Smorgasbord Blogger Daily – Monday 11th November 2019. Robbie Cheadle with Ritu Bhathal, Patricia Furstenberg and Richard Dee

Time to catch up on some of my favourite blogs again after our two weeks away.

The first post is from Robbie Cheadle who is in the process of promoting poets in a Readathon.. And in this post she is showcasing Ritu Bhathal.

Today I am introducing you to poet, author and blogger, Ritu Bhathal. Ritu has selected a lovely poem from her book Poetic RITUals to share here today.

From Twinkle to Reality

Let me take you down that road,

Much-travelled through eternity

The journey to become a mum,

From twinkle to reality.

Head over and enjoy the rest of the poem and post: https://robbiesinspiration.wordpress.com/2019/11/09/poetryreadathon-meet-poet-and-blogger/

Robbie and Michael Cheadle, Buy: https://www.amazon.com/Robbie-Cheadle/e/B01N9J62GQ Blog: https://robbiesinspiration.wordpress.com/ – Goodreads: Robbie Goodreads

Now a guest post by Patricia Furstenberg on the blog Books by Women on the subject of women writers and contemporary war fiction.

At some stage during my adult life, and this will astound my history teacher if she’d discover, I found myself fascinated by the thought of writing fiction inspired by contemporary events.

A thread that brought me here might have been reading Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” in my teens; another one, witnessing the terrorist attack on World Trade Center on Live TV while pregnant with my daughter. A definite thread, silky and alluring, came from enjoying historical fiction by Philippa Gregory and Diana Gabaldon. While the most recent one, still carding itself, draws from my son’s keen interest in war computer games and my own, in military working dogs.

When the seed of writing a fictional book about dogs involved in combat was still on the counter, not even planted yet, I turned to literature for guidance. And hit a wall.

Contemporary war fiction penned by women pales in comparison to the amount of books written by men. Be it in poetry or prose, throughout the centuries an author, not an authoress, depicted more often the combat male protagonist. As Homer put it in his Iliad, “war will be men’s business”.

Why so, since countless notable women were not afraid of fighting battles? The Greek goddess Athena is shown as a warrior, the patron of justice, strategic warfare, mathematics, and arts. The Celtic goddess Brigid is the patron of poetry and smithcraft. Scathach is an Irish Goddess who taught the martial arts. The Amazons were fierce warrior women and there were even gladiator women, gladiatrices, although Juvenal, the Roman poet of those times, depicted them as a mere novelty. History is splattered with the blood of innumerable women warriors: Hatshepsut, Queen Boudicca, Queen Samsi of Arabia, the Trung Sisters from Vietnam, Empress Theodora of Byzantium, Olga of Russia, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mary I and Elizabeth I of England.

Please head over to read the rest of this fascinating article by Patricia: http://booksbywomen.org/why-we-need-contemporary-war-fiction-written-by-women/

Patricia Furstenberg, Buy: https://www.amazon.com/Patricia-Furstenberg/e/B018QGC570 Blog:  http://alluringcreations.co.za/wp/ Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8867736.Patricia_Furstenberg

Here is a post for all of you who are in the second week of your NaNoMo projects from Richard Dee who completed the challenge with the first in his Andorra Pett series in 2016. Head over to compare your experiences of this writing challenge.

Welcome back to my trip through the NaNo projects of the past.

This time, I’m looking at 2016. I didn’t attempt NaNo in 2015, I was otherwise engaged in adjusting to life after work, as I mentioned last week. My shoulder required an operation in the end, an 8mm bone spur was removed. After six months off work. I decided to take early retirement, rather than have to retrain and re-certify for a job that I had been doing for forty years. Don’t you just love the system?

Ribbonworld, the subject of last weeks post, was actually published in November 2015. And I did write a novel in 2015, just not in one concentrated spell or as part of the NaNo challenge. A change of genre for me, it was a Steampunk adventure called The Rocks of Aserol.

I also wrote several short stories. Among them was one that I wrote as a bet. My wife had challenged me to write a female character, and to do a ‘woman-runs-away-from-it-all-and-starts-again-in-a-new-place’ type story, only set in space.

I thought about it and had an idea for a jilted woman, who reluctantly turns amateur detective when she is forced to, by circumstances beyond her control.

I named her Andorra Pett and based her on a combination of the character traits of my wife and my three daughters.

Head over to find out more about Richard’s experiences and to add your own: https://richarddeescifi.co.uk/the-second-monday-of-nanowrimo-2/

Richard Dee, buy: https://www.amazon.com/Richard-Dee/e/B00CN4TTCG/
Website: http://richarddeescifi.co.uk/ – Goodreads: Richard Dee at Goodreads

Please go to Amazon or Richard’s website to view all his books.

 

Thank you for dropping in today and I hope you will head over to read all these posts in full…more tomorrow thanks Sally