Thanks, Cynthia, for having me today. It’s such a pleasure to be here and talk about writing.

As the title suggests, today I’m blogging about writing in winter. I live in Maine on the shore of Cobscook Bay which is an offshoot of the Bay of Fundy. And right now it’s February and of course cold… and dark. This impacts my writing in ways that when I lived in my previous home in Austin, Texas I couldn’t imagine.

So why is my writing different in the winter? First, it’s cold. Second my house is old and very drafty. Third, there’s little daylight, almost like the arctic with the sun going down right after 3 in the afternoon. And fourth, it’s cold. I imagine you see where I’m going with this.

By way of contrast, let me back-track to our lovely summer when the sun rises before 5am and doesn’t set until after 9pm. That’s a long day in which to get things accomplished—19 hours of pure productivity. Well, not every day of course. Some days I just kick back and watch the butterflies and birds flittering around and take my big, old, black dog, Zach, on long walks down to my beach. A wonderful excursion for both us, but still, there are a lot of hours in which to be writing or thinking about writing. And summer these past few years has very gently morphed into a lovely fall. However, I find myself doing more work outside in the fall… no bugs. We have enormous mosquitoes during our summers. Anyway, my writing schedule is a bit curtailed during the fall.

Then comes winter, which usually starts after Thanksgiving and goes through March. However, with climate change… and if you don’t believe this is happening then you should be up here to experience our increasing storms and unusual fluctuating temperatures. The winters for the past three years have been variable, sometimes wildly so. In 2015 we had 15 feet of snow. In 2016 the winter seemed normal with snow falling at appropriate times, but this year January temps varied from the 30s to the 50s and little to no snow at all. February is making up for lost time though with a foot on the ground then a fierce blizzard that dropped another 2 feet with 50 mph winds as well. Another milder blizzard followed a few days later. And a sneak overnight snowstorm piled on another six inches. God knows what the rest of February and March will bring. So I’ve experienced climate change from the trenches I guess you could say. Not so much a warming trend although January felt that way, but increasingly harsh storms and gale force winds.

Changing temperature and the increasing incidence of strong storms including tornadoes is the reason I left Texas. I thought nothing would get me out of there, but after so many summers with growing numbers of days over 100 degrees and a decade of drought when the lake view from my front yard dwindled from lake to caliche cliffs, I packed up and left the first of August almost 6 years ago. The drought has eased since, but the storms there are worsening and it isn’t getting any cooler. That probably means I won’t move back however much I’d like to. Adapting myself to Maine winters is a must.

Over the last 5 years since I’ve been writing, I’ve noticed that my writing schedule as well as writing style change drastically season by season particularly in the winter.

Frankly, I become a hermit. I hardly ever go out of the house except to walk the dog and get the mail. My son does all my grocery shopping and errands. I sit at home in my tights, baggy sweat shirt and thick socks and spend most of my day in front of the computer in the kitchen… where it’s warm… and I write.

The winter view from my office/kitchen window

And in the winter my writing seems to adjust its themes with the available daylight hours. The books I write in the summer include some light-hearted banter and tongue-in-cheek attitude to match the gorgeous light outside my office that is almost like Alaska’s midnight sun. Not quite, but close to 24/7 daylight. In the winter I write about dark emotions, passionate encounters, lots of instances of mayhem because, well, it’s dark outside almost all the time. Then I use the early spring to lighten those when I edit them just so I won’t scare my readers away. Seasons works for me in unexpected ways it seems.

And my winter themes this year are… Russia on the cusp of revolution, cyber-hacking, black-market artifact sales, a re-telling of The Little Match Girl and you all know how that story turns out, and finally sharks, human trafficking and pirates. Fun stuff. But the spring cometh! My editor and I can interject some levity into the final versions, at least my Little Match Girl won’t die in the snow… I hope. And I’m leaving my light-hearted anthology of wedding stories for this summer when I’m in a better mood. But my writing in the winter is necessary particularly when it mediates Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD, a very good description of the condition). Without removing myself from my real surroundings into a make-believe world, I’d be a mess. So, I thank you winter and my novels thank you as well. I have a lot more hours trapped indoors to think up stories.

Happy reading!

Min

The following is a snippet from Precious Stone, my current publication, which came out in November (but was begun in the winter of 2015… the Russian mob and lots of mayhem occur). Enjoy.

Precious Stone, Book 4 in the High Tide Suspense series, available now:

Amazon: http://amzn.to/2fM6a85 to purchase

and

ePub Universal link: https://www.books2read.com/u/bP1Gk7 to buy at ePub retailers such as iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and others.

A gift of thanks to a young girl from the Tsar more than 100 years ago… and now the Russians want it back.

Collee McCullough, the owner of The Bakery in Stone Bay, Maine, has a perfect life until early one morning men in suits come calling. She has something someone dangerous wants. Something that her Russian great-grandmother, Natasha took when she fled Russia in 1913. Too bad Buka never told her family what she had or where she left it.

Jake Elsmore, visiting Stone Bay to sell his mother’s house, walks into The Bakery for a cup of Earl Grey tea, but gets more. There she is. Collee McCullough, stepping out from behind the Chief of Police, a lovely, fiery-haired fairy toting a shotgun while two men lay insensate on the floor of her shop. Looks like that tea will have to wait.

Bio

About the Author:

Min Edwards is the pen name of Author, Archaeologist, Book Designer, and owner of A Thirsty Mind Publishing and Design, Pam Headrick.

She has lived in many countries in her life—England, the Philippines, Cuba, Texas (yes, Texas thinks of itself as a separate country)—gathering experiences for her writing along the way. She earned Undergraduate and Graduate Degrees from Texas Tech University and The University of Texas at Austin in Anthropology with minors in Art, Geology and Geography, and she spent her early professional career as an Archaeological Illustrator and staff historical archaeologist at the University of Texas – Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory.

In 2012, after participating in a round table discussion on self-publishing at a writers’ conference she was inspired to began writing down the stories that had filled her head for decades and now works from a small office in her 180 year old Greek Revival farmhouse at Pheasant Cove Farm near the village of Lubec, Maine, the most eastern spot in the U.S. In the summer she walks on her private beach every day, listening to the song of the pebbles being washed back and forth in the tide. It’s a musical and inspiring sound. In the winter though, she’d rather the beach be sand and maybe transported to someplace warmer… Tahiti seems to be most often on her mind.

Her first novel, STONE BAY, a Contemporary Romance, was published in March of 2014. It was followed by a new Romantic Suspense series, Hide Tide Suspense, bringing danger to the small village of Stone Bay, Maine. Out now in the series are STONE COLD, STONE HEART, STONE FALL and PRECIOUS STONE. Finally for the conclusion of the series, THE RUSSIAN PHOENIX, a women’s fiction historical and the prequel to PRECIOUS STONE is coming soon. These books can be found on her Amazon Author Page: http://amzn.to/2bHJ1kb

You may also find all of her published books at sites such as iBooks, B&N and Kobo through Books2Read.com

Stone Bay: https://books2read.com/u/bw8gDG

Stone Cold: https://books2read.com/u/49x5y8

Stone Heart: https://books2read.com/u/b6QP9J

Stone Fall: https://books2read.com/u/mgK8V6

Precious Stone: https://www.books2read.com/u/bP1Gk7

Drop in on her alter-ego at the business website at www.athirstymind.com where you can learn all about the book design business, and visit with Min at www.MinEdwards.com where you can learn about her writing life.

You can also find her on:

her blog for all things technical:

www.athirstyblog.com

and on her website blog page for her writing thoughts:

www.MinEdwards.com

Twitter @MEdwardsAuthor

twitter.com/MEdwardsAuthor

Min’s Facebook:

www.facebook.com/AuthorMinEdwards

Personal Pinterest:

www.pinterest.com/athirstymind

Min’s Pinterest Page:

www.pinterest.com/minedwards

Waving a big hello to everyone! Cynthia has invited me to visit, and I’m always thrilled to be here. As many of you know, I love to write history in a story form. And what’s a story without a wonderful hero and a heroine worthy of him? Being I’m a totally hopeless romantic, how could I not write a story with love tangled into it? Writing about the frontier days of the American West is a time in history that appeals to men and women. But since we’ve never figured out how to travel backwards in time, a book will transport us there. My job is to make certain your experience is as real as possible.

My research turns up information that was never taught in schools. Often I wind up spending hours on information that I will never use, and I’m fascinated by all of it. When I started down this path of historical westerns, I had to research everything. I like knowing that what I’ve written is historically correct.

I’ve always admired and enjoyed reading another author, a European history professor Roberta Gellis. She wrote historical novels of old Europe and England. One of the things I liked about her books was the history that she put in the stories. Not just the clothing, but how the people actually lived, paid their taxes, and how those taxes were recorded on sticks. My feeling was why didn’t they teach us this stuff in school? I learned more reading her books than I ever did in a classroom. She showed me that history doesn’t have to be boring.

When I started working on my first historical story, I wanted to bring the same sort of accuracy to my work. Unfortunately, I didn’t have Ms. Gellis’ learned background. I began to research, checking, and double-checking resources. Often I chased my tail, and that can be frustrating. There’s plenty of misinformation, and it’s perpetuated in other places.

I thought the railroad went from point A to point C. No such luck! That section of track between points B and C should have been built by then, but it wasn’t completed for another twenty years. That’s a serious amount of time when writing a story. Yet that completed track between points B and C appears on more than a dozen maps! It was a railroad company historian, who gave me the correct information. I had to toss about 10 pages from a novel I was writing, rewrite those pages, and fix several other pages.

I’ve also had to make some strange decisions, especially when it comes to word choices. There were three very distinct divisions in spoken English. The educated people spoke a very formal form of English. Many recent immigrants tended to speak a broken form of English that also bled over to their children. And then there were those who spoke a regional dialect that almost sounds like gibberish to those unfamiliar with it. As a result, if I wrote exactly as each person spoke, it would make reading very difficult, so I tend to not be as stringent with keeping everything historically correct when it comes to speech. I do use dialects occasionally because it adds flavor, immediately identifies a character, and helps with the setting. I believe that the reader needs to be comfortable reading, therefore I keep such things to a minimum.

Nothing is worse than being yanked from a story over words that you don’t understand or an odd sentence structure. Our language is a mix of several languages and has settled into some speech patterns that we never think about until we study a foreign one. That’s when we discover that our yellow bus is bus yellow in another language because they place the adjectives behind the noun instead of in front of it. If I wrote the way a certain character spoke, it would become a difficult read. But wait, I do that occasionally. Then I read it a million times to be certain that the character’s spoken words are easily understood. A little can go a long way, but constantly deciphering sentences can be distracting. A Rancher’s Woman is sprinkled with such speech patterns, as is A Rancher’s Dream, but most people comprehend the German word Ja and Spanish word Si for our word yes.

The other odd situation arises when attempting to write spoken words by our native tribe members. I haven’t looked closely at all the tribes, but the ones that I am using in my stories often struggled with our English language. It’s a fine line because I don’t want to portray them as being less intelligent. They weren’t. They lived, worked, played, hunted, married, and raised their children within their community. If they stepped outside that community, they were faced with people who spoke a different language.

Some did learn our language and very quickly! But to expect all of them to know and be fluent in our language is as ludicrous as saying everyone who lives in the states that border our Latino neighbors must know Spanish. Depending on the amount of contact with those people, they might or might not. There are also those who might understand what someone is saying, but can’t respond beyond a few words.

And remember when I said there are patterns in our language? We automatically use the past, future, and present tense, but what if there is no past, future, or present tense? It’s implied, depending on the situation. Such is the case with our many tribal languages. Anyone who has studied our American Sign Language instantly discovers that it, too, lacks those tenses.

The more contact between people, the more each learns. So an American Indian might have virtually no knowledge of English until his or her contact is continuous. In my fictional town of Creed’s Crossing, Wyoming, there are several instances where families are fluent in Crow or Lakota and the English language. But learning a new language can be a struggle for adults, yet amazingly children learn so quickly.

In the beginning of A Rancher’s Woman, the hero Many Feathers, barely speaks our language. But it doesn’t take him long to learn because he’s completely surrounded with English speaking people, and he wants to learn. By the end of that story, he’s fluent in English and can read and write it.

Rose who is also a Crow, had no command of English, nor any need to be trained. Then Malene, the heroine, came to visit. The only thing the women had in common was the fact that they were women and understood cooking, cleaning, and babies. I’m certain it didn’t take them long to learn each other’s language once Malene remained on the reservation. The bonds of friendship would encourage the need to converse.

That situation is still true today. My husband’s family spent a little over two years in Naples, Italy, when the US Navy stationed my father-in-law there. My husband, as a teen, came home fluent in Italian. His father never spoke a word of it because he was constantly with other Americans on base, and they lived in a military community. My mother-in-law did slightly better because she had grown up in a French Canadian family and spoke French, therefore she often understood the Italians, but again her contact was limited mostly to shopping in the area, and what she did learn pertained to food names, ingredients, and cooking. But my husband embraced the opportunity to be in a foreign country and learn another language. Outgoing, fun loving, and quick to make friends, he mixed with the local young people. Since he spoke French, he had no problem learning another romance language. By the time he returned home, he was fluent.

Our native people were not stupid even though they often were portrayed as such in old TV shows or movies. They didn’t wander around grunting words like ugg. And anyone who has ever been around a man with a wrench on a rusted lug nut has heard plenty of uggs, grunts, and quite often more colorful words. So it’s easy to see how these people were portrayed when they did hard manual labor. But what we fail to realize is that many of them not only spoke their language, but the languages of neighboring tribes, French because of the number of French trappers that dealt with the tribes for years before the English began to settle there, and then some English because they were placed on reservations and had to cope with English speaking agents who knew no other language and many times had no desire to learn.

Portraying our tribal, or any group of people, accurately and keeping the reader flowing through the story becomes a balancing act for the author and sometimes an editor. Many authors avoid the problem completely by pretending these people did not exist, or by showing them as completely fluent in English. Add one more piece into the puzzle – keeping things politically correct according to today’s standards. Huh? Not in what I write! I refuse to whitewash the truth.

Sometimes I get to giggling over reviews where my readers say my language is so clean, meaning no foul words, but it’s not unusual for my characters to curse. The difference is today we think nothing of the word darn, but in the late 1800’s, darn was not a polite word and tarnation was even worse! Although it was not on a par with the worst of the curse words today, it was still shocking. (One of the worst and most blasphemous was Dad!) And that brings up the question about some of today’s vulgar language. Did those words exist back then? Yes, but they were not in general use. There are several words today that are considered quite vulgar. But in the late 1800’s, they weren’t. If they were used, it was in normal conversation, and had to do with cattle breeding. It’s an interesting study. But foul words have almost always existed throughout time. And the curse words a man might utter back then when things went awry don’t raise an eyebrow today. That makes reading some novels rather funny when they use today’s curse words.

I will do my best to show things as they were and not as we’d like to think they were. I refuse to ignore the truth. I walk a thin line while writing. The desire to keep everything accurate, while allowing for comfortable reading, makes writing dialog a little challenging.

Today’s foul words were never used then as intensifiers. But I wonder what words will be tomorrow’s foul ones? What’s your favorite word when things go wrong?