by Roseanna White | Feb 20, 2013 | Uncategorized
We have some winner! From the giveaway for Susie Finkbeiner’s Paint Chips and a necklace from her store, that is. =) First, the book goes too…
Annette {This Simple Home}!
And the jewelry of her choice goes to…
Leila (http://leliaroseforeman.blogspot.com/)
I’ll be contacting you both. Remember, one week to claim the prize!
by Roseanna White | Feb 20, 2013 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
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| Camden Station in 1865 |
One of the interesting tidbits I’ve learned as I’m researching Circle of Spies (the official name of Culper Ring Series, Book 3!!!!) has to do with Baltimore and the trains.
Now, Baltimore was a fairly important railroading town, as one might be able to guess from the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s name, LOL. There were several major lines running through the city. And yet, you wouldn’t hear those locomotives if you were in the city during the Civil War era–oh no. They were considered noise pollution (not that that was the name for that at the time), and running a train through the city proper was against the law.
Kinda interesting, then, since the lines had to go straight through Baltimore to get to, say, Washington D.C.
So there were two major stations. There was the President Street Station that came into Baltimore on one side of town, and the
Camden Station on the opposite side, heading to D.C. In order to get to one from another, passengers either had to debark, take a coach through the city, and catch a different train, or else the cars had to be decoupled from the locomotive, hitched to horses one by one, and pulled through the town to the other station, where a new engine would be coupled up.
Inconvenient for travelers, to be sure, though I suppose the residents appreciated it, LOL. But what I find interesting is how many times this was used for nefarious purposes! This process was around what the first attempt to kidnap or kill Abraham Lincoln was based, when he was on his way to Washington for his Inauguration. And when the war was just heating up and Union soldiers were en route to D.C., Confederate sympathizers dumped sane, bricks, and other debris on the tracks between the two stations to prevent the cars from being pulled along by the horses.
The fun little tidbits I just love learning. =)
by Roseanna White | Feb 18, 2013 | Word of the Week
Have you entered the giveaway yet for Susie Finkbeiner’s Paint Chips and a piece of jewelry of your choice from her Etsy shop? If not, hurry! One more day!
This one will be quick, but that’s okay. I have galleys of Whispers from the Shadows arriving today, so no time to lose! =)
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| Resin oozing from a stump |
Ooze was one of those words like “wow” that really surprised me in how old it was–as in, as old as English. I thought it was a new word . . . perhaps I thought so because of its use in Ghost Busters and Nickelodeon slime stuff. 😉
But nope. Ooze dates, both as a verb and a noun, from the 1300s, and had its modern spelling as early as the 1500s. And the meaning hasn’t changed either. From its origins, it carried the same denotation of juicy, gooy, miry stuff.
Interestingly, its root is the same as the one from which we get virus, which we’ll take a look at next week. 😉
Now, today is the official launch of the Ring of Secrets promo tour! So to kick things off, I’m over at Go Teen Writers sharing the story of the book’s road to publication. Leave a comment there for a chance to win a signed copy of the book AND a chance to name a character in Circle of Spies, book 3 in the Culper Ring Series!
Plus it marks the launch of my Box of Secrets giveaway! For the next month-ish, during the blog tour, you can enter to win these 10 fun prizes, including a complete set of signed books-by-me. (If you already have some of these, think of it as a nice gift for a family member or friend, LOL.) Plus some awesome custom-made items.
And as you’ll see on Rafflecopter, one of the ways to enter is to play my Create Your Own Spy Name game!
Let the intrigue begin. =)
by Roseanna White | Feb 14, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
I know, a predictable topic for Valentine’s Day. 😉 But you gotta love the classics, right?
I’m amazingly blessed when it comes to love. I found my true love in high school, got married at 18, and haven’t regretted a minute of it. In this day and age, I know that’s rare. We live in a kind of strange society where it’s accepted that teenagers are going to be sexually active, but not that they’re capable of making long-term decisions on romance. A world where they’re told to pick a career focus at age 13, but then that college students change majors on average 5 times (or something like that).
But I was never typical–I say that in all honestly, LOL. I knew from primary school onward that I wanted to be a writer. And I knew in high school that if I were smart, I’d marry someone who was happy to support me in that goal until the dough came rolling in. 😉 At that age, I had my list of what the Perfect Guy would be. He would be older than me. He would be taller than me. He would have shorter hair than me. Those were my criteria.
Then I met David. And, well…he was taller. =) Ten months younger, he had a ponytail while at that age I had a bob, but oh the dimples. The green eyes. And most of all, the soul that mine understood so perfectly. He too was atypical. More focused on life-after-high-school than most. Another rare teen who not only understood consequences but contemplated them. A guy who immediately put his total support behind my writing dream…and made it his dream too, deciding then and there that maybe he’d like to get into publishing someday.
Be still my heart!
We went to college together, from our West Virginia town to St. John’s in
Annapolis. Yes, at first my parents worried that I wanted to go there just because he was leaving high school a year early to do so. But I explained that we both wanted it because it was an awesome school, and the fact that we both thought so was, you know, kinda one of those things we had in common that made us such a great couple to begin with… And after visiting the college, my parents knew it was the place for me as surely as I did.
Still, ours wasn’t the typical teenage romance. We were engaged our last year of high school. Not exactly a popular decision among teens today, but we knew what we wanted. During our first year of college, we started planning a beach wedding for that next summer. Good decision, gotta say. 😉
We got married after Freshman year. Found a ridiculously expensive postage stamp of an apartment. Finished college together, David went out and got a job with his family’s company. We decided to start a family, and afterward to move back home. And now, eleven years after those beachfront I-dos, I can say with the perspective of age that, yep, we knew what we were doing. We knew what we wanted.
Because we knew who we were.
In a lot of ways, David and I are so very different. Where I’m temperate, he’s passionate. Where I’m quiet, he’s talkative. Where I’m reserved, he’s demonstrative. Which is perfect. We balance each other out in those respects. He knows how to draw me out, and I know how to listen. And we have the same sarcastic sense of humor. The same dreams. And of course, two of the most adorable kids on the planet. 😉
Some couples have “their song,” usually something they danced to once. We have our song too–from the fabulous kids’ show Phineas and Ferb. =) Yep, we found our Evil Love. (Told you we share a sarcastic sense of humor, LOL.)
by Roseanna White | Feb 13, 2013 | Uncategorized
I got my cover for Whispers from the Shadows! It arrived in my inbox on Monday. A lovely present for my son’s birthday. =)
I’m so excited! I love the colors, I love the ship, the model’s lovely, the dress I would love to add to my wardrobe (eh? eh??), obviously love seeing “Author of
Ring of Secrets” under my name, and I just love the feeling of mystery they captured!
My favorite part, though, is the necklace. See, the necklace is pretty important. It’s from the end of
Ring of Secrets and is passed down to the next generation in
Whispers. I mentioned that in my cover questionnaire, but I also knew it would be difficult to find the perfect one. So when I saw this, it made me giddy. At which point my editor shared that the designer and his wife MADE this for the model to wear! He found the gold chain, and his wife found some pearls that would slip on over the end. Just like in the books. Isn’t that just awesome??
Pre-order from Amazon!
Pre-order from ChristianBook!
I’ll post the official back cover copy when I have it, but for now, I put up a little description of my own making on my website.
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. Having successfully launched two homeschool grads, she now spends her time writing fiction, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years, as well as a fantasy series and contemporary mysteries and romances. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.