BÉESO DAH YINÍLJAA

 

Because I live in New Mexico and sometimes write about it, an article in the Albuquerque Journal in mid-August caught my eye.

BÉESO DAH YINÍLJAA

My accent marks are not quite right because I don’t have a Navajo keyboard and they’re not standard on the Alt code charts.

Here’s the translation: “A Fistful of Dollars”, which has been dubbed in Navajo through the efforts of the director of the Navajo Nation Museum, Manny Wheeler. This is one of the steps he’s taken to keep the language alive (there are no subtitles). Previously, “Star Wars” and “Finding Nemo” had been translated into Navajo.

The translators and voice actors were all Navajo. The challenge in translating is finding the right word, 
according to Wheeler: “…Native languages are more complex than the English language. With ‘Star Wars’, we had to translate lightsaber. We have many words that fit that translation. We had to pick the right one.”

For more examples of Navajo (Diné) language see: http://navajopeople.org/blog/my-mother-navajo-language-lesson/

Don’t expect to learn it. I’m told if you didn’t grow up around Navajo speakers, you’ll never get it quite right.  

Get free books for your autumn reading and maybe win nifty stuff

When was the last time you heard someone use "nifty" in a sentence (or anywhere else)? See  the Third Annual Fall into a Book giveaway event, below, for how you can enter

First, the free books: 

Two of my books will be available for free in The Must Read Historical Romance promo (9/15/2022 – 10/15/2022) if you subscribe to my newsletter on the signup form on Bookfunnel.

A Peculiar Enchantment (release date 12/6/2020; you'll be seeing it before the buying public):  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/gyfihfmvld

A Westminster Wedding:  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/qhj0tetblh

Both are also available on Booksirens in exchange for a review when you’ve read them.

A Peculiar Enchantment (release date 12/6/2020; you'll be seeing it before the buying public): https://booksirens.com/book/GN2ZF4D/YOJGY8S

A Westminster Wedding:  https://booksirens.com/book/FJUHJD6/P1H3US6

And don’t forget that entrants in  the Isn't It Romantic Book Club's Third Annual Fall into a Book giveaway event on Facebook can win loot.

 Over 200 authors are giving away...well, whatever they want to...to the winning entrants. Here’s how it works:

On Friday, September 23, go to facebook.com/groups/isntitromanticbookclub.

Each author will make one post: maybe there will be a game to play or a question to answer or whatever the author decides to do that will call for a response or comment of some sort. 

I plan to pose 4 easy (opinion) questions. My four winners will be able to choose which one of my seven published historical romances they want. Reader warning: none of them contain explicit sex scenes. Sometimes they contain mild bad language (i.e., not as bad as you’d hear on a middle-school playground, probably).

On Saturday, September 24, each author will choose their winner or winners and notify them by friending and tagging or messaging them. 

I'm looking forward to it.

Chance to win books or other swag

 Here's fun for readers of romance novels: chances to win books or cool stuff. Over 200 authors are participating and each will decide what prize they'll award. I'll be offering four of my entrants a choice of whichever one of my seven published works they'd like: An Unsuitable Duchess, Captain Easterday’s Bargain, A Masked Earl, A Duke’s Daughter, Portia & the Merchant of London, A Westminster Wedding, and Most Secret.

There's only one day to enter: September 23, 2022.

Enter to win a signed copy of A Westminster Wedding

 

I meant to write a longer post about this but I've spent the weekend checking galleys for A Peculiar Enchantment and I now need a nap.  

https://www.historicaltimes.org

 You can enter here from 8/14/22 to 8/21/22:   https://rfr.bz/M4im5s9

L𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗨𝗦𝗔, 𝗖𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗱𝗮, 𝗔𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗮 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗨𝗞 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆.

Tagline: A new life...for a few more lies.

 

Where are the foods of yesteryear?

"Hard Times and Hardtack" was going to be the title of my article on Civil

War food for Historical Times Magazine. The title apparently failed to please but the magazine and the article will be out on August 1, 2022. 

https://online.1stflip.com/dssx/3jfn/  

I learned fascinating things while writing it. The following tidbits are among the 3,000 words I cut: 

 American cuisine did not spring into existence with the first colonists. They brought their cookbooks and their ideas of what food should be with them, whether they came from Great Britain, France, Spain, Holland (New York City was originally New Amsterdam, founded by the Dutch), or Africa (via the slave ships). 

The first American cookbook was published in 1796 and almost all of the recipes came from English cookbooks. In fact, even in the mid-nineteenth century, American breakfasts did not vary much from those suggested in the preeminent Victorian cookbook, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861). Any cold meat from the larder “can do duty at the breakfast table”, Isabella Beeton advises, as can potted meat or fish and meat pies. For hot dishes she recommends fish, kidneys, mutton chops, rump-steaks, eggs, muffins, toast, marmalade, butter, etc. The only real distinguishing feature of an American breakfast was the occasional appearance of corn, rice, and sweet potatoes. 

Mutton ham used to be a common dish in this country, as it was in Great Britain. Potted meat, potted pig’s head, salt cod, and cold mush sliced and fried appeared regularly in cookbooks. So did corn fritters, oddly renamed hush puppies in the late nineteenth century.  

A letter from Alexis de Tocqueville to his father dated December 20, 1831, written at Memphis, Tennessee after a trek through the wilderness shows us how primitive frontier food could be: 

…we happened upon a log cabin with chinks on every side through which a big fire could be seen crackling…Picture a fireplace half the width of the room…a bed; a few chairs; a six-foot-long carbine; a hunter’s accoutrements hanging on the log wall and dancing in the draught…the [two or three] poor Blacks served us at his behest: one presented us glasses of whisky, and another corncakes and a plate of venison. The third was sent off to fetch more wood. 

 From https://hudsonreview.com/2013/03/letters-from-america/#.YkG5qOfMIdU, retrieved 3/28/2022.

I finally have a newsletter! Plus you get...

 I'm a techno-dinosaur, perhaps because my mind is so often in the 1740s. For several years I've known I needed a newsletter because every writer does. And every time I thought of it, I went and did something productive: wrote a novel, or ate dulce de leche ice cream, or cleaned the toilet. The thought of figuring out how to set up a newsletter gave me a megrim. 

Illustration for Pamela by Samuel Richardson

I tried twice, unsuccessfully. The house was getting really clean. But after working on it again for several days, I finally succeeded
and sent out my first one. Here I am, preparing to post the first issue. There are still a few bugs to iron out but I'll fix them eventually. And after I hit the magic button and sent my chatty little letter off, I set up a "welcome" letter.

The advice for producing a newsletter that wouldn't be annoying was to put an "unsubscribe" widget at the top, in addition to the one that  automatically appears at the bottom. I tried to do this, but unfortunately, the actual instructions were written by computer geeks for computer geeks. I did not (and still do not) know what a widget is or where to find one, much less how to insert one. One of my less refined characters would probably have a pithy comment about that.

So I jury-rigged one by adding a line at the top that said something like, "If you ever want to unsubscribe, there's a button at the bottom of the page (because I can't figure out how to put one up here...)."

 Surely it should be easier to do this stuff than it is?  Oh, and by the way, the subscription thing is at the bottom of my website "landing page": https://18thcenturyromance.com/. There must be a way to put a button (or widget?) someplace else, too, but that's something I haven't figured out yet.  

And because this is a short post and I happen to have a couple of short reviews, here they are: 

16 Souls by John J. Nance is as good as a disaster novel can be. Even better, it’s a perfect blend of disaster novel and courtroom thriller. The story gripped me and the characters were believable.  I had things to do and places to go yesterday and instead I immersed myself in it until well after bedtime. 

The Pied Wizard of Regis Towne by Laura Strickland is a delightful fairy tale. Who could fail to be enchanted by the story of a self-respecting Rat transmogrified into a Man very much against his will? It’s all the things I enjoyed about fairy tales when I was a child, but with more humor and depth. I spent a thoroughly enjoyable evening with it and will be looking for more by Ms. Strickland. 

  

Hard Times and Hardtack

 As some of you may have noticed, I occasionally write about Georgian era food. This is not solely because I write novels set in the mid-eighteenth century. My fascination with the history of food began when I was nine or ten.  

My father was an excellent and imaginative cook, and should probably have been a chef instead of a rate and tariff analyst. Even so, I might not have caught the culinary research bug but for two things. The first was that he began bringing home Gourmet Magazine. The other was that I loved to read and would read anything I could find. Read "above grade level"? Absolutely, including some books even I wouldn't recommend for children. My mother returned Fanny Hill to the friend who loaned it to her before I got very far into it. Just as well, perhaps. 

So of course I read Gourmet Magazine. At the time, it frequently ran articles on food history, which led to collecting old cookbooks which led to my volunteering to write about Civil War period food for Historical Times online magazine (https://www.historicaltimes.org/). That issue, Number 013 covering the Civil War, will be coming out in late autumn.

Mt. Harmon plantation kitchen at
World's End, Earleville, Maryland

Over the first six months of this year, I researched what people ate in the years leading up to and during the Civil War. Possibly I over-researched: Not only what they ate but why they ate it, how they cooked it, why a distinctive American cuisine took so long to develop, why maple syrup didn't really become a "thing" until after the Civil War, the effect of the Union blockade of Southern ports, and army logistics. 

I tried cooking a couple of the odder dishes. I studied dozens of nineteenth century cookbooks. Most were available on Google Play Books or from institutions for free, thank goodness. 

The first draft of  "Hard Times and Hardtack" ran to well over 5,000 words. The submitted version was down to 2,300, but nothing will be wasted. Some of the cut bits will be recycled as posts here or on my Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/anunsuitableduchess) or on Instagram (18thcenturyromance). 

And now that I'm no longer busy researching for the article, I plan to try making coconut pralines and a couple of other recipes I discovered, including one for sandwich cookies stuffed with coconut, pecans and raisins. 

Oh, and my eighth novel is in the editing stages. A Peculiar Enchantment is coming along faster than I expected. With luck maybe it will be released by the end of the year.

Love is the most peculiar enchantment.

.