Thanks so much for the great response today about all the things that MAKE YOU NUTS.

You all seem so tense I was tempted to give a bunch of books away just so you’d read a romantic comedy and relax.

Of course I write then and I’m sittin’ here with duct tape wrapped around my head, so I can only help you just so much.

The winner of the drawing is — Cheri J. — Cheri let me know your email address. Contact me through my website www.maryconnealy.com or write me at maryconnealy at yahoo.com

And if you didn’t win and would like a relaxing laughter filled afternoon you can click on the link below to buy Calico Canyon at Amazon.com 

Calico Canyon: Lassoed in Texas, Book 2 (Truly Yours Romance Club #24)

And if you haven’t already, for double the fun read book one of this series first, Petticoat Ranch. 

Petticoat Ranch (Lassoed in Texas, Book 1)

What a treat we have in store for you, darlings! Two guest authors this weekend. Yep, that’s the truth and no mistaking it. The Fillies have rounded up two very charming, talented ladies to whet your appetite. Yippee!

Jill Marie Landis, who makes her home in Hawaii, will set sail all the way from across the Pacific to talk “story” and hula dancing. She has two new books out and will be giving away three copies to visitors who throw in their two cents worth.

Tanya Hanson, our dear friend who’s blogged before will sashay into town to entice you with the Luv Wranglers of Ventura County. I guarantee you’ll get a glimpse of a western movie set and laugh yourself plumb to death over three real cowboys who dole out the funniest answers to some ordinary questions. You’ll get a chance to ask them a few questions too so get your thinkin’ caps on. Tanya has one autographed copy of Midnight Bride and a Starbucks Coffee gift card for two special people.

Don’t be shy, now. And don’t you be forgettin’ to saddle up your horse and ride on over Saturday! You hear?

I’ve got a week to go before my next book, Calico Canyon releases and man, oh man can I get tensed up if I think of it…which of course…I do all the time.

I thought … since I can’t think of anything else anyway…I’d give you a look at Calico Canyon.

AND THERE WILL BE A DRAWING FOR ONE FREE COPY OF CALICO CANYON CHOSEN FROM ANYONE WHO COMMENTS TODAY!!! SO GET READY TO MAKE UP AN OPINION EVEN IF YOU DON’T HAVE ONE!

Calico Canyon – Lassoed in Texas Book #2 is a suspenseful, historical western, romantic comedy. In Petticoat Ranch – Lassoed in Texas Book #1, I talked about a man who’d never been around women, dropped into an all-girl world, so I decided to do the flip side of that story in Calico Canyon.

Start with prissy, Miss Calhoun, the school marm, and shoved her, completely against her will, into an all-male world.

A fish-out-of-water story is always fun, and an author needs to make it as extreme as possible and still have the hero be heroic, the heroine be delightful and loveable. Not that easy when she doesn’t understand anything about his wild, ill-mannered boys, less about him and nothing about marriage.

There’s a scene in Calico Canyon that shows a little of how completely useless Daniel is at smoothing the way for Grace. He’s standing with his five sons, about twelve hours after the forced marriage. He went about his business—he had chores to do after all. Grace crumpled up on the floor of the wretched cave Daniel calls a house and hides for the whole day. Daniel and his boys finally work up the nerve to get her to come out and now they’re watching Grace cry:

He and his boys stood absolutely immobilized. The wind moaned around the house and Daniel wondered if he’d have to dig them out in the morning. They lived on fairly high ground. They got a beauty of a snow storm once in a while, he’d heard. A blizzard might cut them off from civilization for a spell, if you could call Mosqueros, Texas civilized. Then he realized there was no way they were going to get to church in the morning. Daniel liked church. He did. But once he showed up with Miss Calhoun in town, his marriage was a done deal.

And that’s when he realized he was still trying to think of a way out of this. But Daniel Reeves was no fool. He could dream all he wanted. He was tied to this woman.

John whispered again, “Is she supposed to get all sad like that, Pa?”

“Yep, in my experience with wives, they’re supposed to fuss about something all the time. I’ve never had me one that didn’t cry up a storm at the drop of a hat.”

Grace lifted her head and scowled through her tears.

Daniel was surprised at his urge to laugh. She was really a mess. The oh-so-tidy Miss Calhoun kept getting herself slopped up more and more. He wondered when she’d gather her wits together enough to care about that.

“Did it ever occur to you that you might be doing things to your wives that make them cry?” She pushed her hair off her soggy face with shaky hands.

“Nope.” Daniel shrugged. “Never was nothing I did.”

This is just Daniel being absolutely clueless and having no idea what it takes to make a woman happy.

The foundational conflict between Daniel and Grace isn’t the fact that they loathe each other—although that’s huge.

It’s the fact that Daniel completely blames himself for his first wife’s death in childbirth, plus how brutally hard it was for him to survive with newborn triplets. He is so deeply traumatized by it that he won’t risk having another woman carry his child. But he has a powerful attraction for his new wife, once he calms down.

So there’s a war inside Daniel and, torn between desire and terror, he handles it like any good romance hero…as badly as possible.

            Parrish is the villain in Calico Canyon, Grace’s adoptive father. She’s hostile to men because of her upbringing with an abusive father. Parrish lived well off the salaries of the young girls he forced to work in a carpet mill.

            So Grace has a very dim view of men and she expects only bad things from her new life surrounded by six of them. It takes a lot to convince her she hasn’t fallen into a rat hole and ended up married to the King of Rats.

            If you’d like to read the first chapter of Calico Canyon you can find it here:  http://www.mconnealy.blogspot.com/

The excitement and tension of this book release makes me long for some kind of mild tranquilizer. Is there anything that you have to handle that keeps you awake at night? Do you think you might have a vein inside your head that’s gonna explode one of these days because of that tension? Do you think if I wrapped my head in duct tape really tight I can head off that explosion? (Any reader with medical experience should reply immediately!)

            What makes your brain start buzzing and your muscles tense and your blood pressure sky-rocket and your heart pound? This isn’t a philosophical question, I’m just sitting at my computer listing symptoms I’m having right now. Keep in mind I am thrilled to have a book coming out.

Put it like this–I was a spinster for a really long time, you’re not going to catch me playing hard to get when a publisher proposes.

Still, it’s not the same as sitting behind a computer entertaining myself with my funny stories of chaos and mayhem.

What makes you tense? Good or bad?

Click on the cover to purchase

Or find Calico Canyon, in bookstores July 1st

Alaska Brides in bookstores August 1st

Good Morning!

Would you be able to survive in the forest, or out on the prairie on your own, completely away from a supermaket?  We are so conditioned in this society to the supermarket as our source of food that many of us might think that food comes from the supermarket, (especially if you live in the city and off the farm).  So I thought it might be nice to begin a series on basic survival, Native American style.

 I still remember when I was on the Blackfeet reservation about 5-6 years ago a conversation I had with an elder of the tribe.  He told me that one could still live off the land.  I also remember being very interested in how this might be done, although I didn’t ask him about it at the time.  But as time went on I became interested more and more in how exactly one could survive on your own, completely apart from others and especially completely apart from the IGA or Albertson’s.

Let’s begin with the search for food.  One of my very dear friends (who is Blackfeet) was always tasting berries and such when she came to visit me here locally in California.  When I discovered this, I was concerned as there are many poisonous plants here in southern Cal.  But she instructed me on the fact that there is no plant that is sweet in Nature that is poisonous.  Medicine men or women would often taste the plants to learn if they were okay to eat or not.  Poisonous plants or berries tend to taste bitter.  But if something is sweet, it is generally good to eat.  Did you know that?  I certainly hadn’t up until that time.

Roots, nuts, mushrooms, berries, turbers, bark on trees can be eaten.  In the old days, women often went out in groups in each season and gathered what they needed.  It was a sort of holiday for them.  But if one is thrust into a survival situation, here are the things to look for.   Watch the birds.  If it were me, I’d watch the birds and eat whatever they ate.  I might leave the mushrooms alone because I am not an expert in this and some are so poisonous and the death from them is so painful, that I would tend to leave them alone.  Look for foods that you know:  plums, blackberries, raspberries, stawberries, huckleberries, blueberries, chockcherries.  There are also nuts like the walnut, pecan.  Even the acorn can be eaten, but careful on this.  One must prepare the acorn.  They should never be eaten raw.  They should be dried in the sun, the shells cracked off and the inner “meat” separated.  They are then ground info flour and washed so that the water can be drained off them.  They are then washed until the water runs clear and the yellow stain disappears.  They can then be made into bread or porriage.

Roots were often eaten and if a man were starving and couldn’t find any other food, the inner bark of trees could be eaten.  Those of the slippery elm, birch, basswood, white oak, sassafras, striped maple.  I have known horses to survive the winter eating the inner bark of the cottonwood tree.  Even squirrels nests can be robbed of their nuts. 

 As far as greens go, I really think you need to know what you are looking for — the wild mustard, clover, watercress are all edible — but would you know what they looked like?  There are also the fish of the waters, the rabbits, ducks, even squirrels and birds can be eaten.  Preparing them to eat is another thing altogether, which often times requires fire.  Fire.  In my next blog, I thought we might discuss how to make a fire if you are unprepared and have no matches.

Survival, in uncertain conditions.  Sometime it might be important.  Hopefully not, but it never hurts to be prepared.  Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to know how to live off the land?  Has anyone that you know ever had to survive in hard times?  What did they do?  What would you do?

Come on in and let’s talk about it.  And don’t forget, there are two books that I have out on the stands right now, THE LAST WARRIOR and RED HAWK‘S WOMAN.  Buy your copy today!

Thank you all for the hearty welcome to Petticoats and Pistols on my very first day! I enjoyed saying hello and reading your comments.

And the winner of the Mountie T-shirt and compact pen is….Sherry!

Congratulations, Sherry!  Please contact me through my website http://www.katebridges.com with your full name and address and I’ll send it right along.

See you next time!

I’m a bit late in announcing my winners from last Monday’s blog, but here they are: Brenda Mazur and Lizzie Starr.  Benda and Lilzzie, please send your addresses to my e-mail address: papotter@aol.com., and I’ll send a book, pronto.

Paty drew a name from her cowboy hat, and the winner is….

MAUREEN!

Maureen, please spot Paty with your addresss.  her email is: patyjage@patyjager.com 

Thank you for the warm welcome to Petticoats and Pistols! It’s an honor to be invited as a regular blogger and to share the same space with these stellar writers. I’m looking forward to chatting with all of you. As some already know, my stories are set in both the American and Canadian West. I’m currently writing about the Mounties.

Have you ever wondered what it was like, panning for gold? On my trip to the Yukon to research the Klondike Gold Rush, I tried my hand at it. (The photo above is one I took of the Yukon River.)

Here I am, giving it a shot. Gold is nineteen times the weight of water, so it naturally sinks to the bottom of the pan. The tricky part is washing away the gravel into smaller and smaller portions while still hanging onto the precious stuff. There’s quite a skill involved. They have a name for the proper technique:  dips and shakes. Never mix these motions together or you’ll lose the gold. Dipping the pan creates waves like an ocean tide over the pebbles. A gentle shake rattles them free until all you have left are nuggets or flakes. Easier said than done!

My arms started to feel heavy after only a few minutes. Imagine standing in a river for hours, or days or weeks till you found something of value. Another thing I hadn’t counted on was the iciness of the water. In the Yukon, spring thaw occurs in May, but the rivers remain frigid. During the Gold Rush days, I’m sure fingers went numb within minutes. How about a person’s feet and legs?

These are the flakes I came home with. They’re suspended in water. Each flake is roughly worth two bucks, and I found five. Some of the nuggets the stampeders discovered in the Klondike were the size of men’s fists–the largest the world has ever seen. And they were plucking hundreds of them from the riverbeds!

I couldn’t help myself–I brought home a gold pan as a souvenir. Most Klondike stampeders did not strike gold, so the pans themselves were more often used to wash socks or to fry fish. I accidentally left mine under an open window earlier in the year. It got rained on, hence rusty.  But now I feel like a real old-timer. Cost of pan: $12.95. Predicted selling price in future garage sale five years from now: 50 cents.

I try to imagine what it must have been like to strike gold big time, but the closest I come to feeling the excitement is when I watch the TV program, “Antiques Roadshow.” 

Do you have any hidden ‘nuggets’ at home? If the “Antiques Roadshow” were coming to your town, what’s the one thing you’d stand in line for, to get appraised?

I’ll start. From my husband’s side of the family, I inherited this ladies antique wristwatch. I believe it’s from the late 1800s. It was brought over from Germany, but may have been made anywhere in Europe (it doesn’t have the maker’s initials, but an emblem). The cool thing is it’s actually a lady’s pocket watch that some ingenious person designed a strap for, so it can sit on the wrist if the lady didn’t want it pinned to her blouse or sitting in her pocket. It must have been the way they first came up with an idea for a wristwatch.

The watch sat on my desk the whole time I was writing my first novel, THE DOCTOR’S HOMECOMING. It became the watch my heroine, the first female doctor in town, owned. Every time I touched it, I thought of Emma. From my search on the internet, I don’t believe it’s worth a huge amount, but it’s fun to imagine it’s worth a fortune.

How about you? What have you got buried in that trunk? Whatever you do, don’t wash or clean it. Experts say getting rid of its natural patina (signs of aging) decreases its value.

In honor of my first official post on Petticoats and Pistols, and in celebration of my current release now in bookstores, KLONDIKE FEVER, I’ll be randomly choosing a winner from someone who posts a comment here today. Prize:  One Mountie T-shirt (black, XL, 100% cotton) along with a compact RCMP pen, perfect size for a purse.

P.S. You know what the latest treasure is in northern Canada? Diamonds. They’re finding lots of them on the bottom of the lakes, equal in quality to those found in Africa. 

www.katebridges.com

To buy any of Kate’s books, click on a cover:

We’re a bit down in the mouth today in Wildflower Junction. Our sister Filly, Geralyn Dawson, has packed up bag and baggage and left us. She’s caring for aging parents, meeting her deadlines, taking care of a husband and children, and fulfilling her duties for the breast cancer foundation. As you know when the days just aren’t long enough, something has got to give. And so she has decided to bid us farewell.

We’re going to miss Geralyn terribly. We love her to death and can’t imagine doing this without her. She’s certainly been an inspiration and a joy to work with.

But, you know how it is when the sun sets and a body has to mosey on down the trail. We wish her only the very best. May she always know love and happiness wherever she goes. We’ve been privileged to have gotten to work with her for the time we had together and hope she won’t forget the way back to pay us an occasional visit. The welcome mat will always be out.

Now ah know y’all are dying to find out who’s replacing her. Hold on to your bloomers, I’m getting to that! The lovely and talented Kate Bridges will be taking her place. Kate has already guest-blogged a time or two on P&P so she’s no stranger to us. She’ll make a wonderful addition to our group.

 In fact, she’ll have her first appearance as a full-fledged Filly come Monday. Drop by and join us and initiate her all proper-like.

Well, those durn mules are in my vegetable garden again so I’d best skedaddle.

Until next time……

Writing historical books requires hours of research and most of that research doesn’t even get put on the page, but it’s in the author’s head, making the setting and scenes real to both the writer and the reader.

I love the research as much as the creating of characters. When I decide on an area, if possible, I travel there and hang out in the museums. I gather historical books about the area, check out information online, talk to people in the museums, and I spend hours devouring newspapers of the area at the time I’ve set my book.

Nothing gives the writer more authenticity than reading the newspapers. This is my favorite, though, most time consuming research method. I chuckle as I read the local sections about who is courting who, who went to visit relatives, and where the good doctor spent most of his time delivering babies.  Reading the notices of local activities such as dances, performances, and horse races the place comes to life.  And becomes real in my head.

Meeting people who live in the area and know the intimate details of their area’s history are even more intriguing to me. I met an interesting woman while researching the Galena, Oregon area for my first published novel, Marshal in Petticoats. Someday, I plan to spin her into a heroine in one of my books. She and her husband ran the last pack train into the highest mountain mining areas.  She showed me photo albums of their mules and the loads they packed to the miners. 

She also told me a fact that figured into, Marshal in Petticoats, and solidified my setting.  The miners hated to waste time traveling down the mountain to, what was then Susanville, to get their mail. So one night, they snuck down and stole the post office, building and all.  The town didn’t go up and take the post office back; they just renamed their town. Learning this, I knew I had to put my accident-prone heroine in this town.

Visiting a local Oregon historical museum in The Dalles, while researching the second Halsey brother book, Outlaw in Petticoats, I met another woman who had lived her entire life in The Dalles area.  We started chatting as I waited for a museum employee to bring me a map of the town in 1887. The woman was a volunteer and loved to talk about her home.  After telling her I was interested in one of the hotels prominent at the time of my book, she told me about various pieces of it that were scattered around town and how the bar had finger holes drilled in the bottom of it, so men who drank too much could shove their fingers in the holes and still remain standing.  I found the bar, and sure enough, there were holes spaced just right to stick fingers in, and leaning back, you wouldn’t fall down. And yes, that little tidbit is in Outlaw in Petticoats.

What are some of your favorite ways to research? When reading a historical do you want the cold hard facts or do you like the unusual trivia?

If you’re interested in reading excerpts and reviews about my books or just entering my June contest head on over to my website at: http://www.patyjager.com

Paty is giving away an autographed copy of Perfectly Good Nanny to one lucky reader drawn from the comments this weekend!

TO ORDER PATY’S BOOKS FROM AMAZON, CLICK ON THE COVERS ABOVE