Michelle Styles: Acquiring a hen as an editor

Gingernuts and copper black hens 

Getting new hens is always an exciting time.

I have kept hens since my youngest was 3 (he is now 22). It was supposed to be a short term thing as he had a big thing on a book about hens and I wanted to see if keeping hens would stop us from running out of eggs as often.

Copper black hen

 For a number of reasons (including being woken up at 3 am with crowing), we do not keep a cockerel. This means when we want to get more hens, I have to buy them in.  I get them as Point of Lay pullets rather than as eggs (hen eggs need to be continously turned unlike duck eggs which are turned twice a day) or chicks (at the moment we have kitten-cats who would undoubtedly love to play with chicks but I suspect the chicks would be less keen.) Hens in my experience are productive for 3 -5 years. Being a wimp, I tend to allow the old girls to die a natural death. Only 2 remained of our current lot and they both ceased egg production and I dislike supermarket eggs.

Columbines have feathered hats

Our usual supplier had gone out of business and so I needed to find someone else. As luck would have it, the UK largest supplier of poultry,Durham Hens is quite near us and had a wide range of available hens to choose from.  I was very impressed with the range and cleanliness of the operation. They had just won a major business award and it was easy to see why. They also offer poultry keeping classes, a hen holiday service (a bit like a kennel for hens) as well as poultry supplies.

My daughter and I chose 2 gingernut rangers, 2 copper blacks and 2 columbines. The hens settled very quickly and have very distinct personalities. This makes a change from the White leghorns which were just a flock of hens. They are the friendliest of the hens we have had.

Gingernut egg (lighter coloured) and Copper black (terracotta)

Yesterday I decided to write outside and one of the gingernuts decided that she in fact was an editor and was not particularly enamoured of my writing. Later one of the columbines decided to thieve a piece of cheese from the tapas plate my husband had put out for us to eat. This was a first as normally the hens are less bold.  

Hens are relatively straight forward to keep. Poultry layers pellets for food, water and mucking out the hen house every week. The manure goes on the compost heap and helps to fertilise the vegetables.

Gingernut inspecting my work!

 Our hens are completely free range but get locked up at night because we do have foxes about. They normally lay in the hen house but some do take to laying elsewhere and so I do check the known places…If you put an egg in a bowl of cold water, you can tell if it is fresh. Fresh ones sink. Rotten eggs float.  Proper free-range eggs taste that much better. There really is no comparison. If you can’t keep hens, do try to get them from a small local supplier, rather than from a supermarket.

We keep the vegetable patch fenced off but the hens do not really bother with the garden much…sometimes if we have been putting new plants in, the hens will scratch at the earth to get the worms and bugs. They like grass. And along with the ducks, they provide a bit of colour to the garden. And did I mention the eggs?

Michelle Styles writes warm, witty and intimate historical romances in a wide range of time periods. Her latest Viking Sold to the Viking Warrior was published in February 2017. To learn more about Michelle and her books visit www.michellestyles.co.uk

Christina Hollis: Thank Goodness For Holidays…

This year started with a bang for me. First, I was asked to write Women Of Bristol for publisher Pen And Sword’s major series on women’s lives between 1850-1950. Then a few weeks later, my crime novel Love Lies Bleeding was accepted by Endeavour. That’s great news, but it means I’m researching and writing non-fiction at the same time I’m trying to create a follow-up to Love Lies Bleeding. Dead Woman Walking is slowly taking shape in the odd moments when I take a break from Women Of Bristol.

OH timed a week’s holiday to include the recent Bank Holiday, and was going to spend it working on the house.  Then the rain stopped, and we had some fine, dry weather. It was too good to waste, so we both escaped into the open air for once. The first thing we did was to go out for our 2016 Christmas dinner. Yes, really! I love partying but OH hates it, so the deal is I drag him to his office’s Christmas party each year, then treat him to dinner at our favourite local restaurant. Work and other commitments (including a tooth broken at the last minute) meant we haven’t been able to have our dinner-for-two until last week. It was well worth it, with four courses of local, seasonal food. Mushroom soup was followed by pigeon, then slowly roasted pork with lots of colourful vegetables and finally cheesecake. 

Find out more at myBook.to/HeartOfAHostage 

After that, our holiday went from good to great. We caught up on lots of reading, took a lot of long walks in the wood with the dog, and did quite a bit of retail therapy. 

I ended the week with a word count of zero, but the garden is looking a lot better as I was able to spend plenty of time outside working on it.

I was a bit worried about the work piling up and deadlines approaching, but it turned out a break helped me focus. I was so keen to start writing again, I soon caught up. 

What’s your idea of a perfect holiday?

When she isn't cooking, gardening or beekeeping, Christina Hollis writes contemporary fiction starring complex men and independent women.  Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and she’s sold nearly three million books worldwide. Catch up with her at http://www.christinahollis.blogspot.com, on Twitter, Facebook, and see a full list of her published books at christinahollis.com

Her current release, Heart Of A Hostage, is published by The Wild Rose Press and available at myBook.to/HeartOfAHostage  worldwide.

My first crush...

My husband (aka Himself) knows how to woo me.  For years I've said my favorite present from him was a pair of a steel-toed boots. (He'd seen me splitting wood and flipping a piece that landed on my toes which made them sweet.)  But yesterday's gift might win.  An entire collection of leather-bound, acid-free paper Robert Heinlein's book.  Oh, be still my heart.

My first real crush was on Heinlein's character, Lazarus Long.  So that's where I went first. I opened Methuselah's Children.  Oh, wow.  Reading a beautifully bound version is a different experience than reading my beat up paperback.  It was lovely!  Adding to the experience was seeing Himself occasionally glance over at me happily reading and smile indulgently.  

It might seem strange to non-book people to have a first crush be a fictional character, but readers get it.  I have a crush on all the heroes I write.  And I want to be best friends with all the heroines.  If I didn't like them that much, then writing the book wouldn't work.  I've been writing Romance+ stories...books that are more than a romance, they're a story of a woman's journey that includes a romance, but romantic love isn't the reason for her journey, nor is it the only destination.  My Words of the Heart series is first person in the heroine's point-of-view.  So I get to know those heroes through the heroine's eyes.  But at the end of Carry Her Heart, Ned gets a small word in edge wise...and every time I read it, even though I wrote it, I tear up.  He comes back in Hold Her Heart and opens the book...and again, he gets me every time.  As I sat reading Lazarus last night, I looked at my husband and understood why Ned's small POV's get me...it's because he gets his heroine, Pip.  He understands her and loves her in spite of her quirks.

Himself gets me like that and proof is in a pair of steel-toed boots and a set of Heinlein books.

Holly

PS The first two books in Words of the Heart are on sale.  Come meet Ned for yourself.

Carry Her Heart

Hold Her Heart

These Three Words

Family Reunions with Kate Walker

I’ve just come back from a family reunion that was a very special event.  I come from a family of five sisters.   (I come right in the middle of them if you’re wondering.)  My eldest sister is living in Australia  so she’s sadly thousands of miles away, but the next eldest sister – the one between her and me – is having a big birthday this year.   And she invited all the rest of us -  and the next generation – and the one after that – to come together for a very special family  party and overnight stay.

W

e had a wonderful time. We all live in different parts of the country, have different lives, but it was as if time and distance hadn’t existed.  So there were my other sisters, two husbands, one sister’s daughter, and the birthday girl’s son, his wife and two daughters. So that’s  three generations. And to add to the celebrations, there were two more about-to-be members of the family as my niece and my nephews wife were both expecting babies due to arrive in September.

Since I came home and I looked at all the photographs – specially one that had all of us, each generation, arranged on a flight of steps, it made me think about families both in reality and in books.  And it got me wondering about the families in some of my books.

I’ve now been published for over thirty years, so some of the babies  conceived by or born to past heroes and heroines will be about the age to become heroes and heroines themselves.   The b

aby that pushes Pierce and Natalie into marriage in  The Unexpected Child would be twenty years old now – just old enough to have her own story. And so will the little girl   Rosie who appeared in His Miracle Baby.

Sometimes I create characters who are connected by family or place and  then if I revisit that place, that family,  there is a chance to catch up with the story of the original couple and see how their life has progressed. I did this with  A Question of Honour where the hero and heroine  - Karim and Clemmie  later appeared – with their children -  in Destined For The Desert King .   And  Nabil, who was to have been Clemmie’s original bridegroom in that story, is the hero of this second book, with his new bride Aziza.  I remembered these books particularly as the story I’m working on will  take my new hero and heroine from their homes in Ireland to the kingdom of Rhastaan  where they may well meet up with Karim and Clemmie, Nabil and Aziza . . .and who knows how many children now?

So that made me wonder.  Do you like books were past characters appear, and you learn about their lives later on? Do you enjoy finding out about what has happened to them since their ‘happy ever after’ ending? Are they in fact ‘happy ever after’?  (I should hope so as I try to write characters who are just made for each other.)

Thinking about these earlier books has made me wonder whether it might be interesting to revisit

What do you think?  Do you like to read books like this? Are there any books - mine  or any other  author’s  where you’d like to know what happened to a younger character – or just another person – in the future?

families and give them their own family reunion  and a story for the next generation.

I  know I’m looking forward to revisiting old friends in Rhastaan as I take Adnan and Ciara out to that country on their rather unusual honeymoon.

I don't have a new book out until January next year but you can  keep up to date with all my news on my web site blog page  or my Facebook page   where you can find out when I have new books appearing in the shops.

The Best Kind of Distraction - Jeannie Watt

I'm having trouble concentrating lately.

And every time I leave my manuscript unattended...

...it seems to write itself. And not necessarily in a good way.

Introducing my new kittens, Lizzie and Fiona. Lizzie writes. Fiona likes tea. 

I'll be truthful--I'd hoped to get a couple of Siamese-mix kittens when I headed to the Human Society to adopt my new babies. The Siamese were all spoken for, but there were a pair of tabby sisters in the next cage over. One of them reached through the bars at me and that was it. Lizzie and Fiona became to the newest four-footed members of my family. 

I also got a two-footed member, Bitsy, to keep my two-year old budgie company after he lost his companion.

The moral of this story is: Do not get babies while on deadline. It's distracting...but in the very best way.

Have a great day,

Jeannie

For more information on my latest releases, please visit my website.

Flowers to cheer - Kandy Shepherd

With some of the stuff going on in the world right now, there seem to be so many unpleasant things cluttering up my social media. I want to see something pleasant!

Autumn roses in my garden

So I thought I’d share some photos of my autumn/fall garden—Down Under in Australia that is! (I always find it a little difficult to get my head around the reversal of the seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres!)

Claret ash starting to colour

Our little farm has a lovely garden, planted by various people before us, dating back to 1928. We’ve added our own plantings over the years we’ve had the garden.

An abundance of camellias

Where we’re located in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, we have distinct seasons and a cold winter. Not cold like some of my northern hemisphere friend’s winters—we very rarely have snow although the frosts can be punishing. But it’s distinct from the sub-tropical climate that, say, Sydney enjoys where the winter is relatively mild.

Bees like the autumn garden

 Spring is my favorite time in this garden, thanks to the spring-flowering bulbs, blossoming fruit trees, roses and iris that thrive in this climate. But autumn is my next favorite when the leaves color and camellias are in bloom.

The shy charm of violets

It’s been a few weeks since I took these photos and frosts have wiped out some of the greenery. 

This rose is called Perfumed Perfection and it smells divine!

But there are still a few hardy roses and the sasanqua camellias are thriving. Soon the hellebores and jonquils of winter will be adding some color to the bare trees.

My cat Cindy likes her bed of autumn leaves

What’s your favorite season of the year? I’d love to read your comments!

Kandy’s most recent book Conveniently Wed to the Greek is a May 2017 release from

Harlequin Romance in North America; Mills & Boon Cherish in the UK; and Mill & Boon ForeverRomance in Australia and New Zealand.

Kandy Shepherd is a multi-published, award-winning author of contemporary romance and women’s fiction. She lives on a small farm in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia, with her family and a menagerie of four-legged friends.

Visit Kandy at her website

www.kandyshepherd.com

Connect with Kandy on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram

Love

It's hard to write about what, to many, may seem trivial things when the world is going through such torment but not long after the horror of 9/ll I heard Suzanne Brockmann talking at the Romance Writers of America conference.

Love, she said, had been the response of those involved. People who knew they were going to die called their families and told them that they loved them.

That is what I'm thinking today.

That love is stronger that fear. Love is stronger than hate. Love is what makes us human.

Hug your family, your friends, those you love and stay safe.

Addison Fox: Friendship and Joy and Quiet Moments

I had a wonderful opportunity this past week – a dear friend of mine has been in for several days and it’s been so nice to simply sit still, catch up, laugh and relax a bit. It doesn’t happen all that often – that ability to shut down and focus and simply enjoy a few moments without other distractions.

Life is busy. The weeks begin and end in rapid succession and it’s easy to look up and find yourself wondering where the days have gone. That’s why those quiet moments – and the opportunity to sit still – is so lovely.

For me, reading often provides the same benefits (albeit without an ability to do a gabfest over a glass of wine!) Those quiet moments when I can shut out the noise and the clutter of the day and do something that’s enjoyable – simply for the joy of the thing.

So as we enter into summer – always a busy time – I wish you some of that quiet. Those little moments spent in a way that makes you happy. A conversation with a friend. A nap underneath a tree. An ice cream cone. Whatever it is, enjoy!

Thanks for joining me today!

XO,

Addison

Nicole Locke - A Medieval Feast...Sort Of.

My latest release, The Knight's Scarred Maiden, involves the heroine, Helissent, who is obsessed with cooking and baking. To understand her, I tried some of her recipes. Today, I'd like to share the Medieval Feast I, and my cousin, made (under no circumstances do I recommend trying this alone).
 
For the guests (I actually invited people over--or should I say: people actually came!), we made:

Fish with Sauce Verte

Roast Chicken with Peynreguson (raisin paste)
Fennel Soup
Rastons Bread (an egg bread, that is twice baked)
Dessert of Chardewardon (pear sauce) and Herbed Fritters

So how did it turn out?

The Sauce Verte (parsley, mint, betony, pellitory, and bread soaked in vinegar) tasted like vinegar and herbs. To save the day, my cousin added mayonnaise. It was yummy.

The Peynreguson (raisins, pepper, ginger, breadcrumbs, white wine), was ugly before and after it was cooked, but it was delicious with chicken. When I wasn’t looking my cousin added butter and champagne...as you do.

Then there was the fennel soup (water, fennel, and onions). It tasted like water, fennel, and onions. Asiago cheese was added to that.

Raston’s bread fascinated me because after the first bake, you’re required to slice off the top, scoop out the middle, saturate that in butter, put it back in, and reassemble it to bake again. I didn’t know how this would work without falling apart when you cut it. Guess what? It fell apart when I cut it. But at no time did the extremely buttered bread not taste good.

There was the delicious Chardewardon pear sauce that was supposed to be a burgundy broth with a jewel-like clarity. It looked and tasted liked spiced applesauce and the kids ate it all.

 

As for the Herbed Fritters. Out of everything, I doubted these the most. Flour, water, salt, herbs (thyme, sorrel, parsley, marjoram), fry, and slather with honey.  I was concerned the herbs would make it taste soapy. But I was wrong. The little dough balls could have handled a lot more herbs, and they were devoured by the pickiest eater.  

Will I do it again? Yes, but I won’t tell my family what they’re eating next time. Using the word Medieval made the children suspicious.

More importantly, did it give me a good idea of what Helissent shared with the hero Rhain in the story? Maybe. But I suspect she is a better cook than me….

 

You can read my other misadventures on different recipes on the Harlequin Blog May 25, June 2^nd and June 13th. http://harlequinblog.com. I've also shared recipes on my website. http://nicolelocke.com

Nicole

Nicole Locke is the author of Harlequin Lovers and Legends series. For more information about her and her writing, check out her website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.