Saturday, July 9, 2016

Amazing Victorian Cannonball Catcher

I've put aside the Work-in-Progress, Never a Viscount, for three months in order to write a holiday novella! By the Light of a Christmas Moon is a spin-off of The Unseducible Earl, scheduled to release later this year. Jamie and Rosemary get their own story!

Jamie contracted Remittent Fever in the Crimea. It's a chronic condition he will have the rest of his life. (Remittent Fever was a chronic infection. No antibiotics then, and some people suffered with chronic, low grade systemic infections for years or for life. I modeled Jamie's illness after the chronic condition Florence Nightingale returned from the Crimea with. One biographer believes she had Brucellosis.) The infection could flare up at any time and produce high fevers. Jamie suffers from body aches, sciatica, and lethargy all the time. He's at risk of dying during one of the fever episodes.

So Jamie wants to get as strong and healthy as possible. To that end he begins a physical training program.

Gymnasiums came into vogue during the Victorian era. A number of exercise machines were developed. There are pictures of Victorians in street clothes--women in corsets and skirts, men in suits and ties--using these machines. But gymnastic apparatuses also became available---the horse, climbing ropes, and Indian clubs.




I wanted Jamie to have a trainer, so I went looking for a Victorian "Jack LaLanne" type. I looked and looked and looked. Not only did I need a well known Victorian strongman or gymnast, he had to be known in 1857.

I found two. Archibald MacLaren built a gymnasium at Oxford University which opened in 1858. The following year he trained twelve army sergeants who then implemented a similar training program for the British military. MacLaren believed both mental and physical parts of the body must be trained. He was expert at numerous gymnastic skills and a fencing master. But other than that, I couldn't find out much about MacLaren. There was also a well known strongman, Professor James Harrison. Although he was honored by Queen Victoria for his physical prowess, even less information was available on Harrison.

So I decided to create a fictional character to be Jamie's trainer. A man who'd trained with both MacLaren and Harrison and followed their philosophies of "physical culture."

The man I found in my research who was truly amazing was strongman John Holtum. I couldn't use Holtum in my novella because he was twelve years old in 1857! But he was phenomenal and I loved learning about him. Holtum had a circus or carnival act that became famous and was never duplicated. He caught a fifty-pound iron cannonball fired at point-blank range. This was the same type of cannon and cannonballs used in war to blow men apart.

The first time Holtum tried it, the cannonball took off three fingers. But that didn't stop him. He wore a skimpy leotard and gloves and a light chest padding and caught the cannonball--fired from a cannon--with his gloved hands and chest. How in the heck does a man decide he can do this, and then try it out? He became famous throughout Europe and England.


Initially people thought it was a hoax. So Holtum invited them up on the stage. He offered a huge amount of money to anyone who could duplicate his feat. No one tried. 

Holtum retired in England and died peacefully in 1919 at age seventy-four. Finding and learning about people like John Holtum is why I love research.




Sunday, June 12, 2016

Release Day!

A HERO to HOLD released June 10, 2016! Wow, what a feeling!
Look what my friend, author Krista Lynn sent to mark and celebrate the day. So beautiful and special!

Sunday, April 3, 2016

OMG. Editing today. Line of dialogue: "Lots 'a folks got 'em." Wondering about that sentence. Looked up lotsa and lotta. Neither in use until after 1870! Now wondering how I came up with the 'a. That can't be right, can it? Start looking in online slang dictionaries, the O.E.D., abbreviation dictionaries. Finally, after much wasted time, realize I'm looking for the contraction of 'of.' And yes, the contraction is o'. But here's the amazing thing I discovered: the contraction o' is used in so many English phrases, and I never once wondered what the o' stood for.
o'clock : of the clock
cat-o'-nine-tails : cat-of-nine-tails
jack-o'-lantern : jack of the lantern
will-o'-the-wisp : will-of-the-wisp

Monday, March 28, 2016

The Cover!

March 25, 2016, A HERO to HOLD went up on Boroughs' website. And I saw the cover for the first time. Beautiful. Amazing. The model is gorgeous. One of my big fears was getting a cover with the model wearing contemporary makeup. That's my pet peeve with historical covers. That, and contemporary haircuts on the men. I was doing cartwheels (in my head). My model is not only lovely, she looks natural.
It took about twenty minutes to realize the cottage and garden were Rose Cottage, where lovers David and Charlotte meet. The cottage is surrounded by gardens, just like the house on the cover. The cover perfectly depicts the heroine and the novel. :D Chris K. knocked this cover out of the park!

Do you have a cover pet peeve?

Story Edits

February 22, 2016 I received my story edits for A Hero to Hold from my editor, Chris Keeslar. His story suggestions made sense and were relatively easy to do. Several suggestions were simply moving some backstory info up closer to the front of the novel. Accomplished.

One scene near the end of the book has a woman saying some rather nasty things about the hero. Chris K. thought the character was over-the-top nasty. He wondered if I could make the character more sympathetic? The character is the widow of the hero's friend.

I worked on that scene all day. Revised, tried different approaches, but nothing felt right. I finally gave up for the evening. The next morning, the moment I opened my eyes, I knew how to solve my problem with the scene.

I deleted the scene. And wrote a completely new one, changing the widow's outlook. I changed the hero's response to her, too. And, wow! The scene became heart-wrenching! I'm so glad Chris didn't like the original scene. The new one is ten times better than the original.

In addition to the story edits, I also went through the MS page-by-page, tightening and generally making improvements. This incorporated things I'd learned since the last time I'd read the manuscript.

When I finished, March 10, I was very pleased with the end result. Back to Chris K. it went. Each stage it gets better and better.