Erica Jurus's Blog, page 5

Happy New Year

Hoping 2025 is a great year for you.

Merry Christmas

Wishing you and yours a happy, peaceful holiday spent with family and friends.

The ancient (and racy) origins of holiday feasting

I begin to sing about Poseidon, the great god,
mover of the earth and fruitless sea
god of the deep who is also lord of Helicon  and wide Aegae.
A two-fold office the gods allotted you,
O Shaker of the Earth, to be a tamer of horses
and a saviour of ships!
Hail, Poseidon, Holder of the Earth, dark-haired lord!
O blessed one, be kindly in heart
and help those who voyage in ships!
(Homeric Hymn to Poseidon)

If you’ve ever worried about your holiday merriment becoming a little excessive, I can reassure you – you have nothing on the ancient Greeks.

The Greeks lived in a world dominated by a large number of goddesses and gods, and devoted a lot of time to propitiating their temperamental and jealous overlords. They held all kinds of festivals to demonstrate their devotion, but these events also brought communities together – and allowed the people to have some fun in between sweating what the gods were going to strike them down with next.

Each month of the ancient Athenian calendar was named after a different god or goddess, with corresponding festivals to celebrate. July was the first month of the New Year. The sixth month, then, roughly equivalent to our modern December, was centred around the winter solstice, and was dedicated to the god Poseidon, one of the Big Twelve on Mount Olympus.

Poseidon-Neptune and triumphal chariot with a pair of sea-horses (Hippocamps). Mosaic, 3rd century. Sousse Archaeological Museum, Medina, Tunisia; source: By Habib M’henni – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28908525

Poseidon was a powerful deity. After his father Cronus, the leader of the primordial Titans, was overthrown, the world was divided into three territories. Zeus was given the sky, and basically became the head of the new pantheon. Hades was given the not-so-enviable Underworld segment, while Poseidon ruled the sea.  

Despite his dominion of cold and stormy waters, Poseidon was a hot-blooded god; he apparently had many lovers both male and female (not all of whom were exactly willing). This led to his siring many heroes, including Theseus, who famously slew the terrible Minotaur.

One of his liaisons that has interested me the most was with a mortal woman named Cleito. He fell in love with her and created a sanctuary at the top of a hill near the middle of the island she lived on. In order to ‘protect’ her (jealous much?), he surrounded the dwelling with rings of water and land. She ended up giving birth to five sets of twin boys, the firstborn of whom was named Atlas. He became the first ruler of the civilization that would be known as Atlantis.

Poseidon sculpture in Copenhagen, Denmark; source: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=280806

The ancient Greeks honoured the god each December with the Poseidonia festival, held predominantly in coastal regions, where the communities were dependent on fishing and trade. Celebrants petitioned for safety on the seas, and if you’re honouring a god with a healthy interest in sex, what else do you do but include wild celebrations and drunken debauchery?

One of these celebrations was the Haloa, a women-only shindig involving nakedness, a lot of wine and “erotic cakes”. The festival was sacred to Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and the harvest, i.e. fertility. Men were almost always excluded from taking part, but, as head of the household, they had a legal and moral obligation to pay for their wives’ expenses to attend the festivities. Good deal for the women!

The Haloa apparently included a mysterious ritual to invoke Demeter and ensure the fertility of the land. There was a feast, with little or no meat but plenty of fish, fruit (except pomegranates, which drew Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, back to the Underworld for six months of each year), cereals, and those explicitly-shaped cakes. A group of men called ‘Arkhontes’, who served as authorities of the mysteries, prepared the banquet.

In the meantime, the men got a huge bonfire going, carrying on a regular tradition of fire lighting. The following day, the communal celebration resumed with public banquets, animal sacrifices and more sex.There was much giving of gifts as well. The month of Poseidon was the most looked-forward-to time of the entire year in ancient Greece.

So as our winter solstice draws near, remember that it’s always been a time to celebrate the bounty of the earth, and however you choose to keep it stays between you and your guests

The Mysteries of the Magi

When I was around five years old, my grandfather passed away, and I remember his funeral chiefly for the overwhelming amount of incense – so oppressive and acrid that it made me cry. (I was sensitive to smells at an early age.)

One of the typical components of incense used by the Catholic church, burned in a vessel called a thurible that’s swung to and fro to waft the aroma throughout, is myrrh, a somewhat bitter ancient resin that was gifted to the infant Jesus by the Three Magi.

The story of the Three Wise Men, or Three Magi, is a Christmas staple, but it’s filled with mystery, from the choice of gifts to the origins of the Magi themselves.

Only one Gospel sets out the tale – Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, which in itself is shrouded in mystery. Although church tradition holds that it was written by the companion of Jesus, there’s no actual proof of that and the Gospel remains more-or-less anonymous.

Byzantine depiction of the Three Magi in a 6th-century mosaic at Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo
Magi; By Nina-no – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2176501

Matthew’s account is extremely brief:

“After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” “

It doesn’t give any further details, not even how many there were. Everything else about them that has come down through the centuries – names, where they came from, what they looked like – stems from extrapolations by later Christians.

Matching the three gifts, in Western Christianity, they are typically referred to as the Three Magi, but in some Eastern Christian traditions there are twelve.

What prompted these men to follow a star across enormous distances in those times? Matthew didn’t stipulate.

The magi in historical record first appear in the seventh century BCE. Like Abraham, they may have come from ancient Ur in Chaldea, whose people were renowned astronomers, astrologers and mystics with various occult practices. They were especially noted for their ability to interpret dreams.

Because of their extensive knowledge of science, agriculture, mathematics, history, and the occult, they gained considerable religious and political influence and were among the highest-ranking officials in Babylon. It was said that no one could be crowned king without their approval.

Into this mix was thrown Daniel, a young Jewish man who, along with three companions, all of nobility and without physical defect, was sent to Babylon to serve in the palace of the king after Jerusalem fell to the Persians. Because Daniel was able to interpret one of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, he became highly regarded among these magi. At a certain point Daniel had his own dream, of “one like a son of man” who’d be given everlasting kingship over the entire world, and it was this prophecy that’s believed to have persisted with the Magi in the Bible until they learned that the baby king was to be born in Judea and felt compelled to find him.

“On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.” The gifts are clearly set out by Matthew, and on the face of it seem straightforward: common elements of the Biblical world. There was an incense trade route Northern East Africa and Egypt across the Mediterranean, through the Levant to Arabia, India and further east. Goods traded included Arabian frankincense and myrrh, Indian spices, gold, precious gems, silk, animal skins, rare woods, even slaves.

All three gifts would have been proper offerings for a king, as Jesus had been foretold to become. But they had symbolism as well. Gold, of course, represented wealth and power, while frankincense was a costly resin used for perfume, and for incense in rituals.

Myrrh, although also costly, had a strange purpose of its own, both for anointing kings, and also in embalming them. It was a painkiller, and was offered to Jesus mixed with wine before his crucifixion. As a gift from the Magi, it’s been seen as a foreshadowing of his eventual suffering and death. Origen of Alexandria, an early Christian scholar and theologian around two centuries after Jesus, wrote “gold, as to a king; myrrh, as to one who was mortal; and incense, as to a God”.

That the visitors from the East brought such luxurious gifts indicates that they were people of great wealth and power themselves.

When they arrived in Jerusalem, they began asking around for where “He who has been born King of the Jews?” could be found, assuming that everyone in the city would know. But that was news to the general populace.

Not so much for King Herod the Great, though. There had been prophecies of the coming of a great deliverer for some time. Herod was enjoying the power and prestige of his appointment by Rome, and was having none of that. So when the Magi finally got around to asking him, he assembled the chief priests and scribes of the time and asked them where the “Anointed One”, i.e. the Messiah, was to be born. They told him it would be in Bethlehem, citing the words of the prophet Micah.

Herod sent the Magi off to Bethlehem, instructing them that after they’d found the baby to “report to me, so that I too may go and worship him”. Sure.

Matthew went on to relate that, after they’d visited the baby Jesus as planned, they received a dream warning them to not go back to Herod. They “returned to their country by another route”, allowing the anointed baby to remain alive until his parents, Mary and Joseph, who’d received a similar portentous dream, were able to get him to safety in Egypt.

Then, according to Matthew, Herod demonstrated his true intentions by ordering the death of all boys of the age of two and under in Bethlehem and its vicinity, in what became famously known as the Massacre of the Innocents.

The entire chronicle comes entirely from Matthew, who may or may not have written it, and its veracity is disputed among Biblical scholars. But it’s such a great story that it’s come down through all the intervening centuries to mesmerize Christians to this day. My hubby and I even have a Magi ornament on our Christmas tree.

Though the names and origins of the Magi were never given, they were assigned eventually by various traditions and legends, probably to fill a romantic void. The earliest and most common names are: Melchior (also Melichior), Caspar (or Gaspar, Jaspar, Gathaspa, and other variations), and Balthazar (Balthasar/Balthassar/Bithisarea).

In my novels, Balthazar is the reputed builder of the earth Roads in the lore of the Ancient Order of Roadwrights. But he actually has a far more important role, based on an impulsive decision made when presenting the gifts to the baby Jesus – a decision that haunts him for the rest of his very long life. And he’s not exactly ‘from the East’. The real story is revealed in Book 2 of the trilogy, Into the Forbidden Fire. Given the sparsity of actual historical records, my version could be as true as any other Read it and see what you think.

A Peanuts holiday classic

Charlie Brown: I don’t care. We’ll decorate it and it’ll be just right for our play. Besides, I think it needs me.

One late November, while searching for a fresh evergreen tree to cut down for Christmas, my hubby and I came upon a beautiful Scotch Pine standing all by itself on the farm, surrounded by stumps of dozens of other trees that had already been taken home.

It was a gorgeous colour, rich shades of green and blue that we’ve rarely seen in an evergreen. But it was missing one-third of a side, where I guess it had been crowded out by a larger tree.

I looked it over while my hubby prowled around for something more conventionally shaped, but my heart was drawn to this lonely tree. It was the perfect size and diameter, and shape, if you looked at it from its good side. I couldn’t step away from it – we had to give this tree a good home. Hubby thought I’d lost my marbles, but I proclaimed it our Charlie Brown Christmas Tree. I think he was a bit embarrassed to drag it to the checkout.

We brought it home, trimmed a bit off the bottom, and secured it in its stand. Once decorated and pushed into place in the corner, where the deformed side wasn’t visible, it was a truly beautiful tree.

Such is the power of a good story, and the television special A Charlie Brown Christmas has held a place in thousands of hearts ever since it made its unceremonious debut in 1965. Almost everyone involved in the production thought it would bomb, but it quickly became a phenomenon.

Charlie Brown (left) and Linus (right) with the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree; By Charles Schultz – Amazon, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44158630

I suspect modern viewers enjoy the special without understanding what a time capsule it is.

Charles Schulz modelled the setting and activities after his childhood memories of Christmas in Minnesota. Yet here in Canada we experienced so much of the same, which may be part of the show’s appeal for the Boomer generation.

When I was a kid, winters were always snowy. We could easily build snow forts during recess, and having a snow day every winter wasn’t uncommon. My dad, like so many fathers, constructed an ice rink in our back yard every year, as soon as the weather turned toward freezing temperatures. Ice skates were a typical Christmas gift. There was also a pond behind my elementary school that promptly froze every year, and during recess and lunch a lot of us were out there sliding around.

School plays were a regular event around the holidays; I remember participating in several, including reciting ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (officially titled A Visit from St. Nicholas) with my entire class in a drafty community hall in Northern Ontario – we all wore our jammie ‘costumes’ over regular clothes to keep warm.

Silvery artificial Christmas trees were a thing. My great-aunt had one, hung with ornaments in shades of blue, and I thought it was one of the most beautiful, ethereal things I’d ever seen. However, the Charlie Brown special, in which Charlie disparaged such trees, sadly led to their disappearance off the market within a couple of years. I’ve been delighted to see them experience a nostalgic comeback in the past few years.

Ironically, you can buy replicas of the tree that Charlie Brown did buy in the show and tried to decorate.

In the show, you can truly see city life as it was in the 1960s – less crowded, quieter, fewer and more modest homes, children walking safely everywhere (even after dark). There’s a lot about that time period that I really miss.

On the other hand, I own a copy of A Charlie Brown Christmas on DVD, as well as a CD with all the music. This became critical when Apple TV+ acquired exclusive rights to all Peanuts-related media in 2020 and wanted to run the shows only for its subscribers. That caused a considerable kerfuffle, and Apple TV+ agreed to run that show and two other Peanuts holiday specials for free during a brief three-day window, in partnership with PBS. Bah humbug! It wasn’t much of a concession to begin with, and then PBS lost its broadcast rights two years later, ending the special’s 57-year run on broadcast television. Fans are at least still able to enjoy the show through in-home technology.

The music from the show is instantly recognizable. It was composed by American jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi, who was originally contacted by television producer Lee Mendelson to produce music for a documentary about the Peanuts comic strip, which had become enormously successful a decade after its debut, and its creator, Charles M. Schulz. That special was never aired, but when the Coca-Cola company commissioned a Peanuts Christmas special in 1965, Guaraldi was brought back to score it.

He composed most of the music, creating the most iconic piece of the entire show, “Linus and Lucy”, to be the theme. A handful of traditional carols, such as “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing”, lent weight to the score, along with Linus’ soliloquy about the true meaning of Christmas. It highlighted the feeling, even back then, that the holiday was becoming too commercial. Imagine what Charlie and Linus would make of the world now, where pervasive media has allowed a bombardment of holiday advertising.  

Perhaps the true magic of A Charlie Brown Christmas is its gentle reminder that the holiday is about kindness, sharing and time spent with the people we care about.

Colour Me…??

I don’t decorate with red and green for Christmas.

Ironic, because red was my favourite colour when I was a child, and it is an attractive combination. I don’t mind it in small doses, but in large amounts it does tend to smack you in the eye.

Is that holiday heresy? Probably in some people’s minds

But I find it fascinating that red-green deficiency is the most common form of ‘colour blindness’.

We see colour as light waves enter our eyes and strike the retina in the back of them, activating special cells called rods and cones. These cells send electrical signals to the brain through the optic nerve, where the thalamus processes the signals and relays them onward to the visual cortex, where a variety of cells make sense of the information. Some of these cells react to colour, some to motion, some to shape and other types of information. Everything then comes together to provide us with identification about an item, such as its colour.

The cones detect colours in the visible spectrum of light – all of the wavelengths that creatures are able to see. When I was studying the behaviour of lizards for my university thesis, I was able to watch them with red light, which their eyes were unable to pick up. (My fellow students jokingly referred to my experimental setup as the lizard red-light district.)

Humans are usually born with three types of cones:

Red-sensing cones, which register long wavelengthsGreen-sensing cones, for middle wavelengthsBlue-sensing cones, for short wavelengths

Full-colour vision is called trichromacy – all three types of cones are present and working properly. In people with colour blindness, some of the cones in their eyes are either missing or not working properly. Colour blindness is an inherited condition, but it can also happen from environmental causes (exposure to some chemicals, certain medications) and from some medical conditions.

There’s currently no cure for colour blindness. Special glasses can enhance the contrast between colours to make differences between them more clear, but they can’t allow wearers to see new colours or fix the problems with the cones.

Maybe some day there will be a cure; new things are being invented all the time.

The colours that we can see are myriad and fascinating, at least for a lot of us. I can’t imagine walking around a garden and not being able to take in all the wonderful colours in it.

Flora (and a Monarch butterfly) from a variety of gardens — all photos by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

But what about colours in other wavelengths – the ones we humans can’t see?

Bees, for example, can see blue and yellow, but also UV light. When they look at flowers, they see patterns we can’t discern, like rings and stripes, which draw them in like guided landing marks toward the pollen they seek.

Rats can also see ultraviolet light, as well as green and blue, but not red. Some snakes are able to see infrared light, which means that they can sense heat signatures. Birds see as many as five to seven colours!

And what if there were colours we couldn’t make out no matter what, but that aliens from other planets could?

That’s an idea I’ve explored considerably in my Chaos Roads trilogy. Romy, my heroine, finds out in the second book that she can see many more colours than the people around her can. Not only that, but as she deciphers the Map of the Universe (an impossibly rare document on Earth that lays out the information needed to travel to other planets), each planet in the galaxy has its own unique colour signature.

Is that totally far-fetched? Well, you be the judge.

Wrinkled aluminum foil with a portion—equally wrinkled—coated in Vantablack — By Surrey NanoSystems – Surrey NanoSystems, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34139562

Several years ago, researchers discovered how to make a black colour so dark that it absorbs 99.965% of visible light. It was given the name Vantablack, afterthe vertically aligned nanotube arrays (VANTAs)that are used to produce it (I’ll explain more in a second). Light becomes trapped and deflected among the nanotubes, eventually absorbed and let off as heat. If you look straight at something painted in that colour, you can’t make out any texture – in the above photo of a piece of crumpled foil, you can’t see any of the ridges. What would someone do with this colour, apart from cool-looking artifacts? It can be used to keep stray light from what’s called ‘skyglow’ (light from the moon, or light pollution) out of telescopes to make it easier to see fainter objects, and could also provide intense camouflage for the military.

In September 2019, at the International Motor Show Germany, BMW unveiled an X6 concept car painted with Vantablack. Take a look at this photo of it, and notice the numerous spotlights surrounding the car – I suspect that without them, we’d hardly be able to make it out. Now imagine a similarly painted vehicle, but without shiny/glossy parts like the chrome and glass – i.e., in stealth mode. At night, it would be impossible to see it until it ran you over.

BMW X6 Vantablack at the International Motor Show Germany 2019 — By Alexander Migl – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82052265

There are colours that have been lost to history. We can see them in ancient artworks, but don’t know how they were made and can’t reproduce them. One such colour that’s come back to life is called Maya Blue. It was used in Mexican wells called cenotes, which were graveyards of human remains, where the blue colour served a ritual purpose. It’s also been found on pottery, sculptures, wall murals and paintings.

The colour was manufactured by the Maya and Aztecs, and fortunately was extremely resistant to weathering, or we’d never have known it existed. But eventually the technique to make it was lost – until 1993, when a Mexican historian and chemist, Constantino Reyes-Valerio, figured out how to do it. Maya blue was produced by combining indigo, a deep blue colour from the añil shrub which is native to the tropical and subtropical Americas, with different clays.

Baltasar de Echave Ibia painting with Maya blue — credit: BBC shareable articlewww.bbc.com/culture/article/20180816-the-rare-blue-the-mayans-inventedfrom Museo Nacional de Arte de Mexico

Other colours have been so toxic to make and use that they remain only in artifacts – pieces of artwork, or pottery. For example, a paint called Lead White was made as far back at ancient Greek and Roman times by soaking lead metal in vinegar and then scraping off the white powder that formed. It had an interesting colour, slightly creamy with perhaps a very faint tinge of grey, was very thick, and dried quickly. Artists loved it, and it was also used in cosmetics to whiten the skin. What no one realized was that lead can be breathed in or absorbed through the skin, and can cause long-term damage to the brain and kidneys. Many artists developed something called “Painter’s Colic” – lead poisoning. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the use of Lead White was officially banned.

In the early 1800s, German colour-maker Carl Wilhelm Scheele released a shade of green so vibrant that it became all the rage in Victorian high society. It was described as the colour of ‘life’ – the greenness of gardens. For city dwellers, who lived amid the gray, ugly smog created by the Industrial Revolution, the fresh green of Scheele’s green was irresistible. And with new gas lamp technology making rooms brighter, the colour was shown off to great effect, not only in beautiful ladies’ gowns, but also in wallpaper, carpet, and even faux plants – until people began to become violently ill. Families started vomiting in their green-painted homes, women wearing Scheele’s Green garments developed blisters. One maker of fake flowers, Matilda Scheurer, had an awful death after even the whites of her eyes turned green.

Assortment of gowns in Scheeles Green – collage from Reddit, source unattributed

Judging by this group of photos of gowns in Scheele’s Green, it was a gorgeous colour – but unfortunately it was made with arsenious oxide, i.e. arsenic. As the dangers became known, other less toxic green shades were developed. There’s now an RGB code that’s supposed to represent Scheele’s Green, but as you can see from this colour chip, it doesn’t really come close. If Carl Scheele hadn’t stumbled across the formulation, we’d have no idea that his dazzling green shade ever existed.

How many other colours once existed that we’ll never see, or might have existed if some enterprising person had discovered them? What other wavelengths exist out in space, unknown to us and never visible because our eyes simply can’t see them? Food for thought

Tea and Topics: Your genre or mine

“When you are drinking tea, it is basically a private conversation between the tea and your individual soul.”  – Lu Ann Pannunzio

Introducing a new semi-regular feature for this blog: brief musings about writing over an aromatic mug of hot tea.

I subscribe to a number of literary newsletters that cover a wide range of ideas, and I was amused by a recent question posed to a tongue-in-cheek author etiquette blog titled Am I the Literary Asshole?.

The inquirer was hoping to make the acquaintance of a writer in their area, but was worried because they don’t like to read the genre he produces, i.e. horror, which they find too frightening. They thought the writer might not understand what could be perceived as squeamishness.

Of course, the blogger said not to worry, that writers are just fine with the idea that their genre doesn’t appeal to every reader out there.

Horror stories are certainly not for all – there’s no wimping out involved. Personally, I like some horror, but not the super-gory stuff. I enjoy the suspense of stylish, eerie horror (loved Edgar Allan Poe, e.g. and have a collection of all of his works). Slasher movies, on the other hand, don’t appeal.

I also know plenty of people who think science fiction is weird, or would never pick up a romance novel (or watch a Hallmark movie ). Yet all of these genres are super-popular. The wonderful thing about stories is that there’s something for everyone, and I haven’t met a fellow writer yet who’d be offended by different tastes.

Assortment of books and genres, including my Urban Fantasy, at the SCPL LitFest event – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

At events like the one I participated in this past weekend, a Local Author Showcase that was part of a larger “LitFest” at a local library, I had great conversations with all kinds of attendees, about everything from children’s literature to the steep price of Taylor Swift tickets (she’s performing in our vicinity). All of them showed interest in meeting an author, regardless of the genre, and were curious about what it takes to produce a book and publish it. Some bought a book, some signed up for my newsletter and some stopped at my table just to chat. The event was a celebration of reading – that was what drew us all together. We authors all made the rounds to connect with each other as well, and talk a little shop.

Despite the flood of books on the market, today is a great time to be a writer because we can bend the rules, and write good stories the way we want. And we very much appreciate anyone who takes an interest in our work, even if it isn’t their…cup of tea.

After I finish my current trilogy, I have a new novel in mind that will definitely lean towards the horror genre, involving a character or two that my readers will already have met. I’d love to know if that’s something you’d be interested in reading – but if not, I’m okay with it

Daytime in the Garden of Bad Tourists

Recently my hubby and I visited Savannah, Georgia, the setting for a best-selling phenomenon of a book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; it reigned at the top of the NY Times list for a still-unbroken record of 216 weeks. Didn’t read the book at the time, but we watched the movie, enjoyed it moderately.

Neither of us is a particular fan of true crime, so we weren’t on a quest to visit the locations of the murder story, other than to see the famous “Bird Girl” statue that has fascinated people ever since the reading public became aware of what would have remained a locally-famous shooting if it weren’t for John Berendt’s novel. It was my interest in the story of the statue that led me to researching and writing this post.

I write speculative fiction, i.e. I make a lot of things up. Certain historical figures and events enter my novels in a transmutated form, embellished by my imagination and thoughts about how events we know little about might have actually happened in the shadowy world of my urban fantasy. I hope that my versions make people pause, and think to themselves, Ooh, that’s an interesting idea!

Many locations in my novels are real, many not (or aren’t they?, I chuckle to myself as I try to blur the lines between reality and fantasy).

Lots of places, or pieces of places, have given me inspiration for their doppelgangers in the books. There is a real house, for example, that I based Wychwood manor on. When I was trying to come up with an atmospheric structure for the manor that forms such an important part of the story, I discarded ‘Victorian’ immediately – a little cliché. But I didn’t have a replacement in mind – until one autumn day when my hubby and I were doing a road trip in Ontario. We were driving through a small town that just happened to be on our route, and abruptly I said, “Stop!” (My hubby so loves it when I do that.)

On our right, perched on top of a bit of a hill, was a vintage house with a tower surmounting a wide veranda and portico, white with just the lightest pall of grey (at least on that overcast afternoon), and it subverted all the tropes about haunted houses. “Wychwood” was born.

I’ll never reveal where that house is. Should my books ever (fingers tightly crossed) become best sellers, I’d hate to think of the poor owners being overrun by fans only because their home suited my purpose perfectly. You can see a little of it on one of my series of bookmarks, but that’s as much as I’ll ever show of it.

On our road trip last month, we had only a day to spend in Savannah, but we enjoyed it. Savannah is a beguiling city, a lovely piece of time warp perched along the Savannah River, draped in Spanish moss and Southern gentility. We took a hop-on-hop-off tour – they’re extremely popular, and a good way to orient yourself – most of the way around, but eventually got off at the river to stretch our legs and have some lunch. The Boar’s Head Tavern, at the bottom of a curving downward street so chunky with old stones that the city advises against walking it for fear of injury, seemed like a good bet. Bouncing down in our tour bus was an adventure for our kidneys.

Atmospheric bar in the Boar’s Head Tavern, Savannah GA – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved.

The Boar’s Head is in one of the older buildings in Savannah, a restored cotton warehouse built in the 1800’s. It shows – thick stone walls, heavy wooden beams overhead, and stone-framed windows that used to be doors opening to loading ramps. We were surprised that the tour guides didn’t recommend it – we had a superb meal in very atmospheric surroundings.

The Savannah River is still a well-used waterway for boats carrying shipping containers, riverboat cruises and other craft. There’s an nice market along the water with all manner of goodies.

What interested us most, though, were the big tree-shaded squares that define the historic district. Berendt mentioned them in his book, and it’s pretty much a given that you get out and explore them.

1770 plan of Savannah showing the first six squares. The Savannah River and “north” are to the bottom of the image. In addition to the first four squares—Johnson, Wright, St. James (Telfair) and Ellis—this map also shows the later-constructed Reynolds and Oglethorpe Squares.
By Unknown author – Savannah, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22743894

Lieutenant-General James Oglethorpe, a British Army officer, left a permanent legacy when he founded Savannah with a network of park squares around which beautiful residences were laid out. I don’t like sunlight much (my husband thinks I’m part vampire) and I loved the squares, offering plenty of dappled shade from trees dripping with moss. (I chuckle when Winifred Sanderson says, in Hocus Pocus, “Oh, look. Another glorious morning. Makes me sick!”) They’re also pockets of nature and green space right in the middle of the city. If we lived in the Historic District, I might find mornings more tolerable

Each square is named after a different person, and has its own personality. A cobbled thoroughfare named Jones, lined with expensive and trendy homes, is the source of the ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ saying. There’s a lot more history behind it all than that, but too much for today’s purpose.

Elegant home on Jones St. in Savannah’s Historic District – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

The tour buses maneuver carefully around the squares, astoundingly making the circuits without taking out the side panels of any of the parked cars. On our second leg, we disembarked at Forsyth Park, the big square with the fountain prominent in the movie. It was named for Georgia’s 33rd governor and spans 30 acres. The imposing fountain dates to 1858 and was modelled after the fountains at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. One avenue was blocked off for a beautifully-set wedding, with photographers, tripods and white chairs all set in place.

Forsyth Park – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

From there we strolled toward Monterey Square, where the now-infamous Mercer House, which became the glamorous home of antiques dealer Jim Williams in the late 1960s, stands sedately on one corner across from the park.

If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, a local male prostitute named Danny Hansford, who was making the bed rounds of Savannah, both ‘high’ and ‘low’, was shot in Williams’ home. Williams’ story was that Danny, who was known to have a violent temper (especially when hopped up on booze and/or drugs), threatened him so badly one night that, in fear for his life, Williams shot him several times – including once in the back as Hansford lay dying on the antique carpet.

Williams was a ‘personality’ in Savannah society. A self-made millionaire, he bought the empty Mercer house, built for General Hugh Mercer, great-grandfather of famed songwriter Johnny Mercer (“Moon River”, “Days of Wine and Roses”…), restored it and turned it into the epicentre of the social scene with his exclusive and sought-after Christmas parties. He was a very active figure in the preservation of Savannah’s historic buildings, restoring over fifty of them.

The Mercer/Williams house on Monterey Square – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

On May 2, 1981, Williams was arrested for the alleged murder of Hansford, whom he’d been intimate with. Williams’ sexuality was a fairly well-known ‘secret’ that everyone chose to ignore until it took titillating front and centre during the ensuing trials.

The first trial took place in 1982. It’s a little difficult to figure out the timeline – the movie fudged it considerably, for dramatic effect I imagine – but from what I can tell, writer Berendt only met Williams for the first time after that trial. Williams had already been convicted of murder, and had been released pending appeal.

Berendt moved to Savannah three years later, after Williams’s second conviction for the murder, and spent the next seven years researching the book. He attended the third and fourth trials. Williams was eventually acquitted at the fourth trial, but apparently confessed to Berendt after the third trial, which the author only put in the novel.

I haven’t read the entire book, in part because although the book is billed as non-fiction, both Berendt and Clint Eastwood, who directed the movie version, took so many peculiar liberties with the story. I wouldn’t be sure how much of what I was reading was factual.

For example, in the first chapter there’s a fictitious meeting with the author and Danny in Williams’ home. The rage-filled encounter actually happened and was recounted by Williams to Berendt. For some reason the author decided to make himself a part of it.

There’s a very dramatic scene in the movie where John Kelso (the fictionalized version of Berendt) had attended Williams’ Christmas party and is awakened in the middle of the night by the commotion of the police arriving to investigate the shooting. Kelso strolls through the murder scene and inadvertently appears in a crime scene photo that’s later introduced as evidence at the first trial. It’s such a bizarre addition to the tale.

I don’t read much true crime, and empathize with sifting through mountains of research to produce a book out of it all (writing imaginary fiction is so much easier), but there’s a distinct sense in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil that Berendt was drawn in by Williams’ saucy and irreverent personality, and perhaps wanted to be a part of his world to the extent of embedding himself in the story.

At any rate, the novel transformed sleepy Savannah into a tourism hot-spot – particularly the evocative photo on the front cover.

The statue was an actual sculpture, not just a cemetery decoration. It was created in 1936 by a renowned artist named Sylvia Shaw Judson. Fifty inches tall, it depicted a young girl with a contemplative expression holding up two bowls to contain food or water for birds. The model was an eight-year-old girl named Lorraine Greenman.

It was cast six times, five times in bronze and once in lead. One of the statues was bought by a Savannah family for their plot in Bonaventure Cemetery, with a pedestal inscribed “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord. II Corinthians 5:8“.

The Bird Girl statue in the Telfair Museum – by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

Bonaventure is a huge cemetery along the Savannah River, located on the former site of Bonaventure Plantation. No one paid much attention to the statue among all the other decorative pieces until Random House publishers hired a local photographer, Jack Leigh, to produce an image for the cover of Berendt’s book. Leigh searched through the cemetery for something interesting, and found the statue on the Trosdal family plot. Tweaking the photo in the dark room, he gave it a moody feel that became the book’s iconic cover, and the statue seemed to be holding scales of justice that added to the aura.

Unsurprisingly, fans of the book began to flock to the cemetery to see the statue, until the family had it removed to keep so many visitors away from all their graves. They decided to lend the Bird Girl to the Telfair Museum, where it still resides. A fiberglass replica was made for use in the movie.

The book and movie have certainly been a big draw to Savannah. According to an article from 1996, The Book, as it became known, created a 46 percent increase in tourism, along with 24 new businesses and 1,500 new jobs. Thousands of copies and all kinds of other memorabilia have been sold.

There was another downside to the popularity of the Bird Girl statue, though. When we asked the staff at the Telfair Museum why the statue had been moved from the cemetery, we were expecting to hear things like people climbing on the statue, or perhaps trying to prop their kids up in the bowls for photo ops. But the reality was much worse: people were actually trying to break off pieces of the thing, I guess to put on a shelf at home to gather dust. That kind of behaviour is incomprehensible to my hubby and me – to vandalize a popular landmark.

To be honest, I’m not even sure that the statue we saw in the museum was the original – it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was secretly a copy. Such an unfortunate outcome, surely not foreseen by the photographer or Random House.

It’s great to be an ardent fan of a story – I’m one myself, having made pilgrimages to both Hobbiton in New Zealand and the site where the Titanic was built in Belfast, Northern Ireland – but let’s all agree to appreciate these places respectfully, taking some photos to remember them by, and leaving them intact when we’re done, so that more fans are able to enjoy them after us.

Face Your Dreams

We don’t really talk about facing our dreams, do we? We nurture them, but how often do we make them happen?

Dreams – the execution of them, of bringing them to fruition – are scary.

But imagine your life if you got past your fears. We all have fears. Admitting that is half of the solution

You’re not alone. We sabotage our own dreams in so many ways.

We fear embarrassment – it’s often referred to as Imposter Syndrome. Are we good enough? Do we have the right to be doing what we’re doing? For would-be authors, this is a real killer.If we admire someone who’s gotten the success we hope for, we worry about comparisons. Or we make our own. For me, I used to wonder how I could ever write as well as the authors I loved to read.Sometimes our fears come from past traumas. As a child I used to be much more outgoing and didn’t mind getting up in front of my classes to deliver a speech project – until during one of them, the roll-down map I was using snapped back up suddenly, leapt out of its brackets and tumbled down onto my head. So mortifying at that age! That was followed by a prop mishap while I was on stage during one of my high school variety shows, which ended up flashing my panties to the entire auditorium. I literally crawled off-stage behind the backdrop. Luckily the audience thought it was all planned and that they’d seen me in a bikini bottom. But after that, I became a wallflower for years until I joined Toastmasters.The belief systems we grew up with can also be limiting if we allow them. I graduated from university and entered the workforce at a time when men dominated it and women weren’t supposed to do anything more than be secretaries – I even had a guy the same age as me comment that he’d never ever work under a female boss.It’s ridiculous how often we entertain negative thoughts about our own self-worth, instead of positive thoughts. (If you want to read a good book on that subject, I recommend The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.)We often tie those ideas of self-worth to our perception of how much we have or haven’t accomplished, usually with a self-imposed timeline that we haven’t met. I turned each decade birthday determined to have written my novel by then, but didn’t. At a certain point I began to think that perhaps it was now too late, that if I hadn’t done it by then, I never would.

And yet, here I stand (actually, sit, tapping away on my laptop), having not only written, but published, two of the three novels of my trilogy. Hot damn! My books will soon be on the shelves of our local library, a place I used to haunt regularly as a child and teen, reading voraciously.

Imagine your life if you got past your fears.

So how do we conquer those fears and start pursuing the dreams in our heads?

Well, first you have to come to terms with the fact that everyone you admire was a beginner once. No one ever becomes an instant expert. If you want to face your fears, understand that being a beginner is actually a good thing. Embrace a beginner’s mind! Open yourself to learning as much as you can about whatever you want to pursue. You have so much freedom at this stage, if you only drop any expectations or worries about what the future will bring. The future will resolve itself at some point.

Then it’s time to step outside your comfort zone. We call it a “comfort” zone because it’s comfortable, safe, reliable. But frankly, nothing changes inside it. No fears were ever overcome, no progress made, no dreams fulfilled in that space. Baby steps are okay, though. My hubby and I have travelled the world, but we didn’t become that confident and adventurous until we had some smaller trips under our belt. With each step outward, we became better and better at it. People asked us how we could go on safari in Africa by ourselves, joining a group of people we didn’t know, but to us that wasn’t a stretch – we’d been doing it for years.

“If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” Martin Luther King Jr.

It might be time for you to change your beliefs about what failure actually means. Every successful person that you might want to emulate will have some failure stories on their journey. Failure isn’t “the enemy” – it’s one of our best teachers. I have a great colleague in the small business group I’m part of, Julie Stobbe, who’s an expert organizer; she told us that with every ‘failure’ she’d experienced, she learned what not to do next time. That’s valuable information to have.

Author J.K. Rowling, one of my personal inspirations, had her first novel rejected twelve times before a literary agent finally agreed to take her on. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has now, on its own, sold over 120 million copies, never mind the other books in the series, the movies, the ‘lands’ at Universal Studios, and coming soon even a baking competition show, Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking (debuting November 14th).

Now, weigh all the pros and cons of your venture.

It might help to write down all your fears – greatly therapeutic, and once they’re down on paper, they’ll likely decrease in magnitude.Think about the various ways your dream might play out; we often worry about some nebulous worst-case scenario that never happens. The worst thing that might happen would be someone saying “no” – not the end of the world. If the worries are financial, approach it in stages; figure out what you can handle in increments. Once we start on a dream, the universe has an interesting way of making things happen. But you have to take those first steps.Talk to people who’ve already done whatever your dream holds. When my hubby asked me where I’d like to travel for our 10th anniversary, I said Egypt, as I’d been fascinated by its ancient civilization since I was a kid. He had reservations because the Middle East has been a powder-keg in varying degrees for decades. So, a friend of ours asked friends of his, who’d been to far more countries than Mike and I will likely ever manage, including Egypt, to talk to us about it. By the end of that evening, Mike’s concerns were allayed, and a few months later, using the same travel company they had, we had one of the most amazing trips of our lives.

Control what you can. Our fears usually rear their ugly heads when we feel loss of control, so here’s what you can do: a) research, and b) prepare. Remember, no one starts out as an expert. When hubby and I went to see the animals in Africa the first time, we chose to do a camping safari because it fit more in our price range – but neither of us had ever actually camped. So, I conducted a lot of research about what conditions were going to be like (e.g. no electricity in the camps, meaning we had to think about how we were going to recharge camera batteries, etc.), what preventative medications we needed to take (standard inoculations for travel to exotic countries, malaria pills – best resource is the CDC Travelers’ Health website), what to pack, how to stay safe in a wild environment… All that planning paid off, and it became another amazing, milestone trip in our lives. I still remember the first night in camp, in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, lying in our tent cots under the vast African sky. It was exhilarating beyond words!

Our first tent in the African bush – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

It’s up to you to show your fear who’s boss.

As you go along, you learn how to adjust on the fly. Learn to embrace the unexpected – the better you get at it, the more fun it is. Okay, don’t snicker – it really is fun. On our trips, our best times have been completely unscripted. You just have to keep your head, your flexibility, and a sense of humour. One of these days, having had many requests, I’ll write a book about our travel adventures and all the crazy, wonderful things that have happened.

Experience is the other great teacher.

Finally, recognize the cost of NOT trying. When I engaged to try and write 50,000 words during my first National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 2020, the main thought in my head was: I don’t want to reach 80 years of age and realize that it’s too late, and that I wish I’d at least tried. What was the worst that could happen – that what I wrote was a piece of garbage? If so, no one would ever see it and I’d have wasted no more than a month. But it wouldn’t have actually been a waste, you see: I’d have given it a shot. If it wasn’t meant to be, so be it, but if I hadn’t tried, I’d never have found out if I could have done it, have achieved a very long-held dream of writing a complete novel. I didn’t even care if I ever published it – I just wanted to write the damned thing.

And lo and behold, I wrote more than 50,000 words (officially making me a NaNoWriMo Winner), then I wrote many more chapters, then at the end of the following July I typed “The End”. That was a breathtaking feeling – and then, when I tentatively put it out there for some beta readers to take a look at, they actually liked it. Hallelujah! Then I began to entertain thoughts about publishing it – and in May 2023 I held the official Book Launch Party. My book was available on Amazon – my name, my words.

After that, writing the second book was in many ways a piece of cake, because now I had the confidence that comes from being a published author with great reviews.

Book 3 is the toughest to write, because I have to create the finale my readers deserve, the payoff for their faith in reading the first two novels. There are plot lines to resolve, justice to mete out to the bad guys (or not – you’ll have to read it to find out ), and a climax that will make your heart pound and your brain go ‘ahhhh’. But I’m enjoying the journey.

So here’s the thought I want to leave you with:

How will you know what you’re capable of, if you don’t try?

Be brave. Face your dreams and make them happen. It will rock your world.

“Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will.” Suzy Kassem, poet

Happy Halloween!

October needs to be longer than 31 days, IMHO, so we could enjoy more of it. After all the build-up of the season, I hope you have a marvelously eerie evening.