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New Year's Resolutions

12/27/2014

picture courtesy of Pixabay.

I understand that Christmas isn't over; the Christmas season lasts twelve days, ending on Epiphany, January 6th.

However, as soon as Christmas Day itself and the day after (Boxing Day to the English world and my youngest son's birthday in my little world) are over, I start to look toward the upcoming year.

I admit it now: I love to plan. Laying out how long a lesson should last, putting together a nine week plan is one of my favorite parts of teaching. Laying out a plot is one of my favorite parts of writing. And making resolutions is one of my favorite parts of the holiday season.

Resolutions for me are guideposts for where I want to go in the year ahead. I ask myself what I want to accomplish before the upcoming year turns old, who I want to be. Then I draft a list of goals that invariably would make me far thinner and smarter, my finances much more orderly, and my house sparkling clean were I to stick to my resolutions as resolutely as I should.

But life doesn't go the way I planned it to go. We have a fire drill and unscheduled assembly at school, and my nine week plan stretches to ten and a half weeks. One of my characters refuses to do what I wanted and my plot takes a twist I hadn't anticipated. I usually end the year a little smarter but not any thinner, with a pile of receipts that don't match my visa bill and more dust bunnies than I could round up in a weekend.

No problem: unfulfilled resolutions at the end of the year give me more to work on when devising new resolutions.

So here are my writing resolutions for 2015:

1. I will publish On Fledgling Wings in the spring. (In order to do this I will need Beta readers. My next blog will ask you if you want to be one of the few who will get the chance to read this novel before it's published.)

2. I will publish Swan Song this summer.

3. I will finish Summer of the Bombers by the time I go back to school in August.

4. I will begin research on a new book to write next fall.

In case you're interested, On Fledgling Wings is a midgrade (meaning for ages 10 and up) historical novel with a boy main charater. It's set in the time of Richard the Lionheart. Swan Song is a double retelling of Beowulf, with a contemporary setting and a prehistoric setting. It is a YA novel (meaning for older readers, ages 16 and up.) Summer of the Bombers is a midgrade contemporary novel about a girl whose family falls apart after a forest fire destroys her home. And the new book I want to write this fall will either be about World War I or a Civil War Battle that occured in New Mexico.

These are my plans. Hope you'll be a part of their being fulfilled.

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The little Depot that witnessed history

12/16/2014

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President Street Station, Baltimore

Last weekend I went to Baltimore for the Army Navy Game, a football game that has enough history to make it worth a blog post of its own.

As the taxi pulled up to my hotel on President Street, I was intrigued by this little building which was across the street. It was dwarfed by the high-rises surrounding it, and looked very out of place.

The building now houses the Baltimore Civil War Museum, a one room exhibit that is a mix of educational panels and curio cabinets filled with items - some identified and some not. But before it was a museum, this building was the President Street Station of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad. Built in 1851, it was the first railroad station to have a barrel vault roof or incorporate a Howe truss, a support system more commonly used in bridge design.

But what really made this building special was not its architecture so much as the historical events that happened in it. The President Street Station was witness to a lot of Civil War history.

"Passage Through Baltimore" Adalbert J. Volck, 1863

On February 23, 1861 Abraham Lincoln came through Baltimore on his way to his innauguation.

Originally Lincoln had planned to stop and give a speech. However, warned by the Pinkerton Dectective Agency of an assassination plot, he slipped through town in the pre-dawn hours wearing a cap rather than his recognizable stove-pipe hat.

If Lincoln had chosen to brave the gangs of pro-secessionists who intended to prevent his safe passage to the capital, President-elect Lincoln might never have lived to become President.

lithograph by Samuel Rowse, 1850

Lincoln wasn't the only person to hide himself in the President Street Station. Henry "Box" Brown arranged to have himself packed into a wooden crate marked "direct express to Philadelphia," and thereby escaped north to freedom from slavery. Frederick Douglas also used the PW&B line to escape, leaping onto a train as it pulled away from the President Street Station, which remains a site on the National Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

"Massachusetts militia passing through Baltimore," oil on Canvas (1861).

The event that the President Street Station is best remembered for happened two months after Lincoln's secretive trip through Baltimore.

Most people consider the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 as the beginning of the Civil War, but the first blood was spilled on April 19, 1861, when the 6th Massachusetts Infantry, debarking at the President Street Station enroute to Washington D.C. were accosted by southern sympathizers who blocked their path and pelted the soliders with rocks and bricks. By the end of what became known at the Pratt Street Riots, four soldiers and nine civilians lay dead in the streets.

For a first hand account of the Pratt Street Riot, click here.

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Proud Loser

12/8/2014

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November was National Novel Writing Month, and like scads (a technical term for a lot, but less than Carl Sagan's billions and billions) of crazy writers, I attempted to write a novel in a month.

I could have done it, too. I was pretty close to right on course: a few too few words some days, a few too many on others. Never so behind that I couldn't catch up.

And then something happened. Specifically, Thanksgiving happened. And instead of spending my spare time battering the keyboard, I chose to spend it with family. Together with my husband, my oldest son, his wife and daughter, I flew to Pittsburgh. We stayed just down the street from my middle son, his wife, and their month-old daughter. My youngest son drove in from West Point, bringing another cadet with him.

I spent the last five days of November holding a baby, watching a toddler entertain her uncles (and vice versa), cooking big pots of New Mexican posole and stews, and reconnecting with the people who mean the most to me.

And my NaNo graph flat lined.

I'm usually a very driven person, and it's hard for me to let go of a goal, but sometimes it's worth it. Someday one of my novels might bring me a large piece of immortality, but my children and my grandchildren will definitely bring me my own, personal piece of tomorrow.

Now it's December and NaNo is irretrievably gone. My new project for the new month was joining a Crossfit gym on a special $21 for 21 days deal. If I stick with this for all 21 days I'll being doing as well as I did at NaNo. And maybe at the end of the month I will be able to report that, for the second month in a row, I am a proud loser.

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Saving the Children

12/2/2014

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Thanks to The Diary of Anne Frank, which is taught in middle and high schools throughout the United States, just about everyone knows that Jewish children in the Netherlands were hidden away from the Nazis during World War II.

Hidden Like Anne Frank make it evident that hiding children away was more common than some of us might have imagined. This book, by Netherlanders Marcel Prinz and Peter Henk and translated into English by Laura Watkinson, allows 14 people to pass on their experiences as Jewish children in the Netherlands during World War II. Now adults, each narrator recounts being moved from house to house and city to city. Some were kept by family members and relatives. Others, by complete strangers. They endured boredom and terror, hunger and cramped quarters. Some were just three or four years old. Others were teenagers. But they survived because of a secret network of brave people who were determined to protect them.

Less well known or understood by Americans is the story of Jewish children in France. One of the reasons for this was that the situation in France was much more complex than in the Netherlands.

France was a divided nation during World War II. After France surrendered to Germans on June 24, 1940, three fifths of France, including Northern France and the entire French Atlantic Coast, was occupied by the German army.

Henri Philippe Pétain, a World War I General who had become a national hero, helped form a goverment commonly known as Vichy France in the remaining two fifths of French territory which was called the Southern Zone.

The senior leaders of the Vichy goverment, in the hopes of preserving a modicum of French sovereignty, turned a blind eye to the plunder of French resources and the sending of French forced labor to Nazi Germany. They also allowed and sometimes aided anti-semite parties in the concentration and persecution of Jews, particularly those of foreign citizenship. Vichy France sent 76,000 Jews to death camps. 11,000 of them were children.

Not all Frenchmen agreed with the anti-semite policies of the Vichy regime or their Nazi allies. The Children of Chabannes tells the story of Felix Chevrier, who housed Jewish children, many of them German or Polish by birth, in Chateau Chabannes, his school in Chabannes, Creuse. In a series of interviews, these children, now adults, speak about how Chevrier integrated them into classes with the local children. They believe that the rigorous athletic programs he developed were intended to strengthen them for the physical and mental hardships that they would face if ever sent to Drancy, the closest Jewish Concentration Camp, or to Germany.

When the Germans occupied the Southern Zone in November 1942, the Chateau began dispersing children to protect them from round-up. When the round-ups came, Chevrier was able to stall and obfuscate records. His deceit and planning saved the lives of hundreds of children.

My novel, Code: Elephants on the Moon, takes place in Normandy during World War II. Normandy was part of Occupied France. As such, then Germans had the ability to round up all Jews, even those who were French citizens.

As in the Netherlands and elsewhere, not everyone agreed with this policy. Many Frenchmen, including the fictional ones in my novel, hid their Jewish neighbors or helped them establish false identities or helped smuggle them out of the country. It is estimated that three-quarters of France's Jewish population survived the war because of the efforts of others.

However, just as not all stories of children hidden in the Netherlands end happily (Anne Frank's, for instance), not all French stories conclude with hundreds of children saved by brave and defiant action.

Steven Schnur's The Shadow Children tells the fictional story of Etienne, an eleven year old boy who visits his grandfather during post WWII in the French village of Mount Brulant.

When Etienne sees the ghosts of hundreds of starving, emaciated, raggedy, forlorn children hiding in the woods, he asks his grandfather and other adults about them. Eventually he learns the sad, tragic, terrible truth: Jewish children who were sent into the country to seek refuge arrived in Mount Brulant, where the people helped them for a time. Yet, when the Nazis hunted the children down, the townspeople allowed the Nazis to herd them into trains and ship them to concentration camps.

The true focus of the story in neither Etienne nor the children, but the grief and guilt of the townspeople, who buckled under the threats of the the Nazis. While this story may be fiction, many Frenchmen feel grief and guilt when recounting this dark period in their history.

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New Year's Resolutions

The little Depot that witnessed history

Proud Loser

Saving the Children

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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