Sunday, December 9, 2018

12 Days of Christmas Giveaway ~ Day 9!

On the 9th day of Christmas, my favorite authors gave to me…a chance to win nine books and a $150 Amazon gift card or one-year subscription to Audible!

Join twelve authors (myself included!) as we celebrate the 12 Days of Christmas Giveaway. 
Today is stop #9 on the blog tour and look at all these amazing books we're giving away.


The prizes are building, and today’s winner will receive my recent release, The Victorian Christmas Brides Collection, with my story A Christmas Promise.


As well as ALL of the following:

An advanced copy of The Secrets of Paper and Ink by Lindsay Harrel

The Sky Above Us by Sarah Sundin

Where the Fire Falls by Karen Barnett

My Heart Belongs in Fort Bliss, Texas by Erica Vetsch

A Sparkle of Silver by Liz Johnson

Cold Case Christmas by Jessica R. Patch

Wyoming Christmas Quadruplets by Jill Kemerer

Christmas with the Cowboy + jingle bell necklace by Tina Radcliffe

It’s not too late to enter in the Rafflecopter giveaway below by following some of your favorite authors on social media and signing up for their newsletters. We draw a new winner every day, and on December 12th, we’ll give away a $150 Amazon Gift Card OR a 1-Year Audible Gold Subscription (winner’s choice) in addition to all the other great prizes! You can also get an extra entry every day by tweeting about the giveaway.

Merry Christmas and good luck!

Don’t forget to stop by Sara Ella's blog tomorrow to see what else will be up for grabs this week!

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Friday, May 11, 2018

Backcountry Brides - Debra E. Marvin

May is the release month for The Backcountry Brides Novella Collection from Barbour Publishers and we're celebrating! All month long, the authors from the collection will be hosting one another on their blogs to share about different aspects of their stories.


My blog will be devoted to the Secondary Characters from each novella and to celebrate this fun topic, my second guest is Debra E. Marvin, author of A Heart So Tender.

Be sure to enter the Rafflecopter Below for a chance to win a fabulous grand prize!



Before we get to Debra's post, here's a little more about the collection:

Love on Colonial America’s Frontier

Travel into Colonial America where nine women seek love, but they each know a future husband requires the necessary skills to survive in the backcountry. Living in areas exposed to nature’s ferocity, prone to Indian attack, and cut off from regular supplies, can hearts overcome the dangers to find lasting love?


A Heart So Tender, by Debra E. Marvin - Secondary Characters

It’s hard to ignore a secondary character when he’s a bigger-than-life, and ‘real-life’ person. In A Heart So Tender, we meet Sir William Johnson, an important man in Colonial History. He was born in 1815 in County Meath, Ireland, and came as a young man to work for his uncle in what is now New York State. It’s said that his familiarity with mistrust and subjugation—as an Irishman living under English rule—gave him an unusual empathy for all he met. While he was not a religious man, he encouraged all religions to build houses of worship and join in multi-cultural settlements.

Sir William Johnson
Johnson set up a trading post and learned the Mohawk language, and by 1744 was appointed Superintendent of Indian affairs for The Crown. He acquired much land and wealth but it was his ability to enlist Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) warriors against the French that helped him land military honors and government favors. He became known as a military hero during the French and Indian War (The Seven Years War), and negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix and others. After the battle of Montreal, Johnson was given a “title” to 100,000 acres of land in the Mohawk Valley.

Johnson sparing Baron Dieskau's life
after the Battle of Lake George
Johnson married (though not in a legal, or church-sanctioned ceremony) Molly Brant, sister of the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant and had children with her. She was not his first wife, but he remained on good terms with his English wife and children even as his new Mohawk family expanded. Later, he was able to find positions of authority and good marriages for most of his offspring.

Being well-respected among the native people made him an important asset to the British Government. After continued trouble along the frontier, Pontiac’s Rebellion to the west, and an incident called The Massacre at Devil’s Hole, Johnson invited chiefs and warriors from every tribe to come to a great gathering of nations at Fort Niagara in the summer of 1764. Many treaties were signed and he managed to win land along the Niagara River from the Seneca who’d been behind the massacre.

Unfortunately, subsequent military leaders had much less empathy for the native people and, because of the Haudenosaunee’s history of friendship with the British, they were burned out of their villages across the region, and sent away during the War of Independence.

The movie The Broken Chain tells the story of Mohawk Leader (and William Johnson’s brother-in-law, Joseph Brant). Actor Pierce Brosnan plays the role of Sir William Johnson, a fascinating character! I enjoy placing “real-life” historical people in my stories, and I hope you enjoy all of the novellas in The Backcountry Brides collection.

Debra E. Marvin tries not to run too far from real life but the imagination born out of being an only child has a powerful draw. Besides, the voices in her head tend to agree with all the sensible things she says. She'd like to live a wee bit closer to her grandchildren, but is thankful that God is in control, that He chooses to bless us despite ourselves and that He has a sense of humor.

Other than writing light-hearted romances and gritty gothics, she has rather normal obsessions such as fabric, peanut butter, vacations, British dramas, and whatever mystery series she's currently stuck on.

Click to purchase Backcountry Brides.

Visit Debra on Twitter or her Author Facebook Page.  

Your Turn: What movies do you enjoy that are based on real events or people? Some that come to mind for me are Apollo 13LincolnSaving Mr. BanksAmistad, and Amazing Grace, just to name a few.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Backcountry Brides -- Secondary Characters

May is the release month for The Backcountry Brides Novella Collection from Barbour Publishers and we're celebrating! All month long, the authors from the collection will be hosting one another on their blogs to share about different aspects of their stories.


My blog will be devoted to the Secondary Characters from each novella and to kick off this fun topic, my first guest is Shannon McNear, author of The Counterfeit Tory.

Be sure to enter the Rafflecopter Below for a chance to win a fabulous grand prize!


Before we get to Shannon's post, here's a little more about the collection:

Love on Colonial America’s Frontier

Travel into Colonial America where nine women seek love, but they each know a future husband requires the necessary skills to survive in the backcountry. Living in areas exposed to nature’s ferocity, prone to Indian attack, and cut off from regular supplies, can hearts overcome the dangers to find lasting love?


The Counterfeit Tory by Shannon McNear – Backcountry Brides

The main secondary characters in The Counterfeit Tory fall clearly into two categories, heroic and villainous. Among the latter are Lizzy’s father, Charles Cunningham, and her brothers, Robert and Richard (Robbie and Dickie), fictional uncle and cousins of the infamous Bloody Bill Cunningham. Ideally a writer should strive to create almost-villains who are more than cardboard cut-outs, to give redeeming qualities even to men guilty of neglect and abuse. I tried with Lizzy’s father and utterly failed. The brothers I painted with a little more sympathy. All three are quite steeped in pride and self-interest, and the father may qualify as a true narcissist. When they fade from the scene near the end of the story, there’s little to miss.

The heroic Zacharias Elliot, on the other hand, may someday demand his own story. Elliot serves as Jed Wheeler’s contact with the Continental forces while he’s undercover with Cunningham’s company, and readers of my first novella, Defending Truth, may recognize him as the older brother of Micah Elliot, who had turned coat long before the Battle of Kings Mountain and figured so heavily in Micah’s reluctance to return home while questioning his own loyalties. (The son of “good loyalists” choosing to go rebel was no light matter at the time.) It was fun to pull in a briefly mentioned character from one story and give him actual screen time in another.

Other secondary characters—the townfolk, for instance, and Jed’s fellow company members—are more ambiguous in their honor. Many loyalists served as they did because their sense of justice or religious duty demanded it; so it was with those on the patriot side. Many loyalists chose to extend mercy when the occasion demanded it, while many patriots exacted vengeance nearly as chilling as that of William Cunningham himself. I hope I’ve captured a little of history’s complexities in these brief portraits, but it’s probably more than a little ironic that the more prominent secondary characters are less evenly shaded.

Click to purchase Backcountry Brides 
And the prequel, The Highwayman, which is now available as a standalone.

About the Author:
 
After more than two decades in the South, Shannon McNear now makes her home on the windy northern plains with her husband, four of their eight children, two German Shepherds, four cats, several chickens, and a noisy flock of guinea fowl. She serves in worship and youth ministry, and has been writing novel-length fiction since age 15. Her first novella, Defending Truth, from A Pioneer Christmas Collection, was a 2014 RITA® nominee. When not sewing, researching, or leaking story from her fingertips, she enjoys being outdoors, basking in the beauty of the Dakota prairies.


shannonmcnear.com

Question for you: What kind of secondary characters do you enjoy in a story? The villain? The comic relief? The overbearing friend? The confidante? Is there a secondary character from a story that stands out to you?
 
 
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