GUEST POST CALEB PIRTLE III

I was really pleased when Caleb accepted my invitation to be a guest here. He has consistently supported my work. Each new book that comes out, he’s promoted it on his page. I was especially thrilled when he named me as one of the Top Ten Writers of Women’s Adventure You Need To Be Reading.  And added ‘Her books are filled with action, intrigue, adventure, and danger’. With an accolade like that, I can’t wait to share news of Caleb’s latest book with you.

You know that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when a reader likes your books? I’m suffering a shock feeling right now, as I’ve just researched Caleb and he’s an author of note and then lots, lots more. I’ve included his bio below so please take a look at that too. He was far too modest to include that in the blurb he sent me.

Lost Side of an Orphan’s Moon was published last month – I’ve downloaded it just now. This is Caleb’s description.

This is a story that has haunted me for a long time. It’s true. It happened during the East Texas Oil boom in my hometown of Kilgore. After all of these years, the story has finally found life, forming the backbone of my new novel, Lost Side of An Orphan’s Moon, the third book in The Boom Town Saga.

It’s historical. It’s a mystery. As I wrote about the book:  Who is the small boy who stepped off the train with a paper note attached to his coat that said: My name is Ollie Porter. My daddy is Oliver Porter. He works in the oilfields. Does anyone know where he is? Is the boy connected to the fancy dancer or, perhaps, the killer? Or is he just a waif in search of a home? 

The true story is just as mysterious. The boy was a fresh face in the midst of strangers, a new face chilled by the rains, and the rains showed no sign of ever stopping. He stepped from the train, lost and alone. He had been that way for a long time. He was only nine years old.

I found his story on the back page of a Kilgore newspaper printed in 1932. The pages were yellowed. The words were fading. The story had already faded. The story was gone. And I grieved for the boy.

The newspaper story was a short one. One column. One paragraph. Small headline. An afterthought, maybe. Newspaper layouts always had a little hole from time to time.

Some reporters filled it.

He wrote of a frightened little boy who shyly stepped off the train and into mud that was piled ankle-deep on Kilgore’s streets.   On the boy’s jacket was a tag, and on it someone had written the lad’s name and the name of his daddy.

His fare had paid his way to Kilgore. He would go no farther. And he had no idea where to do next, surrounded by strangers and faces he had never seen before.

His mama had packed him up like a suitcase and sent him for hundreds of miles down an endless railroad track to find his daddy. His daddy was working in the oilfield. That’s all his mama knew.

His daddy could feed him. She couldn’t. She was penniless and destitute. The boy’s only hope was to find his daddy.

Did he? I never knew, and the missing pieces haunt me.

In Lost Side of an Orphan’s Moon, I write the fictional account of a lost boy on an oilfield town’s street. In every piece of fiction, there is always a nugget of truth.

Buy link:  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B088KV1VFK

About Caleb Pirtle III

Caleb Pirtle III lives in the present but prefers the past. He is the author of more than eighty books, including four noir thrillers in the Ambrose Lincoln series: Secrets of the Dead, Conspiracy of Lies, Night Side of Dark, and Place of Skulls. Secrets and Conspiracy are also audiobooks on audible.com. All of the novels are set against the haunting backdrop of World War II. His Lonely Night to Die features three noir thrillers in one book, following the exploits of the Quiet Assassin, a rogue agent who has fled the CIA. He takes the missions no one else wants. He is expendable, and he knows it.
His award-winning Boom Town Saga includes Back Side of a Blue Moon, the story of a con man who comes to a dying East Texas town during the Great Depression, promises to drill for oil, and falls in love with a beautiful woman who just may have killed her husband. In Bad Side of a Wicked Moon, the lawless have come to the oil patch, and justice has left town.
Pirtle also wrote Friday Nights Don’t Last Forever, the story of a high school quarterback whose life spins into turmoil during his entanglements with illegal college recruiting, and Last Deadly Lie is the chilling story of the gossip and scandal that threatens to break a church apart in the midst of greed, jealousy and murder.
Pirtle is a graduate of The University of Texas in Austin and became the first student at the university to win the National William Randolph Hearst Award for feature writing. Several of his books and his magazine writing have received national and regional awards.
Pirtle has written two teleplays: Gambler V: Playing for Keeps, a mini-series for CBS television starring Kenny Rogers, Loni Anderson, Dixie Carter, and Mariska Hargitay, and The Texas Rangers, a TV movie for John Milius and TNT television. He wrote two novels for Berkeley based on the Gambler series: Dead Man’s Hand and Jokers Are Wild. He wrote the screenplay for one motion picture, Hot Wire, starring George Kennedy, Strother Martin, and John Terry.
Pirtle’s narrative nonfiction, Gamble in the Devil’s Chalk is a true-life book about the fights and feuds during the founding of the controversial Giddings oilfield and From the Dark Side of the Rainbow, the story of a woman’s escape from the Nazis in Poland during World War II. His coffee-table quality book, XIT: The American Cowboy, became the publishing industry’s third bestselling art book of all time.
Pirtle was a newspaper reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and served ten years as the travel editor for Southern Living Magazine. He was editorial director for a Dallas custom publisher for more than twenty-five years.
He and his wife, Linda, live in the rolling, timbered hills of East Texas. She is the author of two cozy mysteries.

I am so proud to have you as my guest this week Caleb.

Lucinda

GUEST POST REBECCA BRYN

I am a massive fan of this week’s guest and I can only shout GET HER BOOKS!  I’ve read all but one, I have her latest on pre-order, and I’m thrilled I asked her to be my guest this week as I see one book I’ve not read – how did that slip through the net?  Over to Rebecca in her own words.

Thank you, Lucinda, for letting me loose on your blog. According to my document recovery pane, this version was created on January 1^st 1601 at 1 o’clock in the morning. I don’t remember being up at 1am, but it was New Year, and the 17^th century was pretty boisterous, so maybe…

As you know, I live in West Wales with my husband and rescue dog and love walking and painting in watercolour. Living close to the sea, painting it in all its moods has become second nature. I love the wild beaches and moorlands of Pembrokeshire.

I began writing some fifteen years ago, although I didn’t published my first novel until 2014. So much has happened since then, I can’t believe it has only been six years. I write mainly historical fiction though I’ve dabbled in mystery and post-apocalyptic. I’ve always loved history and am fascinated by the way our past has shaped our present. At school, I studied British history, mainly from the Plantagenet kings to James II of England although the Anglo-Saxon era and the Tudor period were my favourites. As I’ve grown older, it’s been more recent history, especially social history that has drawn me in. It began with me deciding to try to discover if there was any truth in a family story about a poacher who murdered a gamekeeper and was transported to Van Diemen’s Land, and my addiction grew from there.

The tale about the family my mother called ‘loose-knickered, murdering thieves’ was true, the research fascinating, and it spawned an epic love story set in 1841, the trilogy For Their Country’s Good.

From there, I researched my grandfather’s army career and his own love story. He and his horse were sent to Egypt and Palestine during WW1. Again, the research blew me away, taught me much about myself, and gave his wartime mementos – his army fork and two cowrie shells that I treasure – a special significance. The Dandelion Clock was born.

Not wanting to ignore my father’s family, I researched for Kindred and Affinity and a marriage that went against church law and risked damnation to eternal hell. Surely that must have been true love for people of strong faith to risk damnation?

With any research for a novel, you discover a lot you didn’t suspect and much that shocks – that’s the joy of writing for me, learning something new that increases my understanding of who I am and how my world got where it is. In the time periods about which I’ve written, social injustice, the inequality and lack of rights of women, poverty, and oppression were subjects so ingrained in the periods I couldn’t ignore them, so it’s no surprise that my stories embrace these everyday challenges of the ordinary working people who built Britain by the sweat of their labour. I don’t write about the aristocracy, or royalty, or those in power, just about the lives and loves of the life blood of the country: the farm labourers, the boot makers, the lace makers, the common soldier, the women interred in Auschwitz, the girl left at home looking after the children, the poacher, the doctor, the schoolmistress, the quarry worker, and most recently, the women chainmakers of the Black Country.

Touching the Wire was inspired by a TV news report about Nazi war criminals and my latest book, The Chainmakers’ Daughter, was similarly inspired by a TV article on Flog It!

Can I tell you a bit about the chainmakers? In the early 1900s, women, and girls from the age of about four, full-time from the age of ten, made dog chains, cow chains, and horse traces working in backyard forges. They lived in abject poverty, literally on the bread line as bread was all they could afford. They worked ten or twelve hours a day to earn about four shillings a week – that’s 20p in decimal money. It was enough to buy about twelve to sixteen loaves of bread a week depending on whether the bread was at summer or winter prices. Can you image working some fifty-four to sixty hours for a dozen loaves of bread? I found that shocking. The Chainmakers’ Daughter is Rosie’s story, a girl who joins the fight against the rich chain masters for a legal minimum wage that ended in one of the most important strikes of the 20^th century and paved the way for the National Minimum Wage that we enjoy today.

“Some make chains. Some wear them.” Rosie Wallace survives on three slices of bread a day. Scarred by flame and metal, she makes her life as her ancestors have: making chains for the rich chain master, Matthew Joshua. There is no hope for a better future. No hope even for a green vegetable on the table. Her life will be making chains, marrying Jack, the boy she loves, and babies every year. But when an assault by the chain master’s son threatens the very fabric of her tenuous existence, Rosie finds the courage and the reason to fight for her very life and the lives of her family and neighbours. Set in the first decade of the 20th century The Chainmakers’ Daughter is a haunting portrayal of abject poverty, ever-present death, and modern day slavery.

This lovely review was sent me from one of my beta readers, Rachael Wright, author of the Captain Savva Series.

‘Rebecca Bryn’s The Chainmakers’ Daughter is not only the most vivid and haunting portrayal of the 20th century struggle for workers and women’s rights but it is also timely and a mirror to our own modern struggles. Bryn’s novel is to be lauded for its attention to historical detail and its sharp depiction of true and crippling poverty but it is first and foremost a love story. Rosie Wallace is a woman both out of time and very much in time. Bryn has managed to produce a heroine that is recognizable as a feminist to modern readers and yet not a unicorn to the early 1900s. The Chainmakers’ Daughter is quite simply one of the most compelling and haunting works I have read in years. Characters, vices, and even steel comes alive under Bryn’s fingers and the chain of love she creates is nothing short of miraculous.’

To say this made my day is an understatement.

The Chainmakers’ Daughter is available as an e-book now for pre-order at http://mybook.to/ChainmakersDaughter and will be released on June 28^th 2020. It will also be available as a paperback.

In a moment of madness, I also wrote an illustrated step-by-step how-to book, Watercolour Seascapes as my alter-ego, Ruth Coulson. Available in paperback only.

Books by Rebecca Bryn: all as e-books and paperbacks.

Historical fiction

http://mybook.to/TouchingtheWire – the women and children of Auschwitz and a man who tied to save them. – ‘Outstanding storytelling.’ IAN Book of the Year 2019. Also available as an audiobook.

http://mybook.to/DandelionClock – war changes everything. Lovers torn apart by WW1. Can their love survive the horrors of war and five years apart? – ‘Totally compelling and unmissable.’

For Their Country’s Good series – three young poachers are convicted of killing a gamekeeper and exiled to Van Diemen’s Land. Ella is the girl who wouldn’t be left behind. – ‘Truly exceptional trilogy from one of the finest writers of our time.’

http://mybook.to/OnDifferentShores

http://mybook.to/BeneathStrangeStars

http://mybook.to/OnCommonGround

and the box set of For Their Country’s Good

http://mybook.to/FTCGboxset

http://mybook.to/KindredandAffinity – When the man you love marries the sister you hate. Annie Underwood lets faith and family bigotry get in the way of love, and lets Edwin go to prevent escalating their families’ war and to save his heart. She is distraught when she loses him to her estranged sister who has no such qualms. ‘Gritty and realistic.’

Mystery

http://mybook.to/SilenceoftheStones – Can Alana discover the secret written in the stones before her daughter is sacrificed by an eccentric old lady? Perjury, wrongful imprisonment, and a tissue of lies. – ‘Beautifully choreographed tale of murder, deceit, and redemption.’

Post-apocalyptic

http://getbook.at/WhereHopeDares – When a young healer is kidnapped to fulfil an ancient prophecy, her husband heads into peril to rescue her and discovers that prophecy can be dangerous. ‘Holy cow!! – What an amazing book.’

Non-fiction by Ruth Coulson

http://mybook.to/WatercolourSeascapes – a how-to book with six detailed step-by-step demonstrations to paint seascapes in watercolour. Tackles the difficult subject of using masking fluid. ‘A lovely book. The techniques work well.’

Website: www.rebeccabrynblog.wordpress.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/rebecca.bryn.novels

Twitter: www.twitter.com/rebeccabryn1

IAN: www.independentauthornetwork.com/rebecca-bryn

Amazon: http://author.to/RebeccaBryn

Thank you for reading, and if you pick up one of my books, I’d love to know what you think of it.

Thank you so much Rebecca for being my guest this week and for such an interesting chat.

If you are an author and would like a guest spot, then leave a comment below, or pm me via Facebook, or through my email, and you can find this on my website.

Lucinda

GUEST POST – RAY WILCOX

There are many of us living here on the Costa Blanca who are writing books. I first met Ray when we shared a table together at a local Christmas charity fair. Since then we’ve kept in touch and attended book launches and plan to travel to Valencia to give a presentation to students about books and writing. (When the lockdown allows). We both worked on the same local radio show until the owners returned to the UK. Ray’s books are based on his years working for Her Majesty’s Prison Service.  – In his own words.

I was born in the early hours of 17 July 1949 in Peckham, South London. My early years seem to go from bad to worse and I would describe my family situation as broken. I´m presently writing about those early years and hope to let it see the light of day before too long.

My working like began in 1965 at Daily Mirror newspapers in High Holborn. I left for pastures new at Charles Barker Recruitment in 1973. In 1975 I joined HM Prison Service and it turned out to be my life´s work.

When I retired in 2005 I was a governor. During the 30 plus years, I had worked in 25 prison establishments as well as HQ. I met some incredible people, both staff and prisoners.

We moved to our new villa in Spain one week after I retired, a decision we have never regretted.

I have been writing poetry since 1965 and decided to have a go at writing a book in 2010. A creative writing course put me on the right track.

My first novel Lock-Down Blues was published in 2014. It was a crime thriller based in a prison in NE England. My second novel Unlock These Hands was published in 2018 and is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats. I still have copies of both books. I´m presently working on a third which will complete the trilogy.

We love to travel the world and are happy when we return home to Spain.

You can contact Ray on his web site www.ray-wilcox.com    

Ray’s books are one of the few paperbacks I have on my shelves. Look him up.