Marking Remembrance Day

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie
         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.

"In Flanders Fields"
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
May 3, 1915, Second Battle of Ypres

Today, as we wear our poppies, we will remember them.

New Release: What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank by Krista D. Ball

New this week on Kindle, and coming soon to Kobo and other formats, including paperback - What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank, a Fantasy Lover's Food Guide.

Equal parts writer’s guide, comedy, and historical cookbook, fantasy author Krista D. Ball takes readers on a journey into the depths of epic fantasy’s obsession with rabbit stew and teaches them how to catch the blasted creatures, how to move armies across enemy territories without anyone starving to death, and what a medieval pantry should look like when your heroine is seducing the hero.

Learn how long to cook a salted cow tongue, how best to serve salt fish, what a “brewis” is (hint: it isn’t beer), how an airship captain would make breakfast, how to preserve just about anything, and why those dairy maids all have ample hips.

What Kings Ate will give writers of historical and fantastical genres the tools to create new conflicts in their stories, as well as add authenticity to their worlds, all the while giving food history lovers a taste of the past with original recipes and historical notes.
 

A little taste:

Pound Cake

In the 16th century, for example, all cakes were made with yeast. However, the Germans and British eventually moved to using eggs to raise their cakes. In Jane Austen’s time, cakes were going through that transition, where recipe books like Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery were giving recipes for both kinds of cakes. By the time Mrs. Beeton put out her books in the Victorian era, most cakes were being made with eggs, and only poor people were using yeast to raise their cakes.

Today, pound cake is a yellow cake, browned on the outside. It’s often given terms like “light” and “moist.” While this cake is moist, I’m not sure the term “light” can ever be applied to this one.

Ingredients:

• 1 lb butter
• 1 lb sugar
• 8 eggs
• 1 lb flour
• 1 tsp each nutmeg and cinnamon
• ½ tsp ground cloves
• 2 tbsp caraway seeds
• 6oz wine

Instructions:

1. Beat a pound of butter into a cream. 
2. Separate the yolk and whites from the eggs and beat each in separate bowls. 
3. Combine all of the dry ingredients. 
4. Mix the wet and dry ingredients. Your hero’s love interest will need to hand-beat this for a full hour, so he better appreciate it when she (or he) gives it to him! (Modern chefs can use a hand mixer for 7-8 minutes.) 
5. Butter a baking pan and bake it for one hour in a “quick” oven (375 degrees F).

Find it on Amazon now!

Krista was born and raised in Deer Lake, Newfoundland, where she learned how to use a chainsaw, chop wood,and make raspberry jam. After obtaining a B.A. in British History from Mount Allison University, Krista moved to Edmonton, AB where she currently lives. Somehow, she’s picked up an engineer, two kids, six cats, and a very understanding corgi off ebay. Her credit card has been since taken away. Like any good writer, Krista has had an eclectic array of jobs throughout her life, including strawberry picker, pub bathroom cleaner, oil spill cleaner upper and soup-kitchen coordinator. You can find her causing trouble at http://kristadball.com

Thursday 13: The Lure of Victorian Settings

Today's Thursday 13 is all about why the British and Commonwealth Victorian period is so attractive for writers, still, and likely always - or at least why I enjoy it as a writer (and a reader).

1. It's so deliciously atmospheric, and generally creepy. All those staircases, country estates, gas lamps and foggy, dim side streets, not to mention Jack the Ripper and other shady doings.

2. The fashions are quite enjoyable! Now, if you know me at all, you know I am not usually concerned with clothing and the like, but top hats, waistcoats, deerstalkers, wearing ties to go hiking, shirtwaists, crushed velvet, calfskin gloves, etc, etc, etc... Definitely fun stuff to imagine.

3. Morphine, Gin and Opium, oh my! Even Holmes enjoyed his seven percent solution now and again. Intoxicants seemed to be ubiquitous, and, while not exactly polite, they were not a giant secret, either; nor were they major legal taboos, either. This always makes for some added colour to a story, and leaves ample room for an addled poet or wastrel cousin.

4. You can have a character smoke tobacco wherever he wants. While the ladies were discouraged from smoking in public, men seemed to have little restriction. This, too, adds greatly to the atmosphere, takes away some of the fiddly issues of "where can I place this character where he can smoke?", and gives them something to do with their hands.

5. A total absence of having to deal with the "social media" issue. If you're writing a modern story, you can't ignore the Internet any more. Almost every character can reasonably be assumed to have some form of social media, and it's getting more and more ridiculous to write a character without an email address, so writers are kind of forced into some mention of it. I am not a huge fan, because it feels like something that seems current now, but will date the piece within years. The Victorian era allows me to relax and ignore the Facebook Question.

6. Similarly: No frigging cell phones. Cell phones suck. I really don't care for them. Yet, in modern stories, you are forced to acknowledge them. People are so darned plugged in, it gets a bit annoying. I feel this really damages the drama, and you miss out on the chills of placing a character in the a dark alley, being pursued, without a telegraph office in sight! I suppose we can say that drunk texting gives us a new form of drama, but I don't think it's adequate compensation.

7. Horses, carriages, and early motor cars. And trains. The romance of early transportation is delightful!

8. "Lodgings". I even love the word.

9. The whole steampunky feel. Now, I don't write steampunk, but it has aesthetic attraction. Copper, gold, crystal, iron, pearl, glass, brass, wood, pewter, and so forth; items that were designed to be both functional and ornate. Early machines are wonderful fodder for the imagination. It's a world of mystery, from hot air balloons, to printing presses, to the humblest pocket watch or gasogene.

10. Orientalism at its peak! Now, in my scholarly life, I am critical of orientalism, as most good post-colonialists are. But, as a writer, the scores of "trophies" from India, Chinese ornaments, oddities from the Middle East, and souvenirs from Egypt are rich points of creativity. Added to this, the spiritualism, occult, and Theosophical veins, and you can find almost anything you need to write.

11. Elopements, wedding banns, entailments, hidden heirs, treaties, etc. Even the red tape was cooler in the Victorian era.

12. Telegrams, seals, letters, cyphers, cabinet photos, albums, notebooks, newspapers, etc. It was an age of paper, books, and documents. No Googling, so characters can find a wealth of dramatic shockers spread out over the course of the whole book. It's an investigator's paradise!

13. No one does seedy quite like the Victorians. Perhaps it is the facade of propriety, I don't know, but the picaresque underbelly seemed extra dingy. Nowadays, seedy is so visible it loses some of its narrative elan. When it's seen on every reality show, it becomes a bit meh, and a lot less atmospheric. Victorian life was comprised of worlds within worlds, of secret languages and unseen layers. A treasure trove of plots, characters and happenings lay within!

The ornate complexity of the Victorian period is alluring because there is so much to describe, use, hint at, and sink into. Would I like to live in the Victorian period? No, not a chance. It was certainly a time of white, male privilege, and engaged tooth-and-nail in the hierarchies of class and birth. But, as a writer, it gives me a wondrous playground with an inexhaustible source of mystery, ambiance, and beautiful language. With a mountain of research, an author can hunt around in this period, and never come back up for modern air.

In sum: I'm enjoying my Victorian holiday. Wish you were here!

Review: Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin

Black Like Me: Updated by John Howard Griffin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In all honesty, I must admit I have no idea how to rate this book. Given GR's star system, it's confusing to me. It really is sort of "amazing" in terms of its undertaking, compelling material and its impact. Yet, I'm not sure I can give it a full 5, despite its status as a classic. I loved this book in high school, and back then I would have rated it 5 stars without question. Now, as an adult, I hesitate. I will try to explain.

Black Like Me has a couple different aspects, each with different levels of usefulness.

As an early "non-fiction novel" it does ride up there with In Cold Blood. As a story, I found it hard to put down, and I found it quite gripping. Griffin's prose is charismatic and well constructed, and the "story" has a nice progression and flow due to the travel element, from New Orleans to the "heart of segregation," and it's hard not to hold your breath through his travels Southward. I also found his personal reflections fascinating, as his introspection developed.

As "ethnography," I do feel this book has great importance. Griffin records a lot of voices he would not have been able to capture had be not blackened his face, and his vignettes tell the reader a lot about the nature of segregation. While I feel he pulls some editorial punches (for example, I feel he shys away from recording dialects and other details that might have been valuable left intact), and I know he has shaped the material with a particular theme in mind, I also think it's a valuable read for anyone studying this period, or race relations in general. Griffin, from all accounts, seems to have led a remarkable life, and this period is one of its major highlights.

As social justice philosophy, it's of course admirable in its goals. It does demonstrate that skin colour overrode (overrides?) all, since he changed neither his name nor his credentials as he traveled. He was, as he says, the same man, but for colour, and he succeeds in describing the many, many adjustments he was forced to make because of his darker skin.

However, in this area it has dated a bit, in my opinion. Looking at it from 2012, it's hard to embrace the "black face" of it (though Griffin is clear that he never lied to people about being a black man; he just darkened himself and let people decide what they would), but it isn't just the performance of dark skin that makes me uneasy. It's actually the number of times that Griffin uses the term (or concept) of "we" to describe his experience within the black community, and how often he refers to himself as "black" that makes me uneasy. In a way it fits, because he was living under the restrictions, but I wonder at the "right" of this.

But, he spent eight weeks. Eight weeks, out of (at that point) 40-odd years. While the place of pigment can't be discounted, it's difficult to agree that he had become a black man over eight weeks of sharing these restrictions. Always, he knew he could take it off, and return to his "real life". I can't help but think that pretending simply can't reproduce the feeling of permanence. Darkening one's skin can't really compare with living in that skin, and likely feeling (in the 50s) the sense of no escape, ever, from segregation. So, to me, these assertions rather over-stepped into appropriation. I believe Griffin's heart was in the right place, but I do think this is over reaching the limits of his experiment.

As Malcolm X noted about this book, "Can you imagine how much more horrifying it would be to live like this your whole life?"

For this, I pull back a bit from five stars, because over-stressing this book has its dangers, in my opinion, and buying Griffin as an "insider" just doesn't fly. He certainly had a better understanding than people who hadn't walked a mile in those shoes, but he wasn't really an "insider," either, because he knew it was an experiment.

He works much better as a "participant observer," perhaps, although his own emotional "insiderness" was compelling in its own right when it was appropriate. (Of particular relevance were the moments of revelation he had looking at himself in a mirror, and facing his own racism and feelings of complete alienation from the black face that looked back at him.) His space on the margins of the white community in the face of his beliefs and his findings were especially interesting to me.

Griffin's description of the book's reception by the write community is dreadful (literally, filled with dread). The last section of the book feels a bit disjointed and tacked on, which is a pity, but I think it's part of the book's power. (There were a few moments where it went into martyr-mode, but overall he kept it pretty concise and journalistic, and held back from too much self-congratulation.)

Black Like Me, as some critics have said, is a great book on racism - for white people. It is in the book's portrayal of the whites along the way, and the reactions it spurred, that ring the best for me.

The edition I read had an afterword from after 1967, which made an interesting epilogue. By this point, Griffin was noticing that his position as "spokesman" was wearing thin, and it seems he wanted to (and had been asked to, perhaps) step back. He found he was being asked to consult on the "race problem" with white committees who didn't even think to invite black leaders! He was becoming, for white leaders, a safe or more palatable substitute, and that simply didn't work. As he expressed in an interview elsewhere, it had become ridiculous for him to serve as a voice for the black community, when it had many, better voices of its own. For me, this realization went a long way to addressing my concerns in the book itself.

So, final reckoning...? Certainly worth the read, as history and as a work of prose. I would recommend anyone interested in this period or these issues read this, particularly the updated edition. If you want to know more about Jim Crow laws and practices in everyday life, this book could be valuable to you. But, like with most serious issues, I caution that this shouldn't be the only book you read about it. This is not the final word, and I don't believe Griffin meant it to be. But it might make an excellent starting point, and is a good narrative illustration among the numerous academic books on the subject.

View all my reviews

Romancing Historical Details

Today, we have a guest blog from historical romance author Jackie M. Smith, on the joys of research and the importance of understanding your time period for quality writing.

When I first researched for my historical romance A Soldier’s Vow, I discovered so many interesting facts about the French country during one of the most terrifying periods in their long history. The German army had easily invaded the Northern part of France and often bombarded Paris but never succeeded in penetrating the city’s walls. Nonetheless, the city had been hit in other different and equally devastating ways.

Blackouts, food shortages and influenza affected everyone. Through my research, I discovered many families could no longer afford to keep their children fed, therefore they sent the weakest members of their family to their relatives in the country or other safer places. In A Soldier’s Vow, I wanted to show how the heroine Winnie Douglas saw and lived what everyone went through between 1914 and 1918 Paris. I also show how the war affected the women who stayed behind and waited for their husband, brother, cousin who joined the war effort.

The war also changed the soldiers who fought and saw firsthand the horrors and victories of war. Henry Whitfield, the hero in A Soldier’s Vow, had no idea what he would see and experience when he left his Canadian hometown. Many countries including Canada sent their strongest and bravest men overseas and fight an unknown enemy. They trained hard and fought even harder. Yet what waited for them in the trenches became their worst enemy. Rats, lice and other diseases caused the most terrible living conditions for every soldier on both sides.

Using such details in my book not only creates a setting but also brings the reader back to a time of turmoil, courage and undying love.

So, how do you approach researching your time period?

~*~
Jackie M. Smith is a Canadian novelist who currently writes historical romances for XOXO Publishing. Her novel, A Soldier's Vow, is available for purchase here.