Taryn James's Blog
January 27, 2019
Cover reveal - Crutch
I'll have a release date soon -- depends on my editor :) Meantime, here's a cover for you!
Crutch was originally the working title. I'd intended to replace it with something else, but as time went on, it just seemed to fit.
Crutch was originally the working title. I'd intended to replace it with something else, but as time went on, it just seemed to fit.
January 17, 2019
How poor was the Ingalls family?
Hello Loves -
A bit of a departure from my usual ramblings about my smutty little romances. I've just finished Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser (helping a fellow author out, you can find it here) and I really enjoyed it. Except for one thing. How the author continually harped on what she called the Ingalls' family poverty.
(Reader, please realize that I understand that this book won a Pulitzer Prize, and I write less scholarly works than does Caroline Fraser.)
I loved those books as a girl, and as an adult became an avid amateur scholar of all things Ingalls. I've been to a few of the homesites, and my goal is to hit all of them. I've read practically every book written about them. Prairie Fires is by far one of the best written, but I take issue with the poverty thing.
The Ingalls family certainly weren't rich, and at various points in her childhood and early married life, Laura Ingalls Wilder certainly did experience what one might call extreme economic hardships. But I wouldn't go so far as to call it poverty.
Many of those hard times took place during times of general economic upheaval, financial panic and so on. The hard times experienced by LIW and her family were not unique to them, and were often compounded by personal disaster -- fires, illness, crop failures and suchlike.
To my mind, they way I interpret their story, they achieved a more or less middle class existence towards the end of the Little House books, a status the Ingalls family seemed to maintain from there onward. The Wilder family managed to do the same after relocating to Mansfield, Missouri.
As far as the Ingalls family goes -- how poor are you when you own two parcels of real estate, several head of cattle and other livestock, and can send not only your blind daughter to college, but your youngest daughter as well?
Whilst Mary Ingalls's tuition at the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School in Vinton Iowa was covered by Dakota Territory, she and her family were still responsible for some non-insignificant costs such as clothing, travel, materials and so on. Let's not forget -- Mary was blind. The training she received wasn't so much to prepare her for a career (making fly nets is not a career). She was not going to get a high-paying job out of it. Her loving family worked together to make this happen so she would have the most fulfilling life possible.
I've always admired the Ingalls family for that. It was rather enlightened and speaks to what a wonderful family they were. But, no matter how enlightened they were, if they were dirt poor, Mary wouldn't have gone to college. They certainly wouldn't have bought her an organ and built an extra room on one of their houses for it.
Lesser known is that Grace Ingalls also attended college (Redfield, a small, denominational teacher's college or Normal School). It's suggested that her tuition was also underwritten by the church which ran it, but again -- clothes, travel, materials.
Much is made of the fact that Laura began working at an early age, and that her earnings in part went to help her family. To that I say -- so what? It's not like she was taken out of school and made to work full-time. Much of her employment consisted of doing things most girls of her time, and girls (and boys) do now -- babysitting. Sewing buttonholes during the summer was equivalent to any part time job a kid that age would have now. Mother James made me hand over part of my pay packet from various jobs I had as a teen for board -- and she didn't need it, it was to teach me something or other.
It's quite true that LIW and her husband lost nearly everything in the early years of their marriage, but they were able to recover. Fraser mentions that they were unable to support themselves from the farm, initially, and so had to move into town and take jobs. This doesn't strike me as all that unusual, possibly because I live on a farm myself. The farm they bought, Rocky Ridge, was largely uncleared and uncultivated. Of course they couldn't support themselves on it right away and they would hardly be the only farmers ever who had a side gig, even with a profitable farm.
Farming isn't cheap. You don't just toss some seed in the general direction of the ground and wait for your crop of dollars to come up. You need money for infrastructure. What they had was a log cabin, a couple of cleared acres, and a bunch of apple trees planted in nursery rows. The rest was rock, brush and trees. I sincerely doubt they believed that two adults (of of whom was physically disabled) and a seven-year-old girl would be able to support themselves from the farm in any meaningful way beyond pure subsistence for some time with no tools beyond what they'd managed to haul from South Dakota. I suspect that the move to town proper was always expected, and aimed at.
After Charles Ingalls died, his widow Caroline and daughter Mary lived on in the house he'd built in De Smet (another house, not mentioned in the books). Mary made and sold fly nets, her mother took in the occasional bit of washing and sewing, and they had long-term borders, but none of that strikes me as terribly dire. My mum is retired quite comfortably and the woman still takes in the occasional odd job. And, is it unreasonable to think that taking in boarders not only provided an extra bit of income, but also provided reassurance to an elderly woman and her middle-aged blind daughter who might have felt safer with others in the house?
I suppose what I should have liked to have seen was a bit more context around these claims. What was the mean income of a family in these various places and times, and how did the Ingalls family compare? What was the size of the estate that Charles Ingalls left? How many widows of Caroline Ingalls's age were living independently from 1902-1924? What was the average income of comparable families in Mansfield, Missouri during the time that LIW and her family lived in town? How usual or unusual was it for children to do the kind of work LIW did as a girl?
Context is everything.
Right, enough about that, back to work on Crutch.
TJ
PS - Is no one ever going to explain in one of these books that Almanzo Wilder's disability arose not from a 'slight stroke from overexertion' but most probably from diphtheritic neuropathy? Poor guy basically got hit by lightening with that one.
A bit of a departure from my usual ramblings about my smutty little romances. I've just finished Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser (helping a fellow author out, you can find it here) and I really enjoyed it. Except for one thing. How the author continually harped on what she called the Ingalls' family poverty.
(Reader, please realize that I understand that this book won a Pulitzer Prize, and I write less scholarly works than does Caroline Fraser.)
I loved those books as a girl, and as an adult became an avid amateur scholar of all things Ingalls. I've been to a few of the homesites, and my goal is to hit all of them. I've read practically every book written about them. Prairie Fires is by far one of the best written, but I take issue with the poverty thing.
The Ingalls family certainly weren't rich, and at various points in her childhood and early married life, Laura Ingalls Wilder certainly did experience what one might call extreme economic hardships. But I wouldn't go so far as to call it poverty.
Many of those hard times took place during times of general economic upheaval, financial panic and so on. The hard times experienced by LIW and her family were not unique to them, and were often compounded by personal disaster -- fires, illness, crop failures and suchlike.
To my mind, they way I interpret their story, they achieved a more or less middle class existence towards the end of the Little House books, a status the Ingalls family seemed to maintain from there onward. The Wilder family managed to do the same after relocating to Mansfield, Missouri.
As far as the Ingalls family goes -- how poor are you when you own two parcels of real estate, several head of cattle and other livestock, and can send not only your blind daughter to college, but your youngest daughter as well?
Whilst Mary Ingalls's tuition at the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School in Vinton Iowa was covered by Dakota Territory, she and her family were still responsible for some non-insignificant costs such as clothing, travel, materials and so on. Let's not forget -- Mary was blind. The training she received wasn't so much to prepare her for a career (making fly nets is not a career). She was not going to get a high-paying job out of it. Her loving family worked together to make this happen so she would have the most fulfilling life possible.
I've always admired the Ingalls family for that. It was rather enlightened and speaks to what a wonderful family they were. But, no matter how enlightened they were, if they were dirt poor, Mary wouldn't have gone to college. They certainly wouldn't have bought her an organ and built an extra room on one of their houses for it.
Lesser known is that Grace Ingalls also attended college (Redfield, a small, denominational teacher's college or Normal School). It's suggested that her tuition was also underwritten by the church which ran it, but again -- clothes, travel, materials.
Much is made of the fact that Laura began working at an early age, and that her earnings in part went to help her family. To that I say -- so what? It's not like she was taken out of school and made to work full-time. Much of her employment consisted of doing things most girls of her time, and girls (and boys) do now -- babysitting. Sewing buttonholes during the summer was equivalent to any part time job a kid that age would have now. Mother James made me hand over part of my pay packet from various jobs I had as a teen for board -- and she didn't need it, it was to teach me something or other.
It's quite true that LIW and her husband lost nearly everything in the early years of their marriage, but they were able to recover. Fraser mentions that they were unable to support themselves from the farm, initially, and so had to move into town and take jobs. This doesn't strike me as all that unusual, possibly because I live on a farm myself. The farm they bought, Rocky Ridge, was largely uncleared and uncultivated. Of course they couldn't support themselves on it right away and they would hardly be the only farmers ever who had a side gig, even with a profitable farm.
Farming isn't cheap. You don't just toss some seed in the general direction of the ground and wait for your crop of dollars to come up. You need money for infrastructure. What they had was a log cabin, a couple of cleared acres, and a bunch of apple trees planted in nursery rows. The rest was rock, brush and trees. I sincerely doubt they believed that two adults (of of whom was physically disabled) and a seven-year-old girl would be able to support themselves from the farm in any meaningful way beyond pure subsistence for some time with no tools beyond what they'd managed to haul from South Dakota. I suspect that the move to town proper was always expected, and aimed at.
After Charles Ingalls died, his widow Caroline and daughter Mary lived on in the house he'd built in De Smet (another house, not mentioned in the books). Mary made and sold fly nets, her mother took in the occasional bit of washing and sewing, and they had long-term borders, but none of that strikes me as terribly dire. My mum is retired quite comfortably and the woman still takes in the occasional odd job. And, is it unreasonable to think that taking in boarders not only provided an extra bit of income, but also provided reassurance to an elderly woman and her middle-aged blind daughter who might have felt safer with others in the house?
I suppose what I should have liked to have seen was a bit more context around these claims. What was the mean income of a family in these various places and times, and how did the Ingalls family compare? What was the size of the estate that Charles Ingalls left? How many widows of Caroline Ingalls's age were living independently from 1902-1924? What was the average income of comparable families in Mansfield, Missouri during the time that LIW and her family lived in town? How usual or unusual was it for children to do the kind of work LIW did as a girl?
Context is everything.
Right, enough about that, back to work on Crutch.
TJ
PS - Is no one ever going to explain in one of these books that Almanzo Wilder's disability arose not from a 'slight stroke from overexertion' but most probably from diphtheritic neuropathy? Poor guy basically got hit by lightening with that one.
January 2, 2019
SNOW
Hello Loves -
We got snow! In the desert!
Well, the high desert, and it does occasionally snow here. Generally, it's the kind that provides a light dusting but never accumulates on the roads. This time, however, we got quite a bit. It will be lovely for the farm, as moisture can always be a bit of an issue for us.
The farm is small, and we (by 'we' I mean husband, I just help out) grow veg that does well with limited moisture. That includes chiles, pomegranates, tomatoes, corn, lettuces, and many others. Really, if you plant things correctly and use remediation such as coir, mulch, and planting them early enough and at the correct depth so they develop a strong root system, you can grow many things in the desert whilst conserving water to a surprising degree.
Anyway, it is a lovely day to write, with a cup of tea at the ready and a cat on my lap. I've done quite a bit of work on 'Crutch' but now need to go do some editing on something else. Then, dinner which will be a lovely corn chowder.
Love and Kisses,
Taryn
We got snow! In the desert!
Well, the high desert, and it does occasionally snow here. Generally, it's the kind that provides a light dusting but never accumulates on the roads. This time, however, we got quite a bit. It will be lovely for the farm, as moisture can always be a bit of an issue for us.
The farm is small, and we (by 'we' I mean husband, I just help out) grow veg that does well with limited moisture. That includes chiles, pomegranates, tomatoes, corn, lettuces, and many others. Really, if you plant things correctly and use remediation such as coir, mulch, and planting them early enough and at the correct depth so they develop a strong root system, you can grow many things in the desert whilst conserving water to a surprising degree.
Anyway, it is a lovely day to write, with a cup of tea at the ready and a cat on my lap. I've done quite a bit of work on 'Crutch' but now need to go do some editing on something else. Then, dinner which will be a lovely corn chowder.
Love and Kisses,
Taryn
December 30, 2018
Lazy Sunday
Hello Loves -
Lazy Sunday here at the Cat Ranch. That's what I've decided to name our little farm, since we have so many felines. Husband has other ideas.
Today is a lazy Sunday, I've got a nice Guinness Beef Stew bubbling away on the hob and just finished the outline for my next book, which has the working title Crutch . This is a continuation of His Baby and tells Yuri's story after the shooting which left him disabled.
My outlines are fairly rough, because I like the story to tell me where it should go. Still, I do find them helpful for pacing purposes. I don't plot so much as I create a what if situation and take things from there. I find plotting tends to give a contrived element to a story; you're essentially shoehorning characters into the plot, rather than letting it develop organically. As Stephen King said (paraphrasing) our lives are largely plotless, and everything is a reaction to a situation.
My house desperately needs a good cleaning, but I think I'll forgo that in favor of messing around with this website, which really needs some work. I've done a fair bit of GUI work in my career, but that was for fellow engineers, and our brains simply don't work the same as normal people. What we consider an attractive interface is wildly different than what appeals to normal individuals.
So, I'm off to study a few author websites for inspiration and see what I can do with this one. If you've read this far, please consider joining my mailing list which may well be renamed newsletter in the near future. I'd love to connect with you!
Love and Kisses,
Taryn
Lazy Sunday here at the Cat Ranch. That's what I've decided to name our little farm, since we have so many felines. Husband has other ideas.
Today is a lazy Sunday, I've got a nice Guinness Beef Stew bubbling away on the hob and just finished the outline for my next book, which has the working title Crutch . This is a continuation of His Baby and tells Yuri's story after the shooting which left him disabled.
My outlines are fairly rough, because I like the story to tell me where it should go. Still, I do find them helpful for pacing purposes. I don't plot so much as I create a what if situation and take things from there. I find plotting tends to give a contrived element to a story; you're essentially shoehorning characters into the plot, rather than letting it develop organically. As Stephen King said (paraphrasing) our lives are largely plotless, and everything is a reaction to a situation.
My house desperately needs a good cleaning, but I think I'll forgo that in favor of messing around with this website, which really needs some work. I've done a fair bit of GUI work in my career, but that was for fellow engineers, and our brains simply don't work the same as normal people. What we consider an attractive interface is wildly different than what appeals to normal individuals.
So, I'm off to study a few author websites for inspiration and see what I can do with this one. If you've read this far, please consider joining my mailing list which may well be renamed newsletter in the near future. I'd love to connect with you!
Love and Kisses,
Taryn
December 29, 2018
About Me
Hello, Loves -
I'm Taryn James, and I thought it might be nice if I told you a little bit about myself. Some random facts, as it were. In no particular order - I'm female. I write my own books, I don't outsource them to some poorly paid Fiverr person as some indie romance 'authors' (really, publishers) do. I'm a scientist by education and training. I had a successful career in bioengineering, and continue to consult, but am focused on writing full time because, pajamas. I live with my husband and our ten million pets in the desert Southwest, which is my adopted home. I love tea. The only bagged teas worth drinking are PG Tips and Typhoo. My favorite indie romance author is Penelope Bloom, and I aspire to be her when I grow up. I live on a farm. Despite the preponderance of secret babies in my writing, I don't have children though we have many beloved nieces and nephews. Besides romance, I love sci-fi/adventure, fantasy, biographies and true crime.
I'm hoping, as time goes on, to grow my readership organically. As a scientist, the very first thing I did when electing to pursue writing full time was to look into the landscape and see what others were doing. It seems that a great deal of money is poured into advertisements in order to get one's work at the top of the charts. I've published several novellas this far, and have just released my first full-length book, His Baby, and I can tell you that it's quite possible to earn money without spending loads on ads. I probably won't top the charts any time soon, but that's quite alright -- plenty of room in the middle.
Anyway, I hope to connect with my readers, and the best way to do that is to check this blog, and to join my mailing list. I hope you all have a wonderful New Year!
Love and Kisses,
Taryn
I'm Taryn James, and I thought it might be nice if I told you a little bit about myself. Some random facts, as it were. In no particular order - I'm female. I write my own books, I don't outsource them to some poorly paid Fiverr person as some indie romance 'authors' (really, publishers) do. I'm a scientist by education and training. I had a successful career in bioengineering, and continue to consult, but am focused on writing full time because, pajamas. I live with my husband and our ten million pets in the desert Southwest, which is my adopted home. I love tea. The only bagged teas worth drinking are PG Tips and Typhoo. My favorite indie romance author is Penelope Bloom, and I aspire to be her when I grow up. I live on a farm. Despite the preponderance of secret babies in my writing, I don't have children though we have many beloved nieces and nephews. Besides romance, I love sci-fi/adventure, fantasy, biographies and true crime.
I'm hoping, as time goes on, to grow my readership organically. As a scientist, the very first thing I did when electing to pursue writing full time was to look into the landscape and see what others were doing. It seems that a great deal of money is poured into advertisements in order to get one's work at the top of the charts. I've published several novellas this far, and have just released my first full-length book, His Baby, and I can tell you that it's quite possible to earn money without spending loads on ads. I probably won't top the charts any time soon, but that's quite alright -- plenty of room in the middle.
Anyway, I hope to connect with my readers, and the best way to do that is to check this blog, and to join my mailing list. I hope you all have a wonderful New Year!
Love and Kisses,
Taryn
December 22, 2018
April 10, 2016
New Title – Stepbrother Lust!
Sarah hasn’t seen her stepbrother Jack in years. When she and Jack are unexpectedly reunited at a family party, the sight of her gorgeous, billionaire stepbrother creates all sorts of disturbing new feelings in her. Feelings she’s never had for her loving husband, Chris. Feelings that will take her places she never expected to go, feelings that will leave Sarah with living proof of how lust can overpower even the most loving and faithful wife.
Now available on Kindle Unlimited for free!
September 6, 2015
Kindle Countdown Deal!
Hello, Cupcakes!
From 9/6/15 until 9/13/15 you can get my title Claimed by her Stepbrother for just $0.99!
Love and Kisses,
Taryn
