Gale!

'Twas a dark and stormy night (for real)
And the wind was blowin' a gale (honest!)
And the Captain said to the First Mate (that's me ...)
Wife, are ye spinnin' a tale?
And this is the tale she told ... (to be continued on publication of first novel.)

So, I was actually working on my WIP (Lena Ladimer Chronicles: Bury the Dead) as the gale kicked up.  One minute, it's merely windy and the next- WOMPH!  The winds threw sheets of rain at the poor little cottage, and the ancient wooden structure creaked and moaned in protest. It was incomprehensible to me that electric service prevailed under the circumstances, but the lights merely flickered every now and then and I worked for quite a while. It turned out that this was a small gale with prevailing winds at 60 kilometers an hour.  A lot for our teeny cottage, though.

After a while, I began to feel small and exposed, sitting at my table in front of double windows with nature snarling and smacking to get in, armed with buckets of rain and sea.  Also, I was stuck. And fatigued.

It was a good time to go curl up in a blanket in a pool of light in the back corner of the cottage with Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel.  The protagonist, whose point of view is the lens through which the story is told, is Thomas Cromwell, and he is rendered a sympathetic but complicated character. In the last book, Wolf Hall, St. Thomas More (one of my favorite saints) comes across as a religious prig who likes to torture heretics, but the writing is transportive.  The writing is so good, in fact, that truth leaks out all over the place and Cromwell finds himself perpetually haunted by More, though this is not the premise of the book.  Ms. Mantel has done what most writers of historical fiction have failed to do; she has mustered the universality of human nature and the particulars of that period of history to give life and breath to her characters. Her fiction is far from dry and lacks none of the grittiness that comes across as anachronism and ideological cant (think Ken Follett, Phillipa Gregory, or the writers of HBO's The Tudors) that is the currency of some best-selling authors of the genre.

Alrighty, then.  Off to the Souris Visitor Centre to post this blog entry.  The quicker we get there, the quicker we get back for a blustery walk along the cape in bright sunshine.

Gale coming in (and we thought it was clearing!)

The morning after, seas are still pretty high.

At least the beach furniture was not taken by Davy Jones.  We are going to have to dig it out, though!