Bonnie’s Weekly Posts

Hi! I’m Bonnie Toews, a former business journalist who has turned into a novelist in my retirement. I love to read intriguing stories that keep me awake. I know. We need sleep to keep us healthy, especially when we’re older. But, as a child, I always read books by flashlight under the covers, and now I can’t go to sleep unless I have a book in my hands.

Like many authors I write the kind of books I like to read: Stories about spies, women who look beyond every day challenges to find out who they really are and what they believe in; and humanitarians who deliver hope where there is despair.

Click on Bonnie’s Novels to buy on amazon.

It’s been tough learning how to market my novels and special travel series my partner, John Christiansen, and I have produced for adults and children to read together. He is a magnificent photographer and I talk about the wonders we have seen. It’s not in my nature to brag, but I have discovered that my reason for writing novels has become a reason to talk about them, along with the journeys John and I have taken around the world.

I hope you enjoy visiting our blog site and share your experiences with us as we travel through life moment by moment.

To buy our books on amazon, click on each cover below.

Book One

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BONNIE AND JOHN GO TO:

http://www.authorbonnietoews.com

http://www.bibiandbabu.com

 

A LITTLE KNOWN FACT ABOUT OVARIAN CANCER…

On Jan. 2, 2016, I was diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer Stage Three. It’s called “the silent killer” because it mimics so many other conditions, such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The biggest clue is severe and chronic constipation. If this is your problem, insist to your doctor that you want a CATscan of your abdomen. When I went into Emergency because the pain had become so severe I couldn’t take it any more, they first thought I was passing kidney stones. Since then I have undergone chemo, had extensive surgery and more chemo.

Just when I thought I was getting back a more normal life, I began to experience excruciating pain in my abdomen. I was also severely constipated. By Nov. 1, 2016, I couldn’t take it any more and back to Emergency we went. John and I were there 12 hours. The Chief of Emergency wanted to put me into immediate surgery because my CATscan showed gas outside the bowel. He was concerned there was a hole in the bowel and that if infected I could go septic very quickly and die, but he wanted to confer with the Chief of Surgery first. We had to wait for him to finish another emergency surgery. When he examined my CATscan, he came to the conclusion that I wasn’t in danger of an infection because I had already been suffering with this pain for nearly two months. The Chief of Surgery is a man in his middle fifties and with those years comes much experience. Many of our oncologists today are young doctors, who are just gaining experience. My oncologist learned a very important lesson from this surgeon and so did I.

First he explained the cancer was back and had spread across my abdominal wall. That was a shock to John and me because I had faithfully followed the anti-cancer diet as well as used many natural remedies. He said: I HAVE SEEN THIS BEFORE. OVARIAN CANCER IS THE ONLY ONE THAT DOES THIS AND IT’S WHY IT MAKES IT SO PAINFUL. OVARIAN CANCER GIVES OFF A GLUE-LIKE SUBSTANCE THAT COVERS THE BOWEL AND PREVENTS IT FROM CONTRACTING SO THE FECES CAN’T BE RELEASED. YOU BECOME SO BACKED UP, YOU BECOME TOXIC AND THE PAIN IS EXCRUCIATING. TO RELIEVE THE PAIN, THE ONCOLOGISTS PRESCRIBE NARCOTIC PAINKILLERS, BUT THESE FURTHER ADD TO THE CONSTIPATION. EVENTUALLY THE TOXINS HARM THE LIVER OR KIDNEY. YOU HAVE TO GO BACK ON CHEMO TO BREAK DOWN THIS GLUE-LIKE SUBSTANCE THE OVARIAN CANCER IS RELEASING AS WELL AS TO SHRINK THE CANCER.

Once I started my third cycle of chemo, I realized the surgeon was right because my bowels were back performing normally. I no longer suffered from the excruciating pain. I also stopped taking the narcotic pain killers after the first eight days of CYCLE ONE OF MY CHEMO BECAUSE I FIGURED OUT THEY WERE SUPPRESSING MY APPETITE AS WELL AS COMPLICATING MY CONSTIPATION. I LOST ANOTHER 20 LBS WITHIN THIS THREE-WEEK PERIOD.

I’VE NOW REGAINED 10 LBS SINCE CHRISTMAS. LUCKILY I GOT MY APPETITE BACK JUST IN TIME. I WILL BE ON CHEMO WELL INTO MAY BUT HOPE TO SEE A REMISSION THEN.

“SO… constipation is a BIG clue in detecting ovarian cancer. If more women become aware of this, they may beat the “silent killer.” Rita Gerlach

A LITTLE KNOWN FACT ABOUT OVARIAN CANCER…

The biggest clue is severe and chronic constipation. If this is your problem, insist to your doctor that you want a CATscan of your abdomen.

Source: A LITTLE KNOWN FACT ABOUT OVARIAN CANCER…

My Novel predicted Bibi and Babu’s Love Story

At the end, life is like quicksand and passes in a moment:  Each grain of sand represents a single time capsule filled with precious memories of one life spent.

In one of those grains of sand is our story. Had we known each other in another lifetime? Who knows? But what we do know is: Things happen for a reason.

When John and I met in the spring of 2013, I didn’t recognize that I had already described him in my novel , THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR, until he asked me to read him a passage and there he was: “His dimples, once boyishly cute, had cracked and sunk into craggy rivers, which ran into his jaw line and around his squared chin. Maturity had taken youth’s perfect features and made them rugged and lean…a fleecy forelock fell boyishly over his right brow and invited touching. All at once she became aware of his unguarded vulnerability and slipped her hand through his arm.”

In our first travel book together, I described how we met – at a Tim Horton’s coffee shop in Oakville where his son and family lived 10 minutes away from my daughter and her family. He was ahead of me in the line, and when he turned, he made some comment I don’t remember because I was already absorbed in the twinkle of his eyes. “Life is too serious for me to be serious” is his favorite saying, and whatever he said reflected that. We exchanged a few words and then he invited me to drink my coffee at his table. To this day he claims I did most of the talking, but I learned he had two adopted children as I had one. That was an immediate connection on a level of love that is quite different from biological parenting. The bond is heart to heart rather than by umbilical cord. In that first meeting we talked a lot about our kids when they were growing up and how proud they made us to be their parents.

I remember I didn’t want to leave but I really did have another appointment I couldn’t postpone. As I was opening my car door, John suddenly burst through Tim Horton’s door and called, “I have to hug you.” He dashed across the parking lot and gave me a bear hug. All my normal barriers broke down. I felt as if I had come home.

“We’re going to see each other again, aren’t we?”

“Oh yes,” I sighed.

And we exchanged phone numbers. Our souls had found one another.

To buy our books on amazon, click on each cover below.

Book One

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BONNIE AND JOHN GO TO:

http://www.authorbonnietoews.com

http://www.bibiandbabu.com

Linking my Protagonists

While Lee Talbot is reporting on the Spanish Civil War in northern Spain, Lady Grace is practicing at home with her mother on their twin pianos. She has entered the Belvedere Piano Contest in Vienna, the most prestigious competition in Europe for concert pianists. After she wins, Hitler invites Lady Grace to perform in Berlin. Lee Talbot is in the audience along with Baron Erich von Lohren, a colonel in the SS, and the Gestapo’s section head for Berlin, Colonel Ludwig Ketmann. At a reception following Grace’s concert performance in the Press Club, the two women finally meet. This is also the “night of broken glass” – Kristallnacht – when the Jews were publicly attacked, their synagogues burned to the ground and their businesses destroyed by Nazi rioters. Grace and Lee witness this horror together. They bond, and now there is a reason to develop their special friendship.

From this point on, I would be giving away the plot. I would prefer you read the story and figure out who the traitor is yourself.

To buy our books on amazon, click on each cover below.

Book One

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BONNIE AND JOHN GO TO:

http://www.authorbonnietoews.com

http://www.bibiandbabu.com

 

Creating an Equal Protagonist

As I played with possibilities to build my spy story, I wondered:  Could England’s Prime Minister Churchill and King George VI actually risk the Nazis catching a member of the royal family at the height of the war?

It was well known how the Nazis tortured spies. How could they humanly expect anyone to resist such brutal treatment and not confess who she was and what her mission was? Spies carried a cyanide capsule embedded in a back molar that they were expected to release by biting down on it, if caught, to prevent them from talking. The real “Trudi” was also issued one, but the act of committing suicide is a moral dilemma for some people. Our instinct is to hang on to life at all cost. The Danish Resistance learned “Trudi” had never activated her suicide pill. This meant she endured torture to make her talk. What if she had confessed, wouldn’t her admission compromise the king and Churchill if Hitler blackmailed them for “Trudi’s” release? This is the element to the mission that could only end in a tragic comedy of errors. It wasn’t logical.

Historically, Intrepid told his biographer the Gestapo caught the real Trudi, but what if he was hiding the true story? What if “Trudi” wasn’t really King George’s cousin but a stand-in SOE sent? After all, if Hitler could have a doppelganger fill in for him, why couldn’t Lady Grace have a mirrored image of herself? And just as Hitler’s look alike was expendable, so would be “Trudi’s” substitute. This line of thinking formed a more logical pursuit for Lady Grace’s story.

A mirrored image. The two women would have to resemble each other. But they would also need to project striking differences. One very worldly, the other very sheltered. One ambitious and immoral, the other genteel and naïve. How would their two worlds blend? And what would connect them? Both are loners and both are dedicated to their gifts: one to writing, the other to music. What separates them also joins them together so that they become dedicated sisters-in-spirit. Could England’s Prime Minister Churchill and King George VI actually risk the Nazis catching a member of the royal family at the height of the war? It just wasn’t logical.

With this thinking, Lady Grace’s doppelganger was born:  Lee Talbot, an American war correspondent and Russian immigrant. Her parents are Russian Jews who escaped to America during the Bolshevik Revolution. While her father is a rich merchant, her mother becomes a famous playwright deeply entrenched in Communist ideology. She is so obsessed with her stage career, she abandons her husband and daughter. Her father grieves at losing the love of his life, and sends his young daughter to private school because he can’t stand looking at her. She reminds him too much of his wife. Neither parent shows Lee any love though her father pays for the best schools and colleges so she can grow up to have a meaningful career and independent life. Lee’s motive for living is based on her need to win her parents’ approval and love. She must be the best at everything she does. But, on receiving her American citizenship, she changes her birth name from Helena Miranov to Lee Talbot. This is her act of rejection of her parents. As Lee Talbot, she becomes a highly respected journalist and one of the first women to report on the Spanish Civil War.

How Lady Grace and Lee meet becomes the next puzzle in the plot to solve.

Creating the Protagonist

What set off my desire to write my novel from a woman’s point of view was my experience working with men. In making any major decision, I’ve found men’s egos get in the way. Every moot point is deliberated, each wanting their idea to be the one that dominates. For them, arriving at an agreed decision can take days. In the same situation, women look at all the realistic options, engage their intuition and agree on what is the most practical thing to do – it rarely takes them longer than ten minutes to take action.

After I read William Stevenson’s biography of Winston Churchill’s master spy, code-named INTREPID, I was disturbed with what happened to a woman agent called “Trudi.” In the book, many others were described and as courageous and tragic as their stories were, their missions made sense. But Trudi’s assignment read like a comedy of errors, and the outcome was not funny. She was a cousin of King George VI. She volunteered to join the women agents that the Special Operation Executive (SOE) was training to infiltrate Occupied Europe after her lover was killed on a spy mission. Churchill had been trying to convince atomic scientists located in Germany and neighboring countries to defect to London to prevent Hitler’s labs from developing an atomic bomb before the Allies did. A nuclear physicist – Niels Bohr – located in Denmark surfaced as the key component to the Allies winning this race. He already knew how to split the atom but he refused to abandon the Jewish scientists working with him in his lab in Copenhagen to Hitler’s wrath. Because of “Trudi’s” royal connections, Churchill believed she was the only one who could convince Bohr to escape to England. She succeeded, but the Gestapo captured her while she was radioing London of her success. Even though she had been issued a suicide pill if she were caught, she apparently never used it. Instead she endured torture and the Danish Underground believed she was executed rather than confess who she was or what her mission was. No one really knew what happened because her body was never found.

“Trudi” haunted me. What if she survived? What would her story be? From HER POV?

She was a member of the royal family. How did she fit into a lineage that included Danish and Norwegian royalty on the king’s side? What was her life before the war? Where did she live? What about her parents? What were they like? How did they feel about her becoming a spy? Did she have brothers and sisters? The more questions I asked, the more she came to life for me. My Lady Grace Radcliffe would be a distant cousin from the actual heirs to the British throne. The connection I created to King George was on her mother’s side. Her mother, Princess Alexandria, was a gifted concert pianist who gave up her career when she fell in love and married Lord Radcliffe. A strong government representative in the House of Lords, he inherited both his family’s Victorian manor on the grounds beside the Royal Botanic Gardens and Guild Oaks, their country estate with their stable of race horses. Lady Grace, as an only child, not only shared her father’s love of horses, she inherited her mother’s musical gift. Her parents tutored her at home. Her mother dedicated her life to developing her daughter’s musical career, and so Lady Grace grew up with no other friends than her mother and father and with her love of music and passion for racing horses. Such a sheltered life does not make a good spy. Worse, she may even be a boring heroine. How could I turn her into an exciting romantic character?

To buy our books on amazon, click on each cover below.

Book One

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BONNIE AND JOHN GO TO:

http://www.authorbonnietoews.com

http://www.bibiandbabu.com

 

Structuring My Novel – A Discussion

While I was wondering how to develop my novel, I read Vladimir Nabokov’s LECTURES ON LITERATURE. I found it one of the most inspirational and instructional books about literature and writing I have ever read. How I wished Nabokov had been my English professor for he aroused within me a love and respect for the literary art of fiction that I had never experienced in either high school or university.

According to the introduction, Vladimir Nabokov was born on William Shakespeare’s birthday on April 23 in 1899 in Leningrad, then known as St. Petersburg. His family were wealthy Russian aristocrats who home-tutored their children in English and French, immersing them in the finest of English and French literature. In their mind, Russian was the language of peasants. In 1919, the peasant uprising or Bolshevik Revolution forced the Nabokov family to flee to England. There, on a scholarship, Vladimir completed his education at Cambridge University. As an émigré, he moved to Berlin and supported himself by giving lectures on literature in French and English, but, in 1939, the rise of Hitler once again forced him to escape to the United States. Appointed the Resident Lecturer at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts,  he began writing as well as teaching and his fortunes changed with the publication of his first novel, LOLITA. LOLITA, the movie and the book, became American classics.

Today, more people remember Nabokov as the famous author of LOLITA than they know of his brilliant lectures on literature, but he transformed my understanding of how to structure a novel. It’s more than breaking down a beginning, middle and end. And structure is not to be confused with plot.

Nabokov describes STRUCTURE as the “planned pattern of a work of art.” In novels this is achieved through the “development of events, one event causing another, a transition from one theme to another” including “the cunning way characters are brought in, or a new complex of action is started, or how the various themes are linked up or used to move the novel forward.”

Nabokov encouraged his students to think beyond the norm. In other words, your novel’s structure can be whatever you envision, and so I imagined a house plan. Not just any house but a replica of a Victorian English manor with a central staircase splitting the house into parallel halves – the stories of two women happening simultaneously with the central staircase representing the main theme of treachery. The top floor then joins their two lives together and the overhead roof symbolizes the courage and stamina they share. With this plan, I set out to build a literary life for THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR.

How do other authors structure your novels? Let’s chat about what a novel’s structure means to you and how you use it to build your stories.

To buy our books on amazon, click on each cover below.

Book One

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BONNIE AND JOHN GO TO:

http://www.authorbonnietoews.com

http://www.bibiandbabu.com

Setting – Kew Palace and the Royal Botanical Gardens in London

Since my story was based on one of the Special Operations Executive’s secret missions, I first researched Bletchley Park, where Churchill’s master spy “Intrepid”was headquartered when he was in England. The more I read the less certain I became that I should refer directly to Intrepid, SOE’s operations or its agents in the fictional text of my story. Instead, I created a parallel “secret” world for Churchill’s clandestine atomic project underneath the grounds of the Royal Botanical Gardens. This I named PROJECT AMANITA. What made the garden’s Kew Palace so perfect for the location was its underground dungeon.

You can read the description of this invented world in Chapter Seventeen of THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR.

Here are some excerpts:

Page 121 – The tide was in. An American Gato Class submarine slipped up the Thames River in the smoky light of predawn. Approaching Kew Bridge, it submerged below the water level and veered portside toward the south shore on what seemed to be a collision course for the riverbank. Instead, a manmade underwater channel opened up that led to a natural basin beneath the Kew Palace dungeon.

Page 122 – UNDERGROUND. There seemed to be a maze of concrete corridors intersecting each other after they passed through the Security Block. A strange pinging and whistling noise scooting through the tubes that lined the ceiling followed them. Puzzled, Rolf pointed above. Quinn looked up and grinned.

     “Oh, that’s Amanita’s mail service.”

Page 123 – Dampness greased the amber-lit walls. Without warning, the narrow hallway ended at a metal door. . . INSIDE. Radio sets, arranged back to back, covered three rows of long army mess tables. The air rang with all patterns of Morse code stuttering.

After THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR was released, a former Bletchley transmitter read my story and wrote me about how it brought back so many memories for her. She said the dedication and courage of SOE’s women agents never failed to amaze her, but she was sworn to secrecy and could never talk about them or her work with SOE, not even to her family, until SOE’s records were officially released 50 years later in 1995.

To buy our books on amazon, click on each cover below.

Book One

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BONNIE AND JOHN GO TO:

http://www.authorbonnietoews.com

http://www.bibiandbabu.com

Inspiration for Novel –

When I was ten-years-old, there were two things I wanted to do – fly and become a flight nurse.

I honestly don’t know what triggered the desire to fly. I read every “Biggles” adventure and knew all the fighter aircraft and bombers he flew in WWII. Pilots Amelia Earhart and Jacqueline Cochrane were my heroines. I read all the Cherry Ames books about combat nurses. At 11-years-old, I even wrote my own short novel about a flight nurse in the Pacific.

After university, when I was 25-years-old, I finally earned my private pilot’s licence. At this point, I was beginning a teaching career, not nursing, and writing a novel was not on my “to do” list. Any thoughts of becoming a nurse were squashed in high school. I flunked algebra three times before finally getting a passing 50 mark.

One thing did develop – printer’s ink in my veins. All through high school and university, I participated in every publishing project, from high school yearbooks to the Varsity Newspaper at the University of Toronto to the Teachers College Yearbook. I loved writing and editing.  An opportunity to switch to a career in newspapers and magazines drew me away from teaching.

In 1981, I suffered a heart attack and a stroke. It would be nine years before I could go back to work. Because of aphasia, I lost my spontaneous ability to speak and had to relearn vocabulary. First I tackled the dictionary and then the Thesaurus. And I read all kinds of books – I finally had time to devote to them.

One was the biography of Winston Churchill’s master spy in WWII – INTREPID.  In it, the author, William Stevenson, described an agent code-named Trudi. She was the second cousin of King George VI. A Danish atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, had refused to defect to London, and Churchill decided the only one who could convince him to leave was the king’s cousin. At the time, Bohr’s experiments were the closest to developing the atomic bomb but Hitler was ignoring his findings based on “Jewish” science. Trudi did persuade Bohr to escape but the Gestapo captured her and executed her at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

The outcome of this mission really bothered me. Why wasn’t Niels Bohr more concerned about the Nazis developing the atomic bomb before the Allies? How was the king’s cousin betrayed to the Gestapo? What if the Nazis had learned she was the king’s cousin? Ideas swirled. What if she survived?

My story unfolded. Not knowing where I was going drove my curiosity. I wrote nearly 200 pages before I finally figured out who the traitor was. I’ve always believed if I had known who the traitor was from the beginning I would never have completed the novel.

Now I’m glad I did because THE CONSUMMATE TRAITOR has intrigued many readers.

To buy our books on amazon, click on each cover below.

Book One

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BONNIE AND JOHN GO TO:

http://www.authorbonnietoews.com

http://www.bibiandbabu.com