So last night we watch Rob Roy, a wonderfully-set, large-screen movie with big name stars just eking “Scottish.” It succeeds at the box office in 1996, if $28-31.6 million is any standard. A 1995 American biographical historical drama, the film was directed by Michael Caton-Jones. Liam Neeson stars as Rob Roy MacGregor, an 18th-century Scottish clan chief and the movie chronicles his battles with an unscrupulous nobleman in the Scottish Highlands.

All the things I love about it are right—the beautiful highlands, my ancestry—and subject in my latest series, The Highland-Cape-Fear-Thriller-Conspiracy Series. The fact that it shows awesome costumery (more about that later), the great love story of a man and his wife, the warrior Highlander genre in all his masculine, swashbuckling glory, my favorite movie star of all time, Liam Neeson (I always forgive his Irish beginnings), shocking scenes which make the blood boil produced by Peter Broughan and Richard Jackson, with music by Carter Burwell and screen play by Alan Sharp.

They deserve credit for the massive effort of projecting visually the novel by Sir Walter Scott, famous Scottish novelist, which none of the reviewers seem to even realize. Rob Roy is one of the Waverley novels, says the author himself about his historical written in 1817, followed by The Heart of Midlothian. Scott writes in the literary omniscient style of yesteryear with the named narrator, Frank Osbaldistone.

Scott is of interest to me for his love of Rosslyn Chapel as a Mason, a subject which arises in my books as well.

Rob Roy lived. A historical figure. Just how historical they made him does not worry me one bit. I like a wee bit of playing around with history as you will know upon reading my series if you haven’t already. If he was low country instead of high, I prefer the Highlands, so there you have it.

Tim Roth played the fop who I hated so much I refuse to remember his name. Was he ever the master of innuendo and expression. However, it’s those expressions that make one ill.

Rob’s wife Mary was played by Jessica Lange, and again, red hair glows on many of my leading women’s heads as well. That she exists beyond her relationship with her husband is my main rave to the part and person, a character to be reckoned with but also to be loved, so unlike the snippy, snarky strong women often portrayed in sitcoms.

I don’t care how many rotten tomatoes it got, ’twas a great movie. Back to the costumes as I promised–I got a little bored with it, and I think that can directly be traced to the period and costumery. That’s why, even when I love the look, it’s so limiting to the human psyche in terms of pigeonholing them in time, I don’t do it in my books. Yours truly threads in historical chords, but the main characters are thoroughly modern in today’s day and time, reaching into the future.

I prefer a main couple solving mysteries and taking on world would-be destroyers.

No more spoilers for ye. It’s worth it just for soaking up a bit of atmosphere. And thank you for waiting for my full-blown series, Book I, Stone of Her Destiny, of which is available right now. It’s the Prequel, Inheritance Spurned and Book II, The Tarbert Legacy, that ye’ll be looking for.

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And Big Words like ‘Provenance’

I find it all kinds of fun to follow art thefts. I began doing this while I lived in Germany in the seventies and eighties, even being offered a job by one of the art retrieval outfits. I liked the TV series “To Catch a Thief.”

I’m really fascinated by all the masterpieces stolen by the Nazis, and the repatriation of stolen works to their former owners–a ticklish operation when the new owner may have legitimately paid lots of money for the work with no idea of its journey along the way through thieves (a concept called ‘provenance’).

Just recently a Los Angeles man, Philip Righter, was convicted of selling fraudulently made works to a gallery in South Florida. The contemporary artists he forged were Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring for a million-dollar steal for which he plead guilty.

An FBI special agent announced this.

The scheme started with buying art forgeries on-line, at marketplaces and auction sites. Supplied with fakes, the schemer wrote up letters with embossed signatures claiming their authenticity. Using those letters he approached a gallery, piqued interest, sent forgeries to a warehouse nearby and sent a bill for a mill, plus, requesting the money wired, which turned around to bite him in one of the charges against him of mail fraud. All told, his possible prison time could be 22+ years.

In California he tried the same thing with additional artists like Andy Warhol.

If you like collecting art and scour secondhand markets for it, it might pay you to learn as much about provenance, the word and especially a written description of the painting or sculpture’s ownership journey, as you can.

Picture: Book II, The Tarbert Legacy, baking. Pix: Seals and Castles Speak Authenticity

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My 2020 in some ways just began, but with all that’s going on, that’s easy to understand. Focusing on writing is saving me during this pandemic.

I’ve just finished writing the Prequel, Inheritance Spurned, to my Highland-Cape-Fear-Conspiracy Thriller Series–and Stone of Her Destiny, Book I, many of you have bought from Amazon or Kobo.

I have one disclaimer and one forewarning.

You may have sensed a literary divide between contemporary and historical. So have I. But I don’t understand why.

My feet are firmly planted in both camps, lol. I love current time zones, but I love historical stories. I’ve grown up around history where every house, every framed picture, every path prompts a story, and people are still around to tell them. My cousin is a real historian.

BUT, I will drive the tedious historian mad. That’s because I love alternate history. I write some within my novels which are all contemporary or not so long ago. I also play with history. Not revisionist history to “right” a movement we now consider wrong. I’m totally at odds with rewriting classics to purge controversial copy. I’d rather know the foibles of a people and era. But history shaping now, or history still alive, I love. I’m not as enamored of costume and speech pedantry…unless it’s a fragment of an old costume found.

Take the year-old article on Sotheby’s. For £3,000, a 1.4 cm piece of stone was on the auction block–a chip off the old Stone of Destiny–subject of my latest book, Stone of Her Destiny. The fact that the history of this stone can be traced back a millennium has piles to do with its high price–as does the provenance, since it was used in the coronation of monarchs.

When you think that the 1.4 cm piece was kept by Stonemason Robert Gray, who repaired the Stone of Destiny, broken after it was stolen from Westminster Abbey by Scottish nationalists in 1950, you get a hint of what the stonemason knew about history adding worth. The Courier in Scotland wrote that Gray, now-deceased, never revealed whether the returned (repaired) Stone was genuine. The framed fragment went under the hammer at Lyon & Turnbull’s Sale of Scottish Silver and Applied Arts in 2018. I searched the sold registry, but could find no proof of sale of the sandstone piece he certified was taken by him.To the best of my knowledge, it probably sold for that at Edinburgh auction. If not, I’d buy it, given enough fluid cash.

Well, Kenna, my redheaded Southern heroine and I have chased the Stone for some years now. Its first theft was in 1296 from Scone Abbey by King Edward. Even then major figures contested whether or not it was the real stone, at least a look-alike was taken back to England as a coronation stone until now. Their return of the stone to Scotland in 1996 is token, since the crown contracted to have it back in England on the occasion of Britain’s next ascending royal to the throne.

But the real Stone of Destiny, the one that cries out when the rightful king sits on it like happened when Scottish kings sat on it–its whereabouts are hotly contested, even today.

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New Books Brewing Just when you get used to life as it is, changes occur. A friend moves away. Your massage therapist loses her place of operation. Nothing like it, I’d say. Well, I’m changing, too. Thanks to my web SEO, you’ve a new surprise waiting for you at the website bearing my name. A little clue: it’s in this article elsewhere. My book Stone of Her Destiny just came out on Amazon on August 5, and I’ve written a dossier on Kenna’s ancestor, plus a new book, Inheritance Spurned, and another new novel begun, The Tarbert Legacy. All of the new work is part of the Highland-Cape Fear Thriller Series, a series filled with all things Scottish, the Stone of Destiny, a Southern mansion, intense love, a Cape Fear River chase scene, and unasked-for-thrills and adventures, old letters and other treasures. A series, and yet each book is a standalone. My speed of writing has increased drastically, and I must say, it needed to. Authors can make it today, but they have to work harder than ever. If an author wants to tell her kind of story for the reader to enjoy some gourmet goodies that are just a little bit off the mainstream, she has to publish herself. If she wants a higher cut of the proceeds from the work she does, she goes Indie. Yes, it’s easier than ever in many ways, but harder just due to the multiplicity of apps and services he or she has to have and pay for in order to make it in publishing and marketing. Since I’m writing this to fans, readers, and lovers of the independent way, I won’t bore you with information that others can give you better. If you want to know about all the bells and whistles, check out Mark Dawson’s Self-Publishing Formula. I have him to thank for my recent progress. I have started dictating my books, too, which coincides with my shoulders protesting their typing and painting loads. It’s a pain (the dictating pain) that you can master, as well, if you have the inclination. Lane Campbell and Kenna Alford Campbell still inspect their ancestry, and are hot on the heels of an ancestor common to both of them. Their searches and activities have captured a lot of unwanted interest as well as buzz, enough to keep them ahead of the curve of their life spans and unexpected curves of impinging loyalties. Fortunately so far, the stalkers just want to know what they know. That might just change. There’s nothing as certain as change. Hop on the bandwagon and read my other standalones, as well.       Learn more »

Gothic Novels–Dark, Supernatural, and Plenty of Spies

When I write books, usually there are Gothic elements in them, even if they are not primarily Gothic novels. One of those elements is spy stuff. All the old Gothics have spy stuff in them…and it is to those earliest examples I have returned in my own writing while keeping the new eNovels thoroughly modern.

With that in mind, one look at current news will show you how current and thoroughly modern spying is just now. There’s the 69-year-old political exile Nikolai Glushkov as an example, the Russian found dead in London on a not-too-distant Monday night. His demise was said by the British police to be a murder–a compression to the neck. And Nikolai had been very open in telling people he was on a Kremlin hit list. Glushkov had been a close associate of Boris Berezovsky who was a Russian oligarch and prominent Putin critic. Boris was found dead on the bathroom floor of his ex-wife’s house in Ascot, southeast England back in 2013. After the death of his friend, Glushkov claimed to be on this hit list that far back, and named another victim, Alexander Litvinenko who had been killed in 2006 with polonium poison.

When we did our mission work in Europe and traveled behind the Iron Curtain, we knew a man, a very young man named Sergei Kourdakov who escaped a Russian trawler and swam to political safety. We first met him in the U.S. at church services. He was on a circuit telling everyone his story and his conversion–no one would believe his freedom would only last a few years. While his early death looked accidental, no one of us who knew him believed it was anything but murder–a hit from the then-KGB who operated freely all over the world.

In my novel Veiled in White,

the spy element was part of the inherent fabric of Estonia, its setting. Near St. Petersburg (in the USSR), the small country of Estonia was occupied by the Russians and has always been a target of spies, so the story of the North Carolinian artist who became an art student there and whose American outspokenness got her in trouble on the issue of spies is very accurate and believable.

The spy element is alive and well in the novel A Deadly Provenance. In this case it is connected to the former Nazi network with entanglements into the present and emerging one. Its tentacles reached back into the earlier movement in the USA where a movement of the same Nazi element was born, as well. So when you read about these things in the novel, you can know just how serious, treacherous, and deadly those forces were. There is a love story along with the spy one which brings in a redemptive element.

Yuletide Folly has no spy feature in it per se, but Stormclyffe, Weep! has Irish spy stories in it, and Czech Point recreates the spy scene rather accurately that we ourselves encountered in our tourist trips into the Communist East Bloc.

The spy element of nations is similar to the spying done by secret societies rampant in

Stone of Her Destiny, from Cape Fear to Kintyre, and provides the impetus to a plot to infiltrate and commandeer the Christian Church. Spying is what secret societies do, and a group or nation only has to value the rewards of doing the lurking, stalking, listening, and recording to set aside the funds to do it, and the game is on.

I watched NBC’s live broadcast of the Russian Ambassador to the UK’s talk on Syria and the latest chemical event, and can only say, how can people not acknowledge the many faces worn by the many interacting countries? If only simplicity and innocence were possible…but then, we would have no books.

On to romance with a mission.

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The SUPERNATURAL in Christianity and Beyond

Few realize it, but supernatural powers have often been attributed to stones, including in fiction, like Ali Babi and the Forty Thieves written in the 1800’s with secret word of access, “Open, Sesame.”

Nations recognize talking stones and the sensational regularly, however. Among them would be Scotland, Ireland, Lhasa in central Tibet, Sri Lanka, and Israel. Under the temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem lies a foundation stone held to be the spot of either the Holy of Holies or the Outer Court of the First Temple. Stones credited with supernatural powers are legendary. Scotland’s Stone of Destiny, snatched as a spoil of war by Edward in 1296 is said to be where Jacob slept, receiving the vision from God of angels descending on a ladder. Jesus used mute rock to symbolize indifference to him, proclaiming that rocks would cry out to point to him, if necessary.

Supernatural is at the heart of Christian and Jewish history with the Ten Commandments emblazoned on stone tablets directly from God, to include angel visitations, inception of Mary by the Holy Spirit, a virgin birth, appearance and vocalization of God at Jesus’ baptism, three years of major miracles by Christ and his disciples then and beyond, His resurrection, the rolling away of the stone entry to Jesus’ tomb, conversion of Christian-killer Paul through a public vision making Paul blind, speaking of thousands in unknown tongues, the raising of the dead. Over the years traditional denominationalism gave way to evangelicalism which has now imploded, and everyone is looking for a new moniker.

Tradition often leaves little room for the supernatural.

Mainstream Christians fail to realize that top religious entities, the Catholic Church for one, have documented provisions for supernatural visitations of aliens, a controversial arena shut down by the ‘median voice’ of believers of many faiths. Others believe the final days will explode with supernatural visitations touching Earth. Whether God origins or no are issues resurfacing for free-floating Christians at large who have distanced themselves from the many ecclesiastical bodies.

Re-enter one such Stone–stolen by England’s Edward in 1296 as a spoil of war and returned to Scotland in 1996–a stone on which Scotland’s royals were crowned, and after 1296, was England’s coronation stone, a stone reputed to speak. Some argue that Lia Fail designation was meant only for Ireland’s stone by the same name which bears a totally different look, located on the hill of Tara instead of on Moot Hill. Others say that name still applies to Scotland’s Stone of Destiny under guard at Edinburgh Castle with the crown jewels, brought in on November 30, 1996 in a motorcade to great fanfare.

Back home, now, in Scotland–or is it? Prominent Scottish citizens like Alex Salmond are quoted as questioning Edinburgh Castle Stone’s authenticity.

Diana Gabaldon uses a stone in Scotland for the fictional entry of her character into a fantasy historical past. She uses the history of my ancestor, Farquhard Campbell, in her books that started with Outlander. My romance novel and thriller is based on a Scottish stone as well, but one this author speculatively posits a future for that is based on its history. Stone of Her Destiny’s heroine has direct lineage from that very real but difficult-to-be-traced Farquhard Campbell and his wife Isabella McAllister Campbell whose story bears on this debate in a startling enough way that it might wake the the dead.

Ever since the Stone of Destiny was liberated from its throne chair in the wee hours of November 14, 1996, in Westminster Abbey, the public have wanted to hear every possible detail about the stone’s journey. Since the stone’s vitae contains a history of thefts as well as coronations, one asks a bold and valid question. And now on the eve of destruction, perhaps the ancient stone which one legend holds is the stone that carried the arc of the covenant of the Hebrew children for 40 years in the wilderness, the very stone Jacob lay on when he received a vision from God. Perhaps the stone wants to speak again.

Perhaps it wants to name the true Monarch of the World. The real Stone could resurface just in time to speak once more and shake the Earth.

Follow Kenna as she involves Scottish Laird by the name of her ancestor and his son Lane of Blackheart Heights in a history-propelled search through current-day Scotland into the world of the supernatural to find the Holy Grail, the Stone of Her Destiny.  You can buy this book in the special promo right now at the link. Look for a new promotion first thing in the new year.

Belief in supernatural activity of stones recedes to early folklore and Babylonian culture. Perhaps even for today it is not so strange a belief. A speaking stone could act as pivot point for people of faith, to forever unify or divide.

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New Gothic Romance

Lulled to sleep by grace. Soothed into inaction by forgiveness. Numbed by grief. Led to apathy by distant images of hate. Murderous, thunderous images in abeyance, a shark’s shredding teeth kept at bay by one sheer glass screen. A letter from the past slaps Kenna into action. Who knew an ancient letter could wake the dead, give a country’s coronation stone voice?

Another in her line of Gothic romances, Joanna McKethan’s Stone of Her Destiny takes us on the journey of a quest novel, as Kenna moves from NC to Scotland to cover news of the returning coronation rock “Stone of Destiny” to Edinburgh Castle after a 700-year gap where it sat in Westminster Abbey as a spoil of war. Galvanized by loss and grief, Kenna shoves everything aside to pursue her holy grail, the real Stone of Destiny. A daunting task unless like Kenna you are chosen by God or circumstance or 7 generations of lineage to reactivate facts overlooked by everyone before, facts rediscovered in Kenna’s attic lineage–and in her new residence at Blackheart Heights in Tarbert, Scotland.

From history come forces that stalk her today, kidnap her, watch her and let her go on an unseen tether. Secret societies search the same holy grail and think she knows something, or that she may lead them to something they, too have lost. They must have the real stone at any cost and they believe she just may lead them to it.

Suspense doesn’t grow without love and romance hand in hand in this novel. You might say one feeds the other.

Spies, art objects, love, and danger fill Joanna McKethan’s other novels as well as this new one; Veiled in White is set in spy-infested Estonia near St. Petersburg, Russia. Yuletide Folly is set in Southern Pines on a politician’s megalithic horse estate, and A Deadly Provenance sends a heroine into threats in post-Nazi, Cold War Bavaria, Germany. Her Gothic romances contain espionage in no small measure,  like Czech Mate.

Stone of Her Destiny is due to be released November 30, 2017, on St. Andrews Day–the stone was stolen in 1296 and was returned by Prince Andrew on St. Andrew’s Day to Scotland’s Edinburgh Castle November 30 in 1996.

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Local Author’s Book Release Nov. 30 Features Stone of Destiny

From Scotland to England, 1296. From England to Scotland, 1996. After 21 years this November 30, 2017, the Stone of Destiny might have a new destiny planned for its future.

Organizers of Perth’s bid to be UK City of Culture 2021 want the stone restored to its “historic home”–I am assuming they mean Scone Palace (pronounced skoon), as it was known as the Stone of Scone all these years, as well as the Stone of Destiny, since the kings of Scotland were crowned on the Stone there at Moot Hill at Scone Palace. But I may be wrong. I imagine the wrangling and the wranglers are both kept secret to some degree. When officials in Scone first voiced loud objections to housing the returned stone at Edinburgh Castle, they were told Edinburgh had better security than Scone Palace, or such was the hearsay I picked up at Scone Palace when we visited in 2010, a place replete with so much history of the Stone and the Kings, it screams its historical claim.

I imagine organizers must be planning ramped up security for the Stone, to have the chance to win their bid.

Not many days from now, on St. Andrew’s Day, November 30th, Scots will celebrate the return of the famous stone to their country after being held hostage by England for 700 years, ostensibly a serendipitous response to Lord Forsyth of Drumlean’s request made on behalf of his daughter to return the Scots their stone. I say that because I know Robbie the Pict lead the charge in what I consider his hilarious legal letters to police constables, royals, the Queen, Princess Diana, and who knows all (there’s a book by him, of course) at least three years prior to the stone’s return filled with records of his 3 years’ worth of onslaughts by post. If there was ever a time for a good laugh, it’s reading his not-dry-at-all legal letters as to the real ownership of the stone, the filing of a claim of theft, and more.

Whatever plans are being made, I’m sure it is under the cloak of secrecy, as the first time of planning was for moving the Stone.

Even the Stone of Destiny‘s original return into Scotland was made 2 weeks prior to its show arrival. It was snuck in under the cloak of darkness, after being snuck out from Westminster Abbey under the cloak of darkness, between its closing and 2a.m. when it left on November 15, my birthday. In some undisclosed location in those two weeks following, it was housed at a secret location where it was cleaned, dressed up, and catalogued like some artifact from the British Museum in order to be paraded on November 30th down the Royal Mile encased and highlighted by glass in the back of the van. The Scots’ precious Stone of Destiny was surrounded by glass walls for all to see, proceeded and protected by a company of police escorts in full dress.

Crowds lined up to view the spectacle. Some of this, of course, occurs in the context of Stone of Her Destiny when Kenna and Blackheart Castle’s heir apparent, Lane, use her press passes to view the event at Edinburgh Castle–the event that propelled Kenna into a new life in Scotland after losing her uncle (surrogate father) and romantic connection where she lived in Charlotte and on the Cape Fear River. Kenna traces her lineage of seven generations to Kintyre in the town of Tarbert in this Gothic romance set both in Scotland and in NC along the Cape Fear, stalked by dark forces across continents.

Last year a 20-year celebration was headed up by the HES (Historic Environment Scotland). They need to keep the hype up and plan a good one for this year, as well, imho, but Scone Palace, billed as the original home of the Stone, might do well to keep up its campaign for historicity’s sake. You are welcome to use my novel Stone of Her Destiny to stir up conversation about the ‘Cludgie Stane.’ The Stone’s past before 900A.D. is steeped in legend and often this incarnation of the stone is itself questioned as to whether or not it is the real stone, but that’s another story for another day.

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7th Generation Highland Scot Pens Novel on Stone of Destiny

A rock. A sword. A crown. Letters. A Scots legacy.

Beautifully staged and guarded at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland, the rock with a dozen names and at least that many legends of provenance–the Stone of Destiny–returned to Scotland in a cavalcade of royal limousines on November 30, 1996. The Scots’ Coronation Stone will have resided there for thousands of daily viewers for twenty-one years on its anniversary this year.

In a note of interesting happenstance, Prince Andrew himself returned the Stone to Scotland, November 30th, an official holiday named since 1320 St. Andrews Day, a commemoration of the martyrdom of Andrew the apostle in circa 70A.D. The cultural and official exchange took place in Edinburgh Castle. Although accompanied by much pomp and circumstance, the return of the Stone purloined by England’s monarch Edward as war spoils in 1296 from its home at the Palace of Scone in Scotland, is a nominal gesture since it was ‘given’ on a string. The Scots must return it when the next royal is crowned in England. See more photographs on Pinterest.

Kenna Alford believed seeing the Stone’s return firsthand worthy of supreme effort in the novel Stone of Her Destiny, worthy enough to make her life obsession. Positioning Stone’s return with private agendas abroad, she catapulted all to the land of her ancestors. Her knowledge of Scottish forebears bracketed seven generations and encased the very land on which she had lived in North Carolina on the Cape Fear, land acquired by them and kept in family possession since circa 1736. And gave her letters tracing back all the way to that first generation emigrating from Tarbert, out of Campbeltown.

Together, she and Lane, the heir apparent and lord of the castle Blackheart Heights cover this event and many to come. Just like in real life, royals, processions, regalia, all are quite seductive elements to the commoner to watch, follow, and enjoy. If you are close, you can participate in the festivities. And the intrigue.

Kenna thrives on intrigue. The Gothic mansion she grew up in, a Southern ghost-ridden plantation house, has prepared her for the extended stay she begins at gloomy Blackheart Heights with its strange visitor, a little girl, a doll, happenings, and weird presences going bump in the night.

She finds that she has competition in the romantic department, however, and that her lessons in falconing given by Lane at Blackheart are not the only inroads into his life and heart, but that he has something going with a raven-haired beauty named Tarra Montfort. She finds out that the elite family of Montfort’s are highly-placed Masons that plumb the depths beyond their own estate into the castle where she stays. She finds they have a vested interest in that castle, as well.

With the rug pulled out from under her at home, freed to follow the Stone to Scotland and back and if necessary, over the whole world–to her own destiny, she does just that. Freed to love and to marry. Freed to look under rocks, trace the journey of the Stone, and stir up a world of controversy. Free to learn the enhanced significance of the Speaking Stone to international groups bent on acquiring it for themselves. And so many of these groups think the wrong one lies in Edinburgh. So many think she knows something that the rest of the world does not.

She learned the price of her obsession, endless stalking and intrusion, fear for her life and that of her loved ones too late to withdraw from the grim trek her curiosity and resultant knowledge set her out on. She is driven, drawn, and determined, like any self-respecting redhead of Scottish descent. And like most women, susceptible to a romantic relationship.

Stone of Her Destiny is a Gothic suspense slated to appear as an E book on November 30th this year: St. Andrews Day.

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November celebrates a lot of things, elections, Veterans, the pilgrims’ day of thanks (unless history has been dumped), but I just discovered that November’s National Love Your Red Hair Day celebrates redheads. That’s right, everyone with red hair gets good press on the 5th of November, a custom, I am told, started by two redheaded sisters.

Why as an ash blonde would I want to enter in? Why, because they make up 13% of Scots in Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots being a famous Scottish redhead and 10% of folks in Ireland, because I write books, and because the heroes and heroines in my novels often have Scottish or Irish descendants. Nothing says Scottish like red hair and freckles. Another reason is that they won’t go grey, and hence, stay eternally young, the way a good hero or heroine must to entertain centuries of readers. Give my heroine some green or blue eyes and you have a real rarity, because even among redheads, the common eye color is brown. Bees are attracted to them, I have just learned, so maybe I need to write a thriller with a redheaded victim.

That and because redheads are said to have increased sensitivity to pain, and you know for certain that an author is going to subject her characters to some pain. We fiction authors are something of sadists in that regard, because unless you squeeze the jar, you don’t know what’s in it. The same gene that produces red hair is linked to the gene connected to pain receptors, meaning they might require more anesthesia for intrusive medical procedures.

And in no small part would I pick a redhead because they don’t have the reputation of blondes as being flaky or “I dunno.” Their reputation is hotheaded, independent. So they make strong contenders for your attention as slightly quirky, an inherent difference which grooms them for adventure in your hemisphere.

Great authors have featured stand-out redheads through the ages. Take A. Conan Doyle in Sherlock Holmes, for example and his detective short story “The Redheaded League,” or Anne in Anne of Green Gables who is revisiting us now from yesteryear, or the Weasleys in the Harry Potter series. Then there’s “Little Orphan Annie” and Pippi Longstocking so popular in Germany that we watched when we lived an extended time there. There’s the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, not to mention Dorothy herself of Oz with her cute little braids. There’s Dana Sculley of X-files, one of my personal favorites and the fictional Madeleine of French extract, and I would be remiss not to mention my granddaughter’s current favorite fictional character, Ariel. Don’t forget our wonderful rag dolls, Raggedy Ann and Andy. Then there’s Faramir in Lord of the Rings, quite nice for a hero. In my adopted genre, Gothic romance, popular British novelist Hugh Seymour Walpole published thirty-six novels, including, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair. It is described as a macabre romance, a Gothic tale by a descendant of the author of The Castle of Otranto.

Not to mention that my aunt across the road was a redhead and, to break into brogue, ‘niver ye saw sich an independent female with firmly defined character parameters.’ My cousin the editorial writer has red hair and lots of his cousins, descendants of one of the Scottish clans which made up a huge portion of the population in the Cape Fear region of North Carolina, emigrating from the 1730’s on into the area. My own people are Scottish descendants as well (https://joriginals.net/books/how-writing-a-gothic-filled-in-my-family-line/) and included many influential leaders in local and state government.

Having red hair makes one more likely to be left handed, statistics say, an evidence of a recessive gene showing up because recessive genes like to come in pairs. On average redheads only have 90,000 strands of hair while blonds have 140,000. However, since red hair comes thicker, their hair looks just as full.

Interesting my Christmas novelette features a dual redheaded pair in A Yuletide Folly Follyhttp://books.joriginals.net/author-books/yuletide-folly/, Sinclair, who returns to her mansion and horse farm in the Pinehurst area for some intense intrigue with her geologist boyfriend and love interest, whose red hair leads him in a decidedly levelheaded direction. We hired two models who fulfilled the cover requirements for this. I’m amazed at the odds on having found them, since they are only 2-3% of the total population at large!

Now we have a redheaded heroine in my newest novel, Stone of Her Destiny, by the name of Kenna. I say it takes a redhead to manage her destiny between two worlds, Scotland and the Cape Fear region of North Carolina; with the old world of her ancestry and the modern new world she and her Scottish love must conquer to stay functional. Together they have the combined ancestry which will save the day. This novel is slated for publication before Christmas of this year. I just have a couple more love scenes to incorporate into it, scenes worthy of a redhead, I might add.

Sizzle, sizzle, and still safe.

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