Murder in the Alaska Wilderness

Posted on September 7, 2018 by Gail

Please welcome Robin Barefield, a bona fide Alaska wilderness guide and award-winning author. She’s graciously offering one of her books to all of my readers–see below. BUT ALSO, she’s giving away a signed print copy of one of her books to one commenter, so please leave her your thoughts.

Thanks for giving us a taste of your everyday life and your writing, Robin. Take it away…

My novels are set in the wilderness of Kodiak Island, Alaska and feature Dr. Jane Marcus, a fish and wildlife biologist. Jane is intelligent and strong, but she’s not afraid to acknowledge her insecurities. AlthoughJane and my other major characters, FBI Special Agent Nick Morgan and Alaska State Trooper Sergeant Dan Patterson, play key roles in my novels, the Alaska wilderness holds center stage, and I know this environment well.

My husband and I live in the wilderness on Kodiak Island, and our home is surrounded by the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge. Kodiak sits in the Gulf of Alaska, 250 miles southwest of Anchorage. It is a mountainous island with steep peaks rising from sea level and a shoreline carved by glaciers into deep, fjord-like bays. Kodiak is gorgeous, but its weather can be violent, change rapidly, and might vary considerably from one area of the island to another. Can you imagine chasing and catching a killer in such a beautiful but hostile environment?

The city of Kodiak is locatedat the northeastern tip of the island, and most of the 13,500 inhabitants of the island live in or near the city. My home is on the western side of the island, 65 air miles from town, and my neighbors are huge Kodiak brown bears, deer, foxes, eagles, whales, and sea otters.

Thirty-five-hundred bears live on the Kodiak Archipelago, so no fictional hike through the woods would be complete without at least seeing a bear. During the summer, my husband and I guide guests on wildlife viewing and fishing trips. We hike up small streams and sit on the bank to watch Kodiak bears chase and eat salmon. I both love and respect the wilderness.

In addition to my novels, I write a free, monthly newsletter about true murder and mystery in Alaska. You can sign up for my newsletter on my website: http://robinbarefield.com.

My latest novel, The Fisherman’s Daughter, was recently nominated as a finalist for the Silver Falchion Award as one of the best thriller novels of 2017. To thank Gail and her readers for allowing me to share a little about my books and my life, I would like to give away a signed copy of this novel to one of Gail’s readers.

Robin Barefield is the author of threeAlaska wilderness mystery novels, Big Game, Murder Over Kodiak, and The Fisherman’s Daughter. To download a free copy of one of her novels, watch her webinar(http://bit.ly/2pcCOo6)about how she became an author.

Thank you, Gail, for inviting me to write a guest post.

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Whispering Hope

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Gail

It’s wonderful to welcome back Peggy Blann Phifer, who is offering a free kindle version of her latest release, Whispering Hope, to a commenter. Don’t you love the heroine’s gloves and glamour on the cover?

Thanks for having me on your blog, Gail. I’m pleased to be here. You asked me to share some thoughts about my writing, my book, the genre, and what it took to get it written. So, here goes …

Whispering Hope is what I call Historical Romantic Suspense. I’m not sure there actually is such a genre … officially … but it’s my story and I’m sticking with it. And yes, it’s all three.

Historical: Yes, the time is 1930, during Prohibition. The opening scenes are set in Chicago, but the rest of the story takes place in northwest Wisconsin, my old stomping grounds, in a fictitious town and county created entirely out of my imagination. It was fun to write, drawing on some old memories and locations I knew back in the day. But mostly challenging. It took a lot of research. I bought books, maps, a PBS video of the era produced by Ken Burns, and LOTS of “Googling.” I have at least a ream of paper I printed out during the writing time.

Romance: My lead female protagonist, Virginia “Ginny” Hopewell, Wisconsin country girl, visiting her cousin in Chicago, gets caught in a shooting at a local speakeasy. At the same time and place, was my male protag, Ransom “Rance” Blake, FBI agent for the Chicago Bureau of Prohibition. Their paths cross again after Ginny returns to Wisconsin and Rance is sent up there to apprehend the man responsible for the shooting and to discover how illegal liquor from Canada is getting into Wisconsin and down to Chicago.

Suspense: It’s all there. An elusive gangster. Illegal stills. Suspicious guests at the Whispering Hope Resort. Murder. And a kidnapping.

I hope this whets readers’ appetites!

Back Cover Copy:

1930 Chicago is no place for a Wisconsin country girl.

Virginia Hopewell visits her cousin in Chicago and gets caught up in a deadly gangster shooting at a speakeasy, barley escaping with her life. After learning of the tragic death of her father, brother, and sister-in-law, Ginny returns to Wisconsin and convinces her mother to reopen the resort her father had closed after losing everything in the stock market crash in 1929.

Ransom Blake, an agent with the Chicago Bureau of Prohibition, had been at the same speakeasy acting on a tip about the shooting. Rance is charged with finding the gangster responsible. He and his team are sent to Wisconsin where the man was reported being seen, and to investigate how illegal liquor from Canada is making its way to Chicago.

With the opening of Whispering Hope Resort, Rance registers as a guest and comes face to face with the lovely redhead he’d briefly encountered at the speakeasy during the shooting.

Bio:

Author Peggy Blann Phifer, a retired executive assistant after twenty-one years in the Electrical Wholesale Industry, lives in the ‘boonies’ of NW Wisconsin. A late bloomer, Peg didn’t start taking writing seriously until age fifty.

Her debut novel, To See the Sun, a contemporary romantic suspense, released in January 2012. A second novel, Somehow, Christmas Will Come, contemporary women’s fiction with a touch of romance and mystery, released in November 2014, revised and re-released in late 2015. A new work titled Whispering Hope, an historical romantic suspense, set during the years of Prohibition, released in early May 2018. Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies over the past five years.

Peg is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers. When she’s not writing, Peg enjoys reading, blogging, and sharing her home with her daughter, son-in-law, and a Border Collie mix dog named Rocky.

Social media and buying links

Blog/website: http://whispersinpurple.blogspot.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/pegphifer

Twitter: www.twitter.com/pegphifer @pegphifer

Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/pegphifer

Google+: http://plus.google.com/+AuthorPeggyBlannPhifer/posts

Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/pbphifer

Email: pbphifer@centurylink.net

Purchase link for Whispering Hope: https://amzn.to/2KURU8x

The United Kingdom – Favorites

Posted on June 3, 2018 by Gail

First of all, a caveat: I’m one of those whose perfectionist tendencies used to keep me from producing much in the way of writing, so I’m plunging in regardless. There will probably be errors, and I apologize beforehand. An extremely tentative outline started going through my head in the shower this morning…let’s call it a list.

Although I have a strong inkling I won’t stick with it, I wrote the list for my own sake, so I can look back and remember where I thought I was going. (Kind of like life in general.)

Our grandson helped me with this by asking, “What was your favorite thing about England?”

Mind you, this was about an hour after we arrived home, and it was 2 a.m. UK time, so everything was a happy blur of memories. But I replied that Bletchley Park had to be right up there, vying for first place.

And then I told him about the nifty man dressed in a WWII suit standing next to his wife, with her perfectly elegant suit, WWII hairdo and hat. He crooked a finger at us when he saw me staring, and we walked over.

“If you need anything, I most likely have it here.” He tapped his small black cardboard suitcase. His eyebrows and surreptitious stance shouted BLACK MARKET.

“Could we see what’s in there?”

He nodded and cleverly turned the case toward himself, clicked open the latches, and drew us closer. Then he allowed us a peek. Silk stockings, sweets and other rationed items, all in their original packaging.

Ah…I’ll treasure this memory! We’d just stepped into one of the buildings at Bletchley Park, the highly secretive location where brilliant “nerdy” types were sent to break enemy codes during the war. In numbered “huts”, nearly 10,000 workers wracked their brains to untangle the German enigma machine codes, as well as ones used by the Japanese. Their work made an unfathomable difference in the outcome of the war.

We spent hours reading about these dedicated men and women who endured long, sometimes very cold, damp weeks and months laboring over intercepted messages. One tour guide said their mission was so top-secret that many never spoke of it again.

Decades after World War II ended, he started leading tours. When his elderly father heard that, he told him, “You can’t go up there…that’s top secret.”

On one of this guide’s tours, an older couple were listening to him introduce the particular work that had occurred in a certain hut. To the guide’s astonishment, the visitor ventured, “I worked there during the war, in hut ten.”

His wife turned to him and said, “You did? So did I. I was stationed in hut six.”

Can you imagine? They’d never even told each other what they did during the war.

Tidbits like these stay with me, along with the “God wink” that the day we arbitrarily chose to visit this amazing place happened to be “dress-up day.” We had no idea, but seeing women wearing hosiery with seams running down the backs of their legs and prim hats soon let us know.

In the green expanse outside the huts and museum, re-enactors displayed field hospitals, SOE agents at work, WWII women making corned beef hash attractive to their families, medic tents, ammunition dumps, the list goes on and on.

I promise I’ll share some photos of them and that natty little fellow with the black case as soon as I figure out how to find them in the thousands of images Lance shot during our stay. I’ll probably say it several more times, but having him catalogue everything this way was a great relief–so much to take in, so impossible to recall it all.

Needless to say, if you plan a trip to the UK, I’d suggest setting aside a full day for Bletchley Park.

Country Folk of Another Era

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Gail

Reading Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale has given me an even deeper appreciation of the way simple country folks suffered in the early years of World War II.

When we say country, we visualize rural American farm families. But in France in the early 1940’s, thousands of peasants tended their gardens and vineyards, cared for their children, and enjoyed a simple pastoral setting.

Then, suddenly their freedoms were swept away by the brutal Nazi occupation.

What’s interesting is how people came from all walks of life to help the French Resistance change the tide of the war. One of these, from my Women of the Heartland series, hailed from Iowa farm country. Used to the sight of corn and soybeans ripening for harvest, Kate Isaacs is thrust into the midst of unthinkable horrors.

Unthinkable but very real. Her land-centered background serves her well as she treks back woods trails to avoid the Gestapo, delivering vital messages for the Resistance. So does her heritage of valuing hard work and tenacity. You can’t take the country out of a country girl, right?

Admittedly, this “country,” replete with mountains and deep valleys, is different from Kate’s moorings. Along the way, she views incredible structures like the Abbey of St. Pierre at Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, built in the ninth century. She gasps at this architecture and takes heart at the eternal message of hope engraved in this incredible structure’s entrance.

If you need some more historical fiction to get you through the winter, may I suggest…

HISTORICALS: STAYING TRUE TO THE TIME

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Gail

I’m glad to welcome Cynthia Roemer as she celebrates the publication of her first historical novel. Cynthia, please tell us about your experience researching this story.

I’m as old-fashioned as they come, so historical novels are a perfect fit for me—both reading and writing. As a reader, I love the nostalgia and all the life lessons one can learn from those who’ve gone before us. But as a writer, I enjoy delving into the past and researching the time period, more specifically the nineteenth century. When writing a historical/historical romance novel, research is a must to ensure the book is true to the time period.

My debut novel, Under This Same Sky, which released in late April, took place in 1854. I’ve been thrilled at some of the comments thus far by reviewers stating the novel “makes you feel exactly like you lived back in those days”. How gratifying such comments are to an author who’s spent countless hours trying to be certain every detail is true and accurate.

The well-known facts are easy to achieve. Under This Same Sky took place on the Illinois prairie in the mid-1800s. Most everyone knows settlers lived in log cabins, but do they know how the cabins were erected and what materials were used to chink the log walls? It’s widely known that covered wagons were often used when traveling across the prairie, but not many will know that a bucket of tallow was kept handy so that when the wheels began to squeak and squeal they had to be greased much like a car engine needs oil to run smoothly.

There were so many questions I had to ask as I wrote the novel: What type of clothing was worn in 1854? What farming equipment was available? Had screen doors been invented? How would my characters cross the Mississippi? What would the city of St. Louis have looked like back then? What type of lighting was used? It’s these fine details that make a novel either believable or, if left out, leave readers with a less than satisfied reaction.

Though research is a vital part of writing a historical novel, that’s not to say a writer can’t have a little fun creating fictional people and places along with the true ones. Under This Same Sky is a blend of fictional and real. My main character, Becky Hollister grows up a few miles outside of the fictional town of Miller Creek, IL, but later travels to the very real town of St. Louis, Missouri. Only one of my characters is based on a real person. The others are products of my imagination.

What’s wonderful about historical fiction is that we can have the best of both worlds—the reality of the past blended with the creativity of fiction. A match that—in this author’s opinion, can’t be beat!

~ She thought she’d lost everything ~ Instead she found what she needed most. ~

Illinois ~ 1854

Becky Hollister wants nothing more than to live out her days on the prairie, building a life for herself alongside her future husband. But when a tornado rips through her parents’ farm, killing her mother and sister, she must leave the only home she’s ever known and the man she’s begun to love to accompany her injured father to St. Louis.

Catapulted into a world of unknowns, Becky finds solace in corresponding with Matthew Brody, the handsome pastor back home. But when word comes that he is all but engaged to someone else, she must call upon her faith to decipher her future.

Cynthia Roemer is an award-winning inspirational writer with a heart for scattering seeds of hope into the lives of readers. Raised in the cornfields of rural Illinois, Cynthia enjoys spinning tales set in the backdrop of the 1800s prairie. She writes from her family farm in central Illinois where she resides with her husband and their two college-aged sons.

Contact Info:

Website: http://cynthiaroemer.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorCynthiaRoemer/

Twitter: https://twitter.com@cynthiaroemer

Purchase Info:

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Under-This-Same-Cynthia-Roemer/dp/194509415X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494271640&sr=8-1&keywords=under+this+same+sky

Oh MY!

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Gail

Tonight when my husband and I returned from a walk at the close of this rainy Iowa day, we were looking up at the roof for some reason, and I spotted something that looked like a bird…sort of. But bigger.

Lance is nothing if he’s not persevering. He hung out until he captured an image of the creature…I can’t believe it! We have cardinals, house wrens, hummingbirds, and of course, crows in our yard. But this…never thought I’d see the like. Not here in our yard.

Isn’t this the cutest baby owl? I’ve never spied one before, and this one added excitement to a rather gloomy, although productive day here in the Midwest. I’m a lot like my fiction characters, I guess – it doesn’t take a whole lot to make my day.

And this experience also goes to show that you can enjoy someone else’s hobby almost as much as you enjoy your own. Barn owls have made appearances in my historical fiction, and this little one…oh yes, you can bet she (or he) will pop up somewhere in a future story.

Good morning, sunshine!

Posted on June 26, 2016 by Gail

A quiet Sunday morning, but after a great rain last night, our plants are grinning all over the porch and deck.

Geraniums garner fresh sunshine . . . the plant on the right has TWELVE blossoms right now.

Rosemary and basil greet us . . .

Petunias and johnny jump-ups join in.

Yesterday the first edits for A Purpose True, the sequel to Addie’s story, arrived. A time to pay attention to details, to make things better, to brighten the world around us, and to enjoy the process.

Already, tomato blossoms promise a fruitful summer . . . what more could we ask?

Scene Visits and Perseverance

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Gail

Recently, I met the man who built our house, and he said during the excavation, workers found a Native American matate, or grindstone. I’d been having Abby, the heroine of a novel set here in 1870, watch for the natives–now I have evidence they were really here–nice to spend some time in the setting, as Tracy Groot shared with us last month.

0205151153

In the past two years, someone already unearthed a pumice pestle, perhaps the one used with that grindstone. Pretty cool, eh?

And here are a few pottery shards found in front of our place. Our friend gathers them when she comes up here, in an area where water washes down.

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I have yet to discover one, but I’m getting the idea of what to look for, and enjoy the “hunt.”

This past couple of weeks my writing has brought a few bumps in the road: a rough critique of a would-be novel’s beginning and word from the editor of my first contracted women’s fiction novel: your file’s been corrupted. Send me another. Oops.

Well, that’s the writing life, I’m thinking. Take the downs with the ups and keep at it. Some day, you’ll hold your fiction book in your hand, just as some day, hopefully, I’ll find some pottery shards right in our front yard. Yes, this is a picture of what I peruse in my search.

Anybody want to share how you’ve persevered in your writing life, or in anything else, for that matter? I’d love to hear your stories.

Setting and Scenarios

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Gail

Our neighbor Roy, 93 and a World War II veteran, feeds the elk regularly. One of them even allows him to stroke her muzzle. What a great hobby for someone who sacrificed so much building airstrips on Pacific Islands seventy-some years ago.

Yesterday I heard him croon to an elk, “You back again? Getting a little selfish, aren’t you? You know I like to feed the deer, too.”

Roy writes his story one day at a time and the elk act it out. He just supplies the grain, or shall we say, fodder?

There’s so much novel fodder here under the Mogollon Rim. One of my novels (hopefully publishable at some point), tells the story of a young woman desperate to belong. After losing her family in freak accidents, she’ll pay any price, and does. Every day, she watches the sun climb DOWN the Rim, since it first has to peak over the other side to reach this valley.

Ah, how life twists things around! Dottie, the World War II heroine I’ve mentioned before, experiences the topsy-turvy effects of a horrendous war.

But both of these characters, and all of us, find courage and tenacity during these tough times. The question is, will our characters make changes necessary to their well-being?

Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “All change is preceded by crisis.” And for fiction writers, crisis is integral to the plot. And as Tracy Groot shared with us the past two weeks, so is the setting: feeding Arizona elk or working at a 1947 small-town Iowa boarding house demand different mindsets. In both Dottie and Abby’s lives (and our own), character and setting meld with plot as crises arise.

I’d like to hear your favorite fiction crisis . . . Scarlet O’Hara’s dilemma, the harried chase in True Grit, or some other difficult situation? Or share how you blend setting and scenario in your own writing.

Sara Goff won the giveaway of Tracy Groot’s The Sentinels of Andersonville–congratulations! Thanks for stopping by, and have a great, creative week!

Tracy Groot on Setting and Site Visits

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Gail

Elk and javelina epitomize these rugged Ponderosa forests, the setting for one of my novels, and time spent here makes all the difference in writing.

Today, Tracy Groot shares about visiting the site of your novel.

“Site visits are very important. “The land speaks” even decades or centuries or millennia later. Visits have an orienting effect and always, always, always yield the unexpected: my visits to Andersonville for The Sentinels of Andersonville yielded impromptu interviews with the mayor, a storeowner, a museum curator.

“Visiting a site can infuse your story with small but important details–lovely specificities that round out the tone of many scenes. Also, check out any local museums—they usually have dynamite bookstores.

“My visit to France for Flame of Resistance yielded such a wealth of information, I cannot imagine how the book would’ve turned out without it; I ate the local food in Normandy, visited multiple WWII museums, talked with elderly folk who’d been around during the war. Priceless! And fun! And we’ve learned to combine site visits with family vacations, to save money.”

Did I mention I’ve been working on a World War II series set in Southern France for a looooong time . . . maybe a visit is in order!

Last week we focused on character, so here’s a bit more from Tracy on that. (Can’t you just see character in this scrounger eating food scraps?)

Character always informs story and plot for Tracy. “I love what British historian Arnold Toynbee said, that character results from a person’s heredity and interaction with his environment; so I research where one of my characters is from to develop his or her story and personality. Getting to know the character and realizing how they act or react, helps to inform plot.”

What story does Tracy resonate with most?

“Each book has something that is a part of me—scenes in every one came from the gut—and it’s still a thrill and joy that these scenes actually made it to paper. It’s hard to nail down a favorite—I usually pick the one I’ve last worked on, ha ha! Maggie Bright, a story about the rescue of the British army at Dunkirk, is a current fave. It comes out in May 2015.”

Heartfelt thanks to Tracy for giving us an inside look at her vocation—perhaps readers will get a feel for the commitment she puts into each novel. And writers, she’s given us a wealth of food for thought. Feel free to comment about anything and everything. And be watching for Maggie Bright.

Please include contact information with your comment in order to vie for the prize of Tracy’s The Sentinels of Andersonville. We’ll announce the winner next week and send the copy to you posthaste.