Uncle Joe Conner

Lillian Conner Thanks so all of you who helped celebrate the reissue of Surrender yesterday.  There will be more chances to win. Lady Jayne’s Reading Den is holding its own international drawing for the book. Click here to go there. I'd like to invite you all today to join me at SOS Aloha, where I am guest blogging and remember America's original 9/11 — Pearl Harbor — from a very personal point of view.   Just click here.

Today is the day!  Iain and Annie are back!


After thinking the MacKinnon’s Rangers series was dead, lost to the chaos of the publishing industry, I am so happy that Surrender is available again.


A couple of you have asked me in emails what it was like to get a second chance to write a book I’d already written, and one person was afraid I had changed the book so much that it would no longer be the story she loved.


I will say that working on a book was published in 2006 was strange at first. My first objective was to decompress parts of it by taking scenes out of memories or flashbacks and making them real and present scenes. That was actually harder to do than I imagined. If thinking back to something that happened earlier in the day had been woven into Annie’s or Iain’s thoughts in a scene, and I removed that and put it in the present tense on stage, then what happened to the original scene?


I gained an appreciation for how tightly written the story was. Still, I found ways to make it work that I really liked and which solved a couple of problems that had been there before.


As for changing the story too much, I am not George Lucas. I did not take Surrender and fill it with stuff that just didn't need to be there. (I am so a fan of the original Star Wars films and so not a fan of the redone ones with their endless unnecessary CG creatures.) No CG creatures in Surrender!


It is the same story with the same plot. The only difference is that there are a few new scenes, an extended scene — and the entire thing has been re-edited. I’m a better writer than I was today. When I found ways to make the prose tighter or to eliminate a repetitive word or change something that could have sounded better, then I did it.


One big change, from my perspective, was changing the name of the fort from Fort Elizabeth, which it was in the original published edition, to Fort Edward, the name of the real fort where the Rangers, the country’s original special ops team, encamped. 

Fort Edward is now a town, and the good people of Fort Edward were less than enthusiastic about their town disappearing from its own history. I can’t blame them. The third largest city in the Colonies during the French & Indian War, it is now a very tiny town the significance of which is almost forgotten. I didn’t want to be a part of helping the nation to forget Fort Edward. So now it’s Fort Edward and Ranger Island. (See recent blog post for sat images of both.)


Rather than sharing an excerpt, which I’ve already done, I wanted to share the dedication and acknowledgments because they’re really important this time around. 



 






So happy re-issue day to all of us who have supported and loved this series! To celebrate I’m giving away three copies of the book! To be entered, comment below and tell me what period of history is your favorite.

I’m probably going to get in trouble for this, but what’s life without a little risk?

I thought I’d share with you this fun and scrumptious photo from the photo shoot for the covers of Surrender and Untamed. I know from reading comments in Amazon.com’s discussion forums that not everyone loves the new covers for these two books. Some say they don’t look enough like romance. But that doesn’t really bother me because we know they’re romance.

Call me a geek, but what I love is the effort Penguin put into creating historically accurate art. In that very sexy man’s hands is a real musket. That’s a powderhorn over his shoulder. He’s got moccasins on his feet, breeches and the appearance of leggings — think of them as 18th-century leather leg warmers meant to protect your legs and your clothes from being scratched and torn by branches. The shirt... well, they’ve taken liberties with that for the sake of our viewing pleasure.

And what pleasure it is!

I don’t know who the model is, but they used photos from this shoot for both Surrender and Untamed. You’ll recognize what he’s wearing in this shot — there were hundreds — on the cover of Untamed, which is my fave of the series so far.



I haven’t gotten my author copies yet, so my three prize-winners are still waiting for me to make that trek to the post office. But don’t worry, Elizabeth, Landin and Patti! It will happen. In the meantime, there are only two days until Surrender is out and 29 days until Untamed is out again. There will be more contests and more fun.

And then the countdown to Defiant — due for release on July 3 — begins!

We’re now four measly days away from the reissue of Surrender, the first book in the MacKinnon’s Rangers series. I’m so happy the story is going to be back in print. That means no more emails from people asking me when it’s going to be available again.

I’ve had a number of emails from readers wanting to know what new material exists in the story. I don’t want to run any of the new stuff as excerpts because that really gives it away. For readers who are familiar with the story, that ruins the fun.

But I will say there are a few new scenes that were originally presented as past-tense recollections in order to save room. The original publisher had very strict and ever-shrinking maximum page sizes for their books, and I kept pushing right up against that. I’d had 100 pages cut out of Carnal Gift, and I didn’t want to go through that again. As a result, I kept finding ways to take parts of the story and cram them into the characters’ memories, rather than having the action of those scenes appear “on stage.”

When I re-edited Surrender for this reissue, I scooped out the most important of those scenes and actually wrote them out, rather than having them just be brief recollections. I also added something that had never been in the book before involving Lord William, and extended a few scenes. The result is a re-edited, decompressed version of the story.

Writers should never have to spend their writing time trying to think of how not to write the scenes they need to write, you know?

About Ride the Fire: This week someone asked me when it will be in ebook format again. That’s up to Penguin, which owns the rights to the story now. Eventually — I wish it were tomorrow — the book will be reissued like Surrender and Untamed, with new material. In this case, it will be the epilogue. But I have no control over when that will happen!

Surrender, however, and Untamed are almost out again. Surrender will be available on Tuesday, Dec. 6. Untamed will be out one month later, on Jan. 2.



And then we’ll begin the countdown to Defiant.

I’m off to write. Have a lovely weekend, everyone! Join me on Monday and Tuesday for some release day celebrating, including contests and giveaways!

Who wants to go with me to visit Fort Elizabeth/Fort Edward and Ranger Island? Grab your soft drinks and Doritos because today we’re taking a MacKinnon’s Rangers road trip!

OK, really we’re just taking advantage of Google Earth. I wanted to share with you a bird’s eye view of this part of New York that has become so special to me through the years — Fort Edward and Rogers Island. It occurs to me that this is kind of silly because I have actually on-the-ground images of all of these things taken from my trips to Fort Edward. But somehow it felt like I was taking you there with me when I discovered last night that I could actually look at Rogers Island via Google.

In the original published versions of Surrender and Untamed, I changed their names to Fort Elizabeth and Ranger Island. In the new author’s cut of Surrender and Untamed — Surrender is out in five days!!! — I’ve changed Fort Elizabeth to Fort Edward but left Ranger Island because then everyone just wonders who Rogers is (a good thing to wonder, by the way). This made some folks in Fort Edward happy, because they live in one of the most important historic places in the United States — and no one has ever heard of them. And then a novelist writes a story about them, but calls them something else...

You can see how they might not like that so very much.

Without further ado, let’s rev the engine and hit the highway.

At top, you get a good overview of Ranger Island/Rogers Island. It sits in the middle of the Hudson River near the Great Carrying Place where Native people had to get out of their canoes and portage for a time. Fort Edward stood to the right of Rogers Island. The whole area is now the town of Fort Edward, but the fort itself stood not where the red dot is, but more where Highway 4 jogs to the right across from the island.

Think of the fort with a wide open plain in front of it used for drills. Beyond that on all sides is forest. Off to the left of the island and to the northeast stood a royal block house, completed in 1758 — I am winging the history, by the way, but I think that’s right — which made this spot the most heavily fortified British military position in North America.

In other words, what you are looking at is arguably the most important spot for the British during the French and Indian War. (Fort Pitt, featured in Ride the Fire, and Fort Detroit were also important).

But let’s move in closer and let the veil of history rise, giving us a peek back at the world of Iain, Morgan and Connor MacKinnon, and their adversary, Lord William Wentworth...



We come in from Albany, a port city that until recently belonged to the Dutch. We see mighty Fort Edward standing near that dark patch (center right) with the Union Flag flying from one of the fort’s bastions. There, in the river we see a long, narrow island, Ranger Island, that bustles with activity.





Ranger Island is connected to the fort by a bateau bridge that stands about in the middle of the photo there. Made of small boats, or bateaux, that have been lashed together and covered with planks that are also lashed together, it gives the Rangers a way to get to the plain north of the fort to practice shooting at marks, which they do frequently.

In the winter, ice floes sometimes clog the Hudson, and the bridge would have been relatively easy to remove to prevent the floes from crushing it or damming the river and flooding the island (which happened often anyway).

Let’s move in closer...


Here you can see the actual site of the Rangers’ encampment. The three white squares are excavated Ranger cabins that would have been used by enlisted men. They stood in rows, sharing walls with one another. The two larger white squares are covered excavations of officers’ cabins. In one, a brass compass was found. I have a replica of that compass, which I purchased at the Rogers Island Visitor Center.

If you look to the upper left, you'll see a square marked out with a low wall of stone. That is a cemetery for fallen Rangers.

A moment of silence please...



Let’s take a walk south, past fields where Rangers grew their food, great piles of wood used for cooking and heating, and pens and paddocks of animals used for food to a sad place, a place where there is much suffering — the smallpox hospital. It is believed to have stood near that pine tree in the center of the image.

Smallpox was still a deadly scourge in those days with very few people being inoculated against it, inoculation being something relatively new and deadly in and of itself at times.

Soldiers from the fort and Rangers found to have smallpox were placed in the smallpox hospital, isolated from the rest of the fort — except that their friends could come and visit. Not exactly quarantine by modern standards, which demonstrates a lack of understanding when it comes to infection control.


Here’s one last glimpse down at Ranger camp. The whipping post stood on the western edge of the island, toward your left, not far from the cabins. The small parade where the rangers mustered must have been near the cemetery. The officers’ necessaries were on the eastern edge of the island, the enlisted men’s on the right.

Think about this for a moment. Think 253 years ago when this would have been one of the most dangerous places on earth.

Now imagine rows of cabins, men busy repairing and caring for their gear, a great forest all around them. Tomorrow they leave on a mission. Major Iain MacKinnon is leading them northward to spy on Fort Carillon and see what Montcalm is doing. The men, all sons of Culloden or stubborn Irish, trust him. They’ve fought with him since ’55 when Wentworth forced him to choose between being hanged or fighting for Britain.

They know from experience that anything could happen — ambuscade, sickness, injury, dangerous shifts in the weather. Some will not return alive.

On the way back, something unexpected will happen that will change Iain MacKinnon’s life forever.


EXCITING UPDATE: Eileen Hannay of the Rogers Island Visitor Center posted a link on my Facebook page. I encourage everyone to read this. You’ll get a quick overview of the real history of this site as well as some very exciting news pertaining to archaeological excavations on the island. Click here to read all about it, and come back and chat with me.


To see images from the ground, look for the In Search of MacKinnon’s Rangers slide show on my blog down on the right-hand side.

Now for the contest:

Comment below on my blog and your name will be entered to win a signed copy of the new reissued version of Surrender, in stores on Tuesday. And if you care to share any Ranger lore, please feel free! I’ll be giving away two books on Friday. (The author copies aren’t actually here yet, but I’ll save your addresses until they are. Not my fault!)