MacCorp News January 2025
One of the lead characters in THE JASPER BROOCH is Bastien Bonnard LeBlanc
Here’s a short bio: Bastien is a 34-year-old Army veteran with brown hair and green eyes and 6 feet tall. He was part of a NATO convoy near Kandahar when a Taliban suicide bomber targeted the convoy. Bastien’s Humvee was hit with shrapnel and a piece of metal severed his lower leg.
He wividly recalls seeing his boot on the ground, with his leg still inside. Childhood friend, Remy Benoit, immediately stabilized him, ensuring his safe evacuation to Germany.
Bastien is a below-the-knee amputee whose resilience inspires those around him. He runs his own security company while also playing saxophone alongside Remy’s drums.
Fun with ChatGPT
If you’re part of the Celtic Brooch Facebook group, you’ve seen that I’ve been playing with ChatGPT/AI to generate summaries of THE JASPER BROOCH adventure thus far. Here is one of those summaries for you to enjoy as I continue working on the story.
Marcelle Bonnard LeBlanc, a trumpet player with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, finds herself in 1928 Chicago after a mysterious fog transports her and her brother, Bastien, from their modern-day lives.
Bastien is missing, and Marcelle, with the help of a new friend, Skye Marshall, navigates the jazz scene while trying to find him.
Remy Benoit and Clay MacIntyre, friends from the future, arrive to help Marcelle and search for Bastien. They encounter Al Capone, who is interested in Marcelle’s musical talent. The group plans to perform at the Sunset Café while dealing with the challenges of being in the past.
Meanwhile, Clay unexpectedly reunites with his father, Archibald MacIntyre, and they discuss the mysterious nature of time travel and the brooches that brought them there. The group must balance their mission to find Bastien and return home with the complexities of their interactions with historical figures and the potential dangers of altering the past.
FYI: I don’t write with ChatGPT. It was fun just to experiement with blurbs.
Plaid versus Tartan
Is there really a difference between a plaid and tartan? There is, but sometimes there’s not.
Plaids vary in color, size, and pattern, and can be a piece of cloth like a shawl or blanket. Anyone can wear plaids, with examples like flannel or buffalo check in the US. Tartans have identical vertical and horizontal patterns, often linked to Scottish or Irish culture, and are associated with specific clans, families, or communities. Tartans are registered and named, and some can only be worn with permission from clan chiefs or certain communities.
Here are examples of real-world tartans for some of our fictional clans (courtesy of the ScotlandShop website search).
Top left McBain Tartan; Top right Montgomery Tartan
Family Trees
You can access a number of small family trees via previous newsletters, and found on my website in the BLOG section – May 2024, July 2024, and September 2024. You can also access the complete family tree map by emailing me at KatherineLLogan@gmail.com.