Where do characters come from? My protagonist, Mary Boland, in Shanty Gold, came purely from my dreams. Dreams I had from the time of my childhood about a beautiful young woman with wild, red hair riding a horse bareback along the Irish seacoast. She was easy. But how about when you need a villain—a consummate […]
Blog
If you ever fly across the seas to Ireland,
And I’m hoping, dear friend, that you will. As I’ve told you, the Emerald Isle is my favorite vacation destination. Italy comes a very close second. In the 1950s during his first visit to Ireland, Johnny Cash wrote the song Forty Shades of Green, but that doesn’t do justice to flying over […]
Continue reading If you ever fly across the seas to Ireland,
Why A Famine With A Sea Full of Fish?
I used to wonder why the Irish, starving during the Great Famine, didn’t simply go out in their boats and catch some fish. Were they ignorant or something? I mean, potatoes are nice, but fish is divine. Forgetting that their harbors were owned by the British and all the fish they caught were […]
Technology REALLY Stinks!
Earlier, I wrote about changing email delivery systems for my blogs and how confusing it gets to be a non-Geek operating in a Geek world. Well, it’s gotten worse. I can’t say I’d rather be starving in Ireland like my ancestors did in Shanty Gold, but I sure think life […]
Turn It Over
I sing at funerals. That scares me sometimes because it reminds me of my hometown wakes and funerals when the same old ladies would put on their black dresses and show up. It was kind of a joke in our Irish-American community. My mother called them crepe hangers. It was, we thought, their one social […]
Medical Arrogance and Ignorance in the mid-19th Century
In Shanty Gold’s mid-19th century time period, many women died during or immediately after childbirth from something called “childbed fever.” Since this was years before Louis Pasteur discovered the existence of germs in 1888, the physicians of the day would blithely go from an autopsy to a delivery room without washing their hands or […]
Continue reading Medical Arrogance and Ignorance in the mid-19th Century
Technology Stinks!!
Okay, some of you have complained that you get a notice of a new post and then, when you click it, it’s not there. To fix this problem, I’m now sending out my email notices about blogs by MailChimp. Every Wednesday afternoon, you’ll get a notice of a new blog by me, but it’ll say […]
Irish Toasts
As you have probably heard, the Irish love a good toot! And what’s a good toot without a good toast? So, here are a few I’ve collected during my travels to the Emerald Isle. Some of them come from a book by Padraic O’Farrell. Whiskey, you’re the divil. You’re leading me astray— Over […]
Triumph and Tragedy of Cobh
In 1849, when 13-year-old Mary Boland sailed off on The Pilgrim’s Dandy for Boston, the Cork Harbor was in the midst of an identity crisis. Because that was the year Queen Victoria visited Ireland and the British wanted to change the name of the port from Cove to Queenstown in her honor.
A boy named Kam
photo courtesy of FlickR As Mary Boland contemplates suicide after her brutal rape by three crew members of the Pilgrims Dandy coffin ship, she looks down and sees two black feet standing before her. It is a boy, darker than anyone she has ever seen in her life. She recoils in terror from the boy, […]