Pictures Are Worth Many Words

We have just flown back from Wales, from pleasantly mild weather to a very unusual San Francisco heatwave. So, rather than write a lengthy essay about the "joys" of world travel, I have selected some of my favorite photos of my second homeland.

The 13 year old Sooty, who was having his back
scratched, hence the attitude of bliss. My first riding
experience with a hornless saddle!

A view of Llansteffan Castle from a popular
walking trail along the Twyi Estuary, with
picture-perfect dead oak.

The stream conduit beneath a stone bridge, just outside the village
of Llansteffan, below the castle.

The woodlands below Llansteffan Castle.

The graceful and curious Marv, at the Knightsford Stables at the
junction between the tiny village of Merthyr and the crossing
of Llysonnen Road.

Young Goldie who is awaiting judgment on his suitability
as a riding companion to his soon-to-be stable-mate, Sooty.

This Fushia is common throughout Wales, but this
particular plant is located in the garden of
Hafod y Coed in Aberystwyth.

One antique chair next to an oak chest built in 1731, the proud
family heirlooms of the inhabitants of Hafod y Coed, Aberystwyth.

Good day to you all. Time for we weary travelers to work on correcting our internal clock mechanisms.

Getting To Know Us with Leigh Verrill-Rhys

Yes, we all have bios on this website, but there is so much MORE to know about our Classic and Cozy bloggers.  So the 2nd Friday of each month is dedicated to getting to know us better.  This month I'd like to introduce you to Leigh Verrill-Rhys (also writing as: Lily Dewaruile).

Okay, inquiring minds want to know…why a writer? Certainly not for the fame and fortune…or maybe it is?
Not at all. Like so many of my colleagues and friends, I am compelled to write. At a very early age, I began to tell stories – some true, some imaginary. My first written story, at the age of ten, was about a giant. I still wonder what happened to that manuscript. 

I followed that with more story-telling and play-acting until I went to college, at first as an art student but discovered my visual ideas were best presented in words. 

At college, I had visions of great literary works but when I began writing again after many years of raising a family, my impulse to write returned full force. I was living in Wales by then, married with three sons. Because of my interest in writing, I helped to develop the first women’s publishing cooperative in Wales, Honno, which is still going strong. Becoming an editor of others’ writing triggered my creative nerve and I found time to write late at night. 

Wanting to be a great American writer plagued me. At one point, I considered burning all the manuscripts and giving up any idea of writing.

When did you first put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) to create your classic and cozy characters?
In 2005, I attended the 80^th birthday of a friend and someone asked my husband what he did for a living. He answered this straightforward question and the inquirer turned to me. I began my answer with “I’ve always wanted to be a writer.”

I decided at that moment that would be the last time I ever said that. I re-read all the manuscripts (by now, stacked in boxes that stood four feet high!) and chose the one I wanted to complete. That led to my first completed novel, Traitor’s Daughter, and sending a query to an agent in London, who liked it well enough to request the full manuscript.

After that, I joined Romance Writers of America—though I was living in Britain at the time, the Romance Novelists Association was not open to new, unpublished members and had a low quota for new members they would accept. I was able to attend my first RWA conference as a PRO member, pitch a proposal to an editor and send the first 50 pages of a novel I had begun a few months before.
 
Within three months, the editor sent me an email saying “Avalon would like to acquire your novel, Wait a Lonely Lifetime, for publication in 2012.” I ran downstairs, into the kitchen and pulled out the best bottle of champagne I could find and held it out to my husband, asking “Is this the best we have?” He knew what I was talking about.

Do you have a set writing schedule?
I work a day job that takes up about 9 hours of my day but I set myself down at my laptop for at least 3 to 4 hours a day. I also write while traveling to work. I wrote the first draft of This Can’t Be Love on the streetcar—with some inspiration from my fellow commuters.

Is there a certain routine, food/drink, or location that summons forth the muses for you?
About six months ago I had some time on my hands waiting for my husband to finish work and visited the Salvation Army store across the street. Mine eyes beheld … a roll-top desk. Not a moment’s hesitation prevented me from offering my credit card to the organization. I am at my beautiful desk every day

What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
I am a quilt-maker, a gardener, a photographer, a reader, a collector of information

I imagine you’ve been reading all of your life (all great writers have.)  What was your favorite book as a child?
I adored Pippi Longstocking. Although Astrid Lindgren wrote eleven stories/chapter books beginning in 1945 with the final two stories written between 1979 and 2000, I have considered myself a Pippi-phile all my life

Do you re-read books?  If so, which one have you re-read the most?
I have a good memory for books, plots, characters but these are books I would choose to reread: Daniel Deronda, Middlemarch, Romola, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, Silas Marner — all by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Victorian writer and contemporary of Charles Dickens et al and my personal primary inspiration.

But there is more to life than reading, writing (and arithmetic)…what is your most memorable adventure in your life?
Selling everything I owned to finance a trip back to Wales, after my first visit, to take a Welsh language course and renew my acquaintance with the Welshman who had stolen my heart.

If you were on American Idol, what song would you sing to WOW! the judges? 
I have sung a few solos in front of audiences but my favorite is the mournful ode, Morfa Rhuddlan, in commemoration of the death of Caradog and all his warriors in a battle with Offa in 796AD

What book(s) to you have coming out or what are you working on?
I am working on two novels at the moment. One is an historical novel set in Maine five years after the end of the American Civil War. The other is the first book in a series set in Wales near the turn of the 9^th Century, three years after the death of Rhodri the Great in 878AD.

Last question…movie rights…who’ll play your current main characters when Hollywood comes knocking on your door? 
I have only considered the actor for one character and that is Angelo Gitano in my novel, Salsa Dancing with Pterodactyls. He is the father of the hero of the book, David. The actor I can see playing the part of Angelo is Tony Plana.

Catch more of Leigh the 4^th Tuesday of every month here on the Classic and Cozy Blog.   

For a complete list of Leigh’s books click on over to her website www.leighverrillrhys.com and www.lilydewaruile.com.


And be sure and check out her blog www.everwriting.wordpress.com or www.lilydewaruile.com.

Falling in Love, Time After Time

My fellow bloggers here at Classic & Cozy have written about their conversations and tussles with their characters, especially the heroes. Writers do have the extraordinary privilege of inexhaustible companionship and playmates but I think Romance writers have the best of all possible outcomes.

We get to fall in love, over and over, time after time, as often as our imaginations create the heroes who fulfill all our heroines’ dreams. If we, as creators, don’t fall in love with that guy, how can we expect our heroine to do so?

I’m doubly fortunate in my romantic fictional writing (triply if you consider my personal, real-life romance, to be revealed in February). Not only do I have the opportunity to fall in love with men like David Gitano, Eric Wasserman, Brad Foster and most recently, the soon to be introduced, Mike Argent, I also, writing as Lily Dewaruile, have had the pleasure of meeting and forming lasting relationships with Medieval Welsh heroes such as Garmon Dolwyddlan and his younger friend, Geraint Padarn, who cross my mind and swell my heart from time to time.

However, they have the misfortune of being in competition with my first love, Jehan-Emíl deFreveille, hero and patriarch of my first Medieval romance, set in Wales, Book One of the Pendyffryn series, Invasion. But even Jehan could not stop me from falling for Christophe Maides, his closest friend, who stole my heart when I least expected to be susceptible, especially not to desperate men, adventurers, the worst and the best of their profession—9^th Century soldiers of fortune. And Christophe gave way to his father, Gilles de Maides, in the fifth book, Reconciliation, set in Armenia. 

Mike Argent, hero of my forthcoming “Americans in Love” novel, This Can’t Be Love, will soon leave me, to take his place among the other heroes I have loved and let go, to woo someone else. I don’t mind. Mike has been a delightful compagnon du coeur, during the many months we have been together, as was Bradford Foster of Nights Before fame. I’m sure others will do their best to make up to me for his loss.

I will soon be head over heels in love again. This time with Jehan-Emíl’s second son, Marshal who takes the stage in Justice. And once I have ensured that this wild young man is suitably entrenched in a relationship with the shy and studious apothecary, Tanglwystll, I will abandon him to his fate for the quiet byways of 1870s rural Maine where the kind and industrious, Evie, will encounter G. Rupert Smith, in Pavane for Miss Marcher.

No doubt Evie will entice Rupert away from me. This is as it should be since, as soon as I met her, I knew the sort of man she needed to combat the bullies in her life.  

My fickle love life is never-ending. Falling in love with heroes is as natural as breathing, ask any Romance writer. 

A Child's Hallowe'en in San Francisco

'Arawn' - Ruler of Annwn
(the Underworld), illustration
 by Ioan Einion, © Alys Einion, Y Lolfa

All Hallows' Eve has been celebrated across the Christian World since the formation of a structured church. Calan Gaeaf (Kal-ahn GEYE-ahv), as it is known in Wales celebrating the start of winter, has been a festival since earliest pagan Celtic times. In Ireland, the festival is known as Samhain (SOW-en), celebrating the decay of life and is derived from an ancient cult of the dead.

Hallowe’en as we know it today, did not exist in America, or for that matter anywhere in the world, until the great influx of Irish immigrants in the 19th Century. This day of ghouls and goblins would not exist now if not for Irish children extorting food and money from their neighbors at the behest of their parents, with threats of tricks if the better-off neighbors refused to submit to giving treats.

Although the Irish were Roman Catholic, the religious holiday melded with the pagan to facilitate the youthful blackmailers’ chicanery.

During my childhood, Hallowe’en was a children’s event, anticipated throughout the early Fall with intricate plans for costumes. Gypsy or witch, princess or fairy were the choices we girls preferred. Boys chose Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula or headless ghosts.

From the moment the sun dropped below Twin Peaks, we were out in packs of threes, fives or tens running from one house to the next, ringing every doorbell. I lived in the Haight-Ashbury and our territory for our night of extortion was as far as we could go without getting lost.

Ceridwen, the Witch,
illustration by Ioan Einion,
© Alys Einion, Y Lolfa 

If we breached the entry of an apartment complex, we had access to every resident. Once in a while, there was a party going on at which we caught glimpses of Hallowe’en Future: adults behaving like … us! The only difference was that the adults were not subject to extreme sugar highs – theirs was a high of a different kind.

The total world domination of Hallowe’en as experienced in the USA was not achieved until the appearance of the film, E. T. Phone Home, in which the opening scene was the epitome of my childhood escapades. Even then, fully three decades passed before “Trick or Treat” on October 31st became the norm in the six countries of Britain, five of which are Celtic.

We cannot go back to the innocent times of our childhood. In this city, Hallowe’en is not an event in which children can participate with any sense of the safety, excitement and freedom that I and my fellow witches and monsters enjoyed. Adults have reclaimed the ancient cult of the dead and any aspect of the religious meaning is subsumed by Bacchanalian excesses.