by Roseanna White | Jul 2, 2018 | Word of the Week
It’s summer. And so, as I was casting around looking for words to feature, my daughter said, “Do something summery! Like, you know…a carnival, or the fair.”
When I’m writing this, our County Fair has just finished up, and the neighboring county’s is scheduled for a few weeks from now. But I have to confess, I’ve never researched the history of these traditional events.
I started, of course, by looking up the word. First of all, I discovered that fair, the adjective, and fair the noun aren’t related at all. The adjective dates back to the Old English fæger, meaning “pleasing to the sight, beautiful, morally good.” Similar words can be found in other Germanic languages.
The noun, however–“a regular meeting in a city or town for buying and selling”–is from the 1300s, Anglo-French, from the Old French feire or faire. I had no idea these were totally different words, from different languages!
Back in the day, a fair was much like a market. But centuries ago, big events (often city- or county-wide) began to be scheduled for once a year, where people didn’t just buy and sell, they came to see the latest innovations, enter their food and livestock into contests, and basically stay up-to-date with the rest of the world.
The earliest county fair in America is recorded in 1641, in New Amsterdam. By the 1800s, they could be found in just about every county. They were still primarily agricultural expos. This was where new farm equipment was demonstrated and new techniques discussed. But by this time, a bit of the carnival atmosphere had also come in. Games, contests, and competitions offered something for everyone.
I love that these events are still a part of our culture! I admit that my family mostly likes to go for the rides…and maybe the food, LOL. But I love that horse-pulling competitions have just morphed into mud-bogging and demolition derbies. That people still enter their livestock into competitions, and people still bring baked goods to pit against their neighbors’.
Do you go to your County or State Fair? If so, what’s your favorite part?
by Roseanna White | Jun 27, 2018 | 20th Century, Companion Guides, Remember When Wednesdays
When the design for A Name Unknown, book 1 in the Shadows Over England Series, was shone to me and I saw the spine for the first time, I was so excited to see the series logo they’d come up with. Big Ben’s clock tower.
Big Ben says London. Which is what the designers were no doubt trying to invoke, as my family of thieves are firmly Londoners. But for me, it was more than that. Because in the third book of the series,
An Hour Unspent, that iconic clock actually plays a role in the story.
For starters, a bit of naming. Most of us think of “Big Ben” as the clock, but it’s technically not. Big Ben is actually the bell. The clock is the Great Westminster Clock, though over the years the name Big Ben has come to be associated with the entire structure. So now that we’ve got that straight… ?
The clock tower was designed by Augustus Pugin and completed in 1859. Pugin was an architect, one who is most remembered for redesigning the interior of Westminster Palace and the tower in question, which has become one of the most iconic symbols of England. Though he also designed the face of the clock, the mechanics of the thing he wisely handed over to someone else.
But interestingly, the movement–the gears and weights that make a clock work, and in this case, work with amazing reliability–was actually designed by two amateurs to the field. Edmund Denison, a lawyer, and mathematician George Airy. The construction was the only part undertaken by an actual clockmaker, Edward Dent.
The Great Clock’s inner workings are so precise that a penny sitting on the pendulum is all it takes to make slight alterations to the time. That one little coin will make an adjustment of nearly half a second a day. That doesn’t sound like much, but it allows for small incremental adjustments to keep the clock accurate year after year. The pendulum still has a stack of old coins on it, and the clock is still hand-wound three times a week.
In my story, I gave the job of upkeep of the Great Clock to my heroine’s father, a clock maker. This part is purely fictional, of course, but it would have been considered a great honor to be tasked with such a responsibility, and in my story that’s the proof of Cecil Manning’s proficiency in his trade, even though he’s by no means made himself rich.
That honor goes to another historical figure that my fictional Manning claims as a friend, who revolutionized the timekeeping world. But you’ll have to come by next Wednesday to learn about that…
by Roseanna White | Jun 25, 2018 | Word of the Week
I love that
www.etymonline.com has a list of trending words. Sometimes I click on them solely out of curiosity…like when I saw
circus on there today.
Last May my family journeyed to Charleston, WV to attend one of the final shows of the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and it was frankly amazing. So amazing that we really wished we’d given it a try way earlier so we could have attended more and caught all their different shows. Up until then, I’d never gone to a circus, be it large or small, though a tiny little one set up once on my high school’s grounds. I saw the elephants from the road, but we had something else going on that weekend and I couldn’t go. Kinda wish I had.
But anyway! Did you ever notice that circus looks an awful lot like circle? And circumference? And all those other circ- words that denote something round? This isn’t a coincidence. The word comes directly from Latin, where it meant “a ring, a circular line.” It was used in Ancient Rome for the open-roofed enclosures used for races and so on. The Latin word had been borrowed from the Ancient Greek kirkos, which meant the same thing.
In the early 1700s, the word was applied in English to buildings arranged in a circular pattern, hence Picadilly Circus, and also to a ring road. By the end of the 1700s, it had also been applied to the arenas used to showcase feats of horsemanship, acrobatics, etc.–but at first, it was just for the tent. It took about 40 years for it to come to mean the company or traveling show itself by 1838 or so. Another twenty years, and it had taken on the metaphorical sense of “a lively uproar, a hubbub.” And finally, during WWI, it was used to describe a squadron of aircraft.
Have you ever gone to a circus? What did you think of it?
by Roseanna White | Jun 21, 2018 | Thoughtful Thursdays
Over the weekend, my husband and I took a drive to meet up with some good friends for a dinner, halfway between where we live. We’ve been trying to do this somewhat regularly, and it’s inevitably a wonderful evening.
This time, we realized that it’s been 18 years since we all met and became friends–our first week of college. That’s half our lives. And after being a bit staggered at that, we took a few minutes to laugh and just be glad that we’re still friends. That even though sometimes a year has gone by without us getting together, as soon as we’re back in each other’s company, it’s like it’s only been a few weeks.
I know most of us have friends like that. The kind that can just pick up where we left off. The kind with a firm, solid foundation that time can only temper, not crack.
It’s especially wonderful to know that these friends are those kinds of friends, because we’d talked about it in our college days. In those first few years, as we began losing touch with high school friends and realized that, sadly, some were just “high school friends,” we expressed our desire to be more than just “college friends.” And we are.
Certainly, I still have friends I love from my earlier days, from childhood. We too can get together and it feels like it hasn’t been as long as it’s been. But let’s face it: we all also have friends for a season. Or friends in particular circumstances. We have work friends that don’t translate into best friends. Or maybe we have church friends that we never see out of church. I have writing friends that I only ever talk to online now and then, occasionally meet at a conference–we get along, we have a great time, but that’s all it is.
But then there are the ones that transcend the type or circumstance, right? Stephanie began as a writing friend, a critique partner, but we certainly talk about more than writing now. We talk about everything. It was strange, eight or nine years ago, to realize that this young woman I’d only ever met once, who I emailed every day, had become my best friend. And yet now, all these years later, it’s a given part of our lives–that our best friend lives a thousand miles away, we only see each other in person once a year, but we can still be there, daily most of the time, through the wonders of the internet.
There are still Martin and Kimberly, with whom we can have conversations filled with depth and laughter and insight, the silly and the profound. We can know that whether it’s been a month or a year, we’ll pick up where we left off.
I’m so grateful that God brings people into our lives as we need them. Some for a season. Some for a particular reason. Some forever. I pray that I can be the kind of friend each of
my friends need–again, sometimes just in glimpses, sometimes steadily and forever.
Do you have any friendships that you were surprised to find had deepened beyond the season or type? Or one that has persevered for decades? How did you and your best friend come to be best friends?
by Roseanna White | Jun 20, 2018 | Cover Designs
Sometimes authors come to me with very little idea of what they envision for their cover…and other times, they know exactly what they want. Now, knowing exactly what they want can occasionally be difficult, if that “what” is complicated. 😉 But other times, it makes it oh so easy to deliver a cover they love, quickly.
Pepper Basham has come to me several times with a very clear, very doable idea of what her next cover should be–she’s done several herself, and she has a great eye for what works. Occasionally she just needs me to handle some of the details.
Such was the case for her WWII novella, Facade.
She knew exactly what she wanted. This model…
…over this background.
Pretty simple. So arranging that and sizing it correctly, we have this.
Not bad from the get-go, right? But Pepper hired me to punch it up a notch, so I figured I’d get punching. ? A quick one-two. First, I traded out that blue sky for something a little more interesting–a bit of sunset, golden flare.
Then, of course, I had to tweak the model’s coloring and brightness to match.
There was also a little bit of fine-tuning in there. The background image is an original WWII image, so it’s a bit grainy. I put a surface blur on it to smooth it out and then fooled with the highlights a bit to reflect my new sun as well.
One more small touch–an airplane. We added one of those to the top corner, tweaking lighting to make it reflect that sunset.
A little bit of work, but honestly, not a whole lot. This one came together very quickly. I was happy with the overall image, so it was time to turn my attention to the fonts. I figured something art deco would look great, so I chose Fragile, which I’d purchased in a package of fun fonts. I decided to keep it simple and put both the title and author name in the same font, separating them with an art deco bar. Then I just added a bit of a filter to the bottom to make those words pop.
And there’s our front!
For the full cover, I used the same background image as the front, with a paper texture overlay. Added on all the type and logos and author info, and voila! Full cover.
What do you think?
About the Book
A reclusive academic
who would do anything to save her brother.
A reluctant spy
willing to risk his life to save the woman who broke his heart.
Olivia Rakes has the unique gift of observation, which suits her well since she prefers her books over the general populace, but when her brother goes MIA over France, Livy’s unique skills and her determination to save her brother force her into a world of espionage, deceit, danger…and the most frightening of all–romance.
Agent Christopher Dawson has never forgotten his childhood friend, and first love, Livy Rakes, but since she broke his heart, he’s avoided seeing her for years…until the search for his best friend brings them both together in the most unlikely of ways.
In a world where war changes the rules of life and love, can Christopher and Livy work together work together to unveil the mascarade before the enemy catches them?
You can also find Façade in the Timeless Love Novella Collection NOW AVAILABLE! (And whose cover I also designed, LOL)
It’s summer. And so, as I was casting around looking for words to feature, my daughter said, “Do something summery! Like, you know…a carnival, or the fair.”
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.