TAM LIN AND THE ORIGINS OF
THE SURRENDER OF LADY JANE

or “Where I Didn’t Get My Ideas From”

by Marissa Day

All things considered, traditional ballads and broadsheet songs are not a fertile source for good Romance. Seriously. If you are a hero or a heroine in, say, a Child ballad, your odds of successfully achieving the Happily Ever After are really, really small. You’re far more likely to be betrayed by your lady love over a very small misunderstanding, which will cause you to die of a broken heart (Barbara Allen). Better yet, she could kill you herself over a badly timed joke and have her servants throw you in the backyard well (Proud Lady Margaret). On the heroine’s side, you could be accidently shot because your lover turns out to have bad eyesight and you’ve got an unusually large apron (Polly Von), or the guy you thought was going to marry you could show up already married to another woman, after which she kills you, which causes him to kill her follows that up with his public suicide at the wedding feast (Fair Ellen). Alternately, you could elope with a guy who turns out to be a serial killer and have to chuck him in the ocean and then talk your parrot into not ratting you out (The Outlandish Knight).

Mothers are particularly hazardous to your Trad. Ballad couple. Your mother could leave your true love out in the cold (The Lass of Roch Royal), or you could get the double whammy where your mother curses you, and then the heroine’s mother leaves you out in the cold (The Drowned Lovers). Fathers aren’t any good either. They tend to do things like follow up the arrangement an advantageous marriage for you by trying to perform a public confirmation of your virginity, forcing you to either die of embarrassment or turn into a tree (The Arbutus). For an exciting variation, there’s the possibility that your husband will murder both your shapeshifting lover and your son (The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry), or you could just get murdered by your jealous brunette of a sister on general principles (The Twa Sisters).

Of course, this is not a problem limited to the Scottish and British ballads. Do not even get me started on the dope slap needed by all the players in the traditional Appalachian ballad “The Long, Black Veil.” I’m telling you, it is just not a grand ballroom of glamour and romance out there.

And yet, it was a traditional Ballad that furnished me with the basics for THE SURRENDER OF LADY JANE. The ballad was “Tam Lin.”
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I’m playing today at Wild & Wicked Cowboys! Come join me. I’ve posted a sexy picture of a cowboy and need your help dreaming up a scene in a story to go along with it!

The contest winners are listed at the bottom of this post!

Another of our stops (this one planned because the Red-Headed Hellion knows I love dinosaurs) was Powell Garden in Missouri. It’s a lovely outdoor botannical garden which I might have stopped for anyway, but this summer they’re featuring the “Jurassic Exhibit”.

Plenty of pretty flowers and trees. Love them. Took pics of them.

We walked the couple-mile trail to find the dinosaurs lurking in the bushes. Rawr!

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I was away for a week on a trip that I wanted to be purposely spontaneous. Does that make sense? We had a destination—my brother’s house in Des Moines—but we wanted to be able to stop and explore whatever struck our interest.

The first day out, we drove north from Arkansas and were barely into Missouri when the sign off the Interstate read “Joplin”. We’d watched the newscasts of the aftermath of the powerful tornado that hit there and wondered just how bad it really was.

It was worse than we’d imagined.

Pigs flew. Don’t know why this struck me as wrong, but the only sign of damage at this restaurant was to…well…the sign!

Home Depot had their act together. Their entire store had been flattened, but they’d already had the wreckage pushed to one side of their huge lot and erected this large tent to provide building supplies for the area.

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First, thanks to everyone who posted a “Happy Birthday” wish yesterday, both here and on my FB wall! I was overwhelmed. Really. Humor aside, I really appreciated the thoughts.

Next. Sorry, y’all. I’m still trying to dig through all the work that piled up while I was gone. Give me another day and I’ll be back with pics and a bright shiny attitude. I’m a bit grumpy this morning because I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon until 2 AM trying to get the After Midnight Authors newsletter out the door, but the stupid program (it can’t be me!) kept hosing at the last moment when I was getting ready to send a test message. If there hadn’t been people sleeping in the house I would have screamed and kicked something really, really hard!

Anyway, I’ll just post a saying. Something I hope will inspire me to keep a positive attitude today. Perhaps it will help you too.

Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except
what you’re going to do now and do it.
~William Durant

I’m back from my road trip, but pretty buried now.

It’s my birthday, and my family seems to have settled on a THOR theme. My parents gave me a Thor statuette for my bookshelves. My daughter gave me a special framed, limited edition snippet of film from the movie that’s accompanied by a Marvel comic picture. I’m thrilled with both! And lord, I’m afraid to start answering all the B-day messages waiting for me on Facebook—but thank you, EVERYONE, who left a note!

Yes, the two contests have ended. But I have a good 3000 emails to get through to see whether I missed any entries. So give me a day or two to catch up.

I still have to unpack and get my laundry done, but that has to wait. When I checked my telephone messages this morning, I discovered I missed a summons for jury duty, so I’m trying to get that sorted out so I don’t get arrested! AND I am working with friends of mine today to get a website up for a special contest that will benefit the fund for L.A. Banks’s medical bills.

Give me a day or two to catch up and I’ll announce winners and post pics of my trip. In the meantime, I can’t wait to catch up with you all! Thanks to my guests and to everyone who sent me their good wishes!

Just a quick note. I’m heading this morning for home. Last leg of the trip. Yesterday, we spent the night at one of the most haunted places in America—and I do have a couple of stories to tell—but that will wait until I’m home.

In the meantime, answer a question.

Do you believe in ghosts? Have you ever had a spooky, unexplainable experience?

Remember, the Promo Ho and Cabbage Rose Fairy contests continue!