GUEST POST: Interview with Author Jocelynn Babcock

Today I continue my monthly interview series with another up-and-coming author, Jocelynn Babcock. Jocelynn is the author of the newly released MANTIC Volume 1: The Eyes of March. Let's get down to business!

THE BOOK!

A psychic with amnesia? 

Two women murdered, both with identical tattoos. A third tattooed woman survives an attempted drowning. Valena is the only link to stop the serial killer pursuing her, but she is afraid of her dark truth and surrenders to amnesia. 

Haunted by visions, she meets the Wyrd Sisters and enters a life of psychics, tarot readings, prophecies, and possible death. 

When those from her past find her, how can she accept police help and hide from the killer if she refuses to remember?

But it now at AMAZON

THE INTERVIEW!

Your first book, The Eyes of March, is listed as a paranormal thriller on Amazon. What drew you to write in this genre?

I never meant to write dark murder mysteries. I wanted something light and funny. When I sat down, I had to plot this character carefully. I had to know why she had amnesia. That changed the tone and the theme for the book. It turns out, I have a darkness that needs an outlet and I now write in a genre I’ve never read much in.

So it seems like your characters had a story to tell. When you develop characters do you already know who they are before you begin writing or do you let them develop as you go? 

I develop my characters. They do talk to me. Kim, for example, told me her wife died of breast cancer. That was not planned. For the most part, their archetype, employment, and physical appearance is already pre-determined.

The Eyes of March was fittingly just released in March. Did you do a press release, Goodreads book launch or anything else to promote your work and did it work?

I did a Goodreads giveaway. The purpose of those is to generate awareness and have your book on some people’s to be read list. I participate in author take overs and meet new readers. I think it is always beneficial to build your platform. 

Speaking of platform: what’s your views on social media for marketing, and which of them have worked best for you?
I tracked my advertising and found that Twitter is like screaming into vast nothingness. It produced squat. Facebook generated the most clicks. Social media is a great resource for reaching readers.

Being a writer is a complicated and stressful business. Do you think being a writer is a gift or a curse?
Neither. A “gift” suggests that only a certain group can do it. Though it takes a certain temperament, anybody can be a writer. A “curse” suggests that writing comes from without and we have no choice or control.

Interesting. What about for you, personally: Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing as far as content?

Sex is difficult for me to write. I can’t shut off that voice in my brain that says “My mother’s going to read this,” or “I don’t want my family thinking I’m into this.”

THE AUTHOR!

Jocelynn Babcock hates talking about herself in third person, but loves reading and writing third person narratives. A typical writer, she’ll tell you she created books with her grandma’s yarn as a child and grew up to marry an engineer (as all writers do). She lives in the Channeled Scablands where the fine line between sanity and not is an outlet for idle hands. 

THE LINKS!

BLOG | FACEBOOK | PINTEREST

TWITTER | GOODREADS | AMAZON

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P - Pussy Black-Face and Margaret Marshall Saunders

Earlier this month I wrote about May Agnes Fleming, Canada's first big name author. While Fleming certainly had great (and longer-term) success, she didn't come close to the explosive impact of Margaret Marshall Saunders.

The daughter of a baptist minister, Margaret was born in 1861 in the village of Milton, Nova Scotia. She traveled widely, attending boarding school in Edinburgh and studying French at Orléans.

In 1889 she submitted her first novel, Beautiful Joe, to the American Humane Education Society Prize Competition "Kind and Cruel Treatment of Domestic Animals and Birds in the Northern States" and won $200. (For reference, that would be worth over five grand today, so that's a pretty sweet writing contest payout.) It was the "true story" of a dog from Meaford, Ontario that had his ears and tail snipped by an abusive owner as a puppy, but is rescued by a family and then goes on to save the family's lives. Of course it was written from the dog's point of view.

The book was published in 1893 and came to international attention (this was on the heels of Black Beauty, and animal books were really big back then). It was the first Canadian book to sell over a million copies (the population of Canada in 1893 was under five million, so every household must have had at least one copy of this friggin' book), going on to sell over seven million copies worldwide by 1930.

As with my previous post about Winnie the Pooh, I maintain once again that the secret of literary success is writing about weird Canadian animals.

Margaret would go on to write twenty other stories and novels, mostly about animals. You can actually still get some of them on Amazon, the most stunningly-titled example being "Pussy Black-Face," which to calm your concerns is neither racist nor about some weird sexual fetish. Supposedly it's a children's story about a cat.

(Well, actually, it was written in 1913 so it may very well have racist elements. And, fair warning, if you Google "Pussy Black-Face" you do get porn hits on the first page.)

Here, I googled it for you to save the embarrassment of someone finding it in your search history.

Margaret was never married and by all accounts grew to be a weird cat/animal lady, living with her sister in an apartment in downtown Toronto with an excessive number of rescue animals. She often named the animals after the locations where she found them, including a dog named Johnny Doorstep and a pigeon named 38 Front Street.

She and her sister toured Canada and the US, giving lectures and collecting stories of domestic animals that were the inspiration for many of her writings. A charming and humourous woman, she held strong interest in humanitarian concerns for animals and children. In addition to her lectures she wrote articles for several newspapers on social concerns such as the abolition of child labour and the improvement of playground facilities. She belonged to many organizations, including founding the Canadian Women's Press Club with Lucy Maud Montgomery. (Montgomery of course went on to be even more successful than Margaret, but Saunders paved the way).

Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables has no less than 22 film and TV adaptations, including TWO Japanese anime series and a new "gritty reboot" airing right now on CBC. So where's the Pussy Black-Face movie?

At age 73 she was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Canada's highest civilian honour. She passed away in 1974 at the age of 85.

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My A-to-Z Blogging Challenge theme for 2017 is Weird Canadian Facts and History. To see more blog posts, click here.

O - The October Crisis

Okay, I find this particular story unusual because despite it being a huge deal for our country and the fact that it took place only a few years before I was born, I knew next to nothing about the Quebec October Crisis until I started doing research for this post. Maybe it's just because Newfoundlanders didn't care about it (we have our own separatist feelings sometimes) but I really feel like this should have been covered in high school history.

Quick backstory: The English and the French don't like each other. You probably know that. You also probably know that Canada was an English colony (after they seized most of France's territories after the Seven-Year War). The province of Quebec, however, maintains a strong French identity and culture. They never appreciated being lumped in with the rest of the Dominion, and jumped on any chance they had to rebel. There are many parallels between English/French Canada and England/Ireland, as you're about to see.

Tensions were particularly high in the 1960s (it was a rebellious decade everywhere). The Front de libération de Québec - the FLQ, a Quebec nationalist group reminiscent of Ireland's IRA - detonated some 95 bombs between 1963 and 1970, especially around rich Anglophone (English-speaking) neighbourhoods, killing at least 8 people and wounding dozens more. In early 1969 they attacked the Montreal Stock Exchange and injured 27 people. As the decade closed they became more brazen, and police arrested several men who had been planning to kidnap the Israeli and American consuls.

This is one of the guys they arrested. Remember him, it becomes important later.

They managed to follow through with another plot in early October of 1970, when the FLQ kidnapped both the British Trade Commissioner, James Cross, and the Minister of Labour, Pierre Laporte. Both were taken from their homes in broad daylight. Laporte was playing football on the front lawn with his nephew.

This of course made international news and sparked the nation-wide crisis. On October 12 the military was sent to patrol Montreal. On October 13, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (father of current PM Justin Trudeau) was interviewed by the CBC about the military presence and asked him exactly how far he was willing to go to end the crisis.

Trudeau famously responded, "Just watch me."

Which is a way cooler answer than whatever the hell he's doing here.

On October 16, Trudeau implemented the War Measures Act, granting the police far-reaching powers to apprehend, question and detain individuals without warrants, probable cause or even explanation. It was the first time such an edict had been put into place during peace time, and was a HUGE deal as it suspended many civil rights and protections.

The crazy thing is we have similar, ongoing "anti-terrorism" laws now and people barely bat an eye.

On October 17, the FLQ announced they had executed Minister Pierre Laporte. His body was found stuffed in the trunk of a car. Now proving they meant business, they also released a list of demands, including the release of "political" prisoners (FLQ members who had been arrested for earlier bombings), a plane to fly them to Cuba and $500,000 in cash. The stand-off continued until November 6 when the police raided the FLQ cell. Though they captured several conspirators, including one who would ultimately be charged with the murder of Pierre Laporte, more escaped with James Cross. Over the course of two months the police arrested 497 people. Sixty-two of them were charged, 32 of them with crimes serious enough that they were denied bail. The public was generally supportive of these actions, with polls at the time showing some 90% approval of the War Measures Act, though in the decades since there has been plenty of debate as to whether it was the right choice.

Quebec must have been pretty bad if soldiers in the streets garnered a 90% approval rating.

But here's where the story gets really weird, and reminds me how dumb the Canadian justice system is sometimes.

Though I don't fully understand why, the government eventually negotiated with the terrorists, and Cross was finally released on December 4. The five remaining known conspirators were released and flown to Cuba with Fidel Castro's approval. After months of tension, national intrigue, murdering a cabinet minister and testing the limits of human rights in the country, they let the bad guys go.

It gets even more ridiculous. Four of them eventually returned to Canada, with the government's consent, in exchange for standing trial. They were sentenced to two years (TWO YEARS!) but two of them only served 8 months before being released on parole, and have now returned to society and done quite well for themselves. Jacques Cossette-Trudel is a filmmaker who has received arts grants from the government to fund his films. His ex-wife, Louise Lanctot, received a doctorate from the University of Montreal, worked for several government health departments, and is now a successful author.

Louise's brother, Jacques Lanctot, actually served his full two years before going on to become a writer and publisher. Guess what?

Remember him?

Lanctot was the guy they arrested for attempting to kidnap the Israeli consul and then let him go. Of course. No big deal. It wasn't like he was a danger to anyone.

The only one of them who got any kind of comeuppance was Yves Langlois, and that was only because he was arrested in France for gun-related charges and spent two years in prison there.

Let's compare: Langlois got 2 years in prison in France for gun charges. His conspirators got less than that in Canada for terrorism, kidnapping and accessory to murder.

I don't know either, Pierre.

Quebec nationalism still runs strong in some parts of the province, and there remains a small but vocal portion of the population that would be all too happy to see Quebec be granted independence. They've tried a couple of times to legally move in that direction through referendums and policy reforms. Hopefully we won't get to a place again where militant rebels take matters into their owns hands.

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My A-to-Z Blogging Challenge theme for 2017 is Weird Canadian Facts and History. To see more blog posts, click here.

N - Canada is a Haven for Nazis

Okay, file this one under "shameful, not funny" stories.

Canada has a Nazi problem. And no, I don't mean those modern Nazis who some media outlets insist on irresponsibly calling the "alt-right" (though we have plenty of those, too). I mean, honest-to-god, World War II era German members of the Nazi party.

After the War, it is estimated that somewhere between 2000 and 5000 Nazis fled to Canada. The Canadian government did nothing about this for a full 40 years. It wasn't until 1985 that pressure from the Canadian Jewish community forced the Federal government to launch the Deschênes Commission to dig into exactly how bad the problem was. The report turned up the names of 886 possible suspects still alive and living in the country.

Guess how many of those were successfully convicted of war crimes?

If you guessed any more than zero, you were way off.

Only 26 charges were laid between 1987 and 1992. Of those, only 4 went to court, and none were successfully convicted. One prime example is Imre Finta, a Toronto restaurant owner who went on trial in 1990 as one of the key officials who rounded up some 8000 Jews in Hungary and sent them to Auschwitz. He was acquitted, and the decision was held up twice during appeals, because the courts accepted the defence that "believing Jews to be the enemy was a legitimate excuse for killing them."

I originally had a "disgusted face" animated gif here, but I can't bring myself to make light of how shockingly terrible this whole situation is.

After that gob-smackingly stupid precedent was set, there was little hope of convicting anyone, so the government changed tactics. Following cues from our American neighbours, Canada began stripping suspected Nazis of their citizenship and then deporting them back to Europe, where the criminal justice system was much better at prosecuting them.

Guess how well that worked?

Since 1994, we successfully withdrew the citizenship of only 10 suspected Nazis. Two of those left willingly and the other eight stayed in Canada until they died of old age. Once again, we continue to bat a perfect 1.000 at not dealing with Nazi war criminals.

I actually have a personal anecdote related to this story. When I was kid I knew a guy a couple of years older than me whose father was German. In his house they had proudly displayed his father's war medals, which including an Iron Cross and other Nazi memorabilia. As a kid it didn't really click with me how disgusting and horrifying this was, nor did I contemplate how in some countries just owning this stuff would be illegal. His grandfather lived out his life in Canada, never fearing persecution for anything he may have done, and never even feeling the need to hide it.

This boggles my mind. Canadians are SO fucking polite that we even turn a blind eye when our neighbour may be a goddamn war criminal. I don't have any excuses or explanation for this particular bit of Canadian trivia, just embarrassment and disgust.

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My A-to-Z Blogging Challenge theme for 2017 is Weird Canadian Facts and History. To see more blog posts, click here.

M - You Can't Shoot Mowglis in British Columbia

Before the terms "abominable snowman," "Sasquatch" and "Bigfoot" were popularized, British Columbia had a Mowglis problem.

A mowgli is an earlier term used to describe our elusive, forest-dwelling ape-like cousins, and obviously comes from Kipling's The Jungle Book. It's actually a handy word to describe the feral wildmen who were apparently clamouring around the deepest forests of B.C. During the late 19th, early 20th century, sightings in the area were pretty common, so much so that laws had to be created for them. There is a legend (it's never been proven) that there was actually a local law preventing anyone from hunting or shooting the mysterious cryptoids, because they were apparently so numerous they were actually becoming a nuisance.

(Which, incidentally, is also the way most people in Canada view the noble Canada Goose - giant flying vermin that ravages fields and leaves truckloads of green shit in water supplies. We're not allowed to kill them, either.)

You have no idea how much green shit these birds can produce... 

Unless you've walked in a park in Canada in the Spring or the Fall.

A famous story from an Ohio newspaper in 1905 reports the following: (Why a newspaper in Ohio would be reporting on British Columbia wild people is besides the point)

Thomas Kincaid, a rancher living near French creek, while bicycling from Cumberland, also reports seeing a Mowgli, whom he describes as a powerfully built man, more than six feet in height and covered with long black hair. The wild man upon seeing Kincaid uttered a shriek and disappeared into the woods. Upon arriving home Kincaid wrote Government Agent Bray of Nanaimo, inquiring if it would be lawful to shoot the Mowgli, as he was terrorizing that vicinity.

The government agent replied that there was no law permitting such an act. 

So either there was specifically a law that said "you can't shoot Mowglis," or they assumed it was actually a person and not an animal, or the entire story is completely made up. The story did appear in the newspaper, but whether or not you trust the journalistic integrity of turn-of-the-century reports from Ohio is another matter.

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My A-to-Z Blogging Challenge theme for 2017 is Weird Canadian Facts and History. To see more blog posts, click here.

L - The Deadly Lacrosse Game at Fort Michilimackinac

Fort Michilimackinac was an 18th century French fort and trading post on the northern tip of the lower peninsula of what is today the state of Michigan. It still exists as a popular tourist attraction . I'm including this in Canadian history because prior to the US war of Independence, Michilimackinac was actually located in what was called by the British "Upper Canada."

Also, because Lacrosse is the national sport of Canada.

Bet you didn't know that, right? You assumed it was hockey, right?

(Okay, fine. Hockey is Canada's official "Winter" sport, but that's a relatively new development. From 1859 to 1994, Lacrosse was the country's only recognized "official" sport. Yeah, I don't get it either.)

Pictured: Not hockey.

Pictured: Girls playing not hockey. Notice how they don't need any wussy helmets or gloves.

Michilimackinac (God I love that word) was ceded from France to Britain in 1761 following their loss in the Seven-Years War. The fall-out from this war actually had far-reaching consequences across Canada that are still felt today and are too complicated to get into in this post (basically it's the beginning for much of the English/French/Native tensions in the country). The important point for this story, however, is that while Britain controlled the fort with a handful of troops, the population of the area was still predominantly French and Métis, and they did not get along with their new British landlords.

The young English Major in charge of the fort, George Etherington, is what historians call "a bit of a twit." He patently ignored warnings from the French Canadians that the local tribes were planning an attack. When a huge contingent of Objibwe and Sauk arrived at his gates on June 2, 1763, asking the British to come watch their game of baaga'adowe (also called baggatiway, the forerunner of modern Lacrosse) in honour of the King's birthday, the Major heartily agreed. In fact, Etherington was so oblivious to the dangers that he actually left the gates open and sent his men out to watch unarmed.

Did I mention that the Objibwe and Sauk outnumbered the British troops 500 to 35?

"There's no way this is going to work."

"It will. Trust me. The British are REALLY dumb."

The Attack at Michilimackinac is a bitchin' band name. It was also part of Pontiac's Rebellion, the famed war in which numerous indigenous tribes banded together to oppose the new British rule. The Rebellion ultimately did not drive out the British colonists, though it did force them to renegotiate some of their policies, and led to lasting respect and goodwill between the First Nations and the Colonist governments.

That last part was a terrible joke, by the way.

The Rebellion may have ultimately failed, but Michilimackinac was a resounding, if empty victory. The tribes stormed the fort and slaughtered any Englishmen they could find, sparing the French. Etherington and his lieutenant were taken hostage, and the fort was abandoned and taken over by the French traders. Eventually those very same French traders helped negotiate Etherington's release, and by the next year a battalion of English troops had reclaimed the fort, which the Ojibwe had never really wanted anyway.

Bonus fun fact? A few years later, the British and French colonists and indigenous tribes in the area were forced to band together against a new common enemy. Need a clue who it was? The year was 1776.

Further reading: http://mynorth.com/2010/05/deadly-lacrosse-game-in-mackinac-straits-at-fort-michilimackinac-in-1763/

My A-to-Z Blogging Challenge theme for 2017 is Weird Canadian Facts and History. To see more blog posts, click here.

K - Canada comes from the Iroquois word "Kanata" (probably)

I'll let Canada Heritage Minutes field this one:

The commonly-held belief behind the name of Canada is that early French explorers (probably Jacques Cartier) mistook the local Iroquois' description of their village - kanata - to mean the whole land. While the name Canada probably did come from kanata, it wasn't, sadly, Cartier's mistake (as hilarious as that story is). Cartier himself wrote in his journals that the locals "called their town Canada" and he named the area "le pays des Canadas" (the country of Canadas).

Another theory is that it was actually Portuguese and Spanish explorers who named the land. After coming north looking for gold and finding none, they noted things on their maps like el cabo de nada ("Cape Nothing"), or cá nada ("nothing here"), which eventually evolved to the name we know today. I kinda wish we had embraced that story - "Cape Nothing" is an awesome, metal-sounding name, like the title of a Metallica album.

Here's another one: You know the story that Columbus named the natives of North America "Indians" because he thought he had actually sailed all the way to India? Well, another (highly unlikely) theory proposes that the name comes from those same first explorers mistaking the area as the Karnataka region of India (which, coincidentally, is populated by the Kannada ethnic group). 

My favourite theory, though, is tied to another reference elsewhere in Cartier's writings. He called the province of Labrador "The Land God Gave to Cain," which, if you know anything about Labrador... is pretty accurate. You know, if you assume that God gave him the shittiest piece of real estate he could find on the planet. Somehow the "Land of Cain" became "Canada."

Little known fact: "Cain" is the biblical word for "caribou."

Actually true fact: Caribou and reindeer are the same thing. 

I think that explanation is even more metal than "Cape Nothing," honestly.

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My A-to-Z Blogging Challenge theme for 2017 is Weird Canadian Facts and History. To see more blog posts, click here.