How an 18th century girl sees time travelers

Summer, 1781, near Gibsonville, North Carolina

Young Jenny knows her new mother and grandmother are from a different place--a place where people travel in carriages that fly through the air and where books have pictures that move and talk--but where, or when, they are from doesn't matter.

They love her and she loves them.

Enjoy the novella HA'PENNY JENNY for free on June 5th and 6th,  2014.

If you don't already know, you'll find out what a ha'penny is.

And why her nickname is so wrong...and mean.

Read more about the chatty and optimistic youngster, how she came to be with the family where time and people's ages seem upside down, in NAKED IN THE WINTER WIND, the first book in THE FAIRIES SAGA.

(excerpt)

Why did they lie to me?

(a mother-daughter talk begins) 
 

“So smart people lie, too?”

“Jenny, too many people lie. There have been times I’ve not told people things that I thought they didn’t need to know, but I promise you, I have always tried to tell the truth.” Uncertainty suddenly kicked in. “You haven’t been lying, have you?”

“No. My brothers lied to me. I didn’t even know what lying was for a long time. Sometimes they’d tell me one thing, like the sun always came up in the east because that’s where the sun birds stayed in the mornings and it was their job to carry the sun across the sky. Other times, they said it was because the sun was a great big candle and it floated from one side of the mountains to the other and then big giants blew it out for the night. They never told me how it got back again, though, or what sun birds looked like, or where the giants slept.”

Jenny’s frown was back. “But when they lied to me, they made me feel like there was something wrong with me because I was a girl. They said I was born a boy, but that part got chopped off because I wasn’t smart enough. That’s why I had girl stuff, because my boy stuff got chopped off. Well, they called what you pee with stuff, but still, it’s okay not to have a penis, isn’t it?”

....

(read HA'PENNY JENNY to find out Evie's answer) 

What's she worth?

Waiting for spring

I have to consider myself an optimist. Or realist. Or, as my husband calls me, a Pippy Longstockings.

Alaskan winters seem to go on and on forever. I try to break up the six-month plus season with a trip 'Outside' for color, warmth, and sunshine. As you can see from the photo above, April is still a time of white and grays for us. That wee bit of green on the conifer is just a funky shade of gray to me. Sure, we now have over 14 hours of daylight, and the sun is creeping northward. The sun rises and sets in the east and west now instead of in the southeast and southwest, visible from the same south-facing window three months out of the year. The snow piles are shrinking,  the snow cover on the ground evaporating. The soil below is dark brown, soggy, yet promising.

I envy, sort of, my friends' pictures posted on social media, showing off bushes loaded with rose blooms, while my recently released from cold storage potted plants are only beginning to green up, a few buds striving to photosynthesize sustenance from the fluorescent tubes above and limited sunlight, peeking through the north and east facing windows.

June, July, and August will get here eventually. They always do. As I said, I'm a realist. And the Pippy Longstockings attitude knows that while others are suffering from high heat and humidity, cockroaches and hornworms, water restrictions and drought, I'll rely on the evening rains and occasional breezes to take care of my plants and the air conditioning. And I'll snap as many pictures as I can, to look over through the long winter.

Summer always gets here.
And when it does, it's fabulous.

What a difference a visual makes.

Okay, so the model (Harvey is his real name) on the new e-book cover of Dances Naked doesn't have enough gray hair. Would you have wanted him to? To be more true to the story, yes, but to be more appealing, nope!

DANCES NAKED is the story of a 60-ish British Lord, Marty Melbourne, who has traveled back in time from 2012 to 1782 via The Trees, portals through time. All turns out well, at first, and then he gets lost, is robbed, is rescued by a Cherokee hunting party who accept him into their small tribe, and then...well, the chief knows where the crazy white man he calls Dances Naked wants to go, but he doesn't want to return to those bad medicine trees that swallowed his brother years ago. He makes him wait, and then a couple of pretty white women join the tribe for their own reasons...

Lots of other events occur, too, but how much can you, or should you, show on the cover?

And then there's the discretionary issue. If you're getting a print version of a book, and you already know its a good story, wouldn't the tame version on the right be a little more appropriate to have lying about if the in-laws or pastor showed up unannounced?

The truth is, the e-book cover needs to pull in readers with a glance. Tame doesn't work for that. As soon as I changed covers for THE GREAT BIG FAIRY, sales shot up. True, it was for e-books, but print versions are less in demand.

Instant gratification with inexpensive downloads is what is selling right now. So, I'll share the eye candy for the e-books, but will also offer 'tamer' print versions...just in case you want to give your mother-in-law a great book to read, that won't make her blush if the pastor catches her reading it.

(Cover art on left by TheKillionGroupInc.com. Illustration on the right by Tony Woodward)

Free Fairy Day: March 28, 2014

Get THE GREAT BIG FAIRY for free on Friday, March 28...and a few others, too! http://www.freeebookpartay.com/

***Authors supporting authors with readers getting the (free) results! Sign up for Free ParTay weekly emails (not every day like some others) and you're entered into a free Kindle contest, too.

Free ParTay Super Free Friday! For One Day Only, March 28, The Great Big Fairy will be

FREE! If you like The Great Big Fairy you might also like these other FREE books:

Living with The Hubster, He's the banjo-playing captain of her life's ship. By Judy S. Watts.

The Paris Caper, A rogue detective will do anything to catch the sexy international thief he's fixated upon. By Nina Bruhns.

The Huntress, When they first met, he shot her. Catch The Huntress. By Dorothy McFalls.

The Bedeviled Heart, A Scottish Earl finds love in the medieval highlands. By Carmen Caine.

To enter to win a Kindle and $25 worth of Amazon gift cards, simply visit FreePartay.com and
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Time travel for less than $2000

That's right, folks. I time traveled for under $2000. See where this Alaskan author wound up? That's an 18th century tall ship, sitting in Port Jackson, in the area we now know as Darling Harbour.

Maybe I'd better clarify. The money was for my plane ticket from Phoenix to Sydney, Australia. I truly and honestly time traveled, but I went forward a day (I never experienced January 8, 2014). My intent was to go back 235 years, sort of. I flew to the land where the First Fleet arrived in 1788 in order to experience the terrain and climate those convicts, marines, and sailors encountered when they landed in the 'unknown to white man' region.

If you don't know about the First Fleet, I'm sure you will after reading my book, Fairies Down Under. It's still in process, but I will tell you that it's about a 21st century time traveler, wrongly convicted of a trivial crime, who winds up being transported from England to Australia rather than hang from the gallows.

And that ship in the picture above: that's the James Craig, the only full time tall ship sailing the world today. It's huge, takes quite the crew to sail it, and bounces over the waves like a carnival ride. Both make me sick, but I'd go back to Sydney in a heartbeat (and the 24 hour flight). I think I'll wait a year or so, though. I want to have my book completed for my next journey. Everyone Down Under knows about the First Fleet, but they don't know yet that a time traveler helped them survive that first year...

The Great Big Fairy is the story that precedes Fairies Down Under. If you haven't read it, here's a link. I really think you'll enjoy the story of another time traveler, the 21st century 6'7" red head who goes 'home' to Revolutionary War era North Carolina, to the time traveling family he left behind.

NOTE: I already know of at least one way to time travel. If you know of others, please share. I promise not to tell anyone else...

Hollywood and Vine to Darling Harbor?

Hollywood and Vine? Yup, we have that intersection up here in Alaska, too...Wasilla, to be exact. It’s not my jumping off place, but it’s close.

And, in case you didn't know, Darling Harbor is in Australia: Sydney, New South Wales.

The airfare and hotel are booked and paid for. January 12th, 2014, I will be in Sydney. After taking a day to adjust to the time difference and the 23 1/2 hours spent in the air or in airports, I’ll be walking the same beaches as did those First Fleeters (is that correct terminology?): the convicts and mariners who first set foot on Australian soil to establish a colony for England in 1788. 

I'm going south (just about everywhere in the world is south from where I live in Alaska) to research FAIRIES DOWN UNDER, the fifth book in THE FAIRIES SAGA. 

I’ve read volumes, both online at websites and in paper and e-books, but I want to ‘feel’ the air in January, smell the trees and dirt (arboretums, here I come), feel the ocean beneath my feet. You see, even though I am very prone to seasickness, I will even sail on a big ship, the 1874 barque James Craig, to get as close as I can to being in the shoes of one of my time travelers.

Oh, and it will be deep into our Alaskan winter, with only 6 hours of daylight, when I go down to the middle of a Sydney summer. Counting down, just over 100 days left!