Belated Celebration

Last Friday I was too busy mounting pictures for the coming art show of the students in my after school art class at the community center to post my small celebrations.

But I do have one!

My poem, "Hold On", is in the new spring/summer anthology of The Stray Branch. The Anthology is $10.00 and chock full of good stories and poems. Check it out HERE.



You can read other neat celebrations at Lexa Cain's blog, sponsored by L.G. Keltner @ Writing Off The Edge and Katie @ TheCyborgMom . Also you can link up to other sites and add your own link. Enjoy. Be sure and visit Lexa's blog.

Meanwhile, please visit my other blog, Elizabeth Varadan's Fourth Wish, (next door, so to speak), for a review of Terry Shames wonderful mystery series.

Celebrating Helpful Friends and Student Work

Last week I signed up for Lexa Cain's blog hop: Celebrate the Small Things. I'm a great believer in noticing and being thankful for things that happen daily and weekly as well as the big events, so I like the idea of this blog hop very much.

This Week
1. I received so much helpful advice from online friends for technical questions I had (I'm not very "techie").

2. I met new friends in connection with my book that's coming out in June, Imogene and the Case of the Missing Pearls.

3. My art club students selected their art for our coming art show in March, and while I've been so pleased by the work of these students week-to-week, seeing their selections all together (a variety of lessons represented), I was dazzled all over again. They are ages 7 to 13, and I've posted some of their work on my Facebook from time to time.

What I love about this class is how committed they are to their work. Here are some

This was for El Dia de los Meurtos

samples: A few times I've forgotten to take my camera with me to the community center where the class is held. So not every lesson is represented here.

Baby Animals

Meawhile, the the link to Lexa Cain's blog hop is HERE, where you'll meet lots of other people celebrating meaningful things in their lives,





and the co-hosts of the blog hop:
L.G. Keltner @ Writing Off The Edge
Katie @ TheCyborgMom

More art work samples:

Native American Art

Sunset Silhouettes

         Hope you have enjoyed these! Please vist Alexa's site, and  please leave a comment here about what you are celebrating this week. 

Harlem Renaissance and the
work of Wm. H. Johnson

And while we're talking about Sherlock . . .

At RADIO TIMES You can read a very thorough and well-written article by Lynette Porter about Benedict Cumberbatch. He's up for an Oscar after already winning so many awards. (Click on Radio Times to read the article.)

Lynette Porter is one of many fine writers published by MX Publishing, a UK based publisher that specializes in books related to Sherlock Holmes or Conan Doyle.



She has written two books about Cumberbatch,  that you see above. You can learn more about them, HERE.

Happy reading.

Are you a Sherlock fan? If so, who is your favorite Sherlock? Are you a Benedict Cumberbatch fan? If so, which is your favorite role he's played?

Additionally, I've joined Lexa Cain's "Celebrate the Small Things", a really nice blog hop where you do just that -- celebrate small things. And my celebration is for some lovely news about another book I've written. Too early to say more, but keep posted. Meanwhile, why not link up to Lexa's Friday celebrations and join others' celebrations too. HERE'S THE LINK to Lexa's blog.

In the Footsteps of Sherlock

             

There are two new sleuths on Baker Street, trained and mentored by none other than Sherlock himself.
                 

            This charming book is a fun introduction to Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson for middle grade readers, although ten-year-old twins Jimmy and Emma MacDougal are the real stars in the tale that unfolds. The twins live across the street from Sherlock Holmes and help him solve cases. 

            As the book opens, Jimmy and Emma and their parents are sitting down to dinner with Holmes and Watson as Holmes’s guests. Suddenly, a huge blimp appears outside the window. A moment later a giant rock hurtles through the window with a message from someone signed “The Mad Bomber”, demanding money to keep London safe. Of course more than money is involved in the Mad Bomber’s scheme, but no spoilers here. 

            Soon the twins are tracking down information about the airship, which puts them on the trail of the mad bomber himself. Emma notices small, telling details that add up to serious clues; Jimmy goes undercover and wears disguises. Both of them are shrewd thinkers and quick witted like their mentor. (And they need to be at one point when they find themselves in a particularly dangerous situation.)

            Set in Victorian London, the plot is fast-paced with enough twists and turns and clues to keep a reader guessing to the last. The black and white illustrations show vehicles and costumes of the era with a contemporary flair that young people will like. A nice touch is the occasional glossary of terms like “monocle” or “hansom cab”,  shown in illustrated footnotes at the bottom of some pages.

            The mystery has a satisfying conclusion, and the good news is that there is more to come. A sequel in the series, Attack of the Violet Vampire, will be released September 9, 2015. Watch for it. It’s also available for pre-order HERE .

You can order The Amazing Airship Adventure HERE and HERE

You can contact the author and illustrator at their website: 

   

You can contact Derrick on Facebook          

                    or Twitter with just one click . . .

The Game is Afoot

Before reading my post, have a look HERE at Grace Elliot's post on coffee in Victorian London.

Meanwhile, regarding the picture on the right, how did this come about? Why is this woman dressed like . . . Sherlock Holmes?

It all started with a visit a few years ago to my cool brother, Nathan, and his classy wife, Mary, when they were living in Luton, England. (My brother has passed away since then and is sorely missed. My sis-in-law now lives in Bristol, and Rajan and I enjoyed a visit with her last summer.)

Classy lady and cool guy

But back to that earlier visit: While I was there, they took me to see the Sherlock Holmes Museum on Baker Street. 

As you can see, it's done up very nicely: There was even a bobby at the door - just keeping an eye on things, I'm sure:

The museum

The Bobby

And a little seed was planted in my imagination that slowly began to grow. And that little seed finally turned into a book--A middle grade mystery that's going to be published by MX Publishing in June! 

MX Publishing is based in UK, but has a division in the US. The company specializes in Sherlock Holmes related books. Sherlock fan that I am, I am probably going to go broke shopping there, because there is such a wonderful selection: You'll see what I mean if you go HERE for their UK site or HERE for their US site.

In the meantime, that visit led to a middle grade mystery: Imogene and the Case of the Missing Pearls. Please keep it in mind when June rolls around. (You can read some reviews of it HERE under the Product Description section. And you can pre-order now if you wish.)

Meanwhile, how about you? Has an event during a visit to someone ever sparked a new book idea for you? Are you a fan of Sherlock Holmes? Fan fiction? Historical fiction?

Due to Travels, Currently Posting at My Other Blog, Elizabeth Varadan's Fourth Wish

To My Blog Friends,

Right now we are in Spain, and I am also working on my "cosy mystery", set in Portugal, so my posting is being done mainly on my other blog, Elizabeth Varadan's Fourth Wish. You can go right to it by clicking on it in the upper righthand margin. I hope to get back to Victoriana soon, but Iberia is saturating my imagination.

Hope to see you next door!

Henry David Thoreau

This retouched photo of a
painting is in the Public Domain

I have Thoreau on my mind today, because yesterday I finished reading the latest middle grade fantasy by jane Langton in her Hall Family Chronicles, The Dragon Tree. 

Before I launch into Thoreau, let me just tell you a bit about this series and why I like the books in it so much. The eccentric Hall family live at 148 Walden Street, in Concord, MA. Professor Frderick Hall heads the family and is forever working on a book about Thoreau. His wife, Professor Alexandra Hall, manages to keep everyone else calm and focused, while being extremely absent-minded herself. The three children, Eleanor (currently in Paris), Edward (now in high school), and Georgie (now in sixth grade), periodically take on righteous causes, inspired by their father's devotion to Emerson and to Thoreau (whose bust graces a stand in the front hall). 

In The Dragon Tree, a strange family moves in next door to the Halls. The wife collects stuffed and mechanical animals. The young girl with them seems to live a Cinderella life (before the arrival of the fairy godmother). And the husband, Mortimer Moon, is the new tree warden in town. Almost immediately, he starts cutting down the local trees. Shortly after he fells the trees in his own yard, a mysterious little plant pushes up from the ground between his house and that of the Hall family, growing at an amazing pace. Soon it turns into a sapling, and then a tree, and then a bigger tree. It turns out to be the dragon tree of the book title; an enchanted tree: Thoreau's "dragon tree".  (And if you want to know what that means, you'll have to read this delightful book and maybe a little of Thoreau as well.) 

Jane Langton has written twelve books about the Hall family, and each one offers a different kind of magic. Evil is confounded in each book by the characters in this family, but it's a different kind of evil: the kind you might encounter in real life. Refreshingly, these books don't require a dystopian universe to engage a reader, and the magic differs in each book, drawing a reader into a new adventure where good hearts win the day. You can find her books and reviews Here and Here .

And now to Thoreau: 

In the public domain.
Picture is by his sister.

All my life I had heard about (and read parts of) his most famous book, Walden, basically a spiritual quest, eschewing distractions of the cluttered life in favor of what one can learn from living simply in nature. When I was growing up, my mother had a copy of this. She was also enamored of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a transcendentalist. What I didn't realize then was that Thoreau, too, was a transcendentalist. The transcendentalists believed in the inherent goodness of individuals and that corruption came from entrenched institutions -- a point that resonates with me these days, considering the state of today's politics. They believed that people are at their best when they are independent. (My mother treasured her copy of Emerson's Self Reliance, along with her copy of Walden.)

I didn't realize that Thoreau was an ardent abolitionist and that a great deal of his writing addressed the cause. I was aware of his Civil Disobedience. Mohandas Ghandi (Mahatma Ghandi) took inspiration from this philosophy. Later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., took his inspiration from Ghandi -- testimony to the power of great ideas to reach across time and space and kindle the flame of justice in the human heart. Ghandi and King have been two of my heroes, and it's wonderful to realize that the ideas of this fairly quiet man from Massachussettes were able to emit such a beam of light a century later.

He was also a poet, and you can read his poems HERE 
He had quite a range: Some of the poems are philosophical, some ironic and humorous, and some quite clearly paeons to nature in all her beauty. 

How about you? Has any novel or piece of fiction turned your thoughts to a famous historical or literary figure? Is there any author you thought you knew about suprised you by their other writings?
Please share your thoughts.