THE PIGEON PIE MYSTERY
Written by: JULIA STUART
Published by:  DOUBLEDAY
ISBN: 978-0-385-53556-4
Pages: 335
Pub Date: AUGUST 7, 2012

    After the scandalous death of her father, Maharaja of Brindor, which involved him in a private situation with a maid in his bedchambers, the Indian Princess Alexandrina, nicknamed Mink, is left with nothing as her father left her with several debts. Within a year everything she owned was repossessed, leaving her with only her lady’s maid, Pooki. Queen Victoria hears about Mink’s situation and gives her permission to stay at the Hampton Court Palace.

CYNTHIA’S ATTIC: THE MAGIC MEDALLION
Written by: MARY CUNNINGHAM
Published by:  Echelon Press Publishing
ISBN: 978-1590804605
Pages: 160
Pub Date: 2006

    Picking up shortly after first book in the series (set in 1964), Augusta Lee, or as everyone calls her - Gus, and her best-friend Cynthia (both twelve-year-old) are eager to return to Cynthia’s magical attic that took them back in time, where they resembled and was mistaken for their grandmothers. Once again they climb up to the cobweb invested attic and open the mysterious trunk that throws them back to the year 1914, where they hope to go to the circus with Gus’s great-grandfather, Charles, but their plans drastically change as their grandmothers, Clara and Bess, hide inside a crate that is in the back of the wagon. They might be able to fool Gus’s great-grandfather in believing they are their grandmothers, but their grandmothers will probably hear their voices from the crate causing an awkward situation that they would probably want to avoid.

    Gus and Cynthia return to the attic where they find two clown costumes left there. They slip the costumes on and are magical transported to the circus, where they are mistaken to be new clowns by Blackie, the evil hobo clown and circus leader. They befriend a girl about their age named Annie. She was left as a baby at the circus and was raised the by an acrobat named Lilly.

Thank you for inviting me to visit with you today and to talk about the first two published books in my royal siblings, The Gasquet Princes, four book series.

When I started writing From Now Until Forever, published by Astraea Press, all I knew about it was that it should have a royal hero. I couldn’t ‘see’ my heroine, nor for that matter my hero, so I went for broke and started freewriting.

Melanie, my heroine turned up right away, and indicated this would be a short story geared towards an online site I’d submitted to in the past. I was given a scene through her eyes – well I was given a tiny snippet of scene, let’s be honest about it. All I knew, some guy with blond hair was getting shot at.

Not a lot to go on, but hey, I thought my word target was a tad over a thousand words, surely I’d get something. I did, but according to the ‘crit’ group I belong to while it captured their attention it wasn’t enough, they wanted more!

So I tried again and took it up to five thousand words, submitted it to a publisher looking for content for their anthology. At the same time a friend read it for me and said ‘she wanted it’ if the story was rejected. It was. So I went back to my friend, Kate, who promptly told me, ‘Good, but you have to extend it to fifteen thousand words.’

BELOVED ENEMY
Written by: AL LACY
Published by:  MULTNOMAH PUBLISHERS, Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-590-52903-4
Pages: 356
Pub Date: 1994

    Jenny Jordan, the daughter of Colonel Jeffrey Jordan, takes a job as a sectary for the Senate Military Committee that was offered by the newly elected Abraham Lincoln, just as the Civil War begins. Soon she meets Corporal Francis “Buck” Brownell, who is part of the Zouave from New York. The Union soldier begins courting Jenny, which is somewhat of a problem because she is original from the southern state of Virginia.

    Before long, she finds out that her father is a spy for the Confederate, and he asks his daughter to help him take a message to the Confederate. Jenny loves her country and Buck, but she is devoted to her father and her home state of Virginia. She must become a Confederate spy, but she hopes she can still have a future with Buck.

Canadian War Brides 

My novella ‘Home Fires’ tells the story of Anne Wakefield, a young British woman who travels to Canada after World War Two to marry her fiancé. Though Anne and her story are fictional, the phenomena of War Brides is not. Some 48,000 women married Canadian servicemen during the war. The majority of war brides were British, but some came from France, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. Between 1942 and 1947, these women, along with their 22,000 children, traveled to Canada to begin their new lives.

 Canadian servicemen arrived in Britain in 1939, shortly after war was declared, and remained until after the end of the war. Because they were there so long, the inevitable happened – they met and fell in love with local girls. Almost every British man of marriageable age had been called up for service, leaving a huge gap that Canadian troops gladly filled. Their funny accents and the extra cash in their pockets probably made them exceedingly attractive.

Some were married after quick, whirlwind romances. Others had the luxury of getting to know each other before they tied the knot. But for all these couples, marriage was the only answer. The customs of the day demanded that if they wanted to sleep together, they had to be married. And so they did. The times were perilous with no guarantee of a tomorrow. A sense of urgency compelled them to grab all the happiness they could while they were able.