Marsha Canham's Blog, page 8

Did Random House learn nothing from the demise of Borders?

So I was wandering through Amazon this morning, digitally of course, checking how the freebie promotion for Through A Dark Mist was going (Free for two more days! Get your copy now while the getting is good *s*) when I happened to notice the new and odd pricing for my Scotland trilogy, The Pride of Lions, The Blood of Roses, and Midnight Honor. For the past few months since authors have been uploading their backlists at reasonable prices, from $2.99-$4.99, RH had significantly lowered their prices to stay in competition. All three of the Scotland books had been priced around $4.99.

So this morning, when I saw POL priced at $10.14, and the other two at $11.27, I thought it surely must be a glitch in the Amazon system, which happens occasionally.  Imagine my surprise when articles started appearing about Random House's new pricing policy. I'll quote one of them here:

Random House Raises eBook Wholesale Prices Significantly

by MICHAEL CADER on MARCH 2, 2012 in ENEWS, FREE, LIBRARIES, PRICING

Random House announced their library ebook pricing, effective as of March 1, which will dampen some of the enthusiasm for the house's commitment to the "unrestricted and perpetual availability of our complete frontlist and backlist of Random House, Inc." in ebook form. The new prices, which librarians tell The Digital Shift represent up to a tripling, are calibrated to "bring our titles in price-point symmetry with our Books on Tape audio book downloads for library lending. These long have carried a considerably higher purchase price point than our digital audio books purchased for individual consumption." The new price structure for library wholesalers is:

New hardcovers, "for the most part" are $65 to $85.

Titles available for several months, or generally timed to paperback release, move to a range of $25 to $50.

New children's hardcovers are $35 to $85.

Older children's titles and children's paperbacks are $25 to $45.

eBooks were already sold to wholesalers at prices close to the print retail price. A library ebook sale of an expensive hardcover like Robert Massie's Catherine the Great, for example, now wholesales for $105–which is actually 10 times what Random House receives for the individual consumer sale of the same ebook, agency-priced at $14.99, and yielding them $10.50. A lower-priced harcover, like Anne Rice's THE WOLF GIFT, yields a library ebook wholesale receipt that is more like 8.5 times the yield of a single consumer ebook sale.

Random House says their "new library e-pricing reflects the high value placed on perpetuity of lending and simultaneity of availability for our titles. Understandably, every library will have its own perspective on this topic, and we are prepared to listen, learn, and adapt as appropriate." They say elsewhere, "We believe that pricing to libraries must account for the higher value of this institutional model, which permits e-books to be repeatedly circulated without limitation. The library e-book and the lending privileges it allows enables many more readers to enjoy that copy than a typical consumer copy. Therefore, Random House believes it has greater value, and should be priced accordingly."

*****

Seriously?  With a bazillion indie books being uploaded daily, most of them priced around the same as a good cup of Starbucks coffee…RH is raising prices to nearly double what they were a week ago?  The price for a paperback copy of The Pride of Lions is only $7.99, so why would anyone download the ebook for over $10???

I don't know exactly what brought around the demise of Borders, but they were the only store that didn't have a dedicated reader. Barnes and Noble came out with the Nook, Amazon had the Kindle… Borders scratched their…uh…heads and wondered why their sales were falling way behind.

Now Random House is doubling, and in some cases tripling their prices for ebooks. Does that make sense in any man's language? Even bean-counterese?

Please, dear readers, do me a LARGE favor and DO NOT BUY any of my Scotland books. If sales drop below a certain number, I am entitled to request the rights back, and when I get the rights back, they will, like my other backlist books, be reissued at coffee-cup prices that everyone can afford.

Some things just make you shake your head.

And, as it happens, next week is Read an Ebook Week in Canada…our Parliament even said so *s*.  So check back here on Monday for some coupons.  Check out the official Read an Ebook website too.

 

 

From Dinosaur to Troglodyte.

Years ago, when I first started writing, I used an ancient underwood typewriter with the round keys and the ink ribbons that I rewound by hand and reused several times until the words became so faint on the page I had to break down and buy a new ribbon. There were no easy corrections either. White-out was my friend, but also the reason why I wrote everything in longhand first then typed it out. I used to scoff heartily at the series Knots Landing, when Val decided to become a writer and dressed every day in her cute little velour jumpsuit, hair and makeup perfect, rolled a sheet of paper in her typewriter and plunked out Chapter One then just started typing. A few weeks later she submitted the manuscript, hair and makeup still perfect, had a *phone call* back from the editor saying the book was accepted, and a few weeks later had a book tour scheduled for her NYTimes bestseller!

Meanwhile, there I was still whacking out a key at a time, going through gallons of white-out and the only natty thing I had was a thick file of rejection slips.

Fast forward to the age of electronic typewriters. I thought they were the next best thing to sliced bread! The first one I had came with a three inch screen over the keyboard with enough memory to erase four whole lines of print before it showed up on the page!!!  Nirvana! Heaven! I was chuffed as hell to be in the modern age, but it still took ink cartridges and they had to be purchased by the case because there was no way to conserve (okay, be cheap) and rewind the ribbons. And if revisions were needed…and I've always needed bazillions of revisions…whole pages, scenes, sections, chapters had to be retyped. I did cheat when it came to making minor corrections and white-out was still my friend, but I learned to print with black ballpoint over the white out so it almost looked like it had been typed. Those were the days when you took the finished mss and had it xeroxed for $$, or gave it to a friend who snuck into their xerox room at work and ran it off a chapter at a time.

The next great leap forward into the electronic age came with typewriters that could save *gasp* TWO pages at a time in memory. The screen above the keyboard was still only about four inches big, but you could scroll and correct and cut and paste.  Nirvana! Valhalla! Heaven! I turned out three books on that machine, during which time personal home computers came onto the scene.

AUGH. That was too much. Too many changes for this dinosaur. We had gone to a friend's house for dinner and he scoffed at my fear of the cyber world and took me into his computer room and showed me all the wondrous things he could do with a PC. Back then 500MB's of RAM was the delux super geek machine, and I had no idea what a ram was other than a male goat. He flicked some keys and pages showed up on the screen and I felt like a caveman being shown fire for the first time. And then, wonder of wonders, it crashed.  Screen went blank. He cursed and swore and said: this never happens.  And I thought yeah, fool. I could just see me writing out a chapter and having it crash and burn and get lost in cyberspace forever. Nope. Not for me. I resolved to slog on with my nifty electronic whiz-machine for another two books. Friends all around me were getting computers, telling me how easy they were to operate and use for writing. Surfing took on a whole new meaning, along with the ram thing, and okay, I ventured into another computer room and watched another friend surf the web without even going near water!  Oddly enough, that wasn't what caught my dino eyeball. It was the little square disk that she slipped into the slot and hit *copy*. Hmmmm. "Copy" stored what she had written on the floppy disk (even though I saw nothing floppy about it). I started to see the possibilities.

Even though I swore I would never succumb to the world of computers, I woke up one morning and went into my office and there, all gleaming and new, was the beast I had purchased the previous day. Top of line. 500 GOATS. Came with a free AOL disk to connect to the internet, which I couldn't use because I hadn't called the phone company to set up a line. All I wanted was the capability to write and store and correct and copy and paste without having to put a new sheet in the typewriter or brush on white-out.

Eventually, of course, the internet connection came, and with it another whole new world. I could email! I could surf the web! I could only open one window at a time, view one site at a time and it took forever to load the page, but man did I think I was hot stuff! I still didn't trust the thing and I made sure I copied everything onto a floppy at the end of the day, because of course the one day I forgot to do that was the one day the thing crashed and I lost a full chapter of revisions I was working on.

I won't bore anyone with the progression through the various upgrades to new machines that held 800RAM and 1000RAM, then woo hoo Gigabytes. Or the various Windows editions that called for huge adjustments each time a new machine came into the house. Frankly, I never wanted to change Windows XP. Loved it.  Never wanted to lose WordPerfect either and kept loading the old floppies onto new machines until I finally bought a new puter that came with Vista and had no slot for floppies. Bummer.  Bigger bummer to have to learn how to use Word and to be honest, I still get frustrated as hell trying to change the format on some things.

The next HUGE leap in this troglodyte's computer development was a laptop.  I truly hated the things. Still do. About the time I progressed from MB's to GB's I discovered ergonomic keyboards, which pretty much relegated standard keyboards to the trash bin. Laptops, however, come with those cramped little keyboards and now the infernally stupid touchpads…both of which I have ignored in favor of connecting an external mouse as well as a useable keyboard. Means lugging around a lot of equipment when I travel, but the alternative is cursing and swearing and hitting the wrong keys all the time.

Over the years I've also become somewhat knowledgeable about how the beasts operate. I can fix most problems when they come up, and I'm fondly known as the puter geek down here in Florida–which is particularly funny if I think about it too hard because at home I wail on the phone to my adopted son-in-law, who can diagnose and fix anything to do with puters in about five seconds.

I would be wailing now…which is the whole point of this vent…except I'm in Florida and he's packing for a vacation to Punta Cana. I've had *issues* with my laptop that require either a) hurling it out the window at velociraptor speed or b) throwing it on the floor and stomping on it until the pieces are good only for lining the bottom of flower pots.

Seriously. Some days we trogs look back fondly on simpler times. Rip a page out of the typewriter, feed a new page in…all was well.

 

A Valentines Gift

I realize I've been tardy in getting The Following Sea finished, but life has this odd way of interfering. Things happen. Things fall apart. Things get put together again and just when you think they've been fixed, they fall apart again. No, that's not supposed to make sense, just know that I am working very diligently to try to get the book finished soon. Very soon. As my little Valentine's day giftie to all my loyal readers, here are the first two chapters. I do thank you for your patience and hope you can wait just a little bit longer

The Following Sea

PROLOGUE

Spanish Wells, November 1623

 "You will tell me what I want to know, little puta."

The words vibrated against her ear and sent cold shivers scratching down her spine. There was a frightening edge of pleasure in the huskiness of his voice, as if he was hoping she would remain stubbornly quiet. She suspected that he derived pleasure from the fear he instilled in others and she knew he would use it against her if her courage faltered by so much as a quivered breath. Determined to deny him, her teeth were set in a hard clench. Her fingers were curled around the cords of the ropes that were twisted around her wrist and draped over a low-hanging branch. The ropes had been pulled taut, forcing her arms apart and her body up onto the tips of her toes.

It had taken three of them to subdue her: two to drag her across the packed earth while she kicked and hissed and clawed at any exposed flesh. A third had punched her brutally across the jaw, rendering her dazed long enough for the ropes to be secured around her wrists and ankles. There were others standing in the darkness. Unseen faces, shapes without substance that watched and whispered from the shadows. Light from a guttering fire barely touched them, glinting instead off flashes of metal from pistol-barrels and swords.

She was the focus of their attention. Some sat cross-legged on the ground, others leaned indolently against the wall as if anticipating a long enjoyable process.

"You show courage, puta. Far more than is wise or necessary."

The words were burdened under a heavy Spanish accent. The threat behind them was stark and needed no interpretation. Estevan Quintano Muertraigo had been the military commander of the port of Havana. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, he might have been considered handsome if not for the huge, misshapen portwine stain that covered the entire left side of his face. Marked thus from birth, he had compensated by honing a reputation for brutality that made grown men quake.

She had to close her mind to the terror and try to focus inward, to block out the voice… as well as the feel of the cold sliver of steel that was placed against the side of her neck.

The ferret-like eyes roved over her face, staring at the blood that ran down from her split lip. They moved on, glittering with interest when they touched upon the tiny tear at the top of her shirt.

"Tell me where the Wolf's cub is, puta. Tell me the location of his camp." He leaned close enough she could taste his breath. "Tell me and it will go easier on you, this I promise."

"I told you, I don't know. I was left behind and I don't know where they have gone."

"Left behind?" A thoughtful frown brought the point of the knife dragging downward to the rent in the garment. "Now you lie outright, puta, and that disappoints me very much."

A deft twist of his wrist sent the steel sliding into the frayed seam on the collar of her shirt, slicing it open all the way down her back. As the cloth parted, the whispers and murmurings from the onlookers ended abruptly, leaving only the soft ssssssssssssss of the blade to fill the silence.

She drew a slow breath to calm the pounding in her breast. The blood was flowing hot and fast through her veins, flushing her skin a mottled pink even though the air was chilled where it touched her exposed flesh.

"Because I am in a generous mood, puta," his lips scraped across her ear, "I will give you one more chance to tell me what I want to know."

She steeled herself to keep from flinching. "I can't tell you what I don't know."

The dark eyes narrowed and studied her intently as he came around in front of her again. There was a hint of appreciation for the defiance he saw in the taut lines of her body, but it was not enough to keep the tip of the knife from sliding down to the waist of her breeches. It slivered through the cloth with a quick flick of his wrist then tore downward, following the slender curve of her hip to her thigh, then down to her ankle, leaving the moleskin split wide open.

She would have liked to kick out at her tormentor, to twist free of the ropes and run like the wind, but the bindings around her ankles had been looped around the rocks and pulled tight. Splayed and vulnerable, she could do little more than writhe and thrash her head, scattering her long blonde hair wildly over her shoulders and back.

Muertraigo smiled and with another downward slicing of the knife, cut through the other leg of her breeches until it too hung open over her pried-apart legs. He slid a hand between her thighs and stroked back and forth, watching the disgust, humiliation, and anger alter the expressions on her face as his fingers explored the sensitive flesh.

"So. You refuse to make this easier on yourself?"

She made a sound in her throat then spat the words free. "I told you, I don't know where the camp is. It could be half a mile away, it could be ten miles away. I don't know."

Muertraigo's eyes crinkled at the edges. "We all know something, my dear. And I can promise with some certainty that you will be screaming everything you know before the sands fall through the hour glass."

"Then do your worst, capitan," she whispered, lowering her eyes and squeezing out a tear. "For I have no knowledge beyond what I have told you already."

The Spaniard chuckled low in his throat. "One should indeed be careful what one wishes for."

He withdrew his hand and gazed at his fingers a moment, then lifted them to his nose and breathed deeply, inhaling the scent of her fear. Three quick slashes saw the rest of her clothes lying in a heap at her feet, causing the watchers in the shadows to offer up a collective murmur of appreciation. Her body was slender and pale, her breasts small but firm, crowned with soft pink nipples that had shivered into exquisite little peaks. The thatch of hair at the juncture of her thighs was softly curled yellow down. There was a small puckered scar over her ribs that had the look and shape of a bullet hole, but she was otherwise a flawless beauty.

Muertraigo walked another full, slow circle around her, his eyes lingering here and there, gauging, speculating. The look caused an involuntary reaction in her flesh, making her skin feel as if it was shrinking everywhere on her body.

The knife came up again and was used like a hand to caress her. It skimmed down the side of her neck and onto her chest following the stretched curve of her breast to push aside the tangled waves of her hair. A speculative grunt saw the point rest against the raised peak of one puckered nipple and, with a slight tilt of his head, he pressed the steel inward, dimpling the flesh until there was no more give.

Despite her resolve, a faint sound escaped her lips as the tip of the knife pressed again and the skin gave with a small pop. Almost instantly a small bead of blood welled and parted in twin rivulets to trickle down either side of the knife point.

"A pity to damage such perfection," he murmured. "Are you certain you have nothing you wish to tell me?"

Muertraigo's voice was smooth as silk, almost paternal in its concern, while hers came out a dry, scratchy whisper. "I know nothing more than what I have already told you. No matter how many times you ask, I cannot tell you what I do not know."

He smiled and leaned close, breathing garlic and olive oil against her ear. "How I wish I believed you, puta, for it will be a shame to destroy something so… magnificent."

He straightened and nodded to someone in the gloom. An iron rod had been placed in the fire, the tip glowing red. As the man lifted the rod from the flames and walked slowly forward, the silence became so ominous she could hear the tiny grains of sand beneath his boots cracking and grinding.

Muertraigo took the rod and brought the tip close enough to her cheek that the fine blonde hairs at her temple sizzled and melted.

"I had to take your father's eye before he told me what I wanted to know. Shall we see if the same means of persuasion works for you?"

"No," she whispered, her voice shaking as badly as her body. "Please."

Muertraigo smiled…and brought the iron closer.

 

 CHAPTER ONE

The Florida Straits

It had been a good day to die.

Gabriel Dante had convinced himself of this when he had been bound hand and foot to the rigging of his own ship. The Spaniards had captured the Valour and used her crew and captain as hostages in a battle that had appeared to be lost before it had ever begun. Flanked by two galleons bristling with cannon, laden with soldiers, the Spanish commander had led his small force into a confrontation with another of the Pirate Wolf's ships: the Iron Rose. Gabriel and his crew had been tied to the shrouds and used as human shields against any attempts to attack or rescue. Spitting in the face of horrendous odds, his sister Juliet had ordered her ship and crew forward to what should have been certain doom.

Despite the hopelessness of their situation, Gabriel's chest had swelled with pride as his men had hurled insults at their captors. Even when their Spanish captors had fired grapeshot into their midst, slicing them to shreds, the crew had not stopped jeering and baiting.

A good day to die with good men to die alongside him.

The words had been echoing in his head as Gabriel watched in amazement and disbelief as his sister brought the Iron Rose cutting in recklessly beneath the Valour's guns to lay a full broadside into the hull. Timbers had splintered, guns had been blown off their carriages and Spaniards had screamed as bloody body parts flew through the air. The Spanish gun crews, unaccustomed to the design of the English mountings, had fired wild and wide, allowing Juliet Dante the precious seconds needed to ram the Valour.

While her crew launched a spider's web of grappling lines to the Valour, a second Dante ship, the Avenger, had come streaking out of the clouds of smoke and sulphur to rake the Spaniards on the larboard beam and from one blink to the next, the tide had turned. The captors had become the captives. They had thrown down their arms and fallen to their knees begging for quarter.

Gabriel, bloodied from savage beatings and barely able to stand on his own, cheered alongside the survivors as they watched two more ships from the Dante fleet emerge from hidden ambush to slice across the turbulent waters and attack the hastily retreating escort galleons. Further along the miles of scattered islands, more ships, more privateers eager to engage the heavily laden ships of the Spanish treasure fleet, ran with the wind in their sails to win a resounding battle and declare a victory that would firmly entrench the day in legend.

When the smoke cleared, the survivors had been transferred off the crippled Valour and onto the Iron Rose.  Simon Dante, the patriarch of the clan, had paced from one side of the great cabin to the other, his steps slow and measured, his head bowed, his hands clasped tightly behind his back. On each turn he glanced at the berth where the ship's carpenter-cum-doctor was in the process of sewing a deep gash in Juliet Dante's temple.

"Skull might be cracked," Nog announced casually. "Nay doubt she'll be hearin' bells and walkin' into walls the next few days, dizzy as a wench on a whirligig. Shoulder is blacker than Lucifer's hoary arse too, but if she's not plannin' on t'rowin' herself at any more Spaniards wearin' steel breastplates, she should heal up nice."

"She will have plenty of time to heal back at Pigeon Cay," the Pirate Wolf declared. He saw his daughter's eyes swim open and he narrowed his own in a warning. "There will be no arguments either. Your quartermaster has a hole in his ribs. Half your crew is licking wounds. Gabriel's ship is bound for the bottom of the ocean and between the pair of you, we couldn't manage one captain with enough common sense to know when to run and when to fight. Which brings me to the other demented female in this family."

He turned the full power of his silvery blue eyes on his wife Isabeau, who was sitting on the corner of the desk winding a clean strip of bandaging around the stump of her left arm. She had lost half the arm in a battle several years earlier but the disability rarely slowed her down.

"That I, of all people," Simon muttered, "should have been cursed with two addle-witted women who—"

"Love you dearly," Isabeau said sweetly, "and tolerate your bouts of ill temper with enduring patience."

"My ill temper? Your patience? Madam! You took my ship into battle! You risked your life, the lives of my crew, the well-being of my Avenger—"

"To go to the rescue of your daughter and your son."

"To go to the…?" He stopped and clamped his jaw tightly shut. When he found the patience to loosen it again, he snarled. "I should send you back to Pigeon Cay in irons."

Isabeau smiled. "You could certainly try."

He muttered a curse and aimed the silvery glare at the next victim. The cabin on board the Iron Rose was crowded and he had plenty to choose from. Gabriel and his brother Jonas stood in one corner slouched against the wall, the former almost unrecognizable beneath a swollen, closed eye, multiple cuts and bruises, and lips that looked like two slabs of raw meat. Jonas had fared little better. He had a gash down his cheek, another on his arm; his hand was wrapped in a wad of linen and was cradled against his chest. A grin a mile wide split the red fuzz of his beard, however. His good arm was draped over Gabriel's shoulders and every now and then, he ruffled his brother's dark chestnut hair as if he still could not believe the Hell Twins were alive and together again.

"You find something amusing?" Simon asked.

"Aye, Father, I do," Jonas boomed. "A brother who smells like a vat of pickled herring, for one thing. For another, a sister who has ballocks the size of Gibraltar, inherited from a mother who can outsail, outshoot, and outwit any bloody papist on the Main. Add to that two fat prize galleons loaded to the hatches with treasure, and I'd say we have a fair bit to put a smile on our faces. Oh, and did I mention a father canny enough to find the wife to give him the sons and daughter able to accomplish these feats?"

Simon glared at his eldest son a moment longer.

"Oh, do strut over here and sit down, my love," Isabeau said, patting an empty corner of the desk beside her. "You're as proud as a peacock and you damn well know it."

"I will be prouder when we get these ships back to home port. There is still a fleet of Spanish galleons out in the Straits, any one or ten of them could come upon us at any moment. The Valour is sinking faster than we can offload her cargo."

Jonas nodded. "Of the two galleons we captured, the strongest looks to be the Santa Maria, which will have to serve my little brother for the time being. At least until we get back home."

Gabriel spoke up through a frown. "I have no intentions of returning to Pigeon Cay and even less of running before the wind. As you say, there is still half a plate fleet out in the Straits."

Simon Dante shook his head. "We are all going home, Gabriel. Captain David Smith has already led a fleet of fifteen privateers north to blockade the exit from the Straits. More of the Brethren have been attacking in deadly skirmishes up and down the line, picking off the galleons and scattering the remnants of the flota. My guess is the ships that have been unscathed will turn tail and run back to Havana rather than risk further losses. Chances are we'll not see another Spanish flag between here and Pigeon Cay."

"From your lips to God's ears," Isabeau said quietly.

"God gave us a victory today," Simon told her. "We should accept it with grace and not test His generosity."

~~~

Two hours later the Santa Maria weighed anchor and unfurled her sails to catch the wind that would carry them south and east through the Providence Channel and home. Dawn was painting the horizon a watery pink and as Gabriel leaned on the upper rail, he drew a crisp, clean lungful of the salty air. All that remained of his beautiful Valour was a wide ring of iridescent bubbles marking the spot where she had given a final sigh before slipping to her silent grave in the deep blue waters. She had been a fearsome, spirited lady who never balked at a good fight whether the odds were in their favor or not. She had been sleek and fast and had flown over the waves like a seabird.

The galleon by contrast, swayed and creaked with every crest that rolled beneath her hull. She was heavy and awkward, hampered by square-rigged sails that sent her plowing into the trough of each wave like a lumbering sow. Gabriel had already set the carpenters to work on the Santa Maria's yards and rigging in the hopes of improving her steerage, but there was nothing to be done about the towering fore and after castles that made her so unwieldy.

Gabriel had personally torn down the huge square of white silk emblazoned with the former capitan's coat of arms. High on the main mast, the galleon now flew the distinctive flag in crimson on black that identified the ship as a prize of the Dante clan. The crew had set to work clearing the decks of debris and scouring the oak surfaces free of bloodstains. The gilded letters across the stern had been hastily covered with a sheet of black canvas upon which her new name, Endurance, was being painted in tall, bold characters. There was not an idle hand below or above decks, for each man knew the importance of becoming familiar with every aspect of the galleon, as well as the need to prime her for any potential trouble that might cross their path.

The former quartermaster, Riley, had died on board the Valour and Gabriel assigned one of his best gun captains to the position. Stubs MacLeish—so named because of the three half fingers on his left hand—was short and stout, with a face that resembled crumpled canvas. He had been in the thick of the fighting and half of the dark cropped curls on his head had been scorched off by an exploding shell, making him look like two different men, depending on which profile was in view. He had proudly assumed Riley's place beside the captain, relaying each of the Dante's orders with enough vigor to make Gabriel's head pound like a drummers snare.

"Full and by, Stubs," Gabriel ordered quietly. "Take us home."

"Aye Cap'n!" Stubs formed a cup with his hands and shouted aloft. "Man the braces! Look alive there! Full an' by, lads, full an' by. We're goin' home!"

The men on the yards cheered as they strained on the lines, heaving and panting until the great sheets of canvas were unfurled and lashed to the rigging. The sails luffed like curtains in an open window until the wind became trapped and began to bell them forward. Lines were winched tight and whined like a throng of sin-eaters. The men heaved on the braces again and with sequential booms of thunder, the sails exploded full-bellied before the wind, curling out hard as marble.

The Endurance balked a moment, as if unsure of her new masters, but in the end, she responded and glided forward, groaning and creaking her way toward the southern horizon.

The distance of a pistol shot ahead, the Iron Rose was making similar headway. Off the starboard bow, the Avenger—carrying the Pirate Wolf and his wife Isabeau—and the Tribute, captained by Jonas Dante, were both surging forward, tall pyramids of white sail against the shocking blue of the sky.

"You have the helm, Stubs," Dante said wearily. "Try to keep this beast apace with the others and on course. East by southeast until we reach the Providence Channel."

"Aye Cap'n." Stubs touched a finger to the melted stubble on the left side of his head, scowled a moment as he groped the singed patches, then cursed and turned his attention back to the setting of the yards.

Gabriel moved painfully across the deck and down the ladderway, ducking through the hatch and following a companionway into the stern where the captain's quarters were located. As on most Spanish ships, the great-cabin was lavishly decorated in velvets and gilt, with ornately carved furnishings better suited to a royal brothel than a warship. The capitans were mostly figureheads, members of court who were appointed by the king and not accustomed to suffering the hardships and discomforts of common seamen. Most surrounded themselves with rich trappings from home, placing creature comforts well above practicality.

Directly overhead was a smaller, far less pretentious cabin assigned to the ship's sailing maestro, the true commander of a galleon. Gabriel briefly debated abandoning all the crimson velvet and gold curlicues for simple wood and wool, but his knees had barely held up coming down the ladderway and he did not think it prudent to be seen crawling along the companionway on hands and knees.

Gabriel scanned the luxurious cabin with his one good eye and grimaced… a painful gesture which sent him searching hesitantly for a mirror. He spied one, cracked with battle damage, hanging over a porcelain washstand.  He approached it with no small amount of trepidation, for his captors had applied both the lash and their fists, beating him savagely for three days and nights. His back and shoulders were whipped raw and if the widespread patches of black and blue flesh on his chest, arms, belly and legs were any indication, his face was likely just as grotesque.

Jonas often mocked his younger brother's cavalier good looks saying there was no place for vanity on board a fighting ship. Bracing himself, Gabriel inched up to the mirror but the thing that stared back at him was even worse than he expected. His left eye was purple, swollen to the size of a small coconut, sealed shut with a crust of dried blood that had leaked from a deep cut across the eyebrow. His right eye was red with broken blood vessels, making the tarnished amber iris look inflamed. A second deep gash along his cheek puffed and distorted the square lines of his jaw. Lips that could normally make a wench lick her own in anticipation were split and scabbed. The long thick waves of chestnut hair were caked with blood and filth, and hung in dirty strings to his shoulders.

A wave of nausea swept through him. There was water in the pitcher and he poured some into the basin then took a square of linen and began to carefully wash away the layers of dried blood and grime. When he finished, there was not much of an improvement; he still resembled one of the gargoyles mounted on cathedral roofs to scare off the demons.

He tossed the cloth aside and looked around. He could not remember the last time he slept, and every muscle and sinew in his body was crying out for rest.

The Spaniard's berth was no berth at all but an actual four-poster bed draped in a crimson canopy. Gabriel stared at it a moment, then went to the desk instead and began to sort through the piles of maps, charts, and logbooks that had been salvaged from the Valour.

He was interrupted once by the cabin boy, Eduardo, who brought in a tray laden with biscuits and cheese and heaps of cold mutton. There was a pot of broth too, which was steaming hot and coursed through Dante's battered body with much-welcomed restorative powers. The Spanish capitan had had good taste in wine and after several goblets, with his belly full and his aches starting to go numb, Gabriel gave in to the temptation to rest his head on the desktop for a moment.

At some point he woke and found himself on the bed under a thickly quilted blanket. The cabin was dark save for a single glowing lantern that flickered above the desk, suggesting he had slept through the entire day. Since there were no sounds of gunfire or thundering footsteps overhead, he surmised their progress out of the Straits was steady and uneventful. His eye closed again and he buried his head in the feather bolster, letting the motion of the ship rock him gently back to sleep.

Coming…soon….  

Me and My Pecadillos

I started out bright and early this morning with great intentions of putting in a full day's work on The Following Sea…which is, yes, almost almost almost finished the main draft. I know I hoped it would be finished by Christmas but life has a sense of humor sometimes and throws all kinds of obstacles in the way.  But I'm determined to hit the new target date of Valentine's day, which might be more fitting anyway for the release of a sexy romance novel.

So I sat my butt down, cranked up the puter, typed out the chapter I had written yesterday and…. BANG BANG BANG.  The guy working on the screen room arrived to take down the old, torn screens and put up new ones. Okay, I can live with the banging and the sound of tearing screens.  But then…BOOMBADA BOOMBADA BOOMBADA BOOM.  Apparently he likes hard rock muzak. And he likes to share it with the entire neighborhood.

*sigh*

I'm one of those writers who has to have total silence when I work. That was why I got in the habit years ago of writing into the wee hours of the morning. No one bugging me, no noise, no activity outside, no sunshine luring me onto a lounge, no kids running around.  Just lovely dark silence where I could immerse myself in my characters and story.

I have other pecadillos.  I can only write with blue ink. I do all my first drafts in longhand on a certain type of paper.  Can't be black ink, can't be colored paper, can't be paper with margins or odd spacing of the lines.  I don't write more than thirty pages in longhand before transferring it to the computer because more often than not, the fingers type something not on the lined sheets and the mind veers off with a cool new idea that sometimes negates all the written pages that follow. Scrapping thirty pages isn't as bad as scrapping a hundred.  That's not to say that the hundred typed pages that went before are totally safe. I've actually scrapped a whole book before and started over. My usual scrapping is around a hundred typed pages and comes right about when I hit the Wall.

The Wall is another pecadillo of sorts, because I know it's coming. I anticipate it, though I never know when I'll slam into it. It sits there like a huge block at the point where I look at what I've written and think to myself: this is crap. The characters are weak, the story sucks. I have no idea where it's going or how to fix it. No one is going to read this and if they do it will be with rolling eyes and a heavy hand as they fling it against a real wall.

The Wall crops up in every book, no avoiding it. I suppose it happens because I don't work from an outline. I have no idea, other than where I want the book to start and roughly where I want it to end, what happens in between. I tried, once, to write an outline and actually follow it, but that worked about as well as swimming in shark-infested waters with a cut finger.  Sure, it was all laid out what would happen and how it would happen, but following my little points bored me and left no room for seat-of-the-pants inspiration…the kind where your fingers whisper: kill off the hero, they'll never see it coming.  Now *that* gets the creative juices flowing.

I also lack discipline. I admit it. Especially after seven years of retirement, where my days were so full of doing other things I used to wonder where I found the time to write. Not that I had any discipline then either–another reason why I did most of my writing at night. A neighbor tapping a wine glass could pull me right out of any mood to write, and if I'm not in the mood to write, it just doesn't work. I'm not able to sit at my desk and say: okay, write.  I can tell just by standing in the doorway and looking at my mountain of notes and papers if I'm in the mood to dive in. If I'm not, I just keep walking past the door.  Again, I've tried *forcing* myself to sit and scratch out ten or so pages, but they usually get scrapped for the thirty I zoom through when the left and right brain are in sync.

(I just heard a hugemongous BANG CRASH out in the screen room but I'm not going to look, nope.) (And the guy is cursing, that can't be good)

I can't just immerse myself in a different place and time and assume the guise of a dozen characters as they sail their way through a high adventure, and expect to be able to force the words to come.  I've never been able to do that. Maybe if I wrote simpler books without the cannon firing and the ships doing battle and the characters transforming from what they were to what they are capable of being in the face of stress, adversity, and lust (had to add that) maybe I could crank a book out faster. But then I'd be shortchanging myself as well as the readers. Editors have tried for decades to get me to do that, and they failed miserably *g*. Now that I'm my own watchdog/editor, there is no one to blame but myself if the writing, the story, the characters are not up to par.  It's a scary thought and it does tend to give the confidence level the heebee jeebees. Especially since The Following Sea will be going straight to digital with no buffer between me and the critics. Some might think that makes the process easier with no Big Brother hanging over the shoulder saying you can't do that, you should do this, good grief you'll never get away with that. But it actually makes it harder because it's just me and you, the reader. And if I fail you, then I fail myself.

But I *am* getting back in the groove. I'm enjoying the creative process again. I have my blue pens (medium tip) and my lined paper and hopefully, by tomorrow, I'll have my silence back again.

 

 

Happy New Year! Thank goodness the old one is finished.

I was going to title this:  how I spent my Christmas week, but figured it would be better starting off with a cheerful greeting…because I *am* cheerful. Managed to get out of the snow and had a clean, fun drive down to sunny Florida where the temp is supposed to hit 80 today. Palm trees are swaying. Birds are chirping. No snow. Bonus.

However. The events leading up to this bliss deserve a recounting and as I said up top, thank goodness the old year is finished. Seems like every time I turned around there was some new calamity. Looking back, one could say it started when I got home from Florida last spring and found the house ice cold and the furnace on the fritz. Had to sit around all day waiting for Furnace Guys to install a new furnace and get some heat in the house. Ching ching, welcome home.

On to some retrospective thoughts….

Through the summer, had to fix a collapsing wall at the side of the house. BIG ching ching.  Had the choice of rebuilding the collapsing wall from the walkup basement or just filling the damned thing in. Chose the lesser of two ching ching evils and just filled the damned thing in, but that also required building new walls in the basement, new drywall blah blah ching ching.

And then of course there is always the joys of Stupid rearing his ugly head. Nuff said there.  He always seems to pick the month or so leading up to Christmas to do his shtick. And once again, grandfather of the year he ain't. Not a card, not a phonecall to his grandkids. He should hang his head in shame every time he wears the Grumpy shirt they bought for him. I damn near ripped it off his back when I saw him wearing it. Nuff said.

And then there was the knee surgery. Not fun getting scoped the first time around. Less fun the second time around. Hopefully it delayed getting a full replacement for another year or so, but still…limping around with a knee the size of a balloon whilst recovering is NOT fun. It did, however, prompt me to get all my Christmas shopping done and wrapped well ahead of time, not knowing how mobile I would be. So I could just drive by shopping malls and laugh hysterically watching those last minute shoppers trying to find a place to park.  Lining up a half hour to buy groceries seemed a small enough inconvenience.

Christmas Eve..fun at the son's house. He always has a party Christmas Eve, so it's nice to go somewhere and just sit, put the leg up, relax, let the swelling go down, sip wine, catch up with friends.  I've been sleeping over the past two years so I can share the fun of watching the kidlets rip open their Santa stuff.  This year, however, I was up at 4:30 with heartburn so bad I thought I had a blowtorch in my chest. Tiptoed downstairs in search of Tums or Rolaids in the kitchen…nuttin. Got a glass of water from their machine thing which gurgles…sat quietly in the dark knowing I couldn't lay down and trigger the blow torch again…then I heard skulking down the stairs. It was Jefferson, looking fierce in his tighty whiteys, wakened by the DIL who thought she heard a burglar in the kitchen.  We sort of met in the middle of a dark hall and did the Home Alone scream at each other.  Great fun. After we scraped each other off the walls, we skulked back upstairs where he found me some Tums and I watched Opra classics till the kids got up.

Watched them dive into their gifts in the morning…raced home to cook turkey #1 for my cousin and his family, who are always ALWAYS late and never NEVER in the past 15 years arrived before 6:00. They got here at 4:30. I was in shock, hadn't even prepped the whore's doovers, but happily recovered, had a great evening, up late doing dishes etc, hit the pillows around 3ish. Up by 8 to prep turkey #2 and do a second shift of cooking…family arrived around 12:30ish, kids wired and bouncing off the walls. We poured drinks, retired to the family room, had a blast for the next two hours opening stuff and playing with stuff. Other company started arriving…20 in all…chatted and laffed and drank for a while, then dinner. Everything went great, went smooth. I should learn to read the signs *snort*.

After dinner, just getting ready with coffee and desert when someone comes out of the bathroom saying the terlet is plugged. Great. Two screaming kids running around ( belonging to my girlfriend's son) and my first thought was that one of them probably shoved a toy or 4000 sheets of wadded terlet paper down the loo. Out comes the plunger. Nope. Still clogged.  Jefferson and assistants start in on the mountains of dishes and Tim, who has taken control of the plunger steps back with a look of horror as all manner of food being rinsed from dishes in the kitchen is now appearing in the toilet, which has now overflowed the rim and is spewing volcano-like all over the bathroom and out toward the hall and dining room. Guests dash upstairs for towels, Tim shouts for Jefferson to stop rinsing the dishes, kids scream from the basement that it's raining on them. Yup, volcanic spews of water are flowing down through the baseboards to rain on the kids, who, while they may have been innocent of flushing anything suspicious down the loo, are still screaming and running in circles.

Jefferson finally responds to the full throttle choke hold and stops running the water in the sink. Tim continues plunging, to no avail. Someone uses the bathroom upstairs and new things flow out of the terlet on the main floor. People yell EWWWWWw and now everyone is screaming and running around in circles. More towels are fetched. Main waterline is turned off while sopping up goes on. Kids are still screaming, but upstairs now, where their parental units just watch them with smiles that say "aren't they just so cute"  Yeah, real cute with wet socks running across the carpets.

Meanwhile, back over the terlet, Tim still suspects a blockage. Really? He forages in the garage for a snake not bothering to wonder WHY I would even have one, much less know what one is, and thus settles for the garden hose, which he hauls through the laundry room and kitchen and starts shoving it down the terlet. He shoves, swears he feels something was dislodged, orders the water turned on again…flushes…stands back to admire his cleverness with the garden hose…and gets rewarded with an even bigger flood than before…gushing, spewing water all over the damned place. More people scrambling for every towel I own, even terrycloth housecoats and tablecloths, rugs, anything that will soak up water. Constant bailing is going on as well. Water line is shut off again and a neighbor appears at the door with a real plumbing snake. Hose is withdrawn, snake is shoved in to the terlet as well as the sink, which is also showing signs of filling with undesirable elements.  Corn and mushrooms and threads of saurcraut appear to be the lightest and most prevalent objects.

I grab the yellow pages and call a 24hr plumber. He calls back an hour later to say he charges $250 just to show up at my door on a holiday day. Great. Tim is yelling no, no, we'll figure this out. He's still playing with the snake, reaming out my poor (and now covered with black scratches and saurcraut) terlet bowl. All the men are now involved, most with their socks off and pants rolled up. Most of the women are still running around with towels, which are running low. Two hours later, Tim declares the snake is not working. Really? A second plumber returns his page and says it doesn't sound like a plumbing problem. He asks when the septic tank was last sucked out. AUGH! But I know I'm within a 5 year suck-out, on 2500 gallon tanks that I was told would be good for at least 7 years without another suck-out. Nope, he says. Sounds like a system back up or a clog.  I swear to god Tim's ears perked when I relayed the word clog. He is now in love with the plumbing snake.  There are no 24 hr emergency septic sucking services on holiday weekends. So we have to keep the water off, have to leave all the dirty dishes, have to stuff all fifty or so of the sopping wet and full of ewwww towels into big green garbage bags for a morning haul to the laundromat.

By now the men are wiping their feet and hands with lysol sheets and antibacterial stuff so they can resume drinking and eating desert and opening gifts so that the screaming children will stop screaming: "we want our gifts".  Austin is ready to throttle the youngest one cuz she's obviously fixated on him and clings to his leg wherever he goes, requiring him alternately to hide behind the Christmas tree or the couch. The parental units are still sitting there smiling…one because he was Jefferson's best buddy all through high school and they're both working hard on draining a bottle of Crown Royale.

 So we do the gifts and …yes…the first person gets a strange look on her face.

She has to pee.

But there's no where to pee. No water. No working terlets. The men guffaw and all troop outside like boy's nite at the campground and write their names in the snow, but what do the girlies do?  Why, some declare they are are their equals, and go and squat out in the dark, cold night. Others declare cottage rules and pee is fine, poop is a no no, don't flush, just fill.  Following this first exodus to pee, everyone…with the exception of Jefferson and Gerry, who were now into the bottle of Wisers…has stopped drinking because to drink is to pee and to pee is to….yada yada…



Oddly enough, everyone remained in high spirits.  Bags of towels got hauled away that night, not that I needed any because there was no water. Thankfully there were bags of ice, which melted enough to provide water for coffee in the morning whilst I dialed through the list of septic suckers.



Third attempt, got a real voice instead of an answering service, said he could be out within the hour if we can dig out the tank covers. Hallelujah?  Jefferson had slept over to protect his mommy from any further perils of potential flooding, so he was ousted from his comfy couch and dispatched outside to lift up the patio stones so the septic sucker could get to the tanks. Long story short, he worked that full hour with pick axe, chisels, hammers and shovel and managed to get maybe half a dozen stones lifted from the frozen ground. Tim and his wife returned just then bearing armloads of freshly laundered and folded towels and Tim…he who was in love with the snake…now took over with the pick and gave my sweating and exhausted son a rest. Around the corner next is a neighbour who wondered why we were all out there digging up the patio. He grabbed a shovel and started digging too. Next came the contractor who showed up to get a key for the house and ended up ankle deep in dirt shoveling and digging for septic covers with the other three. It must be a guy thing. See a shovel and you need to dig?



FOUR hours later Septic Man shows up. He drags his honkin big hoses through my garage because he doesn't have enough to go around the side of the house;  tramples through my garden and shrubs like they aren't even there. LAYS down on the ground and hangs over the opening of the tank—which is full to the brim with disgusting stuff, I must say—and declares that the "level is fine, there must be a blockage somewhere in the line between the house and the tank"  No mere snake or garden hose here, cuz Septic Man has the big kahoona. The big-ass hoses that he shoves up the pipe and after sucking for a few seconds, spews forth several chunks of solid white congealed grease. It looked like candlewax and as soon as they got sucked out, water flowed like a river. Jeffer turned the house water on. We all watched with glee as he flushed and the pipes ran clear and fine. Victory!  Almost!  Apparently the tanker truck was already half filled, so Septic Man could only suck out half of one of my tanks. He was leaving there to go for dinner with the inlaws and my parting thought was:  I hope he has real good soap.



Through all of this, there was a planned departure for Florida, supposed to happen on the 28th at 4:30am. Well that was obviously out because I now had to wait for Septic Man to come back in the morning to finish sucking out both tanks. Thus,  I informed my travelling partner about the Septic Situation and told her to stay home an extra day and hopefully we could reschedule for the following afternoon after all was pumped and cleaned. Informed the house-sitter he had to fend for himself another night as well unless he wanted to sleep on a couch and pee on the grass.  He chose to stay at his sisters.

Jefferson had thankfully packed the car for me the day before while we were waiting around, so when my copilot arrived around 1-ish, I said don't even bother taking off your shoes, we are OUTTA HERE before any more calamities strike.  As it turned out, it had snowed overnight…a mini blizzard, so it was doubtful we would have left at 4:30 anyway.  We were pulling out of the driveway at 1:30 and on our way…made it as far as Summerville West VA that first leg o' the journey, stopped about 10:30. Slept till not quite 6, were up and on the road by 6:30 and pulled into the Florida driveway at 7:30. 70 degrees, NO SNOW.

Last night, New Years Eve, 8 of us went for dinner, brought in the new year listening to Epcot Centre explode with fireworks. I found a corner in my screen room where I could stand and watch the fireworks just fine, thank you, without joining the bazillions of people who tried to cram into the parks. My poor little doggins was sick…she doesn't travel well and sort of gets, er, blocked up, and last night she was all shakey and barfy. This morning her pipes were cleared, so to speak and all is well again, she's her normal perky self, but I couldn't help thinking of septic tanks and snakes and how ironic it was she shared a similar blockage *snort*

 And that's how my old year ended and the new one began. Clean pipes all around LOL.


Happy New Year Everyone!  Just as a reminder, Across A Moonlit Sea is free until tomorrow night from Amazon. Just a little perk to start the year off right.

More Canham Christmas Goodies

So my family was over for dinner on Friday…it's a weekly tradition. I pick up the kids from school then the parental units file in between 5 and 6 from their various points of work–the son and daughter in law, the adopted son in law and daughter in law–and we all sit around, gab, catch up on weekly events…and eat. It's a day I look forward to every week because the 3 grandkids fill the house with noise and music, and play Wii and wrestle. And I get to cook, which is something I don't do as much now that Stupid has…well…turned Stupid.

Friday last, I hauled out the Christmas Cake, freshly made. As previously mentioned, the recipe had vanished for quite a few years…since my dad passed away, actually. I was reminded by my son that that was the last time I made it, the last Christmas he was with us. The Chief used to love the cake, and cut huge big chunks of it when no one was looking. (namely my mother, who went through a health food phase and didn't cook anything that didn't have wheat germ in it. She also banished all the booze in the house and he liked coming to my house for dinner because I filled his waterglass (and mine) with vodka. ) And because Jefferson adored him and did pretty much everything the Chief did, he used to snork down huge pieces of it too.

Anyway. Friday. Jefferson at first says he's too full to have any cake, but he watches the grandkids dig into it and the DIL have a piece, so he relented and asked for some.  He took a bite and got a funny little smile on his face. When I asked what the smile was about he said:  tastes just like I remember it. I won't swear to it, but I thought I saw a little tear in his eye.

So today I'm making Canham Christmas recipe number two, another lost-and-now-found recipe that went into the same folder as the Christmas Cake. It may sound unusual when you see the list of ingredients, but trust me…it's yummy.  And not one single person who ever ate it–and everyone used to swan over it–guessed what it was made of.  BONUS…it's a no bake recipe so even I couldn't screw it up LOL

Faith in hand, dear readers, try this out at home. You won't be disappointed.

Canham Cream of Wheat Squares.

2 cups of milk

6 tblsps cream of wheat (not the instant stuff)

1 cup unsweetened butter

3/4 cup sugar (or splenda)

1 tsp peppermint extract (if you don't like peppermint you can use vanilla or almond, or toss the extract and go for the amaretto)

graham crackers.

1 cup chocolate chips or wafers

1 tblsp butter

****

Bring the milk to a gentle boil and add the cream of wheat, cook until thickened.

Cream the butter and sugar, add the mint extract

Line a baking pan (8×10 or whatever is closest. 8×8 is a bit small unless you like your slices thick) with whole graham crackers

Pour the cream of wheat mixture on top

Add another layer of the graham crackers

Melt the chocolate and the tbsp of butter and spread or drizzle it on top.

Cover and refrigerate at least overnight so the graham crackers absorb some of the moisture and soften.

******

Sample Sunday…ME! *s*

I've blogged about my dad(The Chief) before…the fact he was a cop, the fact he liked me better than my sister *snort*.  Mainly because she didn't like cowboys and I did, she didn't like getting dirty and I did, she would never have considered playing with BOYS when she was younger, whereas I did the whole digging to China adventure one summer and it was all boys except for Francis Campbell and myself… and Francis was more the lookout type than the dig and shovel type.

My dad loved Westerns. He loved Randolph Scott and John Wayne, he loved The Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy and The Cisco Kid, The Adventures of Jim Bowie (he wasn't a cowboy, but the Chief thought his knife was cool). Everything stopped if Roy Rogers was on…not the goofy half hour show with him yodling with Dale, but the two hour Saturday afternoon movies. Why don't they rerun THOSE anymore? There were times he would skulk into my room and wake me up to tell me a Cowboy movie was on TV, the mother had gone to bed, and the two of us skulked down to the living room to watch.  By the time it was over, of course, the mother was awake from the hootin' and hollerin' when the bad guys got shot, but by then we didn't care. We were the first ones on the block to get a colour TV when they came out. Why? Because he'd heard Bonanza was going to be the first TV show broadcast in full colour.

Big screen westerns were popular back then too.  I don't know how many times we saw Shane and Stagecoach and 3:10 to Yuma. Even when I hit my teen years I'd still pony up with the popcorn and watch Westerns with him. By then I had a TV in my room and we would check the guide and if a Western was coming on, we'd pass a wink over the table and he'd show up five minutes before it started and while my mother and sister watched skating or ballet, we'd be hootin and hollerin for Glen Ford to catch the bad guy.

I thought about my dad the other day when my son's house was broken into. It brought back another memory from when I was a kid when my dad helped catch a gang of pretty bad thieves. The leader sent out some of his gang to try to discourage my dad from testifying. They tried to burn down our house with my sister, mother, and me in it. Thankfully they were not Mensa members and the attempt failed but I remember the Chief coming home and hugging us all so hard I heard bones crunch.

When I started writing, I sort of kept it quiet for the three or four years I was getting rejections. I thought at the time there was nothing worse than having someone ask: And what do you do? I'm a writer. Oh really, do you have anything published? Well…er…no.

So I waited until I had the letter from Avon in my hand saying they were interested in China Rose. Ironically enough, I was in the hospital having knee surgery at the time. Stupid brought the letter from home and I couldn't even leap up and down. When my mother and sister came to visit that afternoon, I was tongue tied. I didn't quite know how to tell them that I'd kept a secret from them for the past four years. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but when the two most fearsome and critical people I knew were in sitting there in the hospital room, looking around as if some foreign germ was going to leap on them from afar, piling the bed with cabbage rolls and strawberry tarts because of course hospital food was NOT to be eaten…I didn't know how to even start the sentence. Oh, by the way…I wrote a book…

Actually, that's exactly what I ended up doing. They were getting up to leave, were squabbling over the price of parking, and were almost out the door when I said: Oh, by the way….I wrote a book and it's being published.

My mother smiled and said "That's nice" and continued out the door. My sister gave me one of those Don't-even-think-you-can-one-up-me looks that only older sisters can deliver with the perfect amount of cool venom, and she walked out too.  I laid there in the hosp bed staring at the door for a full minute, I swear, before the two of them poked their heads back through the doorway with a  "What did you say?"

Later that evening my dad came. He was on duty, so came straight from work. He was so excited he went to the wrong hospital first and threatened them with the SWAT team if they didn't produce his missing daughter. Luckily one of the nurses suggested gently that he might have come to Wellesley General instead of Wellesley Orthopedic, which removed the SWAT threat, but had him driving the few blocks with full sirens blaring.  I heard him coming down the hall from the elevator, big boots, big footsteps, big blustery voice "Came to see my daughter, the writer!"

First question he asked me, after I got the bone-crunching hug was:  "Did you write a Western?"

Augh. No. Believe it or not I *had* written a Western but it had been rejected and I was told it was too violent, too graphic for the romance market. (sound familiar?) He accepted the news with the same look on his face that he had when I pointed out that Lone Ranger and Tonto always seemed to be riding around the same cluster of rocks.

He was my rock and I loved him dearly. Some years later when I had my son, I walked in on the two of them one day in the family room and yup, they were sitting there hootin' and hollerin' watching a Western. I had just finished handing in a book and was looking for ideas for the next one, and there it was right in front of me. A hootin and hollerin Western.

Some readers may think there are a lot of cliches in Under The Desert Moon…and that's because there are. I deliberately put every nifty cliche from every Western I could think of in there…the schoolmarm with the glasses who transforms into a tough little beauty, the stagecoach ride through Indian territory, the Indian sidekick, the mysterious gunslinger, the blowsy saloon hall singer, the jail breakout, the big shootout…even Billy the Kid.  It's all there and I had a blast writing it.  The first person who read it was my dad, who NEVER read books. NEVER. Reading the sports section of the paper was his limit, so when I gave him the book I figured just the knowledge it was a Western would be enough. Another deterrent would have been the cover. Under The Desert Moon was cursed with the infamous Forty F**king Flowers cover (I blogged about it a while back) Big blotches of pink exploding flowers all over it. The saving grace was the artwork on the inside stepback. It was splendid. A gunslinger and his gal.  But he read it. Pink exploding cover to pink exploding cover and when he finished it and talked about it, he was grinning ear to ear, proud as punch. His only comment, delivered with a fatherly sort of frown, was that maybe I shouldn't have put so many "sexy parts" cuz he was a bit embarrassed reading that, but the criticism was fleeting and he was all grins about the rest of it.  Especially since I had dedicated it to him, but really, there was never any question it was for him and for me and for a childhood spent hootin and hollering for the good guys.

I miss him terribly. I still watch the old Westerns when they come on AMC and I still see him sitting beside me, leaning forward on the edge of the chair as if he didn't know, after the tenth watching of the same movie, if the good guys were going to win over the bad guys.

Shortly after I finished writing Under The Desert Moon, the movie Silverado came out. It was a spoof of sorts, and included every cliche from every Western the writers could think of, even a Billy the Kid character.  When Romantic Times reviewed Under the Desert Moon, Kathe Robin called it " the 'Silverado' of Western romances". I gave out such a hoot when I read that! She GOT it. She really GOT it. And of all the great reviews I've had over the years for all of my books, that one stands out as being one of my top two.

So here then is an excerpt from Under The Desert Moon.

*************

Aubrey approached the shoulder-high wicket and managed to calm herself during the few moments it took for the clerk to notice her.

"Ticket?"

"I already have one," she said. "For Santa Fe. Is the stage on time?"

"Your ticket paid for?"

"Last Wednesday."

"Eh?" The clerk lifted his head and peered through his pince-nez. "Ohhh yeah, I remember you now. The schoolmarm. You jest missed the other coach and bought your ticket then to beat the rush." He paused and snorted derisively. "Welcome to the rush. Just you and her ladyship so far … that is, if'n she can make up her mind one way or t'other. Seems she wants a coach all to herself. Fancy that."

Aubrey looked around the small office, puzzled by the empty benches along the walls. The previous week, the seats had been full of impatient travelers, with more waiting in line, clamoring for passage on any coaches heading west.

"Comanche," the clerk explained. "Rumor has it they're out on the warpath again, jest the kind of news what gives folks a hankerin' to stay to home. You might want to share some of that wisdom yourself, Missy, and wait until the army has a chance to cool them down some."

"I … can't wait. I have to be in Santa Fe as soon as possible. Is the stage not running?"

"Oh, it's runnin'," the clerk assured her. "Jest can't say for certain when. Seems the driver had some trouble comin' in from Little River."

"What? What's that you say?" Aubrey was unceremoniously elbowed aside as a short, round-faced gentleman pressed up to the wicket. "Excuse me, my good man, but did I hear you say the coach may not be leaving today?"

The clerk tilted his head to see over the rim of his pince-nez. The newcomer had a florid complexion, caused as much by the heat out-of-doors as the rotund size of his girth. A ring of graying hair wisped out from under the brim of the derby he wore, while his mouth was all but hidden beneath an impressive bush of a moustache, the ends of which had been waxed and groomed into perfect little circles at each end.

"You got good ears, mister. I said what I said."

"But good gracious … why are we being delayed?"

"Can't rightly say for certain, but I heard the driver lost his gun. Ain't nobody fool enough to head into Injun territory without a shotgun, not even Stink Finger Jim Brody."

This seemed too much for the little man to absorb. He doffed his derby and swabbed an enormous white handkerchief across the bald dome of his head.

"A gun? We are being forced to rearrange our schedules because one of your drivers lost his gun? Can he not purchase another at the hardware store?"

The clerk's eyes narrowed. Moving with exaggerated care, he removed his pince-nez and polished the lenses slowly on his shirtfront. When they were smeared into a cleaner state, he replaced them on the bridge of his nose and peered belligerently at his customer.

"Mister … where are you from?"

"Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania."

"And jest what might you be carrying in them tinker's cases you got with you?"

"I … er, have a quality line of products which have met with great success throughout the Eastern states."

"You ever been west of theMississippi?"

"Why, er, no. No, I haven't had the pleasure until now."

"Never would have guessed it," the clerk snorted.

The salesman stiffened. "See here, my good man, if this is an attempt to extort more money—"

The ticket agent sighed and shook his head. "I said the driver lost his shotgun, mister. Every stage that leaves this here depot leaves with two men ridin' up top in the driver's box, or it don't leave at all. One does the drivin', the other rides shotgun. Man loses his shotgun, he ain't about to give a hang one way or t'other about schedules, quality products, or"—he glared pointedly at Aubrey—"a bunch of snot-nosed Mex kids missin' out on their ABC's. You savvy what I'm sayin', mister?"

"Oh. Yes. Yes, I see." The square of linen swept across the shiny pate again. "But I simply must get to Santa Fe before the month's end. I simply must."

"Nothin' I can do about it, mister. Not till I hear one way or t'other from Jim Brody. Why hell, he might be over to the hardware store right now tryin' to find himself another gun." The clerk chuckled at his own joke. "On the other hand, he's more'n likely over to the Silver Dollar Saloon sippin' his way through a pint of good whiskey."

Darby Greaves, seeming to have ignored the exchange until then, straightened from where he lounged against the wall. "A commendable idea, all things considered. Magenta, my love, what do you say we step over to the Silver Dollar ourselves and see if we cannot work on finding you an engagement closer to civilization."

Magenta's expression did not change and no one else overheard the response that came through her almost motionless lips. "Take one step toward that saloon, Darby Greaves, and I will personally shoot out both your kneecaps," she hissed. "They are paying me five thousand dollars to sing in the new opera hall in Santa Fe and you are not—I repeat, you are not going to piss away an opportunity like this from the bottom of a whiskey bottle!"

"The opportunity, as I see it," he replied nonplussed, "is to get yourself scalped … or worse. Didn't you hear him say the Comanche are on the warpath?"

"Good God, this is 1877. There are no more Comanche; they're all either dead or confined to reservations, and I'll be damned if a few unfounded rumors ruin my one big chance at success."

With a practiced toss of her bouncing gold curls, Magenta swept across the cramped room, her voluminous skirts raising a small cloud of dust in her wake. At the wicket, she leaned forward, allowing the startled clerk an unimpeded view down the dusky cleft of her cleavage.

"Now then, Mr.—?"

"Gibbon," the clerk croaked. "Sidney Gibbon."

"Mr. Gibbon … surely there must be something we can do to clear up this unfortunate situation."

Aubrey sighed and retreated to one of the long wooden benches. She set her carpetbag on the floor and tried not to think of what another delay would do to her plans or her nerves. She blocked out the squabble of voices behind her and stared out the fly-spotted window, but there wasn't much to see through the thick film, and after a few moments, she found her eyes wandering to the notice board hung on the wall beside her. A mosaic of scraps of paper was pasted and nailed up for display, including one for a miracle tonic that claimed to grow hair, cure warts, and prevent personal discomforts in warm weather. A gunsmith named Bullet had printed his handbills on paper cut-outs of pistols, complete with an artistic puff of smoke. Warnings were posted to be on the alert for a pair of con artists who had been seen last in the great state of Louisiana; below that were neat rows of wanted posters, some with crudely sketched caricatures of faces, some with the ominous DEAD OR ALIVE stamped across the top.

"A fascinating overview of our society, don't you agree?"

"I beg your pardon?" Aubrey glanced beside her and was greeted by an effusive smile beamed out from beneath a handlebar moustache.

"The notices." The portly salesman pointed to the board. "Small pieces of life displayed for all to see."

"Yes," she murmured. "Quite fascinating."

"I could not help but overhear the clerk mention you were a teacher. An admirable profession, Miss—?"

"Blue."

"Miss Blue." He tipped his bowler and offered a curt bow. "Armbruster P. Shillingsworth, at your service." He opened his mouth to say more, but a further disturbance behind them changed his intent somewhat abruptly. "Oh! Oh my!"

Two new arrivals were standing in the doorway of the stage office, their presence causing a sudden and absolute silence both inside and outside on the boardwalk. The first of the pair was tall enough and broad enough for his silhouette to block most of the flaring sunlight. He was dressed in an open-necked buckskin shirt and cord pants, neither of them too new or too clean. Brass-colored hair fell long and shaggy to his collar, the unruly waves framing a face that was weathered by sun and open air to the shade of warm teak. The eyes gazing out from beneath the wide brim of his hat were slate gray and moved casually around the airless little room, observing, assessing, dismissing his surroundings with a wry twist of his lips.

Not quite so easy for the occupants of the stage office to dismiss was the sight of the second man, a Plains Indian. He was nearly as tall as the white man and every bit as formidable, judging by the bulge of muscles that swelled beneath his buckskins. His starkly chiseled features could have been hewn from granite, for all the expression he betrayed. Straight, gleaming black hair hung to mid-chest, with several thin strands plaited into a braid that originated at his temple. His eyes were bottomless brown pools, threatening in their intensity, and not the least reluctant to challenge each stare that greeted him.

The white man crossed over to the wicket and nodded perfunctorily at the clerk. "When does the next stage leave?"

"I … well, uh—" The clerk's nervous gaze flicked to the Indian and back again, "I was jest tellin' these here good folks that I wasn't too sure at all when the next coach would be headin' out,"

"There is a scheduled departure at ten, is there not?"

"Well, ah … yes."

"And that is a stagecoach pulled up out front, is it not?"

"I … uh, yes. Yes, it shore is."

"Am I wrong in assuming it is still the custom of the stage line to sell seats on board their coaches?"

"Well now—"

"Fine. How much for two seats to Fort Union?"

The clerk hesitated again, his eyes flickering now between the silent Indian and the bulging leather pouch the plainsman withdrew from his pocket. The solid chink of coin caused him to lick his lips and rub a finger nervously along the starched edge of his collar.

"Will, ah … will these seats be for you and your, ah, friend?"

The stranger's smile was easy. His voice was deceptively soft as well, tinged with the friendly slur of the plains, but his eyes were hooded with a distinct and growing animosity, as if he knew full well the cause of the agent's reluctance and was not about to make the going any easier for him.

He pushed back the brim of his hat with a tip of a finger and leaned his elbow on the counter. "I suppose you have a clever reason for asking, considering there are only the two of us standing here."

"In that case"—the clerk swallowed hard—"the fact of it is, I can't sell you two seats to nowheres."

"Is the stage full?"

"No … ah, I mean … yes"

The gray eyes fixed him with a shriveling stare. "Which is it … no, or yes?"

"Fact of it is, mister, the Kansas Stage Company plain don't allow Injuns on board their coaches."

"Sorry?" The plainsman leaned farther over the counter, a motion which triggered the instant appearance of fine beads of sweat across the ticket agent's upper lip. "I don't think I quite heard you."

The clerk cleared his throat and adjusted his pince-nez. "It ain't my rule, mister. It's the policy of the Kansas Stage Company, and I ain't about to get fired for breakin' company policy rules."

"Come now, Mr.—?"

"Gibbon," Magenta supplied smoothly. She had moved up behind the plainsman and was enjoying not only the clerk's squirming discomfort, but the extremely interesting view of hard, rippling muscles where they strained the seams of the buckskin shirt. "His name is Sidney Gibbon."

The plainsman acknowledged the inviting smile with an obliging grin of his own before he turned back to the clerk.

"Well, Mr. Sidney Gibbon, with business as poor as it is these days, shouldn't you be thankful you have customers who are willing to pay? A less accommodating fellow might simply stop the coach outside of town and insist that you pay him. Me? I could care less where I get on board—here, or ten miles down the road—but my friend there, why he might take it in his head that you insulted him deeply. You ever insulted an Ute warrior before, Mr. Gibbon?"

The clerk shook his head. "C-Can't say that I have, mister, and can't say that I particularity want to, but policy is policy. Besides … I got other passengers to consider. I doubt they'd be all that partial on the idea of havin' an Injun ride on the coach with them."

The plainsman's mouth curved thoughtfully. He turned toward the profusion of purple silk and dyed ostrich feathers and waited for Magenta's eyes to drag themselves upward from the gaping neckline of his shirt. "Ma'am. You have any objections to me or my friend joining you on the stage? I know it's a long trip at close quarters, but I can assure you that both Sun Shadow and myself are housebroken. We can act civilized when the occasion warrants it."

Magenta smiled. "And when it doesn't?"

It was his turn to take a slow, leisurely inspection of the bountiful flesh testing the constraints of the purple bodice. Two good handfuls apiece, he judged, enough to keep a man busy for a few hundred miles.

Magenta read the interest in his eyes and moistened her lips. "I have no objections whatsoever to your company, sir. On the contrary, I'm sure we would all feel so much safer with you on board … wouldn't we, Darby dear?"

Greaves was staring at the Indian, as he had been since the pair had appeared in the doorway. He made no effort to conceal his contempt or his distrust for a race he considered inferior even to slaves.

"Darby dear?" Magenta said again.

"No," he said quietly. "I have no objection."

"There"—the plainsman spread his hands easily as he addressed Sidney Gibbon again—"you heard it yourself: no objections."

"They ain't the only customers," the clerk said tightly, grasping at his last avenue of escape. "The schoolmarm and the salesman over yonder; they both paid full fares."

The gray eyes cast around again and found the dapper little man in the derby. Before he could pose his question, the salesman bustled forward, his moustache quivering around his assurances. "No indeed, sir. I have no objections whatsoever. And the name is Shillingsworth. Armbruster P. Shillingsworth. A household name for corsets and trusses, braces and splints for all areas of the body … er … not that either you or your friend look as if you require any further bracing. No indeed."

The plainsman sought the final vote, his gaze turning toward the window. Aubrey's brown worsted suit and brown hat blended perfectly with the dull brown walls of the office, a blandness not aided by the fact that a haze of sunlit dust hung suspended in a cloud around her, obscuring all but a faint impression of a pale face and glinting spectacles.

*************

Under the Desert Moon is available at Amazon

Where are the mothers of these idiots?

My grandkids came home from school yesterday, looking forward to playing on their Wii or their PSwhatever or just hanging and watching TV…same as they do every day. The grandson is old enough now to babysit, so he earns a little extra money by watching his sister after school–probably extra on top of that for not duct taping her to a lamp post outside when she goes into Diva mode.

They came home yesterday to find the house had been broken into. Teenagers, the cops figured, probably two of them. They came in through the kitchen window, which required some dexterity and nimbleness, but they exited through the sliding doors, both of which they left wide open in the pouring rain. They obviously watched enough CSI to wear gloves, because they didn't leave any fingerprints behind. And we suspect they have done it before because they bypassed all the big stuff and went straight to the bedrooms to look for jewelry…easy to carry, easy to stash in pockets, easy to walk away and saunter down the street looking innocent as newborn lambs.

Easy to completely destroy the feeling of safety a family should have in their own home.

They probably thought they were clever and hit the motherlode. They got the diamond and sapphire bracelet I gave my daughter in law on her wedding day, and the heavy gold link bracelet I gave to my son. They got rings that were over a hundred years old, passed down to the DIL through her great grandmother. They even got the tiny diamond pendant I gave to my granddaughter on her first birthday thinking a girl has to start out life with some bling. It wasn't very valuable, a couple of hundred bucks new and hocked, they'll maybe get twenty. The real value in most of what was taken is in the sentiment. How do you put a dollar figure on rings that belonged to a great great grandmother. It's not like they were from Cartier. Again, they'll get maybe 5 cents on the dollar for them, but to my daughter in law they were priceless.

They got watches and earrings and chains and bracelets, and on their way out, grabbed a Christmas bag that was half filled with wrapped gifts for my son's brother in law. I guess they cleverly figured: who is going to stop someone walking down the street carrying a Christmas bag full of gifts?

What I want to know is, when these Mensa candidates go home, do their mothers not notice a big bag full of wrapped gifts and loose jewelry? Or after the stuff is hocked, do they not notice their kids suddenly have a lot of money to spend even though they're not working and supposed to be school? Do they think that because their little darlings are going through a phase and belong to a *cool* gang at school, that they aren't going to graduate from breaking into empty houses to breaking into bigger and better things?  Ten years from now, when they're emptying their pockets and being patted down before going into the visiting room of a prison to see their precious sons (or daughters) behind bars…are they going to put on the "poor me" face and pretend they didn't see it coming?

As for the thieves themselves…my Christmas wish for you is to have to spend a year chained to the ass of an elephant suffering from diarrhea .  I hope when you do reach the big time bars you're pretty enough to attract Bubba's attention. And when you're lying there weeping and feeling sorry for yourself and wondering where it all went wrong…maybe you'll think back to how much fun you had, how clever you thought you were destroying a family's home and Christmas.

Fukkers.

By request…the Canham Christmas Cake

Maybe if I write down the recipe here it won't get lost for another decade *s*.

Seriously, some readers asked for it, and I don't mind sharing just as long as you know how to measure a whack and a half whack LOL. As near as I could guess at the time, a whack was a little more than a cup…sort of a coffee mug size. That's what I used anyway.

1 whack of craisins

small package (4 oz, I think) of chopped pecans

1 cup of diced citrus peel (the little 3/4-whack container size)

1/2 whack of dried apricots chopped

3/4 whack of slivered (not sliced) almonds

1/2 whack each of red and green marachino cherries chopped+ about a dozen of each left whole for decorating the top

hefty handful of diced dried pineapple

zest from one large lemon

1/2 cup flour

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking powder (it was originally measured using a desert spoon, which was heaped, so I guessed @tsp)

1 cup unsalted butter

1 cup sugar (I used Splenda and it worked just fine)

5 eggs

half whack of rum

Directions:

Put the craisins (or raisins if you don't like cranberries) in bowl, add the rum, microwave for a minute then let sit for a half hour or so to let the craisins absorb some of the rum and plump up. Drain and keep the rum. (Pithy Baker's tip, add more rum than called for cuz after you soak the craisins and drain them, the rum is yummy and having a little snort just makes the whole baking process go smoother *g*)

Combine all the chopped fruit and nuts and zest in a big bowl with the craisins then toss with the 1/2 cup of flour. (This Somewhat Skeptical Baker's note: my mother used to say this kept the fruit from sinking to the bottom, but frankly, there's so much fruit in there anyway, there's no where for it to sink)

Cream the butter and sugar (or Splenda) till fluffy, about a minute, then add the eggs one at a time and beat for 1/2 min each egg. (Erudite Baker's note: I added the eggs all at once and the world did not implode)

Add the dry ingredients and 3-4 tbls of the drained rum.

Gently fold it into the bowl of fruit and mix until everything looks coated. There's a lot of fruit and not much batter so don't panic if it looks fruit-heavy.

Butter up a ring mold baking pan and scoop the batter in then decorate the top with the whole red and green cherries

Bake at 300F for 1hr 45 min or until done. That usually means sinking a steak knife into the middle (gently, as you would to an Ex Husband's liver) and seeing if it comes out clean but again, a lot of fruit kind of muddles the *clean* part so just use your judgement.  I baked it the 1.45 then left it in the oven to cool with the door opened the width of a wooden spoon rest.

When it's cool, remove it from the ring thing and either hermetically seal it in a large air tight cake thing (I use my big round tupperware bowl–with lid– that I've had as long as I've had the recipe because it just fits nice and snug (with a slice removed for tasting of course) *s*) or wrap it in saran and refrigerate.  If there aren't too many children indulging, blast it with another few tblsps of rum before hermetically sealing it.

There you have it. Do NOT murder it with marzipan or any other kind of icing. If you cut it too soon, like before it's cooled completely, it will crumble, but don't panic. Cut a bigger wodge and press it together to even the edges of the gap, then sprinkle with more rum.

 

Christmas Countdown

Last year around this time I posted recipes and did a sort of countdown of all the traditional Polish cooking I do this time of year. I also did some non-traditional baking…why, I have no idea. Just woke up one morning and thought:  I think I'll make Christmas cookies.  Right.

I decided I was not doing that this year. I have enough on my plate, no pun intended, without slaving for hours over pavlova and red velvet cookies.  However.  Whilst searching the pantry for something –meaning I knew I had it somewhere but couldn't find it so I tore apart the pantry in the kitchen, the two big pantry cupboards in the laundry room, and the spice cupboards above the stove, then sat there exhausted on the floor looking at the piles of debris scattered here there and everywhere–I came across two recipes I used to make faithfully each Christmas. They've been *lost* for the past 25 years or so, which says more for my packing and unpacking methods than it does for the actual merit of the recipes. The last time I saw these recipes, we lived in the west end of the city, in Bramalea. This was where, coincidentally, I was invited to that cookie exchange party I mentioned in a previous blog, which was such a resounding calamity of errors with regards to my cookie skills,  that I tucked all my desert recipes away in a folder, put the folder into a brown envelope, and shoved the envelope in the bottom of the *junk drawer*.

I'm sure everyone has a junk drawer, and everyone *knows* that all the junk in there is valuable. So when we moved from Eden Pit to the east end of the city, I pretty much packed up everything from one junk drawer and moved it to the new house and unpacked it into the new junk drawer. Large brown envelopes tend to be put on the bottom, like shelf liner, and when we moved again, a year and a half later, same process. Out of one drawer and into the new one. Somewhere over the next 13 years, while we were in Ajax, I moved the wad of recipes out of the drawer and put them into a standup file with some cook books. When we moved from North Noake to present day Sharon, the file and the cookbooks got tossed into a box with other sundry kitchen stuff and dutifully shlepped to the new location…where, for some reason, they were shoved onto the very bottom shelf, way at the back, of the huge closet at the back door that was converted into a third pantry cupboard.

I like gagets, you see. And there are only so many gagets you can cram into normal kitchen cupboards, plus I have a bazillion serving dishes and…well…just *stuff*. The grandkids like ten different kinds of cereal, so those boxes have to go somewhere too. Besides that, you're reading the blog of someone who has a fridge dedicated to condiments only *snort* So three separate pantry cupboards is quite normal.

So. I found this folder whilst hunting for the elusive vanilla paste. Imagine my pleasure and surprise when I opened it and discovered all sorts of goodies…the warranty for a hand mixer that's been in a landfill for 20 years, several old one dollar bills (we don't even use them anymore since switching to loonie coins about 15 years ago) some postcards from people I don't remember, some photos that were hidden away for good reason, and omg…some handwritten recipes that I've often thought about and wondered where they disappeared to. One in particular, for THE best Christmas cake, was the recipe my mother made every year for as far back as I can remember. I had asked her for it the year I got married so I could bake one of my own, but instead of parting with the recipe, she made me a cake. I tried to explain that wasn't the point, that I wanted to make it myself, and when I asked the next year, yep, she just made another cake for me.

I realized the problem the following year when I again asked for the recipe. This time she made me sit in the kitchen and write it down as she made it because all those years, she never had an actual recipe, she just eyeballed it. I watched her make it, stopped her when she was going to add something so I could take a rough measurement. Coffee cup full of this, 1/2 whack of that, fill your palm like so for that.  It was a challenge to measure a half whack, but in the end I had a recipe that worked…at least for the 13 years we lived in Eden Pit. When we moved to Ajax, that was when I put my foot down about not leaving home on Christmas Day, so the family had to shlepp across the city to spend the day at my house, and of course my mother insisted on bringing the cake so I didn't have make it for the next few years.  After my dad passed away, there were no more shlepping family dinners, so no more cakes were baked and I think, by the time we moved again,  I thought I had lost the recipe.

But there it was, clutched in my hand. Written in pencil, very badly faded, on lined paper torn out of a notebook she'd had handy in the kitchen that day. I actually put it up to my nose thinking I could smell the actual cake on it, because I could sure see it and could almost taste it. I wrote out a list of ingredients I needed and the very next day made it. Even managed to find the baking pan that was only ever used to bake that one particular cake. Had to crawl into a deep back cupboard to get it (found my missing wok ring at the same time huzzah!) but I knew exactly where it was.

Soaked a full whack of craisins in rum, chopped up the almonds and pecans and dried pineapple, apricots, and orange peel, the red and green cherries. Mixed the flour and eggs and butter…more rum…a half whack of sugar. Filled the scooped palm of my hand with lemon zest. And voila. Same cake I remembered. Same smell while it was baking. Same taste.

Merry Christmas Memories. *s* Can't beat 'em.