Marsha Canham's Blog

I’m sure I’ve said it before but my Dad (the Chief) and I were huge fans of Westerns. When he heard that Bonanza was going to be produced in color, he threw out the monthly budget and bought the first color TV on the block. And yes, we had neighbors inside and we had them out on the porch pressing their noses to the window to catch a glimpse of the new invention.

Bonanza, Paladin, Wanted Dead or Alive, Jim Bowie, Roy Rogers, Rawhide, The Virginian were all his favorite TV programs. Even at a young age I learned to wrangle an extra half hour after bedtime, which was a seemingly inhumane 7:00 that kids today would laugh at, in order to watch one of the half hour westerns. Gunsmoke and Death Valley Days bought me a whole hour, as did Bonanza!

On the movie front, anything with John Wayne or Randolf Scott had the two of us heading out to a Saturday afternoon matinee armed with popcorn and root beer. My first real Halloween costume was a Dale Evans vest and a cowboy hat. All the boys in the neighborhood played Cowboys and Indians all weekend and scorned the thought of the only other girl, Francis Campbell, and myself joining in the hooting and hollering until we got cap guns (thank you Chief) and learned how to make bows and arrows out of twigs and string. The latter didn’t work very well, but add some hooting and feathers plucked from a duster and we looked pretty good. Those were the days, of course, when you could shoot a cap gun without having all the adults drop to the ground or call 911. And we could gather in a group of fearsome looking Cowboys and Indians and vanish all day without anyone wondering or worrying where we were staging our Custer’s last stand. Squished red berries and dirt was our friend, cuz of course you needed war paint and camouflage.

Everyone rode an invisible horse, so no one walked. We all galloped down the streets and around the yards. Sometimes one of the other kids would volunteer to be a horse, so they’d get reins tied around their chest and would have to prance and neigh as they were “ridden” down the street.

I’m pretty sure I kept my invisible horse until I was seven or eight, although by then we had moved out of our crowded neighborhood and into the barren wastelands of suburbia. Even so, there was a forest about a half mile away and I used to ride my Beauty in there, sometimes by myself, and sometimes with kindred spirits from the next block over. Cowboys and Indians had been replaced by Robin Hood and his Merry Men so horses weren’t so crucial to a full day of play. The homemade bows and arrows had become a little more sophisticated and it’s a wonder no one lost an eye.

All of this gives a bit of background to some of the things that influenced my writing in later years. The Robin Hood Trilogy came out of that pristine forest and watching episodes of Richard Greene’s Robin. Love of pirates came from Errol Flynn as Captain Blood. My one and only Western came from my love for the childhood memories spent sitting with the Chief hooting and hollering at the good guys in the white hats and the bad guys in the black hats.

Under the Desert Moon wasn’t written until I had several books under my gun holster. Not because I shied away from writing one, but because I knew the Chief would read it and I knew it had to have every cliche he loved, every element of every show he watched, every black and white hat I could cram into one book that would make HIM remember all those hours we spent together throwing popcorn at the screen. When he passed away, one of the clippings in his wallet was a review by Kathe Robin for Under the Desert Moon, where she said it was the Silverado of Westerns. She got what I was trying to do. And he loved it.

Miss you Chief. Every day.

Under the Desert Moon

I have always had a thing for Robin Hood. I watched the Richard Greene series when I was a kid and drooled over Errol Flynn in green tights and sequined epaulets. I’ve probably watched that movie a hundred times, and each time I see something new. A later version starring Kevin Costner was almost campier than the Flynn version, noted mostly for Kevin suddenly getting an English accent…or an attempt at one…halfway through. The version starring Russell Crowe was probably my second favorite. Gritty and more realistic in a movie-fiction sort of way. And then there was Robin and Marion with Audrey Hepburn and Sean Connery, a movie that did what none of the others did…it showed Robin dying and, frankly, it was the movie that gave me the title for The Last Arrow. In the Connery movie, said arrow was the one shot into the forest and where it landed was where Robin was supposedly buried. When I was writing my trilogy I couldn’t quite bring myself to kill my Robin off…mainly because MY Robin was a composite of many legends and stories that I tried to weave into one character who might possibly have come down through the centuries as Robin Hood. As cavalierly as I do tend to kill off characters, some of them important characters, I left each ending of each book on a HEA note.

Having said that, I’ve received reviews from readers who were disappointed not to read an actual Robin Hood story with Robin Hood as the main character. And to those gentle readers I did try to explain that there was no real man named Robin Hood. There were men who might have acted like Robin, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. There was an Earl of Huntington, and there was an Earl of Locksley, there was even a Robin Hode listed in dusty old ledgers, but each of them lived dozens of years apart. And if memory serves, none were around when Gisbourne was sheriff, because the sheriff of Nottingham at the time Robin would have active was a woman. Yes, a woman. Nicolaa de la Haye was as nasty and vile and corrupt as ever a woman could be. And she was a favorite of King John.

I enjoy writing fiction, and especially historical fiction, because I can let my imagination run a bit amok. At the time I was deciding what I wanted to write, a few factors came into play. One, of course, was my love of the Robin Hood legend. Two was the love of castles and jousting matches and medieval forests and outlaws and Richard the Lionheart etc etc. Third was a small paragraph I read in some obscure article about medieval England that mentioned the Lost Princess of Brittany. That was how she was referred to. No name, just the lost princess.

Well. If that wasn’t enough to make my ears perk up, a Sherlock Holmes type search of history books identified her as the Princess Eleanor, daughter to King Henry II’s middle son Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany. Keep in mind, this was back before clicking on a few buttons brought up scads of history documents on the internet. Noooo this was hours spent in the library slogging through history books trying to find out what happened to Eleanor and why she was NOT made the Queen of England after Richard’s death. Geoffrey would have been next in the line of succession, followed by his son Arthur and his daughter Eleanor. Geoffrey had the misfortune of dying, however, without ever wearing the crown. And, as it turned out, although Arthur and Eleanor raised an army to fight John for the crown, both were captured and imprisoned. John then removed Arthur from contention…some reports claim by his own hand…and Eleanor was tossed into a prison for the next seventeen years.

Granted, Queens were not popular in the ranks of the English barons, but then neither was King John, so it made me dig further and further to try to find out why Eleanor was never even rescued from the castle where she was held prisoner for so many years.

Enter the fourth reason why I set out to write my medieval trilogy.

From the age of maybe 14 or 15, I’d been having this very cool recurring dream. It always started the same, played out the same, unwound like a film with a climactic ending. In it, a young blonde woman was trapped or held prisoner in a cave of some sort. She is rescued by men dressed in monk’s cowls and led down a perilously steep cliff to a rocky shoreline below. Before they can reach the fishing boat waiting at the bottom, armored soldiers ambush them from behind a jumble of boulders and in the melee that follows, the girl tries to reach the boat, and just when she gets a hand on the gunwale, an arrow pierces her hand and traps it against the wood, dragging her under. That’s where the dream ended. Always. And I would have this dream once or twice a year and it was always so vivid my hand would hurt in the morning.

I was having lunch with my editor at the time, Maggie MacLaren, and I was telling her I was thinking about writing a medieval, I told her about my love of Robin Hood stories…and then I told her about the dream. She looked a little skeptical, but she asked if I had ever written any of it down. Of course, I hadn’t. Hadn’t even thought of writing it down because it was a dream. But she put the bug in my head and that, combined with what I had been doing to try to track down the lost princess and find out what happened to her…well…BOOM!

If you read Through A Dark Mist, the prologue is my dream, as vividly as I could recall it. I added some embellishments of course as the book started to take shape, the monks took on identities as did the blonde-haired woman. No, there was no mention of Robin Hood, but I did start peppering the story with some clues and names that would be familiar to Hoodies. I had to have a beginning for MY legend, a catalyst for the threads that would follow in the next two books. The one constant thread was the young Eleanor of Brittany who appears in Through A Dark Mist as a mere child, whose fate appears to be decided In the Shadow of Midnight, and whose destiny brings the whole tapestry of threads together in The Last Arrow.

I’m looking to the forest again, to castles in the clouds and dark knights. And I have the germ of an idea fomenting in my brain leading me down that misty path again…..

This has to be one of the weirdest weekends I’ve had in a long time, so what better way to celebrate than write a blog…something else I’ve not done in a long time. As I explained a little while ago on another social media site, it isn’t that I don’t have anything to say. In fact some people might think I say too much at times *snort*. It’s just that I don’t have anything *new* to say about events and happenings that have been discussed around the web whether to do with publishing or not. So I figure, if I have nothing new and insightful and pithy to add, don’t do it just to fill up empty space.

I envy bloggers who come up with new and insightful and pithy things to talk about every day. They’re the ones who do what the social media gurus tell them to do and keep their names front and center. Keep posting. Keep talking and someone is bound to hear you. But if you’re an author, God forbid don’t talk about your books because that would be the *hard sell* approach and that would be kind of like getting that phonecall at 5:32 just as you’re sitting down for dinner. You race over to answer it and get some sales pitch for duct cleaning.

So, just in case you DO need your ducts cleaned, I’m an author and I have written a few books and you can find them all on my website http://www.marshacanham.com

But if you don’t need your ducts cleaned, and you know for sure it’s some dumbass wanting to sell you something at 5:32, just answer the phone in a whisper: “It’s done but there’s blood everywhere, what should I do?” Repercussions? “Why yes, officer, I have a touch of laryngitis and I was cutting up a chicken…”

So, back to my strange weekend. It began on Thursday, when I had arranged to have some friends over to play cards. These are all ladies who migrate south for the winter, where we play cards at least once a week, often more, drink lots of wine, have lots of laughs. Up north, we’re all about an hour away from each other so the games are fewer and farther between. But Thursday was good. The son of one of the ladies has been working in my basement, getting my stained glass shop built and organized, so he was going to be here Thursday. And because her hubby was going to be installing the pot lights, he came Thursday as well to help drywall the ceiling (yay, no more crawling things falling out of the rafters!!!!!!) and do the lights. And because another one of the hubbies hadn’t seen my girls in a while (Suzie and Midget) he was invited to come along as well and bring his saw to cut down an overgrown dead tree-bush-thing. It was a pot luck thing so I didn’t really have to do a lot of prepping, but for some whacky reason I decided to make chicken wellingtons and to bake fresh bread.

A small digression here. I cook…and I cook rather well, I think. Meat, veggies, salads, hors doovers…those I can whip off in no time with great and tasty aplomb. Bread, pastry, cakes…in fact, deserts of any kind…nope. In 50 years of cooking I’ve had maybe five successful deserts that I can make without my guests looking at me with those polite little smiles they wear moments before they bust out laughing. And I admit it. I’m not a baker. However, one of my very very few successes is challah bread. I love eating it, as my hips will attest, and I actually enjoy making it. The smell while its baking is to die for as well. Thus, despite the lack of running around and cooking everything in sight for dinner, I only had to struggle with the puff pastry for the wellingtons and make the bread. The rest arrived with the guests, just like in Florida when we have our pot luck dinners. I mark this as pitfall #1.

Dinner was great, we all ate and laughed and while the ladies had played cards all afternoon, the men had worked at their various jobs. The dogs and I fell into bed around 2ish and woke up the next morning thinking ah, another fine sunny day. Took the dogs for a long walk, did some laundry, did some writing, and when it came time to relax in the evening, flicked on Netflix and found the next episode of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, a series I had discovered the previous evening whilst looking for something other than brain fodder to watch.

And therein lay pitfall #2, because I didn’t look at the program guide for the regular TV.

If you haven’t caught any episodes of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, you should. It’s an Australian show set in the 1920’s with THE most splendid costumes and old cars and Agatha Christie type murder mysteries. The police detective isn’t hard to look at either. Reminds me a little of the Thin Man series of movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Anyway, I watched half a dozen episodes then yawned my way to bed, and hit pitfall #3 because, although I looked at the program guide for the bedroom TV, it’s usually set on House Hunters or Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, and because I’m usually way past any news or weather, I don’t wander much farther than to choose between the two stations. Do I want to watch Guy Fieri eating his way through middle America, or do I want to drool over a spectacular house on a breathtaking beach in Maui where the house hunters whine because the counters aren’t granite. Really?

Woke up the next morning, went through my regular morning routine of get the coffee, let the dogs out, play hearts, rummy, and gummy drop on the ipad for an hour, get my second coffee and glare at the clock if it isn’t 9:00 yet. Not that anything special happens at 9:00, it’s just that one of these days I’m determined to sleep in that late. Hasn’t happened in about 30 years, but I live ever in hope.

That was when it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard the water softener kick in during the night. It’s located in the basement RIGHT under my bed, and at 2:30 every Saturday night, it sounds like a screaming hoard of banshees has invaded the cellar. I think perhaps the workers had unplugged it while they were in the basement, as had happened once before, so down I went to check. The light was on, the dufus was plugged in and working. Still had salt. Hmmm.

Back upstairs, I’m thinking: Father’s Day, so I sat out back sipping coffee, cuddling with the dogs, thinking about my dad and how much I miss him. He never got to see Jefferson get married, never got to see his two beautiful, terrific great-grandchildren. Never got to take a shovel to the back of Stupid’s head…

Ahem.

Yes, and so I went inside and posted a little poem on Facebook that I found, then sent an email to Jefferson inquiring about Payton’s graduation the next day. Since neither grandmother could get tickets (grrrrrr) I figure I can at least go to the house and take pictures before they leave. Not often you catch the Middle Canhams all dressed up in their finest *G*.

An email comes flying back from number one Son. The grad is Monday, not tomorrow.

Huh?

You know that weird tingly feeling that comes over you when you’ve just acknowledged a major dumbass moment. Yup. That was when it struck me that I lost a day. A whole day. Pitfall #1 when the Florida gang got together for cards and potluck. In Florida it doesn’t matter what day of the week it is, no one knows and no one really cares. Pitfall #2 going straight to Netflix which doesn’t give a date or time. Pitfall #3 leaving the channel on Triple D and not even bothering to pull up the TV guide.

As I think back, I know I went for a massage therapy appointment Friday afternoon, but for some reason, it didn’t stick with me as being Friday, it just sort of morphed into being Saturday. On the bright side, it doesn’t feel so much as if I lost a day, it feels more like I’ve gained a whole day! I get to do Sunday all over again!

This brings to mind another time when I got lost somewhere in the Twilight Zone. I was on deadline and hadn’t been out of my office for a full ten days other than to eat or sleep. We were invited out for the Saturday night and Stupid insisted that we go, so, grudgingly, with my mind in the Highlands strategizing a battle scene, we went to a friends house for dinner. I walked in and there were several other couples there, all of them sitting around, eyes glued to the TV. I figured it had to be something fascinating so I sat and watched for about five minutes, not really getting why they were all fixated on watching (boring) live footage of a white Bronco full of orange juice being followed down the highway by a dozen or so police cruisers.

Yup. Missed the whole OJ Simpson thing.

I know it’s been a while since I’ve contributed any pithy blogs, but a lot has happened this year to put me in take-time-off mood.

First and foremost was getting a total knee replacement. I’d been putting it off for a couple of years, but when the doc gave me that beady-eyed, silent glare, I knew my time was up. To all the people out there who say: Oh, I had it done, nothing to it…I say: BITE ME. Or better yet, let ME bite YOU.  It. Hurt. Like. Hell.  It also brought back very unfond memories of when I did the original damage to the knee and had to have surgery to get bone chips removed. Back then, it was a full cast, ankle to hip, for six weeks with stern warnings to rest and stay off it as much as possible. These days they heave you out of the bed within hours and expect you to hobble through the mind-blowing pain down a mile long hallway to the torture chamber (therapy room) where a big-breasted Valkyrie awaits. She takes no prisoners. Not even if they scream or faint. Not even if they stubbornly refuse to get out of the wheelchair and threaten her with an IV needle. THAT horror lasted four days instead of the two I was promised, and even then I told them if they didn’t get the paperwork in order I was leaving without any farking release forms.

At home, I expected to find rest and peace . Ever get put on a hospital ‘air’ bed? Its supposed to prevent bedsores and cramping but every time you move an eyelash it hisses while the air cushions adjust. And for someone like me who can hear a watch ticking three rooms away, it was HELL. And I haven’t even mentioned the food. AUGH! Over four days I had two little yogurts and a spoonful of peas. That was all that was edible. Thank goodness my son brought me sustenance from Tim Hortons.

Where was I? Oh yes, my angelic son. Faugh! All he had to hear was that recovery was quicker if the patient exceeds the required exercises each day and BLAM, he turned into a Nazi general. Tears didn’t affect him. Curses didn’t affect him. Threats didn’t affect him. Two and three times a day he loomed over me like Godzilla until I did the required repetitions the therapist ordered. And when HE wasn’t available, my loving granddaughter took his place, whip in hand. I swear neither of them knew how to count either. I hit ten and they were insisting it was only eight. Hmphf. New math.

HOWEVER. Despite the whining and whinging, I did end up thanking them for pushing me so hard. I exceeded the required measurements for bending the knee that the therapist wanted me to achieve week to week, and after six weeks, she signed off completely and gave me a gold star. As of today, I’m walking normally, no limp, and most of the swelling is gone. The scar is hideous and I set off alarm bells at the airport, but it’s relatively pain-free. Would I get the other knee done? Not unless they send a search party into the deep jungles of Bali and catch me in a big cargo net.

Another reason for blog-silence is because I have nothing much to add about the Amazon-Hatchette dispute. I shouldn’t say nothing much to add, just nothing much that is civil. For those who don’t know much about the dispute or don’t even know that one is going on, in a nutshell, one of the larger publishers, Hatchette, is pissed off at Amazon because Amazon wants them to lower the prices on their digital books. Lower prices=more sales. More sales=more readers=expanding fan base. Lower prices=happy readers. Happy readers=more sales. So what’s the problem? Double damned if I know. The publishing world just went through an enormous price-fixing court case wherein the Big Five were charged (and found guilty) of colluding to keep digital prices high. Afterward there was a flurry of discounted prices at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, and other fine distributors. The only hold out was Hatchette, who decided to keep their digital prices high…higher in some cases than the print version of the same book. Yeah, that makes sense. So Amazon, well within its rights as a distributor, has refused to deal with Hatchette, and for some reason known only to the pea-brain “bestselling NYTimes” authors who already have millions socked away in the bank, petitions have gone flying around decrying the horrible big bad meanie Amazon for punishing the poor innocent authors by standing firm against the publisher. These pea-brained authors even spent over a hundred thousand dollars on a full page ad in the NY Times whining and whinging over big bad meanie Amazon.

Really? Yes, Really. Whining over big bad meanie Amazon where most of their sales over the past few years have taken place, print and digital. Whining over a company who has helped more authors…like me…get a second chance at their careers by letting them self-publish. Whining over a company who treats their authors like a valuable commodity and pays them accordingly each month, not dribbling out crumbs cloaked in clauses like “reserves against returns” twice a year.

Maybe I just don’t get it. Maybe I should be thinking:  Higher prices=fewer sales=but happy publisher.

AND speaking of higher prices…as I predicted months ago, possibly even years ago…the utterly stupid trend of bundling ten full size novels into one volume and flogging it for .99 has finally come around to bite the authors in the ass. I have nothing against discounting books for my readers. I’ve done it many times and have even kept a free book out there (Across a Moonlit Sea), long after I intended to leave it free hoping to interest new readers enough to check out the other two books in the series. And it has helped to keep my sales numbers from slipping into an abyss. September is a notoriously slumpy month for sales across the board for everyone, but I’m not the only one convinced that part of the fault this year lies in the bundling fever.  As I mentioned recently to a yahoo group I belong to: I’ve been against the ten-books-for-99-cent bandwagon since it started rolling. The first few that came out were novel (no pun intended) and probably made out like bandits, so of course everyone under the sun scrambled to put bundles together to catch hold of the new money wagon. In the past six months alone, I was approached FIVE times, four of them by authors I’d never heard of before, but they were all salivating to get cheapie bundles out there.