Blog Hop!

I’m taking part in a blog hop.  I was picked by Linda Wiken (aka Erika Chase) who can be found at http://www.erikachase.com and http://mysterymavencdn.blogspot.ca/ 

To find out who I’m tagging, read on.

And now for the questions I have been given.

Eva Gates

1)    What am I working on?  

I am now going through the editor’s edits for By Book or By Crook, the first in the Lighthouse Library Mystery Series.  This is something very new for me.  A new cozy series!  And I just love it.  The books are for Penguin Obsidian, and they will be published under my pen name, Eva Gates.  The series is set in a library in a lighthouse on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. After writing 16 books with more serious tones, all about human tragedy, broken families, injured war vets, and other not-fun things, to write a book just for fun is a real joy.

Once I finish the edits, then it’s on to the second book in the series.  I have a three book contract.

By Book or By Crook will be released on February 3^rd, 2014, and the second book (as yet unnamed), in August.

2)    How does my work differ from others of its genre?  

This is a very cozy series, and it is written specifically for those readers who love cozies. About the only way it differs from some others, is that I am trying to keep it funny.  If you are looking for a good laugh, along with an interesting location, fun characters, and an intelligent puzzle, please give it a try.  Oh, and the Outer Banks location. And the lighthouse!

3)    Why do I write what I do?  

I was ready for a change, and I was seriously considering giving up writing.  This new project has given me a renewed love of writing. I love the Constable Molly Smith books from Poisoned Pen, and they are doing reasonably well.  I really loved writing standalone gothic thrillers, but the latest, More than Sorrow, pretty much sunk without a trace.  The offer from Penguin (via my wonderful agent Kim Lionetti of Bookends) came at the perfect time.

4)    How does my writing process work?     

I am a total creature of routine.

I get up every morning, seven days a week.  I go to my main computer in my office, and read e-mails, read the papers online, spend a bit of time on Facebook or Twitter. 

Then it’s time to start to write.  I walk into the dining room and stand at my Netbook computer which is on the half-wall between the kitchen and the dining room and boot it up.  (In the summer I might sit outside on the deck) As I pass through the kitchen, I put one egg on to boil.

I always write, standing up, on the Netbook.  I read over everything I did the previous day, doing a light edit as I go.  I then take my egg into the study and eat it while checking email. 

Then back to the small computer for several writing hours, usually finishing around one.

And that’s pretty much it.  I can’t write in small chunks. I can’t write as the spirit moves me.

I have a new web site for the Eva Gates books: www.lighthouselibrarymysteries.com.  It’s still in development, but please have a peek. You can also find Eva on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/evagatesauthor

 Plus, of course, the main web page at www.vickidelany.com

I have tagged three of my favourite writers. They'll be answering the questions on their web pages next week. 

            1) Violette Malan lives in southeastern Ontario with her husband. People tend to ask her about the choreography of stripping – and she'll answer – but most of the time she's the author of the Dhulyn and Parno novels, and  the Mirror Lands novels, fantasies available from DAW.

You'll find her on Facebook, on Twitter, and check her website: www.violettemalan.com

2)   2)   Prince Edward County's Janet Kellough is the author of The Thaddeus Lewis Mysteries (Dundurn), history/mystery set in pre-Confederation Upper Canada, featuring a steely-eyed and stout-hearted "saddlebag preacher" as the hero.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Thaddeus-Lewis-Mysteries-Janet-Kellough/190597476409?ref_type=bookmark

3)    3) Rick Blechta can be found at http://rickblechta.com/

Loyalist Wednesday: Some of The People

Last week I examined what might seem to some a paradox in the nature of people who were Loyalists: Scots who’d come to America after Culloden remaining loyal to the British crowd.

Some history books attempt to make it sound as if all the loyalists were wealthy, elderly conservative (kinda ironic, right?) landowners wanting to keep their own privilege.

But such was not the case.

People had many reasons for taking one side or the other in the revolution. Often it was a case of families divided. I’ve read sources that suggest the Revolution was in fact a Civil War.

Most of the Native tribes were on the side of the British. They are personified by Molly Brant and her bother Joseph (Thayendanegea) .  Molly was the widow of one Sir William Johnson as well as a prominent leader in the Mohawk tribes of New York State.  (The Mohawks had a strong matrilineal leadership tradition).   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Brant.  Molly was very influential in persuading the Iroquois to fight along with the British.  Molly Brant is considered a Canadian heroine and has appeared on a stamp.

Across the Bay of Quinte from Prince Edward County, is the First Nations Reserve of Tyendenaga.  This is Loyalist territory.  The Mohawks lost their land when their side lost the war, moved to Canada, and were given land of their own.   

Joseph settled further west in the area now known as Brantford.

Many black people were loyalists also.  When the revolution began several of the colonies declared that any slave who fought with the British would be given their freedom.  Some then went further and declared that any slave who deserted the Rebels would be given “full protection, freedom, and land.”    http://museum.gov.ns.ca/blackloyalists/who.htm

Thousands of black people did so, and were later settled mostly in Nova Scotia.  Some went from there back to Africa and settled in Freetown, Sierra Leone.  

The story of the black Loyalists is told in Lawrence Hill’s exceptional novel, The Book of Negros.  (http://www.amazon.ca/Book-Negroes-Lawrence-Hill/dp/1554681561/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346256020&sr=8-1)  In the US the book has been retitled Someone Knows My Name (http://www.amazon.com/Someone-Knows-My-Name-Novel/dp/0393333094/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346255933&sr=8-1&keywords=the+book+of+negros)

It is worth noting that the slaves of Loyalists were not given their freedom, and when the black Loyalists arrived in Nova Scotia it was to find that many promises to them had not been kept. But,  as I have discussed earlier, slavery was outlawed in Upper Canada in 1791 and throughout the British Empire in 1834.

The British made use of German mercenaries called Hessians.  Many Hessians (including deserters) settled in the County after the war rather than return to Germany.  

Loyalist Wednesday – Sir John Graves Simcoe

Sir John Graves Simcoe

Quick! What was the name of the holiday you enjoyed on Monday? (If you were lucky enough to have one).  

If you live in Ontario, you might be forgiven for not knowing.

For some reason, the official name of the August Long weekend in Ontario is a confusing mess.  No one really knows what they are supposed to call it.

 It is not the Civic Holiday as it was for a long time.

Simcoe Day, you might have said. You’d be right, if you lived in Toronto.

If you live in Ontario outside of Toronto it is Emancipation Day.  A very little known fact – I didn’t even know that until last year when my friend the writer Thomas Rendell Curran pointed it out.  What starred this train of thought was that I was in the grocery store in Picton, a few days ago and was greeted by a sign 

informing me of the “Simcoe Day” opening hours.

Wrong!

Sir John Graves Simcoe opening the first parliament of Upper Canada

In 2008, the Province of Ontario dedicated its August Monday holiday as "Emancipation Day”. Toronto, however, seems to have suck with Simcoe Day.

The two names are quite closely related.

When the Loyalist settlers arrived in what is now Prince Edward County in the summer of 1784, the territory was so unsettled it didn’t even have a name or a leader.  There was no Toronto, and until the Loyalists began arriving, the tiny settlement of Cataraqui (renamed Kingston in 1788) wasn’t much more than a muddy fort with a tiny village.

It wasn’t until 1791 that the place got a leader, a government, and a name. John Graves Simcoe (February 25, 1752 – October 26, 1806) was first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. Simcoe  founded York (now Toronto) and was instrumental in introducing institutions such as the courts, trial by jury, English common law, and freehold land tenure. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Graves_Simcoe)

Elizabeth Simcoe

The diary of his wife, Elizabeth, provides a valuable record of life on the frontier, as do her extensive series of watercolours.

One of his most memorable accomplishments was the ending of slavery in Upper Canada, long before it was abolished in the British Empire as a whole 

Painting by Elizabeth Simcoe

A personal long-time opponent of slavery, Simcoe introduced a law, titled An Act to Prevent the further Introduction of Slaves and to limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude within this Province in 1793.  This law stated that while all slaves in the province would remain enslaved until death, no new slaves could be brought into Upper Canada, and children born to female slaves after passage of the act would be freed at age 25. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Against_Slavery).  – Thus slavery ended forever in 1810, well before it was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834 and long before it ended in the United States.

Sir John Graves Simcoe was not a Loyalist, but he was instrumental in establishing the colony of Upper Canada, later the province of Ontario, where the rag-tag band of Loyalist Settlers could grow and prosper.  

The Modern Gothic Novel

As followers of this blog (thanks!) know, I’m taking a break from the Constable Molly Smith series to write a new standalone novel for Poisoned Pen Press.

My first two books for PPP were standalones, Scare the Light Away and Burden of Memory. I wrote the type of books I like to read, specifically the traditional British gothic, full of family secrets.

Who knew (not me!) that the gothic is back and as popular as ever, now in modern dress. Rather than poverty-stricken (yet well-bred) governesses banished to bleak Scottish castles, we might have Australian women travelling to English villages to discover the truth of their past (Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden) or a new teacher at an private school in New York fearing that something is moving in the woods (Carol Goodman’s Arcadia Falls).

In the afterword to The House at Riverton, Kate Morton describes the Gothic: The haunting of the present by the past; the insistence of family secrets; return of the repressed; the centrality of inheritance (material, psychological and physical); haunted houses (particularly haunting of a metaphorical nature; suspicion concerning new technology and changing methods; the entrapment of women (whether physical or social) and associated claustrophobia; character doubling; the unreliability of memory and the partial nature of history; mysteries and the unseen; confessional narrative; and embedded texts.

Burden of Memory and Scare the Light Away follow the gothic tradition of family secrets, haunted houses (in one case physical in one just metaphorical), entrapment of women into assumed roles, partial nature of history, and most certainly embedded texts. Burden of Memory, perhapss the most truly gothic of the two, concerns an elderly woman who hires a biographer to help her write her memories of her time as a Nursing Sister in the Army in WWII. The biographer arrives at the old family cottage (i.e. Estate) on Lake Muskoka to find a tough old lady who’d fought her father’s expectations in order to lead her life her way, a large extended family full of secrets, and something moving in the woods (or is there?).

In Scare the Light Away, also set in in the Near-North of Ontario, the protagonist comes home for the first time in thirty years for her mother's funeral and discovers her mother’s diaries and the secrets therein. In both novels, of course, there is a modern mystery as well.

The new book, More than Sorrow (release date Sept. 2011) is with my critique friends now. I’ll be telling you more about it later, but in the meantime here are some links if you’d like to find out more about Burden of Memory and Scare the Light Away. Both are available on Kindle, Sony e-reader, and Nook as well as still in print.

Kindle: Scare the Light Away. Burden of Memory.

Nook: Burden of Memory, Scare the Light Away

Sony e-reader: Scare the Light Away , Burden of Memory.

If you pefer to buy from your local independent bookstore, many still have the books in stock (try Posioned Pen, Mystery Lovers, Aunt Agatha's, Books and Company or Novel Idea) or can order them for you.