A Few Words ...

…Can make a difference.

After working for days on the next book in my In Maine project, I returned to Pavane for Miss Marcher to make a Dramatis Personae to remind me of all the characters that may turn up as I write That Kentucky Boy.

In that prcess, I reread the entire novel and, seeing and unabashedly enjoying the story, I found errors and omissions that needed attention.

That led to the necessity of a 3^rd edition of the novel in print and digital.

This edition is available now in digital format at: Amazon as well as the many Amazon sites worldwide; KOBO; Barnes&Noble; and in print on: amazon.com/ and amazon.co.uk.

And now on Smashwords and its many retail partners, including iBookstore and libraries. 

Ask your librarian to order Pavane for Miss Marcher, 3^rd Edition as an ebook through a library distributor such as Library Direct, Baker & Taylor's Axis360, Gardners, OverDrive, Bibliotheca, Odilo, and The Palace Project.

 

Sides of History

Quite often, we hear that someone or some idea is on the "right side of history." When I began talking about my project, Pavane for Miss Marcher, one of my fellow writers said, "Just make sure you stay on the 'right side of history'."

I knew exactly what she meant and the element of threat was blatant. Also obvious was the attempt to censor. Pavane for Miss Marcher is set in post-American Civil War Maine. I had read widely from all sides and aspects of this era in the history of the United States.

Although, like many Americans, I was very well aware of the heated emotions and often disputed facts of this period, I was determined to write the story I felt most clearly expressed my own ambiguous and conflicted  understanding of our shared history.

The main character is a young woman, Cathryn Marcher, who experiences the trauma and horror of the war while serving in a Union Army hospital in Boston. During her service, she becomes involved with an officer who takes advantage of her youth, loneliness and vulnerability. Their affair ends when he returns to his unit and the war comes to an end.

 Many years before, Cathryn had fallen in love with a young man from her town. Her service as a nurse was her contribution to the war, in hope that somehow Rupert Smith was being cared for by a good nurse wherever he was.

Rupert has spent the last year of the war in a prison camp. His courage and honor win him the respect of not only his fellow prisoners but also several of the Confederate soldiers who are assigned to guard the Union prisoners. When the war is declared to be at an end, Rupert is in no condition to return to his small town Maine home. The men from both sides of the conflict have formed a close bond that takes them West.

The encounter with the adamant writer actually sharpened my intention to write a story based on the realities of human interaction and the facts rather than take up camp on any side, right or wrong. In history, there is only one side: the truth with all its convolutions and contradictions.

This story has a happy ending which sometimes happens in life, despite the horror of war and the evil that surrounds us. When confronted by the demand that I "stay on the right side," I determined that I would: to write honestly about what I know.

1000 Words

For writers, it's not the image but the words that create the image in the reader's mind.

Take for instance, this image: 

 or this: 

or this:

or this:

These are all from my newly acquired garden in the extreme north midwest. Each one has its distinct and unique story. And each has its place in my own story which I have told in my recent blog for In Maine. I reprint that post here:

For the past few weeks, I’ve been living in Cathryn Marcher’s garden — without the pumpkins.

Since moving into our new home, I’ve had the pleasure of gardening for the first time in seven years. While living in a city-bound apartment, I made do with potted plants on the balcony. Now I have about 5,000 square feet of lawn, trees and flowerbeds.

I also have hundreds of volunteers — not the helping kind! Since our lawn did not appear from under the layers of snow until late April, trees and shrubs have had free reign to seed the grass with their own progeny: honeysuckle, ash tree, morning glory, dandelions had all grown to the height of at least six inches by the time our new lawn-mower arrived. 

Removing these volunteers from my grassy realm proved beyond my capabilities. Even days of crawling on hands and knees, digging out taproots and consigning leaves and seedheads to the compost bin made no difference to the number of seedlings propagating amongst the blades of green. Even our resident bunny has not made a dent although it has helped in the cropping of the blades’ height in its grazing area.

To my delight, the flowerbeds are less endangered by weed-growth. Although Ground Elder (aka Queen Anne’s Lace) has raised many heads in the lawn and along the back fence, the perennials such as Peony and Daffodils, Iris and Gladiola have a much stronger will to exist. 

Another joy is the abundance of lilacs. When I was a child living in Maine, my favorite hiding place was a grove of lilac bushes at the back of our house. I attempted to grow lilacs on the balcony, but the plant never took hold despite coddling. Because of my fondness for the blossoms, I had them in my wedding bouquet along with red roses and the requisite Baby’s Breath (Gypsophilia).My four lilac bushes had grown so tall, they were competing with the Locust for space and encroaching on the neighbor’s property. With the information from a tree surgeon that lilacs can be treated as shrubs, I cropped and snipped until all the dead foliage and blossoms were gone and the bushes had the energy to produce fragrant spears again. 

From Chapter One: “Rupert smirked, turned his gaze back to the window, waved the mist out of his face, inhaled the summer rain deep into his lungs along with the scent of white lilacs.” 

From Chapter Four: ‘Noam Snyder pulled up on the reins, bringing the old buggy alongside Cathryn’s front yard, tipping his cap and wiping beads of sweat from his brow. “Mighty hot for a lady to be working like that,” he called out to his tenant. 

‘“Now’s the best time,” she called back, straightening her back, pressing a dirty hand on her lower spine. “These pumpkins won’t win any prizes this year unless someone gives them a hand.” She wiped her neck with a handkerchief and wacked at the weeds in her pumpkin patch. “I swear these dandelions know I’ve got better things to do. They just grow out of spite.”’ 

From Chapter Fifteen: “Running and stumbling through the woods like a mad woman got her as far as the clump of lilac she’d hidden in as a little girl, afraid to go home for the licking her father promised when she refused to help her mother with the washing because she wanted to play the piano for a few minutes more.” 

As Pavane for Miss Marcher illustrates, gardening and lilacs are features of my life in fiction and fiction in my life. My latest novel set Down In Maine is available in print and digital editions on all online booksellers and by order from me! Digital Edition $3.95 / Signed Print Edition $15.00 inc postage.

I'm going back to my garden in a bit but wanted everyone to know where I am!

All the best,

Leigh Verrill-Rhys 
Writer, Gardener, Photographer and 1000 other things!

PS: May 28, 2018


And the reward for all the work: 

This pair have never entered the back garden before. I finished the circle flowerbed with hydrangea as centerpiece and crocosmia bulbs surrounding it on Sunday afternoon. By 5:30PM, the ducks that wandered up and down our street, scrounging in the gutters, had taken up residence at the circle's edge. The drake on guard as always.

Now the bunny, "Scamp" to me, has company along with the squirrels and house sparrows that nest under our patio awning. 

Happy Memorial Day to all and God Bless our Troops, Veterans and their families. Thank you for your service.

Spring Cleaning

There is more to the season than cleaning cobwebs from corners, although that is an excellent metaphor for what many of us are doing with regard to our personal and professional time at this time of year.

When my family lived in Maine, Spring weather arrived several weeks later than the rest of the country. As evidenced by this year’s snow fall on the ‘technical’ first day of Spring, the state of Maine, most northerly of the lower 48, has a long winter. Once in a while, that long winter can be from first snow in October to first thaw in April.

My home town under snow, a typical Maine winter.

In one such year, the house was closed up with snow covering the ground floor windows. The front path was dug out to the road and the snow piled six feet high on both sides. My elder brother used the surplus to build an igloo over the slope leading down to the sidewalk. He dug openings at the top and at the bottom where it opened to the road.

At that time of year, there was no real danger of any child ending up under the wheels of a passing car on Lincoln Street, but the thrill of shooting through the igloo and onto the icy road kept us outdoors and sledding for weeks. Since I was never keen on snow, this was a boon to my mother who preferred all  play to be restricted to the outside, no matter what the weather.

This particular winter, the back parlor had been used earlier for our Christmas celebrations. The wood-burning kitchen stove was used to heat the upstairs bedrooms through ducts into open grills in the floor.  Ducts were closed to the back parlor to keep other rooms warmer.

Spring cleaning meant that all the windows in the house could be opened as soon as the patches of grass were at least eight inches wide and more numerous than the piles of snow. Several doors to rooms on the ground floor had not been open since the first signs of winter and others had been closed since Christmas.

My mother began her cleaning and airing out from the attic. The kitchen was the center of family life and had already been cleaned but it was mid-April before she reached the back parlor. Our Christmas tree stood in the corner, all ornaments and lights intact, four months to the day after it had been decorated. Under the tree, instead of presents, was a thick pile of reddish brown needles.


My mother had better things to do with her time than cleaning house. 

Classic, Cozy & Cunning

We've all read books set in different countries, regions, time periods with characters from various ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. The attempt to capture the sound of speech and cultural nuances is all part of the craft of setting a sense of time and place.

Regional dialects lend authenticity to stories set in specific localities. Regional dialects give authors nightmares and headaches. Regional dialects give readers nightmares and frowns. Walking the narrow line between authenticity and insult is an art. Achieving a sense of place and depth of character without confusion or irritation is an art.

In my most recent endeavor, the novel-by-installment, Nights Before, I returned to my childhood home state, Maine. I had been working on an historical novel set in a small town in Oxford County, and was inspired then to write a contemporary romance as well. I had clear visions of the streets of Portland from childhood and more recent visits, but it is the Maine accent that distinguishes the sense of place more than the images of snow and falling leaves. The whole of the Northeast can boast the brilliant colors of Fall and the quiet of a snow-blanketed scene. Only Mainers talk like Mainers. 

I was born into a family of native Mainers, I remain one myself though I've lived far away for most of my life. When I began this book-by-installments, I wanted to pay tribute to that distinctive way of speech, but, except for a few vague recollections of my mother saying 'cunning' or the proverbial 'down the rod apiece' and 'ya cahn't get theah from heah,' my Maine vocabulary was sadly lacking. 

I realized I had to research my first language!

Fortunately, there are Internet sites for that. I went to several, including How to Talk Like a Mainer which was a lot of fun and reminded me of all I'm missing here on the West Coast. And I realized that the Maine accent is a serious topic for wide discussion. There is something about the way we talk that fascinates those who don't — or I'm just putting a proud face on what the rest of the English-speaking world thinks is plain 'odd'. 

In any case, I had to get it right. The more I went through the pronunciations and the vocabulary, I heard the words in my head, spoken as they had been spoken by my parents and siblings before the great exodus to the other side of the country. They came more easily from my own lips. Ayuh is now my first response in the affirmative and has started to spread to other members of my west coast family. And as I developed the dialogue in the first story of the novel, I went all out.

Howevah, too much of a good thing spoils the affect. Here's an example: 
“Sure. Take it easy goin’ over tah Rosemont. The road’s open now, but I’ve heard theah’s a dip where theah weren’t one.”

Easy enough to read, but what if I'd written it like this: "Shu-ah. Take it easy goin' ovah tah Rosemont. The rod's open now, but Ah've hehd they-ah's a dip whey-ah they-ah wehn't one."

Not as easy. In Elements of Style, Strunk & White make it clear that an over abundance of apostrophes and colloquial spelling curtail the flow of reading. Giving a hint of a different dialect is desirable on all accounts relating to the senses of authenticity, place, time, character, personality. In this novel, I distinguish between native Mainers and those 'from away' or who've been away or have abandoned their roots. 

Although I will never knowingly abandon my accent, the ability to talk like a Mainah fades, returning only when I write like a Mainah and I have to admit, I'm wicked glad I've had the opportunity.

Here is a taste of the vocabulary in these stories: 

• bug - lobster
• cunnin' - cute, sweet
• finest - term of endearment, the best
• wicked - very