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La passione remane

1/22/2015

My mother gave me the necklace I am wearing today. It is one of my favorite pieces of jewelry.

The necklace is a chain with gray pearls. In the middle is a pendant that has a remnant of Roman glass surrounded by a silver frame on which is written Dopo il sogno la passione impressa remante.

The words are in Italian and are taken from Canto XXXIII of the Paradiso section of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Roughly translated (which is the best I can do in Italian) it says After the dream is over, the impression of passion remains.

Dante is talking about a vision of heaven and the brilliant light of God’s presence, but I think the same statement can be used to describe what happens to someone who reads and connects well with historical fiction.

A good piece of historical fiction brings with it the passion of a long-ago time and it lingers in the reader’s psyche like an impassioned memory.

The first time I remember having a memorable encounter with an historical novel was in the fourth grade, when I picked up Black Jack, by Leon Garfield. Set in 1750, it tells the story of Bartholomew (Tully) Dorking, an apprentice who is charged with watching after the coffin of a hanged man for a Tyburn widow, the term for a woman who claims the bodies of hanged vagrants, then sells them to surgeons for experimentation. However, this hanged man isn’t dead. Black Jack has cheated death by ramming a length of pipe down his gullet. Once Tully pulls the pipe from the swarthy giant’s throat, the two embark on a journey that involves the seamiest parts of old London, a bizarre traveling circus, and the rescue of a girl from a private madhouse where forgotten lunatics are chained in empty rooms.

I hadn’t read this book in 40 years when I found myself telling a friend about it during a long walk. I realized that imagery from the book was still floating around in my head, and I could still describe the plot in vivid detail. Later, I wondered how much I remembered and how much was just an impression of what I’d read so very long ago.

Rereading the novel, I found that whole pages jumped from my memory as if I had just read them. The lush cadence of the language and the richness of Garfield’s vocabulary came back to me. And the plot! Events followed each other masterfully, in a way that was not predictable, yet always foreshadowed. I agree with Lloyd Alexander, another of the favorite authors of my childhood, that Leon Garfield was “unmatched for sheer, exciting storytelling."

However, as much as I remembered, what I had forgotten surprised me. It wasn’t the vocabulary or the plot or the lovely flow of words that I’d forgotten, but details. For instance, a meteor shower I remembered vividly, and recalled every August when the Perseid Meteor shower came around, was actually the Northern Lights. I wonder: did my mind choose to forget that the Northern Lights were in my story because I have never seen them? Is this my mind’s way of making the story more relevant to me?

dopo il libro, l'impressione di passione rimane

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Finding a treasure Trove

1/3/2015

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The author with John Pierucki

I never expected to open a treasure trove last fall when I sat behind a table at a church craft fair.

I expected to sell a few books. Nothing more.

But then John Pierucki stopped in front of my table. He looked down at Code: Elephants on the Moon and his brow wrinkled as he asked what my book was about. When I told him that it was about World War II, he frowned a little more deeply and told me that he worked with codes during World War II, and this wasn't one of the codes.

Yes it was, I said. It was one that the Free French broadcast from London over the BBC to members of the Resistance in France. This was a code used just before D-Day.

John's eyebrows shot up. He told me that his ship had gone down on D-Day. Although he wasn't there - he had been left back in Italy - he'd lost many friends on that day.

That was it for me. I picked up a pen and signed a book to John, thanking him for his service. No one has ever done so much to earn a free book.

I met with John yesterday for lunch. He's packed a lot of life into his 90 years, and he has a lot of stories to tell. Some of them are real doozies. John served his country for 30 years as a translator and cryptographer, and he's been a lot of places and talked with a lot of interesting people.

Talking with John was like opening a treasure chest of story ideas. I'm hoping to open that chest a lot this year and run my fingers through the contents.

There's a lot of gold and precious gems in what he has to say.

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On Fledgling Wings ready to test its wings

1/3/2015

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Prototype cover

In my last blog post I said that I wanted beta readers for the novel I planned to publish this spring.

On Fledgling Wings is a coming of age novel about a young boy in 13th century England. He's the coddled son of a minor knight - a big fish in a small pond - and he's a bit of a bully.

Like most boys, Nathan wishes he were somewhere else, doing something heroic. He wishes he could be like his father, who traveled with Richard the Lionheart on the First Crusade. But when he leaves home to begin his training as a page, Nathan finds that reality and the dream he's held so long don't really match up.

On Fledgling Wings is a story about finding oneself. It's about growing up and accepting the limits of one's society. And it's about accepting that some of the holes in one's heart will never be healed, but they can be filled.

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New Year's Resolutions

12/27/2014

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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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Judging a Book by its cover: Part Two

11/20/2014

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L.M. Elliott's Under a War-Torn Sky is one of my favorite novels. It is a fast-paced read that really excites middle school boys who are otherwise reluctant readers. I used it several times when I was a reading intervention teacher, both as a class read and as an individual recommendation, and I've never had a boy not enjoy it.

The story is about Henry Forester, a young man flying a B-24 in World War II. When his plane is shot down and he is trapped behind enemy lines, kind French citizens, some who are members of the Resistance and some who are just sympathetic to a frightened young man, help him to escape and return home via Switzerland and a treacherous route over the Pyrennes.

As one might expect, there are several plot elements in common between Under a War-Torn Sky and Code: Elephants on the Moon. My French girl, Eponine, has a very different life from the French girl who helps Elliott's Henry, but the both share some of the same opinions about the callow young aviators they help rescue.

Some of the questions I was asked when it came time for me to commision the cover for Code: Elephants on the Moon was if there were any other books whose subject or theme were like mine. Could I suggest any covers that looked like what I wanted my own cover to look like?

I immediately thought of Under a War-Torn Sky. I googled it to find cover images and was surprised to find not just the one I was familiar with, but three covers.

I

I sent all three of these images to the artist who created my cover. As you can tell, mine came out very different than any of these. This isn't surprising, since the focus of the two books is different. My aviator plays just a small part in my plot, while he is the main character in Elliott's.

I'm curious: which of these covers attracts your attention? Based on the very sketchy synopsis I've given you, which one best expresses the story? Would you buy any of these three books?

Knowing how you think might influence me when it's time to commission my next cover!

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Excuse me While I nano

11/9/2014

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It's November. For some of us crazy writers, that means we are deep in over our heads in an event called NaNoWriMo.

For those of you who don't know about such craziness, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month, which just happens to be November. Every year, thousands of writers complete the challenge of completing a novel in a month's time.

For NaNo's purposes, a novel is 50,000 words. They don't have to be good words, or parts of good sentences; any set of 50,000 words will do.

This year, I am gaming the system a bit. Instead of writing a novel, I am finishing one and beginning another.

The novel I'm finishing (or, to be more precise, FINISHED yesterday!!!) is Swan Song, a big concept YA that I've been working on, intermittently and fitfully, for the better part of a decade. The novel begins with some questions: What if Beowulf is not really about some 5th century Germanic warlord? What if it's really a much older story, a true story, that was adapted for each new generation of listeners? Who, then, would Grendle the monster be? Swan Song conjectures on those questions in two intertwined stories: one set in a present day high school and another set 29 thousand years ago. Both are stories of exclusion and prejudice and parallel each other.

Now that I'm finished with Swan Song, I'll begin working on Summer of the Bombers, a contemporary midgrade novel set in New Mexico. The bombers in question are the ones the Forest Service use to fight wildfires here in the parched Southwest, and the story is about what happens to a family when a fire disrupts its life and destroys its home.

Even with two different stories to work on, piling up 50,000 words can be a pretty daunting task. What happens if the muse doesn't move me along - if I run out of words before I run out of month? If that happens, I guess my main character will start spouting my grocery lists and middle school social studies lesson plans. She'll recite my Facebook posts and, if I'm really desperate, my Twitter posts. She might even be credited with the words from my blog. After all, there are 393 perfectly good words here, and I might need NaNo credit for each and every one of them.

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Resurrecting Ghosts

10/13/2014

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Last week a teaching colleage and I visited several places of historical interest in New Mexico. Among them were Fort Craig, outside of which a Civil War battle happened, and Fort Selden, a fort used during the Indian Wars.

Time and disuse had ravaged both places, reducing them to fragments of shattered walls and long, low mounds that had once been ramparts. The adobe walls had melted back into the desert soils from which they had been formed.

We visited the one on a Thursday and the other on a Friday, and each time we had the run of the place to ourselves. The only sounds were the whistling of the wind over the broken stones, the chirp of crickets and the crunch of gravel beneath our feet. It was hard to believe that both sites had once bustled with life.

But it had been. I know this because I'd just recently finished reading Hampton Sides' Blood and Thunder, a biography of Kit Carson. One chapter told about Carson's time at Fort Craig, when he was serving as a Colonel in the First New Mexico Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. Carson led his men against Confederate troops in the Battle of Valverde, which was fought just north of the fort. Sides includes in his narrative the tramp of drilling men, the neighing of horses, the cacaphony of parade bands, the thunder of artillery and the crackle of small arms. Mr. Sides breathed life into the scene. He made the Old West come alive again in my imagination.

As I stood among the dry and silent ruins, I remembered Sides' vivid descriptions. I considered how the parade grounds would have looked when the marching boots of seventeen companies of men kept the weeds at bay, how the air would have smelled when filled with the tang of horse dung and kitchen smoke and gunpowder.

Good history and good historical ficiton can breath life into events long past. It can resurrect people long dead and places that have mouIdered into dust. It can make that which has faded away become vivid again.

I don't know how much will be left of the old western forts in another decade or two. Perhaps there will be nothing for my grandchildren to see when they are old enough to care about what happened in New Mexico in the nineteenth century. But my hope is that those who follow will be able to resurrect the forts and the people who occupied them through the power of the written word.