Random Natterings

Mostly housekeeping

2012-02-16T15:55:00.000-08:00

First of all, I haven't figured out how to respond to comments. I'll work on that. I'm not really on Big Ignore, but I'm only semi-literate in the world of computers. Like most of us, I know how to do precisely what I need and not much more. I'd rather spend my tme writing.

First. Seagull Books on 1720 S. Redwood Road in Salt Lake really rocks. I'm had three booksignings there and every one was fun. I'm finding it interesting that people are buying both Borrowed Light and Enduring Light.

Which reminds me: Borrowed Light is a finalist in this year's Whitney Award competition, in the romance ficton category. I think the awards banquet is the first Saturday in May. I'll probably go, unless I get the jitters. Stuff like that scares me. I'm waiting to hear about Romance Writers of America's awards now. I entered Borrowed Light in the inspirational category and a short story from Coming Home for Christmas in the novella category. I think they announce the finalists in March.

I think I have a booksigning at a Seagull Bookstore in Ogden on March 10 or 17. Deseret Book also wants a booksigning on one of those two Saturdays. Their idea is to kill me off with three on the same day. Could be interesting. I'm game, as long as one of the three is not the bookstore on S. University Ave in Provo. That's the place that wasn't even aware there was a signing last year. I wouldn't have minded so much, except that it was a white-knuckle drive over Soldier Summit that morning. Funny. I was chatting with two other authors at that Seagull signing, and apparently others have had the same experience there. Maybe the store is cursed.

Ebooks are starting to dot the landscape. In Love and War, a collection of four of my Signet short stories, is now available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and other venues. On March 2, Reforming Lord Ragsdale will be available in ebook format. In Spetember, Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand will be out in paperback and ebook. So will Daughter of Fortune, my first novel evah.

Regarding Daughter of Fortune (my first title was Saintmaker): I hadn't looked at it in years, and it was fun to revisit that book, and remember writing it in the furnace room of our house in Ogden. My style has changed somewhat, but in basic particulars, it's the same. I'd forgotten just how violent that novel is, but the violence is based on historical records (which I even tamed down). I couldn't help but think of Cormac McCarthy's first novel, Blood Meridian, which is also tres violent. I'm emphatically not in his league, but it's fun to dream...

Oh, yes. Marriage of Mercy, a Harlequin Historical, will be out in May. It's a Harlequin and therefore spicier than my Cedar Fort books, plus it has a stupid title. I called it Choosing Rob Inman. If you happen to buy a copy, just get a 3x5 card and paste it over the book title. No one gets married in the book, but who can define the mind of an editor? Not moi.

Th-th-that's all folks, for now. Some people are coming to dinner, because they're here to see See How They Run, the play Martin is directing for USU-Eastern in Price. It's high-larious. I'm serving meatloaf, because I like it.

IKEA versus SEAL Team Six

2012-02-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

All right: I am no blogger. But you already know that, since it's been so long. I quit blogging in mid-December because I was on a tight deadline to finish that third novel due to Harlequin on my current (and maybe last) three-volume contract. I finished the novel about two weeks ago and shot it off to my London editor. I then spent about a week going over my research and notes for the next book, due sometime in April to Cedar Fort. This one is called My Loving Vigil Keeping, and focuses on the Winter Quarters mine disaster in 1900, at that time the United States' worst mining catastrophe (it's #5 now).

I've started that book now, and it will keep me busy to dealine. I'll blog when I can, but it won't be a lot. I'm not totally convinced that anyone is ever really interested in blogs, anyway. I seldom read them and somehow life goes on.

But now and then, oh, now and then... Yesterday morning, I read an intriguing and high-larious article in the business section of the newspaper about IKEA - you know, the Swedish company that sells cheap Swedish stuff. The gist of the article was that IKEA deliberately sets out to disorient potential customers and leave them them at the mercy of the merchandise.

Apparently the idea is to ensure that no one gets out of IKEA quickly without buying more than he or she intended to. It's like death, which everyone gets to go through. There's no Pass Go and Get $200. At IKEA, you will go through the showroom, the marketplace and the warehouse. According to the article, "... the first goal is disorienting the customer so they have to submit to the store."

Trapped, stupified customers find the showroom to be pleasingly arranged but confusing. As the customer walks and walks to find a way out of the labyrinth, the lure to buy only increases. Taken as an average, the prices are low enough - Remember? Cheap Swedish stuff? - to lull the unwary (all of us) into buying more. And more. IKEA owners are secure in the knowledge that buyers are willing to but item after item in their carts or bags because they know they'll never find that item again, if they don't. Pure genius.

At last there's the warehouse, intimidatingly as vast as that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc. Thoroughly cowed and dazed customers pick up the items and head to checkout, where the aroma of baked goods wafts and wafts. More stuff to buy. Somebody stop me!

At the same time we were discussing IKEA, my daughter Liz and I were talking about Navy SEALs, those men with, uh, nerves of steel, who took out Bin Laden - thank you very much - and recently rescued two hostages in Somalia. I remarked to Liz that I have a glimmer into SEAL ops. (It comes from years and years of studying military history.) What SEALs do, I suspect, is go through many, many contingencies for each op, until these alternative plans are literally burned on the brain. When something fails on a mission, as it invariably will, the SEALs go instantly - I mean in nano-seconds - to Plan B as a one-brain unit. And then to Plan C, and so on. There is no hesitation, no what-if, no looking back. They are trained killers who do not second guess. Good for them. That's what it takes to kill the bad guys and rescue people.

Yeah, but what if a SEAL team were helicoptered into IKEA? Could they survive the experience and find the exit quickly, without buying useless Swedish stuff? Liz and I looked at each other and laughed. I'm not completely convinced that the SEALs would be equal to the IKEA experience. Could they travel rapidly as a unit through the showroom with its convoluted passages, weaving aound zombie-eyed customers, find the merchandise area, weave some more, and negotiate the warehouse without disaster? I'm just not sure. Those Swedes are pretty clever.

But so are SEALs. I've been tempted to leave a bread crumb trail in IKEA, but there's probably some Swedish law of physics that makes it impossible to retreat in IKEA - one must advance. Maybe if the Navy needs to find a training challege for its SEAL teams, they should concoct an IKEA operation.

I'm teetering, but I'll probably give the SEALs the edge for one major reason: My dad was career Navy, and I know, just know, that SEALs are the best. It's in my DNA to know that. My mind will never change on this subject.

As for me, I'll just avoid cheap Swedish stuff and stay out of the store to begin with, especially if I happen to pull up and see a black helicopter hovering over that big blue building.

Hallelujah

2011-12-14T15:41:00.000-08:00

My apologies for not blogging. That always means I'm busy novelizing. And at this time of year, I'm also making peanut brittle, fudge, toffee, popcorn cake, and WestTexas yahoo! pecan bark. Julia Darling would be proud of me. Since all my own little darlings have been good this year, no one gets warm liver salad.

Enduring Light will be out in a few weeks. I have my freebie copies and have been mailing them to relatives and close friends. Publisher's Weekly gave the book a nice little review, so I'm pleased.

What I'm really tickled with right now is a magnificently wonderful You Tube that my daughter, Mary Ruth, forwarded to me this morning. It's from a Yupiq Eskimo village in Alaska, and is a superior rendition of Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." Just go to You Tube and enter Hallelujah Chorus Yupiq Eskimo village. I think Handel would have loved it.

I got teary-eyed, because those wonderful Indian faces reminded me of some sorely missed friends of Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Assininboine Ojibwa Lakota ancestry that I left behind when we moved from North Dakota. Mary Ruth got teary-eyed because the Hallelujah Chorus reminded her of my mom, her Grandma Baier.

It's like this: My mother was a fine musician. An alto, she taught me to sing alto when I was in the second grade. Young, maybe, but I had a good teacher. My dad was in the Navy and we moved around a lot. Everywhere we went, my mom sang The Messiah. No matter where we were living, she found a church or a group that was singing Handel's magnificent work, and she sang it every Christmas.

A few years before Mom died, she sent Mary Ruth her worn-out, well-thumbed, many-times-sung copy of Messiah, with a note saying how she had sung this all over the world. And she had, from Japan to Georgia to Texas.

A few weeks ago, Mary Ruth and I treated ourselves to the Messiah Sing-in held annually in Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City, located directly across the street from the Salt Lake Temple. The Utah Symphony played, and there were some bona fide singers in a chorus on stage, plus individual soloists. The audience, of course, augmented the on-stage chorus for selected portions of Messiah.

Wow, what a sound. It's a hard piece of music to sing on the fly, but we tried. (Mary Ruth did much better than I did.) Anyway, it was a great evening, and it made me suspect that Messiah has been performed annually, somewhere in the world ever since 1742, when it was first performed in Dublin, Ireland. And its popularity continues to grow.

But let me tell you: listening to the Hallelujah Chorus, courtesy of some charming kids and villagers from Quinhagak, Alaska, was as sublime as anything I have ever heard. I hope Handel had a chance to listen in, too, wherever he might be. You can listen, too, if you check out that You Tube video.

I'll state it here: I believe Handel's Messiah is the highwater mark of western musical civilization.

And that's a good note on which to wish all of you a Merry Christmas, or Happy Hannukah, or just Happy Holidays.

Easter Eggs in November

2011-11-20T17:45:00.000-08:00

You probably know all the signs now: When I don't blog for a length time, that means I'm busy with a manuscript. I think I'm busier now, than I have been in years. Good thing writers don't have to retire, eh? On top of fiction - three books due before the end of August 2012 - I got a phone call yesterday from an old friend in Ogden, Utah, who wants me to ghost-write a book with her. I won't say what the topic is, but even after 40 years, it's still sensational. I told her I'd definitely think about it after August.

It may be almost Thanksgiving, but I've been thinking about Easter Eggs. To writers, painters, and media types, these are the personal tidbits that find their way, in my case, into novels. People who know the author might know the reference, but that's not even necessary. I'm not sure who coined the expression, or when, but it's apt - You know, those spun sugar eggs that have a special scene inside. Faberge's gorgeous jeweled Easter Eggs for the Romanov court had cool stuff inside.

The wonderful Spanish painter, Diego Velazquez, painted "Las Meninas" in 1656. He was the painter to the court of King Felipe IV. In the painting, Velazquez himself is seen painting Margarita, the daughter of King Felipe. In addition, the king himself and the queen are seen reflected in a mirror in the painting, almost as if the viewer is the king, and not you and me. Geat painting, and full of Easter Eggs. The British director Alfred Hitchcock used to appear in each of his movies. It was always a brief sighting, but fun to look for.

Enduring Light has an Easter Egg or two. I dedicated the novel to Laura Lee Wilkinson, a dear friend of mine from Torrington, Wyoming, who was raised on an isolated ranch near Laramie Peak. At one point in the novel, Paul Otto is looking for his cattle that scattered during the summer's range fires. He tells Julia about hearing from a rancher "name of Bell," who lives near Laramie Peak and spotted his wandering cattle. That's Laura Lee's grandfather, whose name was Bell. Laura Lee and I know that, and now you do, too.

Kaiser, a rancher from the Colorado Plains that you'll meet in Enduring Light, is named after Mr. Kaiser, a rancher who lived near Cody, Wyoming. I've mentioned him before in an earlier blog. Sad to say, no one is alive now that I know who would remember his first name. I called him John Kaiser in my story.

I wrote several of my Signet Regency Romance novels when I was living in Louisiana and teaching an early-morning religion class for high school students in our church. I often used their names in the novels. In fact, Miss Grimsley's Oxford Career is named for Samantha Grimsley, one of my religion-class students.

Miss Billings Treads the Boards is an Easter Egg to Billings, Montana, close to where my Montana relatives ranched. A short story of mine called "The Background Man" has a heroine named Miss Carrington, named after Carrington, North Dakota, which has great fireworks every 4th of July.

And so on. For a favorite short story of mine, "Make a Joyful Noise," I wrote a really kind and super-duper hero who needed a "hero's" name. I named him Peter Chard. I borrowed the name from John Chard, Royal Engineer with the British army in Natal, South Africa,in 1879 during the Zulu wars. Chard received the Victoria Cross for his leadership at Rorke's Drift, where a handful of soldiers held off thousands of Zulu warriors. I've long admired him, and figured he'd be flattered, if he could know, that I borrowed his name for a what turned out to be a favorite hero of mine.

Nana Massie, the heroine of Harlequin's Marrying the Captain, is named after - yep - Nana Massie, a reader who wrote to me a few times, and whose name I liked. She willingly consented to loaning her name to that particular character. She told me later that Nana comes from the Turkish side of her family, I believe.

This is one way we writers get our jollies. In Marian's Christmas Wish, I wasn't brave enough to name the comic-buffoon of the piece - Ariadne's stuffy suitor - the actual name of a former boss in Springfield, Missouri, someone I detested. I did describe him pretty accurately in the book. Tee hee. My little secret.

Taps at Sea

2011-10-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

My parents, Kenneth C. Baier, and Dorothy V. Blair met in Florida during World War II. Dad had just returned from the South Pacific, and Mom was a Navy WAVE in gunnery, who had the honor of being the first woman in the U.S. Armed Forces to drop a bomb on a target. They married in April, 1945, and spent their lives closely connected with the U.S. Navy. Mom was a housewife, mother and teacher. Dad served in the Navy for 30 years and through three wars. Mom died in 2009, and Dad died in 2010.

They were cremated, and requested that their ashes be buried at sea. In March, 2011, my sisters and I drove to Mayport, Florida, where we turned over their ashes to the U.S. Navy. The USS Boone took their ashes to sea on a six-month deployment to the Caribbean, Central and South America. On August 27, 2011, in the company of other veterans who had requested similar services, their ashes were committed to the deep.

Let me just include a portion of this letter, dated August 27, 2011, from Roy Love, Commander, U.S. Navy, who captained the USS Boone:

"Your parents spent many years in service for their country, and it was a fitting choice that they be committed together from the deck of a proud ship so employed.

"The burial at sea ceremonies took place on the ship's deck on 27 August 2011 at 1000 hours, and conforming, to naval tradition, the ship was slowed, colors displayed at half mast, and the participating officers and crew were paraded in Dress White uniform. The morning was pleasant with warm temperatures, calm winds and gentle seas. Religious and military ceremonies were conducted with dignity and solemnity. After a player and reading of scripture by the ship's Chaplain, the commital was conducted, Petty Officer 1st Class Carlos Ortiz was proud to act as your parents' urn bearer. Full military honors, incuding a rifle salute and the playing of "Taps", were rendered.

"The opportunity to honor former service members in this way is always a privilege and the ceremony is not only touching but also ties us to the generations who have gone before us. The officers and crew of USS Boone (FFG 28) are proud to have participated in the ceremony. Please accept my personal warm regards and sincerest sympathy in your great loss."

The USS Boone, a guided missile frigate, was on its last deployment before decommissioning, come February. Its motto is "Brave Men, Brave Ship." On board was a helicopter anti-submarine squadron, which pleased us particularly, since Dad was often connected with "sub chasers" during his navy career in aviation electronics (avionics).

Let me just add, "Brave Men, Brave Women, Brave Ship," since the USS Boone became on August 27, our Mom's last ship, as well. Rest in peace, folks. You served your nation well and were also mighty good parents to three daughters - Carla Baier Kelly, Karen Baier Deo, and Wanda Baier.

The Wonderful World of Publishing

2011-10-18T06:04:00.000-07:00

Howdy, folks. First, the housekeeping: Booksigning at the Barnes and Noble Bookstore in Orem, on University Parkway, Saturday, October 22, from 1-4 p.m.

Also, November 15 is the date for my Harlequin Christmas collection, Coming Home for Christmas. It was fun to write all the stories in a Christmas Collection, for a change.

It's crazy time in the publishing world. First, the backstory: When I quit writing for Signet - part of the New American Library-Penguin/Putnam publishing world - my agent told me to get a reversion of rights on all my Signet titles. It was a two-year process, but by 2004, I had the copyrights to all my books in my name, and not Signet's, any longer. These certificates of reversion remained peacefully in my filing cabinet until quite recently.

Through the years, I have noticed with some amusement and amazement that the used book prices for my early Signet works, and my one hardcover novel have shot through the roof. By their nature, paperbacks have a relatively short shelf life. I've been told by many folks that they hang onto my paperbacks and don't trade them in. This means some of the books are somewhat hard to find in, for example, Amazon used books.

This has meant some amazing prices. A new copy of Regenecy Valentine II (ever heard of it?) goes for a whopping $347.13. That hardback of Daughter of Fortune (my first novel) commands a $159 price tag. The Lady's Companion sells for $53.70 used. Summer Campaign, my first regency novel, sells for $89.95.You get the drift.

Fast forward to ebooks, principally Kindle. There's ebook gold in them thar hills. A few months ago, I started looking at those used book prices, and noticed that Signet had reissued as Kindle books two of the short story collections where I have a novella. Ooh, hold the phone. I sent Signet's contracts department a letter explaining that I hold the copyright and they need to get my permission.

I didn't hear anything for six weeks, then last week, I received a whole flurry of emails from North American Library, Signet's parent company. The general editor of it now is an editor I remember well from Signet days. She apologized for the incorrect use of my copyright, and then said she had been trying to get in touch with me. Apparently Signet, the former leader in Regency romances, wants to reissue those older Regencies that some of their writing veterans turned out, but which are now hard to find. They're starting to launch them in January as ebooks. She wanted to know if I'd be willing to return some rights to Signet, to be part of this ebook launch.

I said I might, but told her that Cedar Fort already has ebook privileges on Marian's Christmas Wish (out now). Also in the ebook works through Cedar Fort are Reforming Lord Ragsdale, Summer Campaign, and Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand. To start, some will be issued only as ebooks, and if the demand is there, later as softcovers. "Marian" and "Mrs. Drew" (next Christmas, folks), will be in softcover and ebook. Currently there is also a 4-novella collection of my Christmas stories available through Cedar Fort only as ebooks.

The NAL editor urged me not to return all my rights to Cedar Fort, and I said there were some I could revert to Signet. I chose Libby's London Merchant and One Good Turn, because the latter is a sequel to the former, and I want to see where this goes. The editor also said she'd like me to write for them again. Heaven for me would be a new Signet book and a Cedar Fort book each year.

I guess when it rains, it pours. I got an email last week from a company that brokers book deals, Jennifer McCord andAssoc. She's a nice lady from Seattle, and I've worked with her before. Jen McCord was also interested in those Signet Regencies. Instead, I sent her one of my copies of Daughter of Fortune, set in 1680 in the royal colony of New Mexico. See above, $159 hardback) It's a bit gritty, in spite of the fact that I actually toned down the historical events.

So we shall see what happens. My advice to any of you who might be published novelists. If it's at all possible, hang onto your copyrights. I think it will be much harder now, because publishing houses know that ebooks will continue a book's life much longer. I am certain Harlequin will never relinquish any of their copyrights; I wouldn't either, in their shoes. It just so happens that I was ahead of the pack with those Signet reversions, all thanks to my agent. Was she worth her 15%? Yes, and then some.

Grandma's Cooking

2011-10-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

My grandparents, Carla and Vera Baier, lived in Cody, Wyoming, a.k.a. the picturesque eastern gateway to Yellowstone National Park. Dad was in the Navy, so we visited when we could, usually in summer. Raised in Minnesota, North Dakota, and then a housewife for years in Cody, Grandma Baier specialized in ranch/farm cooking: non-nonsense, keep-you-in-the-saddle-or-in-the-field food.

A favorite early memory was the kitchen-window conversation Granda had with a friend, Mr. Kaiser, a retired cowboy who had a little farm close by. He rode a magnificent black horse and brought Grandma cream in glass jars several times a week. (Everything tastes better in a glass jar; it just does.) Mr. Kaiser would ride up on Blackie and tap on Grandma's kitchen window. Without dismounting, he'd hand that pint to her through the window, tip his Stetson, and ride away. This was in the 1950s. I was little then, and just assumed that's how everyone got their cream.

Part of the cream was for Grandpa's coffee, of course. The rest found its way into creamed vegetables, and cream on homegrown raspberries, and oatmeal. Diet alarmists would be right in 2011 to gasp, but this was cowboy cooking for hardworking men (and a visting, somewhat observant granddaughter).

Making a dish that needed extra oomph? Grandma just opened the back door and clipped off chives growing next to the house. Balking at oatmeal? Grandma, the daughter of a Scot, just leveled The Look at me and said, "It's good for you." 'Nuff said; she was right.

Summer meant garden goodies, which eventually ended up on the stove as sacrifices: raspberries bubbling away like paint pot geysers from that park next door. The resulting jam received a parafin top and storage "downcellar." Ditto with the rhubarb sauce. Fall meant visits to neighbors to bargain for apples, which morphed into pie and applesauce.

Oh, the meals: chicken and homemade noodles; what she called Yankee boiled dinner; beef - naturally - in all its western glory. When I was newly married and visiting, I asked for that homemade noodle recipe. Grandma just snorted and said, "Carla, it's just a handful of this and that!" I watched her handfuls, approximated, and ended up with a recipe I still use, now and then.

Our garden in Wellington, Utah, has chives and raspberries, and we still live in cow country. (Lamb country, too; Carbon County has a Greek and Italian mining heritage.) My jars of raspberry jam line up downcellar like little soldiers. When I look at them, I smile and think of Grandma Baier. I'm smiling now.

As a sidenote: When I needed another important stockman for the sequel to Borrowed Light, I "auditioned" a variety of last names - novelists do that - until I remembered Mr. Kaiser. John Kaiser was born.

Here's a ticket, you're stupid

2011-09-26T15:57:00.000-07:00

The curmudgeonly Carla is alive and well, thanks to way too much canning. I'll blame all typos in this blog on my charred fingers - I've been making uber-hot salsa. This morning I blanched and then froze most of the corn in Iowa. This afternoon, it was salsa. My daughter Liz, who is currently living with us, really likes it, so I see it disappearing at a rapid rate. I realize food is canned to be eaten, but I'd like it to last at least until the first frost.

We have some friends who really like my refrigerator pickles. I gave them two quarts earlier in the summer, and now they are hinting for more. I'm through making those fridge pickles and the bottled dill ones, so I gave a bucket of cukes plus the recipe to my husband to take to these folks. Well, they decided they were too busy to make them, so he dropped them off at the senior citizens' center for folks who did want them.

Curmudgeon. I'm still shaking my head over 64-year-old Amos Wayne Richards, a genius from North Carolina who thought he'd hike solo in Little Blue John Canyon, where Aaron Ralston end up trapped by a boulder for 127 hours in 2003, and had to amputate his own arm.

Anyway, Genius broke his leg and had to crawl four days before rangers from Arches and Canyonlands found him. Let's see: hiking alone with no plan left with anyone, in a canyon that's a known killer. I guess what almost bothers me the most is that rangers had to waste their time and maybe endanger their own lives in finding this dummy. But they do it because they're rangers, and feel responsible, even for idiots in our national parks and monuments. I rangered at much-safer historic sites, but we all knew rangers who died in the line of duty to help those who can barely chew gum and walk, in our national parks.

My Border Patrol son says he wishes he could give tickets for stupidity. I agree. I hope I'm not incurring horrible wrath here, but I had to shake my head over the LDS missionary somewhere in Latin America who was badly mauled by a zoo animal best left alone. It seems the missionary was climbing where he shouldn't have, and the animal was smarter. I feel bad for what happened to him, of course, but gee whiz, none of this had to happen. His wounds became infected, and he was seriously injured, and had to come home a bit early from his mission. I really trust he learned something from his experience, and I wish him all success in future. Totally.

Part of it's being young and dumb. I understand that. The North Carolina hiker was old and dumb. I understand that, too. I just wish people would think a bit before engaging in questionable behavior. Don't monkey with dangerous animals, and exercise reasonable caution in national parks. It's not a lot to ask.

And be careful with my hot salsa.

Stop me if you've heard this one

2011-09-14T06:34:00.000-07:00

I've got the giggles, and I blame the current issue of Reader's Digest, which seems to be devoted to humor this month. Yeah, we read Reader's Digest. How low-brow can you get? We also subscribe to The New Yorker, but I'll tell you right here I just read it for the cartoons and movie reviews. They typically review movies that would only come to Price, Utah, if hell freezes over, but hey, we can order them on Netflix.

Anyway, I'll probably laugh about this joke for days, because it describes me, almost to perfection:
"I was diagnosed with antisocial behavior, so I joined a support group. We never meet."

That is my kind of society. I am no joiner.

Our stake president in Louisiana once said, "It takes a very good meeting to beat no meeting at all." Truer words were never spoken. I know I'm going to some cold outer rung someday because in a Primary stake meeting in Wyoming, one winter day, I objected when we were informed that there would be no meeting because the person in charge wasn't there. I asked, "Why weren't we informed before we drove 90 miles?" Shame on me. What was I thinking?

I'm still laughing about an incident in the life of James Whistler, the truly great American artist who spent his working years in Europe, producing a whole lotta stuff that was superior to what we know as "Whistler's Mother," but which is titled, "Arrangement in Gray and Black."

Whistler wasted - uh - spent three years at West Point, before he was booted out for a variety of reasons, once of which was misconduct in art class. (H'mm. Wonder what he was drawing?) Anyway, he went to work for what basically became the US Geological Survey, and spent a lot of time doodling in the margins of his maps.

As the story goes, he drew a couple of little children playing on the shore of either a lake or the coastline. The Powers That Be further up the food chain told him to get rid of the children. The next draft he sent had two little headstones on the shore. Whistler was my kind of guy.

Sometimes you just never know who is a ribald humorist at heart. Indian Wars historians LOVE the collected letters of Frederick Benteen, officer in the Seventh Cavalry who hated Lt. Col. Custer, the second in command. On the day of the fatal Custer fight, Custer divided his forces and sent Benteen off "valley hunting," as Benteen called it. It turned out to be a good day for Benteen, because it meant his three companies, along with Marcus Reno's companies, managed to survive Custer's fate. Benteen was dour, sour, and had what I call "shark eyes"-completely devoid of emotion.

Anyway, Benteen wrote frequent letters to his wife during his military career, and that's the collection. They were explicit and not what you might believe came from a Victorian. (Don't be fooled. Those of the Victorian Era weren't that prudish.) The fun thing about Benteen's letters were his little margin doodles. They'd make a sailor blush. Trust me here: you're not an Indian Wars historian if you haven't laughed and gasped over the Benteen letters.

My prescription for the day? Go have a good laugh. I'll be missing my antisocial behavior support group in your honor today.

Where were you?

2011-09-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was on my way to work at Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site. I was a ranger in the National Park Service. I was listening to National Public Radio on the short - very short - commute from ranger housing to the fort. I heard an announcer interrupt in an apologetic tone that he needed to break in to say that it appeared a plane had crashed into one of the two tall towers at the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. I did a "H'mm," kind of mental measurement, and then walked up the long hill to the fort, a reconstruction of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company fort, built in 1828 and a site of generally peaceful commerce between Indians and fur traders until 1867. It's a great site.

When I got to work, all the other rangers were upstairs watching the television. I got there in time to see the first tower collapse. What a day. Immediately, all Park Service sites were placed on very high alert. No one knew what would happen next. We all agreed that if the country needed to hide the cabinet or the president, there was no safer place than Fort Union: It was remote, isolated, had a 14-foot wall around it, and plenty of readily available firepower, from assault rifles stored there (oh, yes), to black powder muskets of the flintlock variety. We weren't making light of the situation, but in our own way, quite ready to absolutely do what needed to be done to protect our site and our leaders. No one on duty that day would have flinched at any sacrifice required of us. (You probably had the same feeling, wherever you were.)

Strange day, followed by strange week and month. As federal badge wearers, we were encouraged to put a strip of black tape over our badges, and most of us did. We were a pretty solemn bunch, as I know you were.

The hardest part of that month was the duty we generally did as a matter of course and took largely for granted. Instead of just raising the U.S. flag, we had to fly the flag at half staff, in memory of those who died. We did it for a month, and I think we all dreaded it, when it was our turn. There is something so disturbing and visceral about raising the U.S. flag to the top of the staff, then lowering it to mid-level. It was a hard duty that made me cry.

I lived on the other side of North Dakota, and I drove home the following Saturday - I worked one week on and one week off. When I got home, I typically went through the week's mail, and sat down to read. This time, I picked up the latest Newsweek Magazine, which had something on the cover that was totally pre-9-ll. I remember thumbing quickly through the magazine, and then closing it. Since that Tuesday, the world had changed, and there wasn't any point in reading old news.

True to form for me, I next went to my bookshelf and picked up my copy of Owen Johnson's The Lawrenceville Stories. He wrote the book in the late 19th century, and it just happens to be one of my favorite books. I took it off the shelf and just held it, because it was a little piece of comforting normalcy in a horrible, abnormal week. Then I fix myself a bowl of cheese grits with hot sauce, the ultimate comfort food.

The things we do, when the world changes.

Here, kitty kitty

2011-09-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

Marian's Christmas Wish comes out today, Sept. 8. My daughter Liz and I were taking about that this morning, and our conversation segued into Christmas. As we talked, she was thumbing through one of the numerous catalogs that seem to spring up like daisies in our mailbox at the Wellington P.O. She came to a listing for what Liz calls "Granny sweatshirts," the ones with a demure little collar and pictures of cats on them, or butterflies.

We had a chuckle because my Mom, who died in 2009, used to wear Granny sweatshirts. And thinking about those kitty sweatshirts reminded Liz of the Christmas debacle when she was a freshman in high school (I think).

My mother was never blessed with the wise-selection-of-Christmas-presents gene. One year she sent me a bathrobe for Christmas, which was super. I told her how much I liked it, which meant that for years I got a bathrobe for Christmas. Now, I don't know about you, but one of those suckers lasts me for years. I just didn't need one every year.

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not an ungrateful kid who pouted over gifts, when I should be lucky I got anything at all. I just found myself wondering what Mom's thought process was every year around the Holidays.

The Kitty Christmas is the one we remember. My older three children were out of the house and the youngest two daughters were in high school. We happened to be all there in Louisiana for Christmas, so I saw what everyone got from my mom. I remember that second-son Sam, then living and working in West Texas, got a western-style shirt that might have fit him ten years earlier. We had the most fun with what the three daughters received: identical long, red flannel nightgowns with a kitten embroidered on the front.

After the shock, general hilarity took over as they laughed and vowed Never.To.Wear.It. In the course of a few days, they learned that their two girl cousins, Sandhya and Jyoti Deo, each received a similar kitten nightgown.

As I recall, Sandhya was then a junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Tecnology. Yup, that branch of the family - my older sister's kids - are uber-bright. Sandhya was a bit more resourceful than my daughters. She saw the gag possibilities of the kitten nightgown and took hers back to MIT with her, looking for an opportunity.

Bright girl. She managed to persuade one of her male student friends to wear it to class for a day. I don't know if money was involved, or if he was just the adventurous type (probably that), but he wore Sandhya's red flannel kitten nightgown through a day of classes at America's most prestigious brainiac school (sorry, CalTech and St. John's).

I like that. I appreciate a spirit of adventure. Sandhya's bold friend furnished us with a great story that always makes us smile. (I don't think anyone ever dared to tell Mom what had happened. I doubt she would have been amused.)

In Marian's Christmas Wish, a Christmas pudding figures prominently in the novel. Apparently this was something on the order of a fruitcake, that most-maligned holiday goody. I have a theory that there is really only one fruitcake in America, and it just keeps getting passed around, uneaten, to friends and relatives during the holiday season. Someone should band that fruitcake like a bird, and see where it actually travels.

In Enduring Light, Julia Darling makes a Buche de Noel for her fiance, Paul Otto, and later, his picky little sweethearts on the Double Tipi. I am certain that Buches do not get passed around, but are treasured, exclaimed over, and consumed. I'd love to try one. I may have to break down and make one, or try to.

Just as long as it doesn't come in a Kerr canning jar. I'm at that point now in the canning season where I am heartily tired of plunking veggies into jars. Although I do like that little pop when the jar seals. So satisfying.

Just some housekeeping

2011-09-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

Just a short note and a new photo. This is pretty much what the cover to Enduring Light will look like. I'm pleased with it. I think it conveys Julia, except I wish she'd smile for her cover photos. Maybe she's shy... That book will be out January 8, 2012.

Marian's Christmas Wish will be out on Thursday, Sept. 8. Cedar Fort lists it as an ebook, too, although it doesn't say that yet on Amazon. It's supposed to, I believe. Ebook folks may want to order through the Cedar Fort website.

My first booksigning for "Marian" will be at a Seagull Bookstore (not sure which one yet) on Saturday, September 24, from 10 a.m. to noon. Next will be a booksigning at the Deseret Book- Ammon, in Idaho Falls, on Friday, Sept. 30, from 6-7:30 p.m. The next evening there will be a booksigning in Cardston, Alberta, at that cool bookstore on the main street.

And that's it for now. Hubby had surgery yesterday on his neck, and he's home now. It went better than the back surgery a year + ago, so that's a blessing.

Eli Jenkins Prayer

2011-08-30T05:35:00.000-07:00

First, some housekeeping. That Box of Shame is really filling up at the post office. We continue to pick our veggies when they're small, so they needn't suffer the indignity of the aforementioned box. It seems the only humane thing to do.

Now to Eli Jenkins. Some of you may be familiar with the lovely poem/song from Dylan Thomas's "Under Milk Wood." I've been listening to Welsh music lately, and Welshmen Bryn Terfel and Rhys Meirion sing a particularly beautiful rendition:

Eli Jenkins Prayer (Sunset Poem)
Every morning when I wake,
Dear Lord a little prayer I make,
O please to keep thy loving eye,
On all poor creatures born to die.

And every evening at sun-down,
I ask a blessing on the town,
For whether we last the night or no,
I'm sure it's always touch-and-go.

We are not wholly bad or good,
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first,
To see our best side, not our worst.

O let us see another day!
Bless us all this night, I pray,
And to the sun we all will bow,
And say, good-bye - but just for now!

It's that third verse that reveals Dylan Thomas' understanding of the human condition. As he knew all too well, we truly are not wholly bad or good. But he understood the Lord's tender mercies, because the Lord is inclined to see our best side, and not our worst.

And than, in turn, reminds me of that comment made centuries ago by Bishop Gregory of Tours, which I have mentioned before: "A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad."

That's the word for now. I'll try to make a better effort today to lend a hand and look kindly on people who are as human as I am.

The Box of Shame

2011-08-23T12:05:00.001-07:00

I've been waiting for it to appear at our post office, and there it was yesterday: The Box of Shame. The box sits inside the first set of doors into the post office. During gardening/harvesting season, it is the repository for Unloved, Unwanted Vegetables.

You know the ones I mean: the zucchini that hid under a big, shady leaf until it turned into the U.S.S. Nimitz; the yellow squash that grew and grew until it developed more warts than a toad; the cucumber on steroids.

It's a hard-knock life for vegetables that don't make the cut for the family table or the canning jar. They end up in the Box of Shame, waiting for someone to take pity on them - someone who maybe doesn't have a garden, or someone who is not too proud to eat rejected vegetables, because it's the end of the month and food money has run out.

Maybe fruit fares better. Bananas that get too ripe can be mashed and turned into world-class banana bread. Mushy apples can become fine applesauce. Peaches are good enough for the average eater to "work with them," by pariung around bruised spots to make them edible.

It's a sad fate to end up in The Box. Free puppies, wagging their tails, look charming in a box in front of Walmart, with hopeful kids and parents standing by to ensure good homes. Not free zucchinis, which have nothing to wag, and no little whiny, look-at-me sounds to make. The Green Machines are abandoned without a backward look, or even the hint of a quivering lip. They have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and no one cares.

I can empathize a little. I remember those dread days on the playground when we lined up to be chosen for kickball and dodgeball teams. I was never the star athlete, but I did have friends, so I can't remember a time when I was ever chosen last. Still, it's tough to wait and hope.

So, gardeners of the world, make a better effort to search out all those veggies in your garden that might be lurking under leaves or other hiding places. Spare them the Box of Shame. Rejection is a painful thing. Remember: except for some cosmic quirk of fate, that could be you, sweltering in the cardboard box, desperate for acceptance.

I Be Jammin'

2011-08-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year, when I hunt the elusive raspberry and cram it into leetle jars. There's more to it than that, and probably the best part is remembering my gran, Vera Baier, who used to make raspberry jam in Cody, Wyoming, and then later in Worden, Montana. There was generally a slice or so of bread lying around to spread it on, so we were in heaven, yea berrily.

I learned to be wary around those raspberries. When they get all bloated with sugar and subjected to heat, the mass turns molten, reminding me of Yellowstone NP paint pots. I learned to be careful - you know, sort of like not frying bacon nekkid.

Daughter Mary Ruth and I both made raspberry jam last year, and a peach jam I make with maraschino cherries and orange Jell-O. We bought cornbread mix by the case, and divvied it into gift bags for Christmas. One jar jam to one box cornbread mix equals something tasty for friends.

On my end of the gift-giving, I occasionally added a small jar of my lemon curd. Oh my word, lemon curd (or its close cousin, lime curd). I would eat a doorknob, if someone spread lemon curd on it. The stuff is heaven on English muffins, rolls, toast, or ice cream. Now I tend to eat it on fat free Greek yogurt, and that's heaven enough. What I'm saying is, if you get jam from me, plus the lemon curd, you know you've been elevated to most favorite nation status. That's the way it is.

Mary Ruth introduced me to a new jam recipe that is making the rounds in the Granite School District in Salt Lake City: Peach Raspberry Jam. It won't replace lemon curd (nothing will), but I'm going to make it this year, along with other jams, because it used fewer raspberries and won't break the bank.

Peach Raspberry Jam
5 c. peaches, mashed
10 oz. frozen raspberries (or an equivalent amount of fresh ones)
8 1/2 c. sugar
1 pkg. pectin
1/2 c. lemon juice
Red food coloring, if you want (I don't)

Mix all ingredients except sugar and bring to a boil. Add sugar and boil for four minutes. Pour into jars and seal. (It doesn't need to be processed, as long as those jars seal.)

It's quite good.

Now it's back to pickles. I be picklin', too, mostly dill, but also refrigerator sweet pickles.

And then it's back to my Fort Laramie book, where times are tough and it's January 1876, and it's bleak and cold. I'll slice some cucumbers and eat those as I write, and think cold and dismal thoughts. I wonder if lemon curd would taste good on cukes...

My heroes

2011-08-11T07:51:00.000-07:00

There was a little article in this morning's Deseret News about Florence Smith Jacobsen, who is 98 years old now, and going strong. Years ago, she was general president of the LDS Church's Young Women's Mutual Improvement Association. It's a worldwide organization for LDS young women ages 12 to 18.

She also served as Chuch Curator. It was in this capacity that I had my only encounter - via letter - from Sister Jacobsen. It was in the mid-'70s, when I was a seasonal ranger at Fort Laramie National Historic Site, located in Eastern Wyoming. As curator, Sister J asked me to do a little survey of local historic sites that were also of interest to Mormons, who pioneered what became known as the Mormon Trail in 1847. Specifically, she wanted me to drive to Chimney Rock, near Bayard, Nebraska, and see what kind of historical site it was, and how the state of Nebraska was maintaining it.

One day, we put our three youngsters in the car and drove to Bayard, Nebraska, about 40 or 50 miles from Torrington, where we lived. The historical site was maintained by the state with rustic restrooms, and a signboard, as I recall. I took photos. It was rudimentary, at best.

What happened then, I've never forgotten. You've probably seen photos of Chimney Rock, a distinctive formation that most folks traveling west from 1847 on, wrote about in their journals. It was a milestone of sorts to those trail pioneers, because they knew they were approaching the heart of the west.

Sam was our youngest child then. I think he was about two years old, a sturdy little guy. Martin set him down and Sam and his older sibs started walking toward Chimney Rock. It was some distance from the signboard, but away they went, glad to be out of the car. I watched them. Eventually, I called them back, because it was time to leave. The older two turned around, but Sam kept walking. And walking, on those short legs. He was quite determined to reach Chimney Rock (It was still at least a mile away), and didn't take kindly to being stopped.

In my mind's eye in 1974, I could see other little ones like Sam, walking and walking along the Mormon/Oregon/California Trail, 120+ years before our fact-finding visit. In their case, they had no choice, no warm home to return to, no safe bed to sleep in, no guarantee that there would be anything for them at the end of the trail, or even if they would ever arrive in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Sam humbled me that day with his determination and courage. I've never forgotten it, and I still silently thank Sister Jacobsen for creating a memory. What a chuff I am. I have tears in my eyes as I write this, and I'm not particularly sentimental.

We also stopped at Rebecca Winter's grave, on the return to Torrington. In 1854, I believe, Rebecca Winters, one of the saints headed to Utah Territory, died of cholera. Her grieving family buried her by the trail, and stretched out a wagon tire iron, to arch over her grave. Years later, when the Burlington Northern Railroad was surveying the route by Scottsbluff to lay track, they came upon that tire iron arch, which had been crudely inscribed with Rebecca's name, date of death, and destination.

Kindly railroad officials managed to located Rebecca Winter's family in Salt Lake. Her descendants returned and put up a very nice marker, which also included words from that Latter-day Saint trail anthem, "Come, Come, Ye Saints:" It's the verse that reads, "And should we die, before our journey's through, happy day, all is well. We then are free from toil and labor, too, with the just we shall dwell. But if our lives are spared again, to see the saints their rest obtain, oh, how we'll make this chorus swell, All is well! All is well!"

The railroad kindly did a jog around Rebecca Winter's grave. Today, there is a nice area, plus more of a marker, as Rebecca Winters continues to touch passersby. All is quite well at that monument to pioneers.

Anyway, I sent photos and descriptions of what I found at Chimney Rock and the Winters' grave to Sister Jacobsen. I couldn't resist, though, and my native cheery temperament took over. I told Sister J that I was really sorry, but Chimney Rock was eroding, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it.

Sister Jacobsen filled her Church Curator's role with great accomplishment. She was responsible for saving the Lion House, the home for many of Brigham Young's plural wives. It had been headed for demolition, but she made a proposal to preserve it that was wise, and led to its renovation, rather than ruin. It remains a lovely landmark in downtown Salt Lake City. She also suggested the creation of the church's Museum of History, which is a wonderful place today. She also supervised the renovation of the interior of the Manti Temple. which I have always considered one of the most amazing pieces of historic architecture in the United States. We happen to be fortunate enough to live in the Manti Temple district and spend quality time in there.

So my hat is off to you, Florence Jacobsen, and you, Sam Kelly, for touching my heart in many ways. You're my heroes.

Hi diddle dee dee, a writer's life for me

2011-08-08T20:36:00.000-07:00

Ah, crazy times in the writing world. I came home from Salt Lake today and found a leetle box from Harlequin, which usually means one of my books has been translated into another language. The book cover was for Beau Crusoe, the book I wrote that still makes me blush a bit, but I had not a single clue what the language was. Usually I'm good at languages, but this one defeated me. A serious look at the small print on the inside cover revealed the language: Turkish. Wow. This means I've been translated into nine languages now: English, German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish and now Turkish. Anyway, I have three copies of Beau Crusoe in Turkish. Know anyone who speaks Turkish?

My reading epiphany came years ago when I finally read War and Peace, which was a superfine book. Trouble was, all the time I was reading it I kept wondering, "If this is so good in English, imagine how much good it must be in Russian." Now I have no ego that my translated books even hold an unlit match to Tolstoi, but I do wonder how they read in other languages. The only ones where I'll have a glimmer is when Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand and Reforming Lord Ragsdale come out in manga in Japan. Comic books of Regency novels! To quote probably Jane Austen, "I'm diverted."

A kind reader was curious about status of forthcoming stuff. Here goes: Enduring Light is now at the publisher's, and I think the plan is a January 2012 release. I've seen a draft of the cover, and it's gorgeous. Julia is just the cutest thing, and Mr. Otto approves. I had so much fun writing Enduring Light that it must be illegal in at least 24 counties. Driving home through the canyons today, I started daydreaming and wondering who I would cast as Mr. Otto, Julia and James in the movie version... Maybe I should pay attention to the road, eh?

Coming Home for Christmas is a three-story anthology I wrote for Harlequin. It will be out November 15, I believe. My editor and I thought about this one and decided on a family during that trusty, rusty Regency era, with three members trying to get home for Christmas. I ramped it up a bit this way - the first story is about a ship's surgeon stranded in San Diego in 1813, on the far side of the world with no rescue at hand. The next story is his daughter's story, when she is Doing Good in northern Turkey during the Crimean War, and also trying to get home for Christmas. The third story is her son's story. Like his grandfather, he is a surgeon, but in the U.S. Army, on leave from Fort Laramie and trying to get home to Philly for a Christmas wedding. The three-generation thing worked quite well, and I had fun. It's handy when wars line up so neatly for my characters in three generations. I'm going to enter the first short story, "Christmas in Paradise," in Romance Writers of America's Rita Awards contest, in the novella-length category.

I'm currently writing The Hesitant Heart, set at the aforementioned Fort Laramie during 1876, that summer of the Rosebud battle, the Custer fight, and the Starvation March. Nuff said about that, because I prefer not to discuss what I'm currently working on.

Now to the saga of Choosing Rob Inman, which begins in Dartmoor Prison just as the War of 1812 is winding down. I turned it in in November of 2009, and heaven knows what hole it dropped into. All I know is that it will be coming out in the middle of 2012, and has been renamed Marriage of Mercy. I kid you not. If I searched for years, I doubt I would have come up with a worse title. Tell you what: if you buy a copy, write Choosing Rob Inman on a 3x5 card and paste it over Marriage of Mercy. For all that, it's a good book. Maybe someday it'll end up translated into Urdu.

Marian's Christmas Wish is now up on Amazon and will be out in September. Why September? Maybe to beat the Christmas rush. This is a reprint of a book that came out in 1989, I think, but which is hard to find now, hence the reprint. It will also be available in ebook format. Also out for Christmas, but so far only in ebook format, will be a collection of four of my earlier Christmas stories: "The Christmas Ornament," "Object of Charity," "Make a Joyful Noise" (a personal favorite), and "The Three Kings," rather a dark tale.

Oooo, horrible transition (read, none) to this next paragraph -

You know what question I get a lot about Borrowed Light? People want the recipe for Cecils with Tomato Sauce. Here it is:
1 c. cold roast beef or rare steak finely chopped
salt and pepper
onion juice
Worchestershire Sauce
Flour
2 T. bread crumbs
1 T. melted butter
Yolk of one egg, slightly beaten
Season beef with next salt and pepper, onion juice and W Sauce; add remaining ingredients, and shape into the form of small croquettes, pointed at ends. Roll in flour, egg and crumbs, fry in deep fat, drain and serve with tomato sauce. (Julia substituted ketchup, for the sophisticated palates of her guys on the TTP.)

And that's it for me. Back to The Hesitant Heart. One more thing: I'm speaking at a writers' conference at Utah Valley University on October 6. It's an advanced romance writing class. I called it "Now What? Writing and Selling." Not sure what I'll say yet, beyond don't quit your day job, and always keep a copy. I'll have something useful by October 6. I promise.

Truly random natterings

2011-07-25T10:28:00.000-07:00

I have a writing board by my computer. At least, that's what I call it. You know, those easel thingees you used to prop up letters or information or notes, while you're writing. When I finish a writing project, I generally deep six the chapters outlines, etc., that have gathered there, and clear the decks for the next book. What this does it get me down to the metal surface of the writing board, where for years I have affixed various thoughts that either appealed to my twisted sense of humor or - hopefully - a more tender side.

On the funny ones, I added this little poem from the Wall Street Journal when my kids were the age where this made total sense:
Heavens Above
If children moved away at twelve,
We'd wring our hands and grieve;
Thus God provided teenage years
To make us glad they leave.

(It's attributed to Steve Cornett, who must've had a doozey of a week with his teens)

This bit of fluff came from the Orlando Sentinel:
What do you know about Holland? The British wit Alan Coren wrote this about it: "Apart from cheese and tulips, the main product of the country is advocaat, a drink made from lawyers." That still makes me chuckle.

One of my favorite authors was Ellis Peters, who wrote the wonderful Brother Cadfael series. This bit of wisdom is from One Corpse Too Many, where the good monk teams up for the first time with under sheriff Hugh Beringar, creating one of crime fiction's best duos:
"You did the work that fell to you, and did it well. God disposes all. From the highest to the lowest extreme of a man's scope, wherever justice and retribution can reach him, so can grace."

The historian in me that never lurks too far below the surface always appreciates this, because it is monumentally true of people and times. It's from the introduction to The Age of Napoleon, which was co-authored by Will and Ariel Durant, surely one of history's most interesting - and possibly unlikely - couples:
    "All in all, in life and in history, we have found so many good men and women that we have quite lost faith in the wickedness of mankind."

And this, by a wise man, indeed, Bishop Gregory of Tours, many, many years ago, from his History of the Franks:
   "A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad."

As I embark on chapter five of The Hesitant Heart, a novel set at Fort Laramie in 1876, I am always in agreement with this wisdom from Galsworthy: "Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem."   I've done many years of research on the Indian Wars, and let me assure you, this was a common complaint on the frontier, when soldiers flinched as folks sitting comfortably back home were in huge sympathy with the Indians on the plains. (Now don't think of me as hard-hearted. I'm a total realist, and I look at the Indian Wars from the 19th century POV. The US Army acted as an agent of the federal government, nothing more.)

This comment from the great Ray Bradbury is something I am always mindful of, when I write. I hope all writers are:
    "I held the bird in my hands, one hand cupped over the other. I could not feel the weight of the bird and would not have known it was there or even alive except I could feel its heart beating. So it is with a good story or poem. You should feel the heartbeat, without feeling the weight of what you are reading."

To conclude on a lighthearted note: "Don't put off 'til tomorrow what you can do today. That way, if you liked it, you can do it again tomorrow."

Now to fill up the writing board with new chapter outlines... It's all good.

In the mines

2011-07-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

Sorry about my blogging silence for so long, but when I'm in the home stretch of writing a novel, it'sh hard to think of anything else. I finished the sequel to Borrowed Light on Saturday, and spent the next few days revising and tidying it. I also included a bunch of recipes that Juljia cooked on the Double Tipi. DOn't know if those will be in Enduring Light or not, but I've got them together. Someof them I want to try, especially Lemon Queens.

I also spent last Monday proofing the final copy for Marian's Christmas Wish, which Cedar Fort will publish in September. When I left Signet, I was able to get my copyrights for all my Signet work, plus Daughter of Fortune, my first novel. Since those early Signets are quite pricey on used book websites, it seemed like a good idea. The book will be in paperback and also available in ebook format.

To continue. It's a day or two later, and I noticed that my blog didn't print as I wished. The fault is undoubtedly mine, but oh well. The title is slugged as "In the mines," but none of that came out in the blog I thought I wrote.

I volunteer at the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in Helper, Utah. Last week I got lucky, and was able to interview - for the museum - a brother and sister who were raised in Castle Gate, Utah, near one of Carbon County's numerous coal mines.

Anyone traveling on Highway 6 through the canyons to Price, Utah, will pass Castle Gate, a distinctive rock formation. There used to be a tunnel, but the highway eventually blasted through. There also used to be a town of Castle Gate. It's gone completely. When a mine was closed because the demand for so much coal petered out, or what was there become too hard and dangerous to mine, or for a variety of reasons, the coal company usually just razed the town. In some cases, the people living there were allowed to purchase their homes from the coal company and then the company moved them to a different location.

Castle Gate was one of those coal camps that was razed. There are few, if any, indications that a thriving little town once existed there, in the shadow of Castle Gate and some imposing cliff faces. Boyd Newbold and his half sister Helen Vexler were raised there. Boyd's wife, Joyce, was raised there, too. Joyce never knew three of her grandfathers, who died in the tragic Castle Gate mine explosion in 1924, when 174 miners perished. (Joyce was a bonus. I was there to interview her husband Boyd and sister-in-law, but her story was equally compelling. I expanded that interview with pleasure. It got even bigger when her nephew Mike Vlamakis showed up, and I got a Greek-American angle, too.)

It's the detail that can make a story memorable. I asked Boyd and Helen to tell me of a distinct memory from their childhood in the 1930s. Helen remembered the whistle that blew, indicating some sort of catastrophe in the mine - one short burst and two long ones, over and over. Then the phone would ring in her house, and her stepfather, Mac McDonald, would report to the mine. He was the master electrician and one of his vital jobs was the get air flowing out of the mine, to drive out accumulations of deadly methane gas.

The McDonalds lived in one of the few houses with a telephone, because his job was so essential to mine safety. Mac didn't generally go in the mine. Boyd and Helen both remembered that he smoked a pipe, and always had matches on him. According to Boyd, when Mac had to go in the mine, they would search him for matches and take them away, because the danger of explosion was always present. "He always clenched his pipe in his teeth," Boyd said. Once they tried to take that away before he went in, and Mac told them in no uncertain terms that if they took his pipe, he wouldn't go in the mine. So there's this tall, thin Scot, pipe clenched in his teeth, working underground and most emphatically not smoking.

Boyd remembers the days of strikes, as the United Mine Workers of America sought to unionize the mines, and to help the miners negotiate better contracts. Before a shift, the men went into the change house (or bath house) to put on their pit clothes and get ready to go in the mine. If a strike was imminent, the president of the local UMW chapter would walk out among the men and dump out the water he carried in his lunch box. (These lunch boxes were cylindrical affairs with part containing food, and part containing water.) When their president silently dumped out the water, they knew they weren't going in the mine that day, because no one went in a mine without water. "Then we'd change clothes again, and go to the union hall to find out what was going on," Boyd said.

The strikes could be lengthy. Three months was not uncommon. Boyd remembers going to other mines to show support for the miners at that location. The striking miners made life as miserable as they could for the "scabs," men the company hired to take the places of the miners on strike. When a coal truck tried to leave the mine, the men on strike would swarm it and pull down the end gate, dumping the coal.

And there's more. I asked Helen for one of her earliest memories. She recalled Mary Kay Burgess, a first grade friend, who died when a large boulder from that cliff face crashed into the Burgess house, killing her. The company had dug deep trenches behind the houses, which generally were effective enough to stop smaller boulders from rolling into the houses. But when a hunk of the cliff fell, that was too much.

Joyce showed me a photograph of her great grandmother Mary Ann Davis Reese, born in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. She was a beautiful woman, dark in the way of the Welsh, with beautiful eyes. She and her husband moved to Winter Quarters, Utah, and he worked in the mines there, drawn by work he was used to doing in Wales. The promise of better lives in America drew them there, as well as the urge - in the case of Mormons - to move to Utah. As was true in so many cases, the real benefits of U.S. life smoothed the path for their descendants, but not necessarily them.

Mining life is not for the faint of heart, even now. My bishop's wife remembers that day of the recent Crandall Canyon mine disaster, when 6 miners were trapped and died, and eventually 3 rescuers died, too. Her husband, Brad Timothy, was head of mine rescue at a nearby mine. All that day, over and over, the networks played a shot of Bishop Timothy in his truck, headed to the mine. "It was a long, long day," Margaret remembers, as she watched that same shot.

And Helen remembers that when the whistle blew in Castle Gate, all of the wives whose men were in the pit that day would hurry to the mine entrance and wait and wait.

As they say here in Carbon County, if you can turn on a light switch and get light, thank a miner.

All through the night

2011-06-03T20:10:00.000-07:00

This writing business is not for the faint of heart, especially when a writers chooses - or is chosen by - a big topic. I'm on Chapter 19 of the sequel to Borrowed Light, and it's more fun than is probably legal in some states. Writing can be like that, at times, or it can be like pulling teeth. Sometimes I have to just wait patiently for the story to surface. The cool part is that I know it will. I just have to be patient.

For me, anyway (all writers are different, I suspect), what happened today indicates that I am already thinking about the next book for Cedar Fort, which will be My Loving Vigil Keeping, a story of the Scofield Mine Disaster. The title, of course, comes from the Welsh lullaby.

This afternoon, I was driving home from Manti, and decided to take the back road to Scofield, which meant threading down a twisty, windy road past the Skyline Mine. My goodness there's a lot of snow on Utah's mountains. I stopped and looked for a minute at all the cars and pickups in the mine parking lot, thought of the many men underground right then, and said a small prayer.

In tiny Scofield, I finally had the courage to visit the cemetery. Two hundred men and boys died in the explosion and rising damp of the Winter Quarters Mine on May 1, 1900. Many bodies were shipped to other cemeteries in Utah and the West, but a substantial number remain there in Scofield. Nine Luoma men and boys from Finland - yes, one family - died there and remain there. Luoma Luoma Luoma Luoma Luoma Luoma Luoma Luoma Luoma, all in a row. And there are Welshmen, and Scotsmen, and one touching stone from Mrs. T.H. Reilley, to her husband: "Sleep on, dear husband/And take thy rest,/God called thee home,/ He thought it best."

Marker after marker, and all with the same date: May 1, 1900. On and on. I've been in some sad places: The Holocaust Museum, the Antietam Battlefield, in particular. And now there is a third one, and it seems more terrible than the rest: the little cemetery at Scofield, Utah. Maybe it seems more terrible to me, because in January or February when I start writing that story, I'll be deep in the middle of the sorrow. And the joy. I couldn't just write a sad story.

I sat in my car, and my shuffle happened to be playing Welsh folk songs. "Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee, all through the night./Guardian angels God will send thee, all through the night./Soft the drowsy hours are creeping, hill and vale in slumber sleeping./I, my loving vigil keeping, all through the night."

There are far too many young men who will be always be young men, in that cemetery. I sat there, cried, and promised them I'd write them the best book I could.

And that's the easy life of a writer. We do take things personally, or we'd never write.

When I'm writing, I'm happy...

2011-05-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

Boy howdy, it's been awhile since I randomly nattered, but I get that way when I'm writing novels. I should apologize, but there's no point. When I'm writing, I get pretty focused on the manuscript, and that's not going to change.

First, some housekeeping: On Saturday, June 4, from 2-6 p.m., I'll be signing books at BYU, as part of the Utah Festival of Books. Should be fun. As far as I know, that's about it for booksignings anytime soon. I think I'll be back at BYU for Education Week in August.

Something high-larious happened about six weeks ago. First, a little backstory. Several years ago, I was contacted by a publisher in Japan who wanted to translate two of my Regency romances into Japanese: Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand, and Reforming Lord Ragsdale. I agreed, because it's aways fun to get another check for something written years ago (I call that free money). The publisher did a fine job, and sent me six copies of each book. H'mm. One would have been enough, considering that my entire repertory in Japanese is Ohayo gosimasu. End of story.

Or so I thought. Six weeks ago, I heard from the same publisher. Here's the deal this time: another publisher wants to turn those two books into manga! As far as I could figure out, manga is the equivalent of what we now call graphic novels (which I have always called comic books). Regencies as comic books??

To say I was skeptical would be to understate the matter. I e-mail Kyoko Sagoda and told her I'd think about it. That evening, I mentioned to my daughter, Liz, about the potential comic books of two of my Regencies. My word. Her eyes got big and she grabbed me and said, "Mom! Do you have any idea how big that is in Japan?" Well, obviously, Mom didn't, because Mom just gave her a fishy-eyed stare. I called another of my savvy daughters and told her about the manga deal, and she got equally excited.

With those unsolicited reactions, I figured I was on to something, so I did the deal. My daughters assure me that manga are (is?) a huge deal in Japan. And you know, the more I think about it, the more curious I am to see what Regency ladies and gentlemen look like in Japanese comic books.

But back to writing. I'm on chapter 14 of Enduring Light, my sequel to Borrowed Light. If anything, it's even more fun than the first book, because I know these folks pretty well now. I figure I'm close to halfway through now, and should have it to my editor by the end of July. Writing takes up a great deal of my time, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Mr. Otto and Julia Darling have become friends of mine.

Onward. Back to chapter 14.

Medicine Bow, Wyoming

2011-05-09T16:41:00.000-07:00

First, the housekeeping: What will be coming out this Christmas are Marian's Christmas Wish and four of my moldy oldie Christmas stories, but only in ebook format. The editor says that if the demand is good, they'll be issued in paperback sometimes next year. Works for me. The cost will be around $2.99, we think, which seems reasonable.

Now, back to last week. After I left the Indian Wars conference (excellent, as always, except gee, we Indian Wars scholars are getting older and older), I visited friends, then spent Sunday night in the Virginian Hotel in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. Now that's a hotel. Built in 1911, the current owner, a nice chap named Scott, is staging a centenary event in June. James Drury of the old Virginian TV series will be special guest of honor. (James Drury has got to be getting long in the tooth.) Scott says all the rooms are taken, plus the motels he owns in Medicine Bow, and the old bank that's been converted to hotel rooms.

When I checked in, Scott warned me that the heat hadn't been turned on upstairs yet (not many late spring visitors), and I'd be the only one staying in the hotel proper that night. I said I didn't mind, and I didn't. I was given one of the suites, which is a separate bedroom, bathroom, and sitting room. It was like staying in a museum. The brass bed was comfortable in all the right places, and there was a teeny bit of heat coming out of the radiator in the sitting room. I've enclosed a photo of the room, and the Owen Wister dining room downstairs. (If there had been any ghosts roaming about, I'd have been fair pickin's, but I slept quite soundly. Nice to know the Virginian is not as haunted as the St. James Hotel in Cimarron, New Mexico.

While in The Virginian, I reminisced about something my friend, Laura Lee Wilkinson, had told me, when I saw her that day in Torrington, Wyoming. Laura Lee comes from a ranching family. Her sister and husband still ranch on the old property, which is located near Laramie Peak. It was, and remains, an isolated ranch. When Laura Lee and her two sisters were high school age, they moved into town (Laramie) for high school. When Laura Lee eventually graduated from the U of Wyoming and returned home to teach at a one-room school, she rode her horse to work. (She had a blizzard story that made my hair curl.) When they lived on the ranch, they only went into town twice a year for supplies. And I don't believe there was any phone service.

Laura Lee told me about an experience her father had as a 12-year-old boy on a trip to rootin' tootin' Medicine Bow from the ranch. This must have been in the 1910s or '20s, as near as I can figure. He was told by his father to hitch up four horses to the wagon, tie his saddle horse on behind, and ride to Medicine Bow for salt blocks for the cattle. Before he left, his father told him, all calm-like, to be careful when he drove the team across the railroad tracks there in Medicine Bow.

"If that near horse hears the train whistle, he'll spook," the rancher told his 12-year-old son. "What you do then is keep tugging on that inside line. The team will go in a circle, and you can get them quieted down."

It was a two-day trip. He spent the first night on the trail. The next day he got into Medicine Bow and filled the order at the feed store. Sure enough, as he started across the railroad tracks, there was a train coming and it tooted.

"Dad told me that the team took off running," Laura Lee told me. "He tugged and tugged on that inside line, and the team, the wagon, and the saddle horse tied on behind went around and around in circles until the one skittish horse settled down."

When everyone was straightened out, he pointed to team toward the ranch and started home. After one more night on the trail, he got there. His dad helped him unload the supplies, and when he was done, asked him, all casual-like: "Have any trouble, son?"

"Nope."

"You're sure?"

"Yep."

And that was it: a kid growing from boy to man because he had to, in a great state with people just like him. I love Wyoming.

Good news and work

2011-05-09T09:49:00.000-07:00

I'm a failure as a blogger right now. I visited with Jennifer Fielding, my Cedar Fort editor, on Friday, and the word is go ahead right away on a sequel to Borrowed Light. So that's what's starting today, which means writing comes first. If I hit my mark - preface and far into Chapter One today - I'll blog tonight.

Jennifer also said that BL is in its second printing, and Cedar Fort will be issuing my Signet traditional regencies in both a paperback and ebook format. They're starting with Marian's Christmas Wish for Christmas, and I think a collection of my Christmas short stories. I think they're talking two reprints a year, to alternate with my new novels.

Had a really good booksigning at the Seagull Book at 1720 Redwood Road in Salt Lake City: lots of semi-bewildered husbands with small kids, looking for something for Mom on Mother's Day. Nice folks.

Cheerio, folks.

Justin Osmond

2011-04-24T16:49:00.000-07:00

Now I ask you: What author forgets to bring a pen to a booksigning? I can tell you that it's Justin Osmond, Merrill and Mary Osmond's second son, who has just self-published (with Shirley Baulmann's help) his autobiography, Hearing with My Heart. Saturday's booksigning at the Mount Pleasant Library was Justin's first one, and he forgot a pen.

But I got lucky. I shared the table with Justin, loaned (and then gave) him my extra pen, and met a friend. What a delightful young man. He has 90 percent hearing loss, the only one of his generation of Osmond cousins to have inherited a family trait. He moves gracefully between the deaf world and the hearing world, mainly because of his own will, and the strength and tenacity of his parents, who saw that he had the help he needed throughout his young life, and his reliance on the Savior.

After listening to him speak to others about his book (I assured him that was what authors did at booksignings), I watched him interact with friends and potential buyers, sharing his story and encouraging them. Justin's a busy man. He has recently returned from Africa,as part of his work with the Starkey Hearing Foundation, which provides hearing aids for children and others in parts of the world where such things are terribly hard to come by. I doubt his has lots of time for booksignings, but he's a total natural, because he's such a people person.

And now he's written a wonderful book describing his quiet world, and the tremendous role that his parents and siblings and gifted educators have played in opening this quiet world and helping him reach his maximum potential, which is limitless, as far as I can tell. Over and over to his fascinated audience on Saturday, Justin explained, "While I may have a hearing defect, it doesn't have me. It doesn't define me."

That's the strength of his well-written book: whatever challenge or disability - seen or unseen - that a person might possess, it can be overcome using courage, tenacity, a sense of humor, and belief in one's self. As Justin points out several times, it never hurts to have Heavenly Father on your side.

Although some might look at the Osmonds' life as one of privilege, it's been a challenge. True, there are material blessings that have come their way, but the cost is high: travel; fathers and uncles away from home on tour; moving from place to place, at times; and real difficulties that come from having a famous label attached. Justin doesn't mince any words about the difficulties he and his siblings encountered while living in Branson, Missouri, when the Osmonds performed there. Branson High School was full of bullies quite willing to pick on the Osmonds. Even transfer to a so-called non-denominational Christian academy didn't make it better. But they stuck it out, taught where they could, and lived Christian lives among people who don't think Mormons are Christians.

As I read Justin's account of those trying years, I remember a time I was asked to speak about writing to a similar non-denominational Christian academy in nearby Springfield, Missouri. (We lived near Springfield and I worked at Cox Medical Centers.) I was all ready to speak, when I found out that the school had recently shown its students a scurrilous bit of video vomit against Mormons called, "The Godmakers." I sent a letter to the school and said that I would not speak there, after all, because I was LDS, and didn't want to have anything to do with a so-called educational facility that considered it Christian to so abuse another church, with no attempt to get facts straight.

Upon reflection now, I think Justin and his brother, Shane, were much braver than I was. In a school assembly they asked for permission to sing "I Am a Child of God" to the student body. It was granted, and they sang. After that experience, the school board voted to make "I Am a Child of God" the school song. I had refused to go to a place like that, but these two boys bravely sang in front of their peers and teachers. My hat's off to you, Justin. I didn't have your courage. (Sadly, Justin pointed out that when the Osmonds left there, the school changed the rules to ban Mormons from ever attending. Ah, well.)

Yep, Hearing with My Heart is a great read. You can buy it on Amazon, or go to http://www.justinosmond.com/. I think it's also available at Deseret Book. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Zulu, my guilty pleasure

2011-04-17T16:43:00.000-07:00

Amazing how one thing leads to another. After finding a talk by Elder Jeffrey Holland for next week's Relief Society lesson, I started nosing around on the category, "What does Welsh sound like?" Sure enough, there were plenty of good examples on the Interwebs. And that just naturally led to Googling Welsh choral singing, which is always guaranteed to send shivers down the spine. Don't know what it is about the Welsh, but they can SING. First I had to listen to "Suo Gan," that ineffably lovely Welsh lullaby, featured on Spielberg's Empire of the Sun. If there is a more beautiful melody, I don't know what it could be.

Well, "Suo Gan" morphed into "All Through the Night," (Ar hyd y nos) another gorgeous Welsh lullaby. Found that one, too, and sang along. And once there, it was only a matter of time until I found "Men of Harlech," which is especially stirring when sung by an entire audience of Welshmen at a rugby match. I don't know why the opposing team even bothered to come out on the pitch, after that bit of vocal intimidation.

And "Men of Harlech" always and forever leads to the 1964 movie, Zulu. After two days of terrible fighting, the little British Army contingent (140 strong) at Rorke's Drift in Natal is waiting for the final charge from some 4,000 Zulu warriors. It is January 23, 1879, at the end of the Zulu Wars. (If you ever want to read a good book on the Zulu and their wars, try The Washing of the Spears, by Donald R. Morris. It's the standard work.)

There's something about the Zulu. I had a friend at BYU years ago from South Africa, and we were talking about the various native groups in her homeland. I asked her what the Zulu are like. She just waved her hands in a gesture of complete inadequacy and said, "Well, they are just...just Zulu." I think I know what she meant. When I think about the Lakota on the North Plains, that's about what I am reduced to.

So there are the British, waiting for the final stand. The Zulus are singing and banging their spears against their body-length, cowhide shields, when Colour Sergeant Bourne approaches one of his Welshmen in the South Wales Borderers, who were the lucky guys at Rorke's Drift. The sergeant asks in his unflappable British way what the Welshman thinks of the singing.

Equally thoughtful, the Welshman replies, "They have a good bass section, but no top tenors, that's for sure." The man - dirty and desperately weary - thinks a minute, then starts to hum. He has a beautiful tenor voice, and he sings the first verse of "Men of Harlech." Men of Harlech stop your dreaming/Can't you see their spear points gleaming/See their warrior pennons streaming/to this battlefield?

The other Welsh soldiers join in, and nearly drown out the Zulu. Men of Harlech, stand ye steady/ Let it not be ever said ye/ For this battle were unready/ Welshmen do not yield.

The Zulus charge, and are beaten back. The mission and supply depot at Rorke's Drift survived, and the legend of the thin red line gets another burnish. Good stuff. Of the 1,400 or so Victoria Crosses awarded so far, 11 were won at Rorke's Drift. All that is fact.

I don't know if that singing really happened at Rorke's Drift, but as we used to say in grad school, "It should have." I know for a fact that Western history reenactors love to watch Zulu. It's our guilty pleasure. Quote me a line from the movie, and I'll quote one back. (Private: "Why is it us? Why us?" Sergeant Bourne: "Because we're here, lad. Nobody else. Just us.")

Yep. Nobody else. Just us.

Cancelled book signings

2011-04-14T20:57:00.000-07:00

H'mm, here's an interesting development. Emily called from Cedar Fort today to tell me that the two Seagull Bookstore booking signings this week end have been cancelled because all the Borrowed Lights are sold out! I was a bit surprised, and disappointed, too. Once I get geared up for a booksigning, I like to go through it. She said the books will be arriving sometime next week, so we have to reschedule those April 16 signings for sometime in May. So it goes. I was honestly hoping for two good booksignings to take away the taste of last week's fiasco at the Deseret Book on S. University.

I'm very much looking forward to the April 23 event in Mt. Pleasant. Apparently the good folks there have remodeled their library, and are holding two days of booksignings then: one on Friday basically for children's and young adult authors, and the next one on Saturday for the rest of us. I'm looking forward to it, plus the chance to shill Here's to the Ladies, as well.

Ladies is still my favorite book, probably because the Indian Wars setting always reminds me of the fun I had during my ranger years in the National Park Service. It was the kind of a job where they paid me every two weeks for doing what I probably would have done for free. So enjoyable. And along with the setting of some of America's best Indian Wars forts were the wonderful men I worked with through the years- most retired now, one gone, all remembered with great fondness.

I'll be seeing most of the at the end of April at the Fort Robinson Indian Wars Conference, in Crawford, Nebraska. It's a terrific setting for a great gathering. Since there are only so many Indian Wars scholars, we all tend to see each other every few years.

When I was in Cheyenne a few weeks ago, I went to the State Museum there and was lucky enough to find a copy of Tom Lindmier's I See By Your Outfit: Historic Cowboy Gear of the Northern Plains. I'll take it along for him to autograph, because I gave my original copy of Lindmier's book to a friend in North Dakota before we moved. I always called him Lindmier; maybe that's where I got the idea for Mr. Otto to plague Julia Darling by using her last name only.

But Saturday, it's off to the grandkids' house in Magna, which will ultimately be more fun than a booksigning. We're having an early Easter egg hunt - provided there's no blizzard - and husband Martin bought puh-lenty of chocolate treats for the plastic eggs. I'll make my sugar cookie dough and we'll make way too many cookies, too, because we can. I can't think of a better reason.

Hoo Boy

2011-04-10T06:54:00.000-07:00

Me oh my, what a stinko booksigning on Saturday at the Deseret Book at 989 S. University Avenue in Provo! I'd been looking forward to this one, because it was my first booksigning at a Deseret Book Store, which in this area is the Big Dog. Weather was crappy, and it was a white knuckle drive through Price and Spanish Fork Canyons, but I knew this would be worth it.

Could I have been more wrong? I arrived early at the store, as I always do, but it wouldn't have made any difference. No one told the staff in the store that there was a booksigning! Sigh. I assured the person who was playing manager on Saturday that there was a booksigning, so they started clearing off a table while someone scurried away to call the real manager.

She returned to inform me that yes, there was a signing scheduled, but no one in charge had told them. Also, the books that were supposed to arrive via FedEx on Thursday hadn't arrived. Sigh squared. They did round up 12 books from various other Deseret Book Stores, and put those on the table. I had brought along a poster Cedar Fort has created. They found and easel and put that up in the entrance area.

Since I was already there - the signing was to go from 1-3 - I sat down and went to work. By 1:30, the 12 books were gone. I suggested that maybe they could drive to the very nearby Seagull Books and buy a few, but no, that wasn't an option, apparently. (Doesn't Deseret Book own Seagull Book?) I sat there a little longer, but felt a bit silly, since there weren't any books to sign. I left.

Crazy. Perhaps Deseret Book is just too big to care. Still, if I had been managing that particular outlet, and the books hadn't shown up by Friday (they were due Thursday), I'd have gotten in my car and driven TEN MINUTES to Cedar Fort and bought a few books. Initiative seems to be sadly lacking at that store.

So it was another white-knuckle drive home. At no point in this old, dreary business did I raise my voice to anyone; not my style. I'm not a writer who expects blue M&Ms in a Waterford dish, and shaved ice brought from the Andes by Inca runners, but at a booksigning I expect a) a staff that knows there is a signing b) actual books on the table to sign. Doesn't seem like much, eh?

Of course, part of the problem was that the Saturday before, I had participated in a truly wonderful booksigning at the Cardston Book Shop, in Cardston, Alberta, run by father and son David and Randy Prete, so this miserable signing suffered by comparison. The folks at the Deseret Book on 989 S. University could take notes from the Pretes on how to run a signing.

I have two booksignings next Saturday, April 16: one at a Seagull Book in American Fork, Utah, from 1-3 p.m., and another at the Seagull Book in South Towne in Sandy, from 4-6 p.m. Seagull seems to be more on the ball, so I think they will be fine.

Sorry I'm complaining, but ineptitude makes me grouchy. It'll pass. Right now I'm making a few changes in the Christmas anthology collection I've written that will be out in November, courtesy of Harlequin. I'm happy with it. It's always more fun to be writing.

Still, though, a shout out to Earl and Afton Condie,who had heard about Borrowed Light from their friend Lella, read it, and bought 8 books for themselves and their children, all Wyomingites by birth. They're the kind of folks who make booksignings so much fun.

In praise of Hal Halvorsen

2011-04-07T19:15:00.000-07:00

Next booksigning is this Saturday, April 9, at Deseret Book, 989 S. University, Provo, Utah, from 1-3 p.m.

When I travel, as I did last week to Cardston, Alberta, for a booksigning, I like to take along an unabridged novel or history to listen to. I got lucky and picked out The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour, by Andrei Cherny. There might be a bit of hyperbole in the title, but it was a great book to listen to.

And never more than on this trip, when I was headed to Canada, and drove right past the turnoff in northern Utah to Garland, Utah, where Col. Gail S. Halvorsen is from. He's still alive - 91, I think - and still remembered in Berlin, for his little effort to provide some chocolate and other candy to Berlin's children, who had never known such luxury during all those years of war and its aftermath, when the Soviets did their darnedest to shut down Berlin and drive out the allies. (The Soviets come across as thoroughly nasty in the book, and you know, they were.)

Probably most literate people know the story (and only literate people read this blog, I am convinced). Here was an army pilot with Air Transport, the least glamorous kind of flyer. His WWII was spent flying prosaic transports from here to there. The Berlin Airlift became Hal Halvorsen's defining moment. He had taken a brief tour of Berlin and noticed the little group of children watching the planes land at Tempelhof Airfield. In poor German, he chatted with him. The few kids who had some English responded. As he left, he was struck by the fact that in all his other duty posts around the world, kids just naturally came up to Americans and asked for candy and gum. Not these kids. They were polite, hungry, traumatized, in rags, and expected absolutely nothing from him.

On an impulse, he handed out the two sticks of gum in his pocket, after breaking them in half. Those four sticks were appropriated with shy thanks, and then the wrappers circulated among the children, who just sniffed them and handed them on. Touched, Halvorsen resolved to save his little weekly ration of chocolate and gum and send it out the flare chute of his C-54 transport. He told the kids that he would wiggle his plane's wings as he flew over Tempelhof. They would know to look for the three modest parachutes made of his handkerchiefs.

It began with three parachutes. As word spread, Halvorsen's kind little gestured evolved into Operation Little Vittles, which materially altered German fear and distrust of Americans. It allowed Americans to send candy and handkerchiefs to the flyers of the Berlin Airlift. Thousands of chocolate bars - tons of candy - dropped over Berlin before the blockaid was finally lifted, and Berlin remained at least half free and in allied hands.

The book is far more than just Halvorsen; it's the complete story of Berlin after WWII, as a shattered people began to regroup and eventually defy the Soviet Union's heavy-handed efforts to choke off Berlin from the West. It's the story of President Truman, more and more demonstrating the political skill that shaped him, the "accidental president," into one of the country's finest presidents. What a story: the Truman/Dewey campaigns for the presidency in 1948; the courage and savvy of Gen. Lucius Clay, who resisted all efforts to have Allies pull out of Berlin, once the blockade began. And Gen. Tunner, who shaped the at-first-haphazard airlift into a well-oiled machine that landed a transport every three minutes at the [eventually] three airfields in Allied hands and keep Berliners alive more more than a year, when the Soviets backed down. What a good book.

Oh, the booksigning in Cardston was just super. The weather was frightful, but that didn't stop folks from turning out on Ladies Night to buy lots of books. I love Canadians, especially Darren and Verena Beazer and their kids, and Sister Barb Niche. It was good to see my son, Jeremy, and celebrate his birthday on April 4 with a chocolate pie with meringue/walnut crust.

And then I drove by Garland, Utah, again on the return home, and gave a little salute to Hal Halvorsen. Nice to be reminded there are still heroes among us. (The Germans have never forgotten him. At the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Col. Halvorsen, still plenty spry, carried the German placard in front of the Olympic team. No, they haven't forgotten, and we shouldn't, either.)

Sorry I'm so long in catching up with the blog. I think about it a lot, and don't want to waste your time with inconsequentials.

Housekeeping, plus the Utah Legislature (something stinks)

2011-03-24T13:14:00.000-07:00

Well, I call this housekeeping. Looks like my dance card is full with booksignings from now to the end of April. This Saturday, March12, I'll be at the new Seagull Bookstore in Springville from 10 a.m. to noon. On Saturday, April 2, I'll be at the Book Shop in Cardston, Alberta for another signing. This one is especially fun, because it gives me an excuse to visit/stay with my son on the border in Montana. On Saturday, April 9, I'll be at the Deseret Book on 989 S. University in Provo. April 16 will find me at one Seagull Bookstore or another - Cedar Fort isn't sure which one yet. And somewhere there will be a Friday signing at another Seagull Bookstore.

Probably the most fun gig will be a Saturday, April 23 booksigning at the library in Mount Pleasant, Utah, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Megan Osmond called me to arrange it, and she said it's a grand reopening of the library, after a length renovation. I love to be in places where books are. She also told me that she finished Borrowed Light at 3 a.m. Monday morning. She said, "There in the living room, I gave you a standing ovation!" I laughed. She's arranging for the booksigning through Cedar Fort, and I'll be bringing along copies to sell of Here's to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier Army, which was published in 2004 by Teacup (Texas Christian University Publications:TCUP).

The Cedar Fort folks wanted me to be at the BYU Bookstore the following Saturday, April 30, during Women's Week, but that's when I'll be in Fort Robinson, Nebraska, for the biennial gathering of Indian Wars scholars at a conference. I spoke one year, and a friend of mine is speaking this year, and it's a great chance to see my friends. We're a close-knit group. We all go to the same conferences (there arren't that many of us older specimens), have the same friends, etc. You get the drill. I never miss the Fort Rob gathering.

And good news from Amazon: Borrowed Light is now available on Kindle.

But here's what I want to talk about: politicians and human nature.

In 1972, it was Richard Nixon versus Senator George McGovern, Dem-S.D. Nixon was a shoe-in for his second term, but Watergate rumblings had begun. A friend of mine convinced me to vote for McGovern, and I did. Well, Nixon won that by a landslide, as well all know, because few of us voted for McGov. But wait: there's more. Watergate happened, and Nixon resigned the presidency.

The strangest thing happened. Through the years, more and more people claimed that they voted for McGovern. (No one wanted to be associated with Nixon, of course.) Some pundit humorously stated, years later, that if all the people who claimed to have voted for McGovern had actually done that, he'd have been elected!

So it goes, but what about that stinky bad bill HB477, that the Utah legisslature passed recently. Basically, the bill allows for much less transparency in what goes on in the state legislature: never a good idea, except for sneaky lawmakers. There is a special session coming up really soon to probably repeal it, mainly - or maybe only - because the good citizens of Utah ALL cried foul, and demanded it be repealed. Already, I have been amazed how many members of the legislature have been nimbly leaping away from their own complicity in initally signing that stinker. Pretty soon, nobody in the house or senate will have signed that bill, in the first place! What we will see is the immaculate conception of bills in the Utah legislature. No one will have signed it, so it must have been a miracle that it passed and was signed into law by our guv.

I'll call this the Nixon/McGovern Syndrome. I think the legislators have felt the heat and realize they are in serious danger of being booted out of office, when their time comes to face irate voters. And sure enough, before it comes to that, every legislator will swear he/she never voted for it in the first place. Ah, yes, the Nixon/McGovern Syndrome in action. Oh, I do love politics.

In the horror section?

2011-03-17T13:03:00.000-07:00

If I think about this much longer, I'm certain my head will explode. It concerns a certain major store, prominent throughout the United States, and Canada. We will call it StallMart, just to give it a name. I think it was called Mega-Lo-Mart in "King of the Hill," which I always enjoyed.

The folks at StallMart were nice enough to arrange a booksigning for Borrowed Light last Saturday in Price, Utah, from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. The first sign of trouble happened the Thursday before the signing, when I dropped by the store to just make sure there were enough books on hand, since none of them seemed to be on the shelf in the LDS Book section.

When two assistant managers showed up to answer my questions, they told me that the main guy was out of town all week. When I asked about the books, neither man seemed to have the slightest idea what I was talking about. Oops. One of them thought there might be some books arriving on Friday, and he wandered off to find out. I left then, went home, and e-mailed Emily Showgren, the trusty PR lady at Cedar Fort. She promptly contacted the WalMart buyer, who said that 75 books would be delivered the next day.

When I checked on Friday, sure enough, there were books available. None were on the shelf, though. Maybe that was a new concept. I put up an "Author Signing" poster on an easel which Dave kindly located, and left it in the Customer Service section. And when I showed up at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, there was a table and chair inside the front entrance, near the bananas and the GloDomes, whatever they are. It was a good spot.

I think I signed between 25-30 books, and was OK, considering that there was a parade in downtown Price at noon that kept some potential buyers busy elsewhere. No matter. I was happy enough. (Didn't sell any GloDomes, though.)

On Monday in water aerobics, Mayzell mentioned that she had stopped by earlier that morning at StallMart to buy Borrowed Light off the shef, but there weren't any. She asked about it, then went back later, and found one, which I signed the next morning.

Wondering myself now, I stopped by Tuesday to see if there were any copies of Borrowed Light on the shelf. I figured there must have been at least 30 left over from the booksigning, so surely some would be on the shelf. Nothing (and don't call me Shirley). I checked with yet-another assistant manager, who had no idea. He did say there would be books on the shelf. When my daughter stopped in StallMart that evening, she couldn't find any.

I was in StallMart this morning to get some veggies, and went back to the book section just to see. Nothing. When I got home, I called the store and asked to speak to someone who knew something about the book section. She sent me to "Electronics." The lady who answered there didn't know anything. When I explained the situation, she said they had nothing to do with books. I suggested that some human had to put the books on the shelf, and she grudgingly agreed. I told her the name of the book and the author, and she asked me to spell them. I spelled Borrowed and Light, and then she asked me if maybe the book was in the Horror section. I told her I sincerely hoped not, because it should have been shelved under LDS Books.

Here's all I can figure: Either Borrowed Light is selling like hotcakes and they can't keep them on the shelf, or no one has a clue at StallMart and only puts out one or two at a time, as the mood directs. I'm realistic enough to think it's probably the latter.

Ah, well. There's a booksigning at the new Seagull Books in Springville on Saturday, March 26, and one in Cardston, Alberta, on April 2, and I have high hopes for both. Randy Prete at the Book Shop in Cardston has already been in touch with me for a bio, so he can put it in an initial e-mail sent to all bookstore patrons. He's right on top of everything, and I'm grateful. There will be a Deseret Book signing at the DB store on South University in Provo on April 9. Maybe I'll have someone take a photo of me there so I can give a copy to the assistant managers at Price's StallMart and show them that the book exists.

I shoulda been a plumber.

Roads taken

2011-03-06T15:46:00.000-08:00

I didn't mean to put bloggers on Big Ignore last week, but I was busy, driving from Wellington, Utah, to Waukesha, Wisconsin, and back again, to fetch my daughter, Liz. The original plan was to take a more leisurely trip and spend a little time with friends in Torrington, Wyoming, but Mom proposed, and daughter's cats disposed. Not to say that Mr. Pants and Flower weren't about as good as cats could be, cooped up in a minivan for three days - still, it was better to move along more quickly to avoid 1) incoming storms 2) kitty meltdowns.

The only bad weather happened where it could be expected to happen: in Wyoming behind Elk Mountain. Sure enough, there was about an hour's worth of blizzard - blizzard definition: cold (check), snow (check), wind (check).

Here's the deal with Elk Mountain. It's a big hunka mountain just west of Laramie, and I swear it makes its own weather. In the 1960s or '70s, when I-80 was going through southern Wyoming, the smart engineers in the project planned to build that stretch of highway at Elk Mountain lower than old highway 30. The locals advised the hotshots to reconsider, because doing that would mean a real problem with winter driving. In essence, the bigshot engineers patted Wyoming on its little head and said, "We're the experts. We'll put this highway lower and a bit straighter. It will save money in construction, and will shorten the travel along that stretch from Laramie west to Rawlins. We know best."

That's what happened. I-80 went through as the engineers planned. Big mistake. When the winter weather gets going, that hunk of interstate is just treacherous. Locals called it the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and wisely continued driving on old highway 30 from Laramie to Rawlins.

I took the Ho Chi Minh Trail on the way to Wisconsin, because I did want to save time. It was none too good then. On the way back, we were obviously headed into a winter storm and I did the smart thing and took Highway 30 above Elk Mountain. Yep, there was an hour of tense, watch-the-yellow-line driving, but then it cleared up and the road was fine. Even in the worst spots on Highway 30, I knew it was worse on I-80.

Sometimes it's good to stick to the tried and true path. Sometimes it's best to listen to the voices of experience, rather than the guys with slide rules (in those days) who only think they know, but who really don't know Wyoming as well as the veterans who have been driving that route for years.

Besides, when you take highway 30, you get to stop in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, the "home" of Owen Wister's 19th century Western (the first, maybe) called The Virginian. Liz and I stopped in Medicine Bow and went to the Virginian Hotel. The folks there are pleased to show off the really great old 1911 hotel's rooms. They're open for business, and plan to celebrate The Virginian Hotel's centenary in June of this year.

I'll be going through the area again in April, and I plan to spend a night at the Virginian Hotel, soaking in the atmosphere. Um, I hardly need state that there is no atmosphere on I-80 between Laramie and Rawlins. Sometimes you have to try the blue highways, instead. Safer, too, in the winter. And if you remember Wister's grand Western, you can think, "When you call me that, smile!"

The Envelope Please

2011-02-27T21:23:00.000-08:00

I'm in a motel in Evanston, Wyoming, on my way to Wisconsin, for a particular visit with my daughter, Liz. I just finished watching the Oscars by myself. Usually I'm with family members, but this is a trip I'm making by myself, and that's OK, too. I think the most fun I ever had at the Oscars was the night my daughter, Mary Ruth and I were in San Antonio at a motel, visiting my son/her brother Jeremy, who was going to UT-San Antonio. As I recall, we had Chinese takeout from HEB (oh, yes) and mostly enjoyed each other's company. I don't remember who won anything that year, but I'll remember this one, because Colin Firth won for playing King George VI, and he stuttered.

So do I. I always have. My stammer was more pronounced when I was younger, but I've never grown out of it. I've learned to breathe better and can accommodate it better, but the stammer is still there. I could totally and completely identify with Colin Firth's role in The King's Speech. I know the feeling of dread and desperation of having to speak, that Firth interpreted so well.

My dad was in the Navy (so was George VI), and we moved around every three years or so. This meant new schools and new opportunities to show off my stammer. Or so it seemed to me. Given my own habits, I'd happily have stayed in the same place and never have to re-introduced myself every few years to new critics. I remember the pain of having to read out loud in turn, because my stammer was always there. And sure enough, that first time would usually be followed by a visit to the school district's speech therapist. Nothing really made a difference. Visits to psychologists didn't make a difference, because stammers don't necessarily have psychological overtones. Now the consensus seems to be that stammers are caused by some synapse that doesn't click in the brain. Oh, well, whatever. It never affected my intellect and native cheery temperament.

But because we moved around, I always had to meet people. There would be laughs sometimes, but I'm a charming person and a good student, and I always had friends. I was never shunned or avoided because of my stammer, and I'm thankful for that, but it was always a black crow sitting on my shoulder, that only I could see, I suppose.

When I first heard about The King's Speech, I knew I would have to see it, no matter how far I had to go from my little rural home. I have always liked Colin Firth's performances, even when he played that thoroughly nasty royal in Shakespeare in Love. But it was my huge respect for King George VI that was always the main reason for seeing the movie, because I do what he did. I have to think that most of the world's stutterers feel the same way. It's nice to see one of our own get his due.

And what a king he was, even though he was a Navy officer, as he would have preferred to remain. King by default, he rose to soaring heights to lead his nation through the dark, dark years of World War II from 1939-1941, when England stood alone. He and his queen - they were best friends and lovers - reached out to their people. Those newsreels of the pair of them, strolling through blitzed out sections of London, were not done as cynical photo ops, but as a couple of Brits reaching out to other Brits. George and his queen remain stalwart role models of grace under extreme pressure - living examples of unflinching character in the face of the evils of Nazism.

What a man. What a king. A few years ago, my father, also a naval officer but in a diferent navy, gave me a coin from the Fiji Islands that he wore as a good luck charm in the South Pacific during his own war. It's a shilling, with 1942 and a turtle and Fiji Islands on the side, and King George VI on the other. I think I'll wear it more often now. My dad has always been my hero, and George VI is, too.

About my stammer. I've been slowly realizing in the last few years that as onerous as it was when I was younger, and even now occasionally, I don't think I would have changed a thing. Not one thing. What my stammer seems to have done for me is force me to listen more in silence, to learn how people act and speak, to listen to their stories, and build up an amazing vocabulary. All stammerers do that, I think, because we need lots of words. Some words are easier to say than others, so we learn a lot of words and their many meanings. And words are important to me and my characters.

I think The King's Speech is going to be my favorite motion picture for a long time. It almost feels like a personal victory. It gave a lot of us our own voice.

I hate my coat

2011-02-23T13:15:00.000-08:00

Spring may or may not be coming, so it's time to recycle a column I wrote when I worked for the Times-Record in Valley City, North Dakota. I've updated it a little, and doubt many of you have read it, unless you live in Valley City. I wrote four years-worth of columns, which probably ought to be published in one collection someday.

It ain't heavy; it's just ugly

I hate my coat. This is problem, because it's only February, and with this winter, it's possible that spring won't arrive for another six months.

I knew this was coming. I hated the same coat by the end of winter last year, but the darned thing refuses to wear out. I can't afford a new one. Even if I could, such wild extravagance would send all my Scots relatives spinning in their narrow, frugal graves.

I bought the thing in December of 2000, because I was heading to Washington, D.C., for research, courtesy of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, and wanted a lighter coat for the warmer weather. I somehow thought denim would be lighter. It wasn't. In Washington, the denim coat didn't allow me to blend in with the natives, all of whom were wearing black in 2000. You'd have thought the District was a Johnny Cash convention with lobbyists. The other project researcher was a professor from North Dakota State University, and he wore his parka. We probably looked like Jean and Jerry Lundegaard from the movie, Fargo. You betcha.

If necessity had required that I wear the coat all year round, I would have worn it out sooner and replaced it. I've thought about leaving my coat somewhere, but it would probably come home like a cat, slinking up the driveway and flopping down on the porch.

Maybe I should name my coat. That simple act might have increased my affection. Years ago, my husband bought a used Buick, green and huge. We had five children at home then. In a pinch, I think we could all have lived in the trunk. Maybe even installed a hot tub.

Jeremy, in high school at the time, started calling that green machine "The Nimitz," after the aircraft carrier. We still remember The Nimitz with fondness, but what do you name a coat? Lester? Kiki?

To my relief (and probably everyone else's, who has to look at it), my coat is starting to wear out. I lost a button, which I haven't replaced yet. The cuffs are starting to fray, and it's getting shiny in the seat.

Still, there might be months and months to go until spring. Maybe I'll start a support group. Surely I'm not the only woman in the greater metropolitan Price/Wellington area who hates her coat. I'd offer to trade my dog of a coat to someone, but I'm too nice even to suggest that.

Something has to happen between now and summer, though, because I'm really starting to envy the German army of World War II. No irate, knee-jerk letters, please; hear me out. I know the Nazis were dirtbags. We historians - unless we work for Fox News - tend to look for the Big Picture. The Wehrmacht - the German army - was a bit different from the Nazis. The army had some remarkable commanders; the Nazis, not so much.

So here comes my guiltiest secret of all: I've long been an admirer of those sexy, ankle-length overcoats that German army officers wore. No army looked better than the German Army in wintertime, with those overcoats and shiny boots. It was Wehrmacht haute couture: warm coats, well-cut coats, grey double-breasted, kick ass coats with shiny buttons.

A few years ago, I taught a university course in modern European history. We spent some class time watching World War II newsreels, and I did a lot of reading. I invariably ended up at Stalingrad, a frightful slugfest on the Volga River that may have been the turning point of the war in Europe. Other historians point to the tank battle the following summer at Kursk, but it all is intertwined.

Of his namesake city, Stalin declared the Germans would not move beyond it. On the other side, Hitler said the German Army would never retreat. Between August 1942 and February 1943, two huge armies struggled by that bend in the Volga River, literally fighting room to room in the massive factories. (For a look at this, watch the 2001 movie, Enemy at the Gates, or the even better 1993 German film, Stalingrad.) The Soviets and citizens of Stalingrad gave new meaning to the word stubborn.

When it ended, the Wehrmacht's entire Sixth Army, bled white and starving, surrendered to victorious Soviets, who marched the 91,000 survivors to prison camp. Years passed. Fewer than 5,000 of those Germans ever returned to their homeland.

There is a terrible newsreel of a German POW walking by himself to internment and probable death. His beautiful grey overcoat is in shreds and he is wearing boxes on his bare feet because he has no fancy boots.

Suddenly, that coat I hate so well doesn't look too bad.

Water, water everywhere

2011-02-19T05:36:00.000-08:00

I was looking at computer news last night, and there was the big article I'd been dreading but knew was coming: It looks like another bad flood year for the northern plains.

We left Valley City, North Dakota, in July of 2009, after Martin retired from teaching at the university there. We moved to Wellington, Utah, which is pretty much in the desert. We bought a little house that had a basement, but one which showed no signs of water damage. We'd been living in a lovely town in Nodak that turned into Flood Trauma Central, after a long, long snowy winter. It was a winter/spring where no one had seen Sheyenne River flood predictions that high since the 1880s, and no one was alive who remembered it. We didn't want to go through that again.

The Sheyenne River, normally beautiful and peaceful, winds through Valley City, turning it into what is known as "The City of Bridges." That spring of 2009 it was a monster. We had a smart and savvy mayor, Mary Lee Nielson, who started hauling dirt early. For a solid month, from early morning to late at night, big trucks rumbled through town, building makeshift dikes along the river. Almost everyone lives near the river in Valley City, and we were no exception.

Valley City State University is right on the river. Dikes went up, as well as dikes inside of dikes. The same thing was going on, on a larger scale, in Fargo, and in other towns. Most of the rivers in the area dump into the Red River of the North, which flows through Fargo and north into Canada. The rivers all rise at different times, and do their damage. Fargo went first, and we followed, as did Jamestown to the east of us, on the James River.

Soon all the bridges in Valley City were blocked off with dirt, except one, so people could still get in and - more important - out, if the need came. It used to be such a treat to drop down off the gently rolling prairie and into our little valley. Now our little valley was filling up with sandbags, dirt dikes, and that ever-growing Sheyenne River.

The university was finally shut down about a month before graduation, because it was just too dangerous to expose students living along the river to potential hazard. VCSU is the first university in the nation to go entirely wired and laptop, so kids were able to finish their classes online at a distance. It was my husband's last semester of teaching, and his final play of his career was cancelled two days before it opened, because the university closed. Sigh.

The public school system closed, too, mainly because as the water kept rising, the sewer collapsed. Mary Lee told everyone to evacuate, and many of us did. Our grandson, Noah, was living with us that year and going to junior high. We called friends in Fargo (their flood was receding) and asked if we could refugee to their house. They said sure, so we did. Gov. John Hoeven send out a statewide APB for us and towns like ours that were in trouble to send kids to school anywhere in the state. The state would pick up the book and lunch tab. Noah - um, what an appropriate name for the time - went to school in neighboring Maple Valley.

After about a week of this, we returned home. Our mayor had arranged for Porta Potties to be hauled into Valley City. The deal was, we could use all the water we wanted, but none of it could go down those drains. Hence, the portable johns. We met our neighbors in new and different ways for a few weeks, until an over-the-street pipe was jury-rigged to take sewage. In our house, we plugged the bathtub and took extremely brief showers, where the water fell into a bucket, which we dumped outside the front door. The rest of the water was drained by a shop vac and then dumped outside.

So it went for awhile. People in the northern plans are highly resourceful, and we managed. It makes my heart ache to think they're going to have to go through all that again. Valley City was mostly spared that year, and again in 2010. I say mostly, because many outlying homes along the river went under. I know they are worrying about this spring, which threatens to be as bad as 2009, if not worse. And I worry, too, because I love Valley City and the wonderful folks who live there.

Water is a funny thing - we need it, we like it, but it can turn on us. Right about when we think we can master it, water has a way of reminding us that we aren't in charge and never will be.

Whose life is this anyway?

2011-02-14T17:59:00.000-08:00

On the way to water aerobics, Vondell and I pass a white house with a Utah Highway Patrol car on the curb. Sometimes he's there, suggesting that he works nights, and sometimes he's not, suggesting shift changes. It interests me, because my son is in law enforcement and happens to be pulling a month of night duty right now. I am also in the habit of "creating" people's lives. It's the curse or blessing of the novelist.

Vondell and I have created our own fiction about the highway patrolman. A few weeks ago, when the black pickup was gone, and the cop car was in the driveway, we decided that maybe she had left in a huff and taken the kids with her. There was his lonely car, parked where the pickup usually was. Maybe he was inside on the telephone, pleading with her to come home. A week later, when we saw the pickup back, and the patrol car, too, we figured they had made up. It's hard to be a law enforcement wife; maybe she needed a break.

Usually, the pattern seems to be that we'll see his patrol car on the curb and the black pickup in the driveway when we head to water aerobics. When we drive by an hour later, the patrol car is usually still there, and the pickup is gone, suggesting to our nosey minds that she is at work somewhere, and he gets to sleep in peace and quiet, after a night spent keeping Highway 6 relatively crime-free.

But today is Valentine's Day. We noticed on our return drive-by that his patrol care was still there, and so was the black pickup, suggesting, well, you know what it was suggesting. We both laughed and hoped the lovebirds had a good Valentine's Day. Even cops need love.

Vondell and I think we should find some subterfuge to knock on the door and see who actually lives there. We're too old to be selling Girl Scout cookies, so that won't work, and neither of us looks much like a meter reader. Maybe we need to rein in our imaginations. I just hope that we don't drive by some morning and see the patrol car gone and another car there, along with the black pickup. I'd hate to have to bang on the door and stage an intervention...

Or maybe we should drive down a different street and leave the poor cop alone.

How do I love museums

2011-02-11T21:17:00.000-08:00

First, thank you, Amazon, for removing the crazy review. Nuff said.

Last May, for my birthday, my husband asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, "Go to the Mining and Railroad Museum in Helper." (Helper's a small town at the mouth of Price Canyon, about 14 miles from where I live.) I am a cheap date.

We went to the museum, and I started volunteering about a month later. What a cool place. It's a museum housed one of the old hotels (1914, I think), with a new annex. This winter, I've been doing research for the museum on an exhibit we're building called "The Shady Side of Helper."

Helper was a mining and railroad hub, with an active life between 1900 and 1950. And I do mean active. Miners came from all over the world to work the mines in Carbon County. Helper even had a Japanese boarding house, and Kabuki Theatre was performed when traveling troopes went through. Kabuki in Helper: hard to imagine. There were Poles, Slovenians, Italians, Cypriots, Welsh of course, Greeks (many) - a whole United Nations of miners in Helper and Price, and the numerous coal camps.

Helper was a hard-living town, with brothels and bordellos catering to the male population, many of them single men far from home. The main street was lined with hotels, many of which had brothels on the second floor. In fact, the last brothel in Helper was shut down in 1976. Saloons there were aplenty. I've been researching the prohibition era, and the law of the land doesn't seem to have made much of an impact on Helper.

In the interest of research and the museum, the director, Stephanie Fitzsimons (neat, neat lady), and I went to that former brothel (second floor, of course) and took photos. The building now belongs to the E Clampus Vitus Society - not sure what they do, but there seems to be alcohol involved and considerable conviviality - and the owner kindly let us see the second floor. Some of the rooms have been restored, with vivid wallpaper. Others still sport their original, rather garish paint of the Pepto-Bismal variety, or a flamboyant green that made me wince. I think there were some ten rooms on that second floor. The last madam's name was Babe, and she was a respected businesswoman in Helper.

A wicked past dies hard in conservative Utah. In 1965, when I was a freshman at Brigham Young University in Provo, the tame side of the state, we were advised not to cross the mountains to Carbon County and Price or Helper, because of the "evils" there. Oh, well. I really like living in Carbon County. There air is crisp and clear here, and I like summer's desert climate. Of course, humidity is so low that alligators have soft skin, compared to mine.

Helper was such a lively little town in former days. There are still plenty of mines in the area, but the ones closest to Helper have closed and been reclaimed. Now Helper is trying to reinvent itself as an artists' colony, and doing rather well. There is an annual artists' event in the summer that attracts those who paint and sculpt and those of us who buy, or wish we could (this would be moi).

I'm writing the copy and labels for the Shady Side of Helper exhibit. Last week was prohibition, and this week will be the "sporting ladies." Then it's on to saloons and gambling. Gee, I guess Carbon County is corrupting me, after all. I volunteer once a week at the museum, and call it good.

In cause you're wondering, Helper was named after the helper engines: additional engines put onto a train - front, back and in the middle - to help the coal trains get over Soldier Summit, altitude 7,400 feet. Even today, it's quite a sight to see four engines in the front, six or more in the middle, and another two on the end of a coal train, all engines revved up and schlepping coal from one side of the state to the other.

If you're around and visit the museum, be sure to ask for your gift: a lump of coal. We have them neatly bagged with a little history about the area. I think some folks collect them for stockings, right before Christmas.

Actually, Carbon County is one of Utah's well-kept secrets. I like it here.

Scary time

2011-02-09T18:53:00.000-08:00

Ooh, boy, the nuts are out. I thought I was prepared for reader angst that I'm not writing Regency Rmances anymore, and have decided to focus more on LDS-themed novels. I was wrong. There are only four reviews up on Amazon right now, and three are decidedly unhappy. That's OK; it's my choice to do what I'm doing.

But there is one that crossed the line, from Susan M. Choyce. She titled her review, Goodbye, Ms. Kelly! She freely expressed her disappointment and obvious dislike of Mormons, and that's her choice and privilege in a free society. She concluded by comparing my Regencies to Georgette Heyer's, which is high praise, indeed.

Trouble is, she ended this way: "...now you are both dead and gone. Farewell."

Frankly, that creeped me out, and sounded more than a bit unbalanced. Attacking my book is one thing, but wishing me dead and gone is quite another. I e-mailed Amazon immediately, explained the situation, and asked that they remove that review. I don't know if they can or will, but it scared me. So it goes.

On a much, much lighter note, Vondell (my water aerobics friend) and I went upstate to Orem today. She had a doctor's appointment at 11 a.m. We are power shoppers and we had an hour to spend wisely before the appointment. We dropped in at the Distribution Center to buy a little white dress for her granddaughter. Since Vondell is raising her granddaughter and has adopted her, she is going to be sealed to her soon in the Manti Temple.

Next we powered over to Michael's, where I got a basket for my office and she tried to find gourds (no luck; wrong season). We made it to her appointment with 15 minutes to spare, and then we powered over to the Cinemark and saw the noon showing of The King's Speech. What a movie. Yes, there's some bad language, but it's integral to the plot. Not a wrong note anywhere in cast, script, direction, costumes.

I left the theatre with a renewed appreciation for Colin Firth (all right, girls: we know we loved him in Pride and Prejudice), and King George VI, a monarch with a stammer who became the symbol of the stalwart British nation during World War II. I've seen pictures of the king and his queen walking through bombed out rubble and chatting with their subjects, after a long night of air raids and destruction. What panache; what a king. It's a superb movie.

Torches and pitchforks

2011-02-08T18:46:00.000-08:00

I'm afraid some of my long-time readers are breaking out the torches and pitchforks, because I seem to be abandoning the Regency. If it's any comfort to them, I have another Regency coming out sometime this year, called Choosing Rob Inman (at least until the publisher decides to call it something else). I'm finishing a three-story Christmas anthology that follows a family from the Regency era, to the Crimean War, to the Indian Wars in the U.S. Then my last novel for Harlequin on my current three-book contract is a novel set at Fort Laramie during the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877. (This should be fun. My personal favorite book is Here's to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier Army, which contains many of my Fort Laramie stories. I worked there for several years as a park ranger, and it's a spot dear to my heart.)

And then it's on to two books for Cedar Fort, the first due in November, and the next one due in August, 2012, I think. It'll be a busy year.

I can assure you it's a little scary to be branching out into something besides Regencies, but it's also a pleasant change for me. I feel that if I keep writing Regencies, I'm going to get stale. There is only so much I want to say about that interesting era.

Since we moved to Utah in 2009, I've found myself fascinated all over again by my own kind, the LDS kind. There are plenty of competent LDS writers, and I think I'll have a good time in a new arena. I'll be 64 in May, but I have lots to write yet. Readers are welcome to join me, and I hope some will. Readers are certainly free to choose what they want to read, and I suspect writers like that same freedom to write what they want to write.

I truly understand that tendency of readers to want what they're comfortable with. I do the same thing in my own reading. I really like crime fiction, and would be aghast if Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Peter Robinson and James Lee Burke abandoned their tried and true characters. But having said that, Connelly did branch out a bit with Micky Haller, a defense lawyer, and Crais seems to be focusing more on Joe Pike. I'm fine with that.

So we shall see. I'm still pecking away at my computer, with a smile on my face.

Cowboys, gotta love them

2011-02-03T12:18:00.000-08:00

Bidness first again: that Authorpalooza on Saturday at the Barnes and Noble in Sandy's South Towne Center, from 1-4. I have to chuckle about the event. I assured Emily Showgren at Cedar Fort that I would be at any and all events requested, but ONLY if it's not snowing at Soldier Summit. At 7,700 feet and with a little snow and wind action, it looks like Everest. When Emily e-mailed me yesterday, she mentioned that it looked like good weather at the Summit. Hope she's right, because I plan to be at the B&N as scheduled.

I'll probably drive over listening - and singing along - to cowboy music. I'm not a country/western fan - wait, I take that back. For some weird reason that I have never understood, I listened to Country Music Television during the year I was writing my thesis. I'd get home from class and work, turn on CMT, and start writing. For another weird reason, I wrote that sucker in long hand. Don't know why. Well, maybe I do. Taking time, slow page by slow page, meant a good thesis. I haven't listened to CMT since, though. (Want to know the world's greatest pick up line among historians? "Hey, I read your thesis." No joke. Someone told me that. He's still a friend.)

But I do like cowboy music. My favorite singers are Michael Martin Murphey and Ian Tyson. MMM came to my attention recently. Last fall, he did a benefit concert in Angel Fire, New Mexico, for a Catholic school, I believe. My son Sam owns the Sunset Grille at Angel Fire, and told me that MMM was going to have dinner at his restaurant. As it turns out, he didn't, but I had sent Sam a copy of Here's to the Ladies: Stories ofthe Frontier Army, for Mr. Murphey. A little while later, Sam told me that MMM's hostess started reading the book, and gave it to him reluctantly. MMM very kindly autographed a CD for me ("Lone Cowboy") and sent it to me via his hostess.

I was so pleased that I sent another copy of Here's to the Ladies, to the hostess, whose name I can't recall. Whereupon she sent me another MMM-autographed CD called "Cowboy Blues." (At least, I think that's the title. I'd go out to my van and take a look at the title, but it's about 19 degrees out right now and my house is warmer.)

I told my son to let me know when MMM is in Angel Fire again. I'll happily drive that 8 1/2 hours, just to hear him sing in person. I might make him some of my world-class Cowboy Cookies, which have a certain fame in National Park Service circles.

Lest you think I'm not sufficiently cultured, I also enjoy Puccini operas, Handel's stuff, and just about anything by Bela Bartok. But when I want to sing along, it's to Michael Martin Murphey and Ian Tyson, my favorite Canadian singin' stockman. The older folks among us - that would be moi - might remember him from his Ian and Sylvia, folksinging days.

I like Murphey's song, "Vanishing Breed." It has a closing line, something about: "We're not vanishing. We're just hard to see from the Interstate." That's what I like, too. I-70 is 60 miles to the south and east, while I-15 is some 60 miles north and west. Perfect.

Hope I'm not boring you with this, but I have another favorite cowboy, besides Mr. Paul Otto. I knew him as Mr. Kaiser. He was a cowboy in Cody, Wyoming, my dad's home town, and a friend of my grandparents. Mr. Kaiser and his wife had settled down on a small farm just outside of town. I remember many a summer day when he'd ride his beautiful black horse to my grandparent's house, and tap on Grandma's kitchen window. She'd open it, and he'd lean in and hand her a quart of cream.

The Christmas I was four, Dad was in Thailand during the Korean War, and we were living with the grandparents in Cody. One of my Christmas presents was a little farm. There was a cowboy figure about two inches high. I named him Mr. Kaiser, and kept him for years. Yep. I love my cowboys, starting with Mr. Kaiser.

Dewey Day in 1900

2011-01-29T07:59:00.000-08:00

A little bidness first: I'm participating in an Authorpalooza next Saturday, February 5, at the Barnes and Noble in Sandy, Utah. This is at South Towne Center from 1-4 p.m. Apparently there will be 30 or 40 authors. My daughter Mary Ruth got really excited when she found out that the author of the Fablehaven books will be there. I asked the PR person at Cedar Fort if she could arrange for us to sit by him, because then we'd be mobbed! H'mm. I'll bet it doesn't work that way.

Last week, we had Danny Price over for dinner. Danny turned 90 in December, and he's the nicest man. (We belong to the same ward in Wellington.) I had heard earlier that Danny joined the CCC when he was a young man of 16, living in Emery County, and I wanted to ask him some questions about it. We sat down after dinner to visit. I didn't take notes or have a recorder running, because I just wanted to get to know him better.

He worked with the soil/water conservation arm of CCC, farther west in the Utah deserts. Very interesting. It was just a free-ranging conversation. I've done a lot of interviewing, and have a good idea how to go about it. I know far better than to get locked into one agenda and not listen to whatever else surfaces, which might be far more interesting.

That turned out to be the case with Danny. He worked in the mines briefly, served in the Navy during WWII, but spent most of his working years as a surface supt. in the mining business. I got the feeling that Danny was a bit of a virtuoso with a bulldozer, and that kept him aboveground. Like many around here, Danny is of Welsh descent.

Then he said the magic words: Winter Quarters. Wow. The Winter Quarters mine was located in Pleasant Valley, about 45 minutes from where I live now. It was the Winter Quarters mine that blew up on May 1, 1900, leading to the deaths of 200 men and boys. Some know it as the Scofield Mine Disaster, named after the nearby coal camp (that's what mining towns were called). For years, that was the worst mine disaster in the U.S. In 1924, the Castlegate mine blew up, claiming the lives of 179 men and boys, the second worse disaster for years. You drive right by Castlegate on Highway 6, in Price Canyon.

Danny's grandfather owned a ranch in Pleasant Valley, and his own coal mine. Now, these were what I'd call "mom and pop" mines: just small mines providing for the family's coal needs, with some maybe shipped to market. Danny told me that mid morning on May 1, his father and grandfather were in the field. They heard an explosion. Danny's father made some remark about the miners starting early to celebrate Dewey Day. (The mines were to have closed at noon on May 1, for the celebration.)

His father said no, that was an explosion. They went toward the Winter Quarters mines (there were four shafts, two of which fatally connected), and ended up taking bodies out of the mines. They had to wait until the afterdamp settled (deadly combinations of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and nitrogen), and then they went to work.

Danny said his father told him that when they went into the mine where the afterdamp did the killing, they found that the miners had carefully laid down their tools and stacked them neatly, before trying to escape. "Dad told me that if they had just taken off running, they might have survived," Danny said.

Oof. The tragedy of that left no room for any inane comment on my part. But even then, I was thinking to myself, "I have come as close as is possible to a first-person interview with someone who was there that awful day."

Another thing that struck me was the expression, Dewey Day. Most recent accounts of the Scofield Mine Disaster mention the early closing on May 1 for May Day celebrations. No, it was Dewey Day. Until Danny mentioned that, I had forgotten, myself. That was the day to celebrate Admiral Dewey's May 1 victory in Manila Bay, during the Span Am War.

Thank you, Danny. Little details help make a good story better. I've learned so much from interviews. I've also learned that the smartest thing a writer or historian can do is just be quiet and listen.

It's always been easy for me to be quiet and listen. When I much younger, I had a definite stammer. I still do, but it's much easier to control. One consequence of this rather unimportant defect is that I have always been a better listener than a talker. It caused me some agony when I was kid, but now, I don't think I'd trade my particular defect for anyone else's. I've learned a lot by just listening. Funny to think I might actually be thankful for a stammer. I think I am.

Bountiful

2011-01-27T05:53:00.000-08:00

I'm still getting the hang of this thing. I wish there was a way I could comment to folks who have written comments, but I haven't discovered it yet.

To answer Heidi's question, yes, I am LDS. I cast my lot with the Mormons in December of 1965, and have never looked back. It was perhaps the smartest thing I ever did. I've felt some definite unease in recent years, because I do feel that I've been writing books that go a bit over the top for me. I generally prefer to be a bit more sedate about sex in novels. (I have nothing at all against sex in novels, let me state.) But having said that, I am still pleased with my work for Harlequin. But when the opportunity came along to write something more to my comfort level, I did. The result was Borrowed Light, which is the first of what will be more my pattern from now on, I think.

My next book out for Harlequin will be what I have called Choosing Rob Inman. Heaven knows what Harlequin will decide to title it. I am currently finishing a three-story Christmas anthology about three generations of Scottish Wilkies, beginning in the Regency, moving to the Crimea, and then heading west to Fort Laramie. It's been a challenge and vast fun. Following this is one more book for Harlequin, which is set at Fort Laramie. I guarantee a three-hankie read for that one. (I used to ranger at Fort Laramie, and have a M.A. in Indian Wars history, so it was almost a no-brainer to write one. I'm grateful Harlequin finally let me do that.) I've enjoyed the Regency, but there are other eras and I'm exploring them now.

And then it's on to more Cedar Fort, which is a nifty little publishing house. They recently signed me to a two-book contract. They wanted more books at once, but I prefer to work in two-book increments. I have agreed to write a novel that takes place during the tragic Scofield Mine Disaster, which happened in 1900, about 45 miles from where I live now in Carbon County, Utah. H'mm, turn that into romance? You bet. I'll be following that with a road romance about the Mexican Revolution in 1912, in which Pancho Villa and his ilk sent the Mormons in Mexico fleeing north to El Paso. It's a most interesting time. I'm finding that I like that 1900s era quite a bit.

But enough of that. Let me tell you of a great discovery I made in - natch - the swimming pool during water aerobics. Mayzell King was talking about Bountiful Baskets, and I perked up. I'd been wondering if there was a food co-op in this area, and there is!

What a neat organization. It covers Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. You pay roughly $16.50 a week, and on Saturday, go to your particular locaton to pick up a marvelous basket of fruits and vegetables. You transfer from their basket to yours, take it come and eat it. Talk about healthy options. Last week's basket had lemons, bananas, tomatoes, potatoes, broccoli, asparagus, grapefruit, apples, lettuce, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting.

You have roughly a 20-minute window to pick up your produce, and then anything left over is donated to the local fire station for distribution. If the volunteers have things ready early, you'll get a phone call, so you can arrive sooner. They still hold to the original distribution time, so this typically give someone more time to get there. And if you're ready to go, that means you're done that much sooner. (That make sense?)

And if you're away or still eating on last week's basket, then you simply don't sign up for the next week. You're in the system, so when you get back in, everything runs the same. For example, my husband grows a fabulous garden, so in late summer, we probably won't participate with Bountiful Baskets. But we'll be back in for fall, winter.

It's a great program, and a wonderful co-op. I'm happy to sing the praises of bountifulbaskets.org.

And now it's time to get ready for water aerobics. On Thursdays, we do zumba in the water, which means a whole lotta shaking going on for this grandma.

Ketchup with that?

2011-01-19T12:18:00.000-08:00

I saw something funny in the Deseret News this morning. Valerie Phillips' food column listed the 50 spiciest cities in the U.S. The information was courtesy of the McCormick Spice folks, who ought to know what they're talking about. The common "super-spices" referred to were black pepper, chili powder, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, garlic powder, ginger, oregano, red peppers (including paprika), rosemary, thyme and turmeric. That's a pretty standard list, as far as I could tell. The top five cities were no real surprise: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas/Fort Worth, and San Antonio/Corpus Christi, Texas. Oh, let's throw in Houston at number six. (Texas ranked high, and that's a no-brainer to me.) I was surprised to see New Orleans as far down as number eleven, but McCormick ought to know.

My personal chuckle: Nowhere - and I mean nowhere - was there a single city from North Dakota. None from Minnesota or South Dakota, either, but I understand this. I spent 12 fine years in Nodak and still miss it, but there is no cuisine in North Dakota. Oh, the Germans from Russia who populate the Golden Triangle of the state would likely disagree with me, but I'll stand by my statement. North Dakotans will tolerate salt and pepper, but they're a bit suspicious of ketchup. Anything beyond that is a strange new world.

And yet. And yet. One of my favorite recipes from North Dakota is one I got from Marilyn Hudson, a Mandan/Hidatsa lady who runs the Three Tribes Museum in New Town, ND. Marilyn's recipe is called 1,000 Year-old Stew, and it is superb. I know it's an approximation of a really old Plains Indian recipe, because I've had a similar stew on the Fort Peck Rez in Montana.

Here it is: It helps to use bison roast, if you can find one, but beef roast will do.

1 lb. buffalo roast, cut into 1/2 inch cubes (more is better)
1 c. sunflower seeds, roasted
2 c. cooked pinto beans, or naby, great northern, lima or red
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. homegrown sage, if you have it
1 6 oz. package of Uncle Ben's Long Grain and Wild Rice
1/2 onion, diced
1 can hominy, drained and rinsed

Use a slow cooker. Add all ingredients and cook on high, covered, for 3 1/2 hours, then turn down to low and cook for 3 more hours. You might add some broth, if you think it needs some. Delicious.

Nope, there's no cuisine in North Dakota, but I think of Marilyn's stew more often than I ever think of something fancy from New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.

It's no mistake that Dr. Joe McGeshick, who teaches at Fort Peck Community College, says that the real name of the school is FPCC, but it stands for "Feed People Community College." It seems someone in the office is always throwing a potluck event. But that's the way Indians are.

Fort Peck is a Sioux/Assiniboine reservation. A few years back when I rangered at Fort Union Trading Post NHS on the Montana/Nodak border, Loren Yellow Bird and I were in charge of one of the Indian Showcase events. I asked Joe to demonstrate "stone boiling." Assiniboine means "stone boiler," and you probably all remember in elementary school about reading of Indians boiling food in buffalo bladders, using stones. I had never seen it done, and figured that our visitors at Fort Union hadn't, either.

Joe stone-boiled for us and the visitors and it was beyond cool. He just used a metal pot, but the stones were lava rock, and heated in a campfire. He would drop in a few at a time, and the water would just explode with heat. As he talked, he'd take out stones and add more hot ones. Everyone who saw that demonstration enjoyed it. Did it work? You betcha.

Joe's name intrigued me, since I have Scottish ancestors. I told him I had never heard of a Scottish name like that, and he laughed. McGeshick is a white man's interpretation in English of (I think) a Cree or Ojibwe word meaning eagle flying. Joe has a PhD in ethnology and I recall him now with real fondness. I may have to send him an e-mail - you know, one Fergusson to one McGeshick.

Well, toodleoo until next time.

Still here

2011-01-17T14:33:00.000-08:00

No, no, I haven't forgotten my blog. I was in Florida for a week, doing lawyer-family business, which is never fun, and then came home to some excited e-mails from the good folks at Cedar Fort Publications. It seems that Walmart placed a really big order for Borrowed Light, and wants me to have another novel done immediately. Right now.

No can do, I reminded my editor, because I am halfway through a three-story Christmas anthology for Harlequin, and still owe them a book which is due July 15. We did have a meeting and agreed that as soon as I finish that third book for Harlequin, they want me. U'mm. Sounds nice. They wanted a five-book deal, but I said I'd rather do a two-book contract at a time.

So that's the plan in the tan van (an old Sesame Street routine that my kids remember). I'll have the first book due to Cedar Fort Nov. 11, and the second one in June of 2012. They'll be moving those right along for publication, so that'll work. I already know the topics, and somewhere in there, if the numbers justify it, there will be a sequel to Borrowed Light.

So now I have to write, which is always fun.

The Story of Us

2011-01-02T05:05:00.000-08:00

For Christmas, I bought my husband the History Channel series called "America: The Story of Us." The whole thing relies on way too much CGI, and it's pretty simple history, but it picks up about halfway through, when camera images were easily available (i.e. after about 1900).

Beautifully narrated by Liev Schrieber (except he can't pronounce Antietam or New Orleans), "The Story of Us" is worthy of viewing. What the series hammers home, is the inventive nature of us restless, violent, free Americans. So much has happened in the world, and much of it - cars, electricity, computers - came from American minds, bent on solving problems or making life better. We do crave our technology.

As I watched, I was reminded of one of my favorite scenes ever in motion pictures, because it illustrated Yankee Know How to a huge degree. Apollo 13, directed by Ron Howard and starring everybody, was the story of the ill-fated mission to the moon that had to be aborted because of severe difficulties. The movie gave us one of Holloywood's best lines, too: "Houston, we have a problem."

For me, the best part in the movie is back at command central, when the guy in charge of the mission gathers together a pile of stuff that is available to the astronauts in their confined quarters. He loads it onto a table in command central and gathers his experts around him. I can't recall the exact words, but he gestures to the pile and tells his men this is what they have to use, to instruct the pilots how to jury-rig a return home from outer space. The guys set to work, and sure enough, find a solution. Coupled with the piloting skills of the men on board, they do indeed return. Cool scene.

What's so moving about it is to watch people under pressure take what they have, and make it work. Nobody whines; they just go to work. I'm not saying this is solely an American trait - I'm not that naive - but it does symbolize something about America that I have always appreciated: finding solutions to complex problems. Never has this been portrayed better than that scene from Apollo 13. I'm also moved and humbled by the fact that the computer I am writing this on has more power than that entire roomful of computers that sent people into space. Wow squared.

Yep, we're brash, violent, independent-to-a-fault folks, but we do have a way about us. It was nice to be reminded of that by "America: The Story of Us."

I'm heading for a week in Florida with my sisters, so probably won't be able to update this blog until next Saturday. Florida in January - someone has to go there. Might as well be me.

Happy New Year and all that

2010-12-31T18:20:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, Christmas Eve generally began with me flopped on the couch, reading Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I'm not totally sure why. Perhaps it had something to do with the book, which began on Christmas Day, with Marmee delivering food to the huddled masses, yearning to eat free. I would usually finish it by New Year's Eve, and call it good. It's still a favorite book of mine, although now I filter it more through the Civil War, since I studied that a good bit in grad school. I also wonder what it was like growing up in Bronson Alcott's disordered household. Sheez, but he was a piece of work.

Ah, but there is Jo, writing her heart out, and homebody Meg, and doomed Beth, and frivolous Amy, and lovestruck Laurie, and wise (read stodgy) Prof Bhaer. They became my lifelong friends a lotta years ago, and remain so. I am reminded that I have excellent sisters of my own: Karen and Wanda Lynn. I'd have liked them even if I hadn't been related to them. I'll be in Orlando next week, visiting them, so count me fortunate.

On New Year's Eve, Robert Utley, that dean of American Indian Wars history, and his wife Melody Webb, like to bring in the new year with oyster stew and Casablanca. I usually e-mail Bob and wish him a happy new year. I remind him that he may not always have Paris, but he will have a whole slew of wonderful histories, and some fine national historic sites that he brought into the Park Service, when he was chief historian. (I got to know Bob better when he was the subject of my master's thesis. Prince of a fellow)

When our five kids were of a worthy age, we started watching favorite videos on New Year's. (That's about as exciting as it gets around our house.) We generally watched The Sting, or sometimes Trading Places. I believe we'll watch both tonight, and I'll make popcorn. Woo hoo!

I have a new - well, sort of new - guilty DVD pleasure: The More the Merrier. This high-larious movie was made in 1943, when Washington, D.C. was in the middle of a monster housing shortage. The lovely Jean Arthur - she of the little-girl voice and impeccable comic timing - sublets a room in her apartment to a kindly old gentleman, who in turn sublets part of his room to a GI briefly in town and bound for North Africa. The GI is played by Joal McCrea, and he is beyond marvelous in this movie.

One of the funniest scenes in all moviedom is the scene when Joel and Jean (her character is engaged to someone else), sit on the front step and he pitches wonderful woo. His hands are everywhere, and she tries to continue a rational conversation by politely fending him off. I swear there is one place where I am certain he has three hands in motion. It's a marvel.

I used to ocasionally catch the movie on TCM. Imagine my delight when I found a copy in the DVD bin at my local supermarket for $5. I did a little happy dance in the aisle, pleased to own that national treasure, and tickled to know that someone else (whoever authorized that DVD) appreciates great comedy.

I think I'll watch it tonight, because this year needs to go out with a laugh and a high kick.

You have a good one, too.

Goodbye for now

2010-12-29T14:45:00.000-08:00

Funny how a day that starts so nice - water aerobics again after Christmas off - can end so bad. After a day of volunteering at the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in Helper, I came home to the bad news that my longtime friend, Nick Karpov, was dead. Nick, a retired electrical engineer, was a bachelor, a Russian/American, and my good friend. In my top ten list of great good times, right up there was the day we spent at Disneyland when I was about to start my junior year at BYU, and Nick was a bit older. I'm not even sure how much older than I am, but maybe twenty years. No matter. He had a good time in Disneyland, too. I was thinking about that and him just this weekend, when my daughter Mary Ruth and I were talking about their Disneyland trip last summer.

How ironic that he should be dead. I doubt he was even sick a day in his life. Problem was, he ignored the signs of advancing pneumonia until it was too late, and even the best doctors in L.A. couldn't save him. Oh, Nick, why oh why didn't you go to the doctor sooner? If I could see you again, I would probably scold you first.

Nick looked like just what he was: a Russian from the Ukraine. He was built like a fireplug, and never lost his accent. He always looked a bit grizzled, so when he finally got old, he didn't look any older than he ever looked. He knew so much, and shared his knowledge in ways that educated, and never antagonized. He was a lifelong learner, always taking classes, learning yet another language (Spanish his latest), reading challenging books and keeping notes on them.

Nick took me to plays in Los Angeles, and to the Brown Derby twice: the first time, just because, and the second time, a few days later, just because we'd had such a nice time the first time. He took me to a Russian restaurant where I had my first caviar. It was so good. I may have to buy a jar and eat some, just for Nick.

I met Nick through my brother-in-law, Narsingh Deo. When he was working at Jet Propulsion Lab in L.A., Narsingh moved into the same Monrovia apartment building where Nick lived, and they struck up an acquaintance that lasted until that awful phone call on Dec. 28. I got to know Nick a year later when the BYU orchestra was touring southern California, and Narsingh, Nick and my sister, Karen, came to a concert, then took me to dinner at the revolving restaurant at the LA airport.

The following Christmas, I stayed with Karen in LA in Narsingh's apartment, while he moved in with Nick, a few doors down. Remember when people were conservative about relationships? That was us. I had a good time, except that Narsingh and Karen were both vegetarians, and I was about to the stage where I would have killed for a piece of meat. Nick happened to drop by after work. I recall hauling him off to one side and begging him to take me to the nearest McDonald's for a burger. He didn't hesitate. Nick, you saved my life.

He shared his love of Russian literature with me, and we had marvelous conversations. He always made me feel smarter than I was. (A few weeks ago, he corrected my grammar on this blog - I think it was a typo - and I made the appropriate change. Thank you, Nick.) He shared Pushkin, which is every literate Russian's favorite. A few years ago, I agonized over Sholokhov's epic Quiet Flows the Don books. Images from the books still remain with me; I suppose they always will. What I learned about Russian literature, I learned from Nick first.

Nick was a private man; he would not like this blog about him. I'm a pretty good interviewer, but I could never get him to tell me anything - I mean anything - about how he and his parents came to the U.S. from Russia, after World War II. I have to wonder if perhaps the came into the country illegally, but who knows? He served in the U.S. Army in Germany, and he was educated in California, working for Burroughs Corp. for years.

He has every single thing I have ever written. I had sent him my most recent book, and I know he read it before he died. I have to smile about that. Here is this scientist, scholar - he read in at least four languages - and there is his collection of Carla Kelly ephemera. Ahem, I don't think I was on the same shelf with Pushkin.

We had a joke about that. A few years ago, someone rammed the back of his car and mashed his trunk. In it was, as he wrote me, "The opera of Pushkin." I e-mailed back and said I didn't realize that Pushkin himself wrote an opera. Whereupon, Nick promptly reminded me that opera is the plural of opus, which meant "the works of Pushkin." Doh! I gave myself a dope slap, because I knew that. Just wasn't thinkin'. Since then, we teased each other about operas.

Nick came to see us in Wellington last summer. He was only planning to stay a day and a night. We hauled him to several dinosaur sites and museums, and out to the museum where I volunteer, and he decided to stay another day and night, because he was having a good time. I'm so glad he did.

When he got here, he presented me with a beautiful white maple end table that he had made for me in his woodworking class. At that time, we were in year two of remodeling. I assured him that when my office was done, I'd put the end table in there, in a place of honor. I did. It's really quite beautiful.

I look out my window right now and it's a Russian landscape: snow and more snow. Confirmed southern California that he is now, or was, Nick would like the snow today. Gee, I miss him. When the house was quiet, I cried and gave one of those all-purpose, one-size-fits-all primal screams. I'll always miss him. I have the last 7 or 8 actual letters he wrote to me, just before I got engaged to my husband, Martin. Some 35 years ago, I happened to come across them, and sat on the floor in my sons' bedroom in Wyoming, rereading them through a more adult perspective. I read them, and began to grasp how much he loved me. Since his death, both of my sisters have mentioned that to me. Sisters, I knew. I really did. That makes his death all the more painful. I hope he knows now how much I cared.

There's so much I want to tell him. My son Jeremy gave me a truly magnificent book for Christmas called The Tiger, by John Vaillant. It's about a man-eating Siberian tiger in Russia's outback. I remember thinking that I had to e-mail Nick and tell him to get the book. I can't now.

But I want to. This morning, I e-mailed him. I wrote, "I miss you, Nick. Love, Carla," and sent it into the ether. Who knows? Maybe it'll float around forever.

The Famous Air Tree

2010-12-18T08:14:00.000-08:00

In 1990 or 1991, when we were living in Louisiana, my husband lost his job. I was a grad school, and we were broke. I asked the kids still at home whether they would like to spend $20 on a Christmas tree, or use the money for a few more presents. They wanted both, of course.

I got clever. I bought a roll of transparent fishing line, and a box of push pins. We had a blank beige wall in one corner of the family room, so I hung my Christmas ornaments against that background, basically in the shape of a tree, or where a tree would be, if one were actually there. The ornaments were all of different heights, as though they hung on that imaginary tree. I called it the air tree, of course.

It was totally cool. Against that background, the ornaments appeared to be hangng in mid-air. The effect was truly stunning, and cost me about 5 dollars. As an added touch of whimsy, I put the tree stand - filled with water, of course - underneath the air tree.

The neighbors enjoyed the tree as much as we did. In fact, I think it was Denise Grayson who dubbed it "The Famous Air Tree." She even brought my tree some lightweight ornaments.

A few years later, when times were more plush, I suggested to the kids that we could afford a real tree again. Oh, the howls of protest! I continued the air tree for quite a few years. Time eventually takes its toll. I'm not wild about getting on a ladder to arrange my ornaments, so I downsized to a little artificial tree. It's fine, but we all remember the magic of the air tree, and the "can do" spirit that triumphed when it came about because of desperation.

We Are Seven

2010-12-15T11:07:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned Vondell, who rides with me to water aerobics every morning. That's a fun group, by the way. We exercise, to be sure, but there's enough time to chat. We've all agreed that "what happens in the pool, stays in the pool," which might be a good thing. Price, Wellington and Helper are small towns close together in Carbon County. We discovered, when we moved here, that everyone knows everyone, and most of them are related to each other. I confess to listening, and squirreling away ideas for stories.

Vondell is a non-complaining lady, even though she is legally blind, and has had what most of us would consider a heaping portion of challenges. Her husband, a good man by all accounts, died a few years ago. Vondell's daughter died as a result of domestic violence. Her son died of a brain tumor. Vondell is in her late fifties, and raising her granddaughter, who is ten now. Vondell doesn't waste her time complaining. She's an excellent seamstress, a bookkeeper, and a "crafty" lady. I've been printing my manuscripts in 18-point type so she can read them. I feel lucky to have such a sweet friend.

She shared a poem with me that someone gave her after her son's death. It reminded me of a favorite Wordsworth poem, which I just copied out and gave to her. Mabe you'd like to see it, too. It fits my church's philosphy of life after death, and, I suspect, illustrates how most people feel. Wordsworth was definitely on to something.

We Are Seven

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

A simple Child,

That lightly draws its breath,

And feels its life in every limb,

What should it know of death?

I met a little cottage Girl:

She was eight years old, she said;

Her hair was thick with many a curl

That clustered round her head.

She had a rustic, woodland air,

And she was wildly clad:

Her eyes were fair, and very fair;

Her beauty made me glad.

'Sisters and brothers, little Maid,

How many may you be?'

'How many? Seven in all,' she said,

And wondering looked at me.

'And where are they? I pray you tell,'

She answered, 'Seven are we;

And two of us at Conway dwell,

And two are gone to sea.

'Two of us in the church-yard lie,

My sister and my brother;

And in the church-yard cottage, I

Dwell near them with my mother.'

'You say that two at Conway dwell,

And two are gone to sea,

Yet yet are seven! I pray you tell,

Sweet Maid, how this may be.'

Then did the little Maid reply,

'Seven boys and girls are we;

Two of us in the church-yard lie,

Beneath the church-yard tree.'

'You run above, my little Maid,

Your limbs they are alive;

If two are in the church-yard laid,

Then ye are only five.'

'Their graves are green, they may be seen,'

The little Maid replied,

'Twelve steps or more from my mother's door,

And they are side by side.

'My stockings there I often knit,

My kerchief there I hem;

And there upon the ground I sit,

And sing a song to them.

'And often after sunset, Sir,

When it is light and fair,

I take my little porringer,

And eat my supper there.

'The first that died was sister Jane;

In bed she moaning lay,

Till God released her of her pain;

And then she went away.

'So in the church-yard she was laid;

And, when the grass was dry,

Together round her grave we played,

My brother John and I.

'And when the ground was white with snow,

And I could run and slide,

My brother John was forced to go,

And he lies by her side.'

'How many are you, then,' said I,

'If they two are in heaven?'

Quick was the little Maid's reply,

'O Master! We are seven.'

'But they are dead; those two are dead!

Their spirits are in heaven!'

'Twas throwing words away; for still

The little Maid would have her will,

And said, 'Nay, we are seven!'

Getting into hot water

2010-12-12T05:54:00.000-08:00

    In October, I took a two-week trip to a) make some connections for Borrowed Light booksignings b) attend my Park Service boss's retirement party c) visit my son on the Montana/Canada border d) attend an LDS meeting house dedication in Torrington, Wyoming e) just hit the open road.
    I did all the above and it was a great road trip. There's one part of the trip that just "happened," that I keep remembering, especially now that it is chilly out. On a wild hare, I visited the Wyoming State Bath House.
    Aha, I'll almost bet you didn't know the state of Wyoming had a bath house. Even better, it's free, even if you don't happen to be a current resident of said state.
    Here's how it happened: On the last leg of my trip, I spent a night at Old Faithful, in Yellowtone National Park, visiting with another ranger-friend. Bob and I go way back to our Fort Union Trading Post NHS days, and he likes my chocolate chip cookies. After I left Yellowstone, I just naturally went to Cody, Wyoming, which is 53 miles from Yellowstone's east entrance. My dad was from Cody and I love the town.
    I did the museum thing there - five world-class museums, and tried to eat at the Irma Hotel. The next morning, I started toward home in Utah. When I was a kid, my Grandma Baier would talk about going to the hot springs in Thermopolis, a small town south of Cody. I remember wondering about that, so I decided to stop, some 55 years after I first remember her talking about it. It was on the way, so why not?
    There it was: Hot Springs State Park. There are two state-owned pools, each on the smallish size. The water comes out of the springs at 127 degrees, and it's reduced to 104 degrees for the pools. State health officials have designated 20 minutes as the limit per visit. It's free, but if you're stopping on a whim and don't have a towel in your possession, that'll cost you a dollar to rent one. Best buck I ever spent.
   I rented one, got out my swimsuit, and took the soak. Me oh my, heaven on earth. One pool is indoor, and the other isn't. Since it was early October and nippy but not prohibitive, I opted for the outdoor pool, which I had all to myself. I shared it with some falling leaves. The small pool is probably 3 feet deep (I'm not much of an estimator, though), with a stone bench lining the inside, so you can wade in and sit down. When I sat, the water was about chest-high on me.
    The heat was divine, and the smell of sulfur totally medicinal. I sat and thought, and felt those cares melt away. Yes, it was hot, but it was glorious. I thought about Grandma Baier, and her good farm cooking, and how she would laugh at me in later years when I tried to get her to give me cups and teaspoons on those recipes, so I could try to reproduce her glorious food in my kitchen. ("Oh, Carla, you just add a smidge of this and a handful of that!") I remembered the fun of visiting her and Grandpa in Cody, with its nightly summer rodeos and Indians dancing in the streets, and cowboys and silver dollars, because no one in Wyoming ever used paper dollars. Not for years and years, anyway, and these were the big silver dollars, not those genteel gold ones you can get now. You know, wimpy money.
    I got out of the free water after twenty minutes, dried off, got dressed, and immediately phoned my older sister to say, "OK, Karen, next year. Here. You, me and Wanda." We all have some old bones to soak, some memories to remind each other of, and a care or two to send to the hot springs gods.
   And I'm going to have my own towel, because I really want that soak to be free, courtesy of the great state of Wyoming (which has always had the coolest state flag and the coolest license plate, way before any states had cool plates).
   If you're anywhere near Thermopolis, stop and enjoy.

All that stuff in the middle

2010-12-07T18:46:00.000-08:00

Vondell and I were driving to water aerobics this morning, and she had some questions about writing, one, in particular, I know many writers must get: Where do ideas come from?

That's never been a particularly interesting question for me, because it just happens - I get ideas. Other people are good with musical instruments, or maybe crafty stuff, or knitting, but I Get Ideas.

The more interesting issue for me is what makes a story believable. I told Vondell that's what I enjoy - getting from point A to point B in an efficient fashion that doesn't defy logic. Anything other than that is what I jokingly call that the After-Wonder-Boy-Escapes-from-the-Cave Syndrome. You know, or maybe you're waay too young, those desperate moments in the weekly Saturday matinee serial cliffhanger. Right at the end, Wonder Boy is left in a desperate situation, a true cliffhanger. All too often, the following week's Wonder Boy serial begins with Wonder Boy out of the desperate situation of last week and on to something else. The derring do becomes the derring did, and I don't know how it happened.

Even when I was little, I knew that was a crock. I mean, how did Wonder Boy escape from the cave? Inquiring minds want to know. Point being, if you're going to get Wonder Boy in a desperate spot, you'd better know how to logically get him out of it. If not, you don't have a credible story.

I learned more about this years ago, when Life magazine ran an article on the sequel to Tom Sawyer that Mark Twain never finished. I think it was called something like Becky Thatcher among the Indians. Twain had written several chapters, up to that point where Becky, older now, is captured by Indians out West.

And there it stopped. In the 19th century, white Americans were convinced that once white women were in the hands of Indians, that rape would always follow. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn't. Twain realized he couldn't take that next logical step, or he would lose the allegiance of a lot of his loyal, Victorian-era reading public. He put the manuscript away and never finished it. The sensibilities of the times wouldn't allow him to take the next logical writing step. Anything else he did wouldn't make the work credible, and Twain fully understood the matter of events following events in realistic, logical fashion.

To me, that's the challenge of writing: Does what I am writing make logical sense? It needs to be entertaining, but it also needs to be logical and credible, if readers are to give themselves wholly to the story.

Some wag once said that fiction was "one damned thing after another." This is so true. I think anyone can begin a novel, and anyone can end one. The ability of the writer lies in all that stuff in the middle: how it gets the reader from once upon a time to happy ending.

My newest novel, The Admiral's Penniless Bride, is a good example of the logic of fiction. What happens to Sally Paul throughout the novel, beginning with the Meet Cute in Chapter One, builds on something logical that inadvertantly happens in Chapter One. Her harmless introduction comes back to haunt her, and it's all perfectly credible. A far-more-skillful example is Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, where Bathsheba Everdene's impulsive gift of a Valentine to Squire Boldwood sets up the eventual fraught consequences. What delicious fun.

That's one of the many things that makes writing fun. Years ago, when I worked in hospital public relations, my boss made an interesting observation about me. June was a pretty good writer, but a much better photographer. She labored over her writing, and it wasn't much fun for her. She told me, "Carla, the difference between you and me is that you like to write, while I like to have written."

She was absolutely correct. The whole process intrigues me, even the tough parts.

No bears, no bears at all

2010-12-05T06:11:00.000-08:00

After that blog on bear troubles in Glacier, I thought I'd better redeem myself with another bear story. This one was a column I wrote for "Prairie Lite," when I worked as a reporter for the Valley City Times-Record. The North Dakota Newspaper Association awarded this humorous column first place for newspapers with less than 12,000 circulation. This column was published in 6 October 2005.

No bears, no bears at all

Jeremy the Border Patrol guy called last week from Montana with a real story. He claims it's true. He heard it from a game warden on the Blackfeet Reservation, who says he saw the whole thing happen in Glacier National Park. Who am I to doubt?

It seems a tourist from back East went into a store in the park and bought a can of bear repellent. He took the can and his family into the parking lot, lined them up, and sprayed them.

Apparently he thought bear spray worked like insect repellant. Oops, no. His whole family went to the hospital. I only hope, when she recovered, that his wife got a good lawyer and lots of lovely alimony.

Jeremy's been on the Montana-Canadian border for a year now. This summer, he decided to walk his area along that imaginary line. He hiked a little each day, and now he's done. He had bear sightings, but none were too close.

The Border Patrol doesn't issue bear spray, and he's too cheap to buy it, so he checked out a shotgun and took that along. He called it bear spray.

Because inquiring minds want to know, I had to look up bear spray on the Internet. I learned there are several varieties, and all claim to repell bears by spraying it on the bear and not, um, on oneself.

One spray claimed it was "university-tested" at the University of Montana. Yikes. Maybe the best way to avoid bears is to stay away from the University of Montana, since they seem to be on campus. That's almost a no-brainer.

Another spray, called "Guard Alaska," is manufactured in Maryland and New Jersey. New Jersey? Would you trust bear spray from a state with probably more Mafiosi than wildlife? The other brands were manufactured in Arizona and Missouri. I'm skeptical.

Jeremy hasn't seen a bear up really close yet, and he'd like to keep it that way. We do have a common bear experience, though, through a book. It started when I was a little girl, and my mother read me Alice Dalgleish's story, "The Bears on Hemlock Mountain."

It's about Jonathan, 8 years old, who is sent over Hemlock Mountain to borrow a big iron pot from his aunt. He's heard rumors about bears, but his mother tells him, "There are no bears, no bears at all, on Hemlock Mountain."

Jonathan hurries over the mountain. What with one thing and another, he doesn't start back until dusk, lugging that iron pot. He keeps repeating, "No bears, no bears at all," over and over until (gulp) he sees a bear. Not one, but two.

Because he is a resourceful pioneer boy, Jonathan tips the iron pot on top of himself and hides underneath. It's a great book for children, because it's a little bit scary, but everything turns out all right.

My mom read it to me; I read it to my children, starting with Jeremy. When my first grandchild was old enough, I bought a copy, taped myself reading it, and mailed book and tape to him in San Diego. Maybe someday he'll read it to his children.

That's as close as I want to get to a bear. No force on earth will drag me to that new documentary, "Grizzly Man." It's the sad saga of Timothy Treadwell, who cavorted (briefly) among Alaskan grizzlies. He and his friend, Annie Huguenard, were romping with the bears as usual when, uh oh, everything went south in a bad way.

Treadwell had videotape and audiotape running during the whole thing. Luckily, nothing appears on the videotape. The audiotape recorded the attack from beginning to lunch.

Treadwell was probably a nut to begin with, even though he managed to survive among the bears for several years. Funny thing about bears: When it goes bad with bears, there's no middle ground.

So if you're out in bear country this fall, remember to make lots of noise as you walk those trails. If you happen to surprise a bear, back away slowly and don't make eye contact. Assume a non-threatening posture. If a bear attacks and you have bear spray, use it on the bear.

And if you happen to be in Missoula, for heaven's sake, stay away from the University of Montana.

As an addendum, in October, I visited a ranger friend at Old Faithful, in Yellowstone Park. Bob's a back country ranger, which means his crew walks the back trails, keeps them in repair, and arranges back trail hiking permits for visitors. Bob told me a few of his tourist stories, and assured me that the most dangerous entity in Yellowstone is an urban visitor. "They don't know enough to be cautious," is how Bob put it.

He was called out to difuse what park people call a "bear jam," and found a tourist trying to get his little daughter close to a bison for a photo op. "You can't be subtle," Bob said. "These people are clueless. You have to get right in their faces."

Bob quickly got between the bison and the little girl, and motioned her to back away from the bison and her father. When Dad got huffy, Bob said this: "I'm doing this so when you are gored and tossed, your daughter will be safe." Apparently Dad finally got the message.

Rangers stick up for each other; it's a hey-rube sixth sense. I remember one calm and sleepy morning at Fort Union Trading Post NHS, where I worked. I was doing paperwork in the ranger office in the basement, when I started hearing a visitor talking in a too-loud voice to Loren Yellow Bird, the ranger on desk just upstairs. I dropped everything and went upstairs to stand next to Loren. Yeah, me the granny. It was nothing, and the guy finally left. Loren's great at calming down Those Who Should Be Medicated.

When the visitor took his rant elsewhere, Loren just laughed and said, "Guess he forgot to take his pills this morning." That's Loren. And I went back downstairs. It was a nothing experience, but I just want readers to know that we look out for each other in the Park Service, the Forest Service and for sure the Border Patrol.

Borrow Light book cover

2010-12-02T14:22:00.000-08:00

I just looked at Amazon.com and the cover is finally up for Borrowed Light. It's a good one, and I'm delighted.

Black Friday wimp

2010-12-02T09:54:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit slow in a random nattering. My editor had me do some revisions on Choosing Rob Inman, which should be out about this time next year. Boy howdy, I hope they leave that title alone... Anyway, that tied me up. So here we go.

We were "over the mountain" in Lehi, Utah, for Thanksgiving, visiting my husband's relatives. I told my SIL that I was looking for two yards of canvas material to make some bookbags. All we have is Walmart on my side of the mountain, and that leaves something to be desired, at times. She suggested I go to JoAnn's Fabric, and I thought, Yep, that's the place. Drive on. (Inside joke there for Mormons.)

I figured, how bad can a fabric store be on Black Friday? It's a huge store, and I thought everyone would be elsewhere. Gee, was I naive.

I fought my way into the store, and discovered that JoAnn's was having huge fabric sales. I kept going, thinking, how bad can it be?

Jeez Louise, it was awful. There were a lot of Really. Determined. Women. with their carts crammed with 12-15 bolts of fabric, waiting to get them cut. I took a number, and got in line with my pitiful bolt (all I wanted was two yards). I waited and waited, and kept seeing women in front of me with those 12-15 bolts in their carts, obviously ready to sew for the entire Chinese Army, or maybe that family in Arkansas now expecting child #27, or something like that.

It occurred to me after only about 15 minutes (I am a late bloomer) that if I stayed in that line, I would probably still be standing in that line the next day. I put away my now-pitiful one bolt and slunk away. Here's the joke: I actually did find the fabric I wanted at the Price, Utah, Walmart (my side of the mountain) the next day. It took me 5 minutes, tops, to get it and get outta the store.

And that's as close as I will ever come to ANYTHING on Black Friday. I'm 63 years old and I now have that grand mindset: "There are some things in life that I just don't have to do." Oops. I'm almost embarrassed to mention how long it took me to figure that out.

G'night, sleep tight

2010-11-22T10:18:00.000-08:00

My son, Jeremy, called this morning with a great story. He's a U.S. Border Patrol agent on the Montana border, right up against Glacier National Park. (Yeah, I know: someone has to live in that beautiful area. Might as well be my kid.)

This story happened a few years back, and was told to him by one of the Glacier N.P. rangers. For obvious reasons, the Park Service didn't want this one spread around, but hey, it's a good story.

Park biologists were doing some bear studies and needed to tranquilize a grizzly. Four guys were supposed to rendezvous at the bear trap. These are big, cage-like affairs where bears can be lured in with a sheep's head, or some such vittle, and immobilized so the biologists can do their thing.

Well, the first showed up, and there was a royally pissed grizzly inside the cage, according to plan. The biologist waited and waited for the other guys to show - cell phone coverage is poor in those remote areas so there was no way to contact his compadres. Expecting them at any moment, he decided to go ahead and tranquilize the bear and get started.

He shot the tranquilizer into the bear, and waited until it went limp. He waited around some more, and when the guys still weren't there, decided to just go inside the cage and get started. He did, and took his hair, blood or whatever samples from the unconscious griz.

Well, you know what happened. The wind was stiff and sure enough, the cage door slammed shut, with him inside the bear cage with a still-unconscious grizzly. His trank gun was outside the cage and he Could Not Get Out.

Tranquilizing bears is not rocket science, but there isn't a really good way to know how long they'll be tucked up in the arms of Morpheus before the bear comes to, looks around, and is REALLY irritated. The only thing the guy had was a little penknife. Since he had no idea how long the bear would be unconscious, and no idea when the other guys would arrive to free him from the cage, he figured he'd better kill the grizzly with the penknife.

Apparently, the poor sod hacked and hacked and sawed and cut until he finally killed the unconscious grizzly bear. Meanwhile, he's drenched in blood. Any idea how many gallons a grizzly has?

Well, the other biologists finally showed up and came across this horrific scene. Their buddy is nowhere in sight, and the bear cage is pouring blood. They called and hollered, and finally the poor guy hollered back. When they let him out, he was blood-soaked and pretty traumatized (which is probably as vast an understatement as I have ever written).

Jeremy and I speculated that there was probably an opening for a biologist at Glacier N.P. by the end of that week.

Moral of this story: For heavens sake, don't anesthetize a grizzly bear all by yourself.

Borrowed Light

2010-11-19T14:36:00.000-08:00

So far, Amazon has the book buried down my list of books. The cover isn't up yet, but I'll see if I can figure out how to upload the tip sheet onto this blog. Yikes, that's about more than my brain can process, but hey, I might manage. It's a gorgeous cover. I'm told it will also be available in Kindle.

Borrowed Light is my first - and absolutely not last - novel with an LDS theme. So, if readers are looking for more than a kiss, some sexual tension, etc., they won't be happy campers. But having said that, it's a book anyone would enjoy, Mormon or not, because a lot of us go through the kind of growing up that Julia does. At some point, we all have to be guided by our own light, and not stand in borrowed light. (And no, I do not shove religion down anyone's throat in this book. I hate stories that do that.)

I got the idea from a marvelous book called Perfection Salad, which I picked up in a used book store in Denton, Texas, years ago. Perfection Salad reads like someone's dissertation, and it's the story of the growth of scientific cooking, which developed around the turn of the 20th century. Think of "home economics," and the use of calibrated measurements, and you'll get the drift. Oh, and "dainty cooks," too.

Julia Darling is a newly minted graduate of Boston's Fannie Farmer School of Cookery. The year in 1909, and she's home again in Salt Lake City, rather unhappily engaged to a fine fellow that everything thinks is perfect for her - except her. Her little sister (!) is getting married that morning in the Salt Lake Temple, and Julia is feeling decidedly OLD. (She's 27)

In that low mood, and on a whim, she answers an ad in the Deseret News titled "Rancher Desperate." Paul Otto, long-time Wyoming rancher, wants a cook who is specifically a grad of Fannie Farmer's school. The story goes from there: At first, Mr. Otto and Julia are chalk and cheese, because they both "assume" more than they know about the other.

The story is set in southeast Wyoming, about 100 miles north of Cheyenne and not too far from the Nebraska border. The terrain is high rolling plains, with the mountains close by. We lived in Torrington, Wyoming, when my husband finished graduate school for the first time. He taught at the community college there, and I worked at Fort Laramie NHS as a ranger.

I joined the Goshen County Historical Society, and admired - from a distance - a fine-looking old rancher named Paul Otto. Thirty-five years ago, for some reason, I decided I would use that name in a western. And now I have. The original Paul Otto was distinguished-looking in that way that only a successful stockman is. When I knew him, he was getting up there in years, but he sat as straight as if he was on horseback. Marvelous memory.

Borrowed Light is a book I've been wanting to write for a long, long time.

Big box

2010-11-17T19:03:00.000-08:00

It's always a nice moment when UPS delivers a box with 48 freebie copies of the latest book. I think The Admiral's Penniless Bride goes on sale in January. Typically, I get such a box a month before it goes on sale, but Harlequin was early with this one. Mabe they want to beat the Christmas rush. It's a good book, and I hope it does well.

Weight Watchers tonight. I lost -.4 pounds, which isn't much, but it wasn't a gain. Part of the value of WW is learning to make wise choices. For example, last night we were near Manti, Utah, at a Chinese restaurant. I was a good girl and ordered steamed vegetables and tofu (our daughter Liz called it toad food when she was a little girl). It was very good, and I even got a good fortune in the cookie. Pluses all around.

A sequel?

2010-11-15T17:52:00.000-08:00

I rely on my readers to give me clues. Monday through Friday, I go to water aerobics in the pool in Price, Utah. I call us "Eight - or ten - fluffy women in a pool," with some of us more fluffy than others. There's a lady that I pick up on my way to the pool. She's so neat. VonDell is about my age. She's legally blind, because she was born with a really rare form of cataracts. She can read if the print is big enough, and if she holds the page close enough to her one not-good-but-much-better-than-the-other eye.

One of my Regency novels came out in large print, so I loaned her that, and she enjoyed it. Then I printed out the manuscript of my LDS-themed novel, Borrowed Light, in 18 point type. (That book will be out in February - available on Amazon -- shameless commercial)

She finished it over the weekend and realy liked it. Said she's going to start over and re-read it, which thrilled my writer's heart. She also said she wants a sequel, because there are a lot of characters, in addition to the main characters, who need more "face time," according to VonDell.

I'd never even thought of a sequel to Borrowed Light, but I think she's right. I send my editor and e-mail and asked her what she thinks. Thank you, VonDell!

Right now, I'm working on a three-Christmas-story collection, which is going pretty well. I'll have the first story done by the first week in December, I think. I'm also waiting for my office to be finished. It's a neat room we added on the other side of the porch, and was the summer and early fall's remodeling project. The built-in desk (really basic) just needs a top to it, and I can move into the office. This will be much better than my usual writing places through the years, which have varied from a furnace room, to a kitchen table, to several laundry rooms. Imagine. A room for writing. I doubt my prose will be any more deathless than it already isn't, but it will be nice.

Winter's Bone

2010-11-13T07:35:00.000-08:00

Last night we watched Winter's Bone, a wonderful indie movie that has done quite well in the public eye. It was filmed in Taney and Christian Counties in Missouri, and depicts the courageous and desperate struggle of a 17-year-old girl to maintain her family home and continue caring for her two young siblings.

We lived in the Ozarks twice. I wouldn't care to live there now, because I have terrible allergies there, but I remember at least some of those years with real fondness. There is nothing quite as lovely as a Missouri
"holler" on a misty morning in fall, or an early spring morning when the dogwood is beginning to bloom. I'll pass on summer's humidity!

I remember the stalwart people. In particular, I remember a little family in Shannon County, one of America's poorest counties, and the kind of place Winter's Bone was depicting now, where some, at least, have succumbed to cooking meth and creating even more desperate lives.

My errand in Shannon County came about because I was a public relations writer at Cox Medical Centers, in Springfield, Missouri, and I was chasing down a story for our quarterly newsletter. A little girl from Shannon County had been life-flighted to Cox after a freak accident. She had accidentally aspirated into her lungs that tiny nib on the end of a Bic pen which had made her breathing really labored. The local folks couldn't see the problem (it was so small), and she was flown out of her rural surroundings to Cox in Springfield. X-rays revealed the difficulty, and the nib was promptly removed. She survived.

I was to go to Shannon County - about 100 miles away, as I recall - and interview the family. It was grey day in winter, much like the scenery in Winter's Bone. The county is so beautiful, scenery-wise, but desperately poor. This incident happened in 1989, but I doubt Shannon County has changed much. There aren't many jobs, and farming has never really prospered there.

I came to the home, one of a small enclave of what were probably relatives' houses. It was small and tidy, but poor. The house was heated with wood. There was running water, but apparently no sewer system. When I washed my hands in the bathroom, the water flowed into a bucket under the sink.

The mom and siblings - Dad was at work somewhere - treated me so kindly. I heard their story, took some photos, and came away with a good story of how effecient medical practice can reach out into surrounding counties. Mostly I remember the dignity and kindess of the people I interviewed. I suppose most people would consider their life to be quite marginal; they were obviously living on the ragged edge of survival. They were wealthy in family, though, and it showed. I hope I conveyed some of that in my little story.

The mom in the family had a nice little collection of salt and pepper holders. Since then, I wish I had scoured one of Springfield's antique stores and found another set to add to her collection. I should have.

Since then, too, I've wondered about that little girl - central to the story - and her family. I hope they have done well. I hope life isn't so hard. I hope I always remember how generously they gave of their time and their story. I doubt they remember my visit; I know I won't ever forget it.