When I was researching ideas for a new Regency series, I came across a story about toy panoramas from that era. Apparently, modeled after the sprawling panoramas on the ceilings of various buildings, artists began to make miniature versions of them. The intent was to make them available to children, as small toys they could carry around with them, but they quickly became popular with adults as well. Soon, women were buying the tiny pieces of art to carry around with them in their reticules. Each painting was only a few inches high and wide, and was rolled up on a thin wooden spool. The scenes could be anything the artist wanted to create, such as buildings, animals, nature, or even people. The possibilities were endless!
My story, “Color of Deception” is book one in a series of three. Each book focuses on a different Sullyard sister. Aside from being artists, each sister finds herself embroiled in her very own mystery. Books two and three will be out in the next couple of months.
Here’s the blurb for “Color of Deception”
When artist Kitty Sullyard draws a strange symbol in her toy panorama, she doesn’t expect it to be life threatening. Tossed into a situation she never asked for, she learns the hard way who not to trust.
After Kitty mysteriously disappears, Nathaniel Bexley has only a single clue with which to find her. It’s something only he would know. Will he be able to decipher the secret message she’s hidden in a drawing, or will Kitty be doomed to the hands of her kidnappers?
Being an amateur artist myself, I loved discovering the process of how they went about creating their hand-painted panoramas. I can’t imagine creating something so tiny, or how many grueling hours it would have taken just to complete one!
I hope you enjoy book one of the Sullyard Sister Series!
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Lark Singer is seventeen years old and already on the way to a brilliant music career. But as she and her band, Starlight, gear up for a competition, life seems to be throwing her a few curve balls. The mysteries of her past seem to be unraveling, and she’s no longer certain she wants to know those answers or how knowing about her past will affect her difficult relationship with her mother. And when her best friend, Bean, changes things between them, all her plans for a musical future are placed in jeopardy. How can she balance her complicated personal life to keep her musical goals on track?
just a half apron tied at the waist. She had work aprons for doing household chores, afternoon aprons, for when the chores were done and she would sit and relax for an hour or so before my dad got home. She had frilly Sunday aprons, sheer or lacy holiday aprons. Really, an apron for every occasion. She is always in my heart, but just seeing someone in an apron often brings my mom to the front of my mind.
But she had goofy and crazy side, too. And she was really big into doing things with me as a child. She would sit and play with me. She kept updated on the best toys so she could get them for me. And she kept Santa real for me through a lot of elaborate fancy footwork probably long past the time she should have. Later, she helped me do the same for my own children. We would go to community parties and sing-alongs at Christmas. She
helped me craft awkward but fun Halloween costumes. She threw birthday parties for me – even went above and beyond the year I had chicken pox on my birthday to invite kids whose parents knew they’d already had the dreaded itchy bumps. And when no friends were around because they’d gone on vacation or to summer camp, she made sure we did things together, just the two of us, like going to Sanders for ice cream sundaes.
I was not allowed more than goldfish when I was a young child because my mom was a little afraid of animals. But she helped me put together the best fish tank ever, and she did more of the cleaning out of that thing than I did. And when I was old enough to force a pet on the family, a gray cat with a tip on his tail with the unoriginal name of Tippy-Tip, she made me take full responsibility for him even as she slipped him treats of cod and haddock. And when I moved out, she insisted it would upset the cat too much for him to move with me.
We were best friends, confidants, mother and daughter. We spent time shopping together, plotting get-togethers, watching the same shows and gossiping about them. She is the one who started my love for reading. I remember being a child of about four years when she sat and read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to me. And she would give me household chores so I could earn an allowance, which she would then happily take me to spend on a new book from the book department at Hudson’s. She would also read those books with me or after me so we could talk about them. And if I didn’t quite have enough for a particular book, she slipped me the difference on loans that she never collected on.
mistakes were all originals that I made on my own. She watched my kids if I needed to run to the store and later when I had to go back to work. And she put the same effort and same quality of energy into my children as she had put into me.
Natalie Carter divides her time between her biological mother and her adoptive parents. But it’s really her bio mom’s adopted brother-in-law who causes her frustration. Sometimes it seems like he doesn’t even see her, and when he does, he treats her like a tag-along little sister.
