Reading

When an author tells a story just right, the imagination takes over -- and although the eyes take in each word -- the mind visualizes the story internally and lets it flow. Have you ever had this happen? Where you became so enchanted you can't put the book down?

While understanding is important to non-fiction writing, only fiction lets the mind take this extra leap to make the author's story a personal experience. It's similar to watching a movie or seeing a play, where for a few hours, you become emotionally involved with what is happening on the screen or stage.

If this has happened to you, have you ever stopped to consider what a wonderful process this is? I'm not sure what exactly happens, but I know the imagination is a powerful force to make the author's world seem real.

Even if you don't read scifi or fantasy, it is a magical moment.

Contemporary Time Capsules

Georgette Heyer is listed as having written the first ‘historical’ romance novel. Don’t you find that interesting? I love so many historical novels. Jane Austen’s have become classic literature, as have Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Classics and historical, yes, but at the time they were written, these books were contemporary romances.

As time passes, contemporary novels often act like time capsules for the generation about which they were written. I remember reading Emily Loring’s romances when in my late teens. I found it interesting they were written at the time my grandmother was a young woman and gave me a picture into her world and cultural mores and what life must have been like for her.

If you have read some of the romances written since 1950, each decade comes alive as a special time and place in a novel's setting. So when you read a contemporary romance today, think about how the setting is revealed and how true it is to the world as you know it. Someday in the future, your granddaughter might read the same book, now a historical fiction, and relate to you and the world you live in today.

Vote -- Celebrate Women's Hard-Won Rights

My last post was about heroines, too. The Suffragettes were the real-life version.

My sister sent me an email today about why women vote. Not because its an inalienable right, but because a few of our predecessors worked tirelessly to make us independent by giving us a simple thing -- the right to vote.

It's important to remember that not so long ago women belonged to either their father or husband. The great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers of women eligible to vote today earned those rights. It took courage to bring about change, and the willingness to face the consequences. While I cannot forward the message I received, I found an on line version minus the photographs. Please go read this article about the 'Night of Terror.' Then be sure to vote in November.

Why Women CAN vote