways and teaching Miss Libby’s Academy.

More Thing

I do have something to ask. I’m planning on creating a Mail Chimp program for my website. It’s a “join in if you like” set up for a newsletter and other announcements. It will make it easier for me to talk about updates, book information, and giveaways and leave the blog for writing about the things I enjoy the most– writing about history, family and story. I promise not to be a bother. You can see the sign-up sheet near the top of the front page.

Thanks. Now I’m off for a library talk. Good times.