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Finding a treasure Trove

1/3/2015

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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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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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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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.

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Code Name: Cover

7/21/2014

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Everyone knows the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover." Everyone also knows that everyone does exactly that. Mark Coker, the guy behind Smashwords, one of the premier sites for self-pubed ebooks, says "your cover image is the first impression you make on a prospective reader. A great cover image makes a promise to the reader. It tells the reader, “I’m the book you’re looking for.”

So how do you decide what images will make readers decide that your book is the one they're looking for? Tricky question.

Just how tricky this question is to answer becomes obvious when you look at the five different covers that have graced Elizabeth Wein's new YA historical fiction Code Name Verity. Wein's novel is about what happens to two women whose plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France in 1943, and it's told in first person through the writings of the two women. The cover on the left pictures a plane trailing blood-red smoke as it goes down, a dark silhouette of a woman, and a rose, and I can say without giving too much away that all three images are appropriate, although I am not enough of an airplane enthusiast to tell you if the plane on the cover is the right kind or not. The next cover shows two women's arms bound together, and while it does show how the two characters are emotionally bound to one another, I first wondered if this novel was about lesbian lovers or bondage rituals. The middle cover shows two old bicycles against a stone wall, with bombers in the background and is, like the first cover, appropriate although not as mysterious or dark as the first cover. The remaining two covers have women's faces and the suggestion of imprisonment: one with high strung barbed wire and the other with the shadow of fencing. One features a red gash across the woman's face; the other, the bombers again. Two of the women seem to have dark hair and eyes. The third looks like a blue-eyed blonde, which is what the woman whose code name was Verity was.

I've added a little more about this book to my web page on Code: Elephants on the Moon, in the for further reading section.

I first came across this novel when I was looking specifically for cover ideas for Code: Elephants on the Moon, and at that point the only cover I saw was the center one. I liked the bombers and, since bombers also feature in my novel, I decided to include them in my cover design.

So what do you think? If you had to judge Code Name Verity by its cover, which would you choose?

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Killing the Gatekeepers

7/7/2014

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When I first began submitting manuscripts to editors nearly twenty years ago, the editors were the gatekeepers. They were the people who stood between a would-be author and publication, making sure that the books that were published were worthy of publication. The only way around these gatekeepers was using a vanity press, which was both expensive and, as the name suggests, a way for the vain but not erudite, to get published.

Back then, home computers were still rare and the internet was in its infancy. The submission process involved printing out one's manuscript and a cover letter on a dot matrix printer, using a long, accordion-folded paper that had to be ripped apart along perforations to produce pages. These were stuffed, along with a SASE, or stamped, self-addressed envelope, into a large manila envelope. Then the waiting began. My recollection was that the wait averaged anywhere from two weeks to three months. The fastest I ever got a manuscript back was one day, when I managed to fold up the envelope TO the editor and stick it IN the SASE with the other materials. The longest I ever waited was a year and a half, at the end of which I received a letter from a widow apologizing that her husband the editor had died and it had taken her some time to deal with the pile of papers he left behind. But in those early years I always did get some kind of response. One was a scrawled "No Thnx" on the bottom of my query. Some were standard form rejections, photocopied until they were pale and listless. But many were personal, encouraging and helpful.

But then the industry started to change. As home computers became more common, so did the number of people who thought they had produced the great American novel. Overwhelmed editors began putting up barricades to stem the barrage: gatekeepers for the gatekeepers. First houses that had welcomed manuscripts now wanted only queries, then only queries from writers who had membership in a professional organization such as SCBWI. Then I began seeing stipulations that houses were only accepting manuscripts from authors with agents, followed by agents who only wanted manuscripts from people they had met at conferences. The gatekeepers seemed to be proliferating; the distance between manuscript and publication more daunting. And perhaps even worse, many houses and agents changed their policy so that they only time they contacted you was if they were interested. Instead of waiting a month or six months for a rejection, one now waited forever for a rejection that would never come at all. It's now been years since I received a personal, encouraging or helpful rejection. That's a long time to stand at a door and wait.

Some of the gatekeepers out there are not really gatekeepers at all, but hucksters trying to take money from desperate writers. They stand at the gate and pronounce that they have the key, and they will share it with you for only $199, or $250, or $1,000. They tell you that if you let them send out your queries or write your business plan, or edit your manuscripts: if you attend their conferences or webinars, join their clubs, follow them on Twitter, you will be successful. And maybe you will. But maybe you will just be poorer.

Yet, at the same time that getting through the ever-lengthening line of gatekeepers seemed more and more like running a dispiriting and expensive gauntlet, other doors were opening. Print on demand and e publication joined vanity presses as a way to put one's writing out to the public. Years ago a friend and I talked about this. She encouraged me to give it a try. I didn't. I wasn't ready to rattle the knobs on any of those other doors.

The reason I wasn't ready is because I was still waiting for a gatekeeper to allow me to pass. I wanted someone - an agent or editor - to tell me that I was good enough - that my manuscript was good enough. I wanted a gatekeeper to assure me that I wasn't being vain in believing that I had a story to tell. I wanted validation. It didn't seem to matter what friends and critique buddies had said.

Then suddenly this spring, something happened. I don't know what it was, really. I just suddenly knew that I didn't need to wait for the validation of a gatekeeper to get published. I could open a door myself, without their approval.
Because really, it wasn't an editor or an agent who was keeping me from being published. They weren't the true gatekeeper. Fear was. And I wasn't going to let my fear stop me anymore.

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Breton Horses

5/30/2014

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The horse I saw in Amblie

"Write something about a girl and her horse," an editor had said at a SCBWI conference I had attended that spring. Living out in New Mexico, I don't have too many chances to interact with editors at major New York publishing companies, so when told me to do something I took note. And the fact that SCBWI, the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, had brought this editor out impressed me even more deeply.

So here I was, walking with my husband through the little French Norman town of Amblie. It was evening and we had eaten the dinner of sausage and cheese and fruit and wine and very good bread that I'd carried back from Bayeaux in the handlebar basket of my bicycle. The shadows were growing long in this sleepy little town. Every once in awhile a villager would throw open their window and greet us. "Bonjour, les Americaines!," they'd call. Obviously we were the only visitors in town.

As we walked I thought about the story possibilities that this town offered. I thought about Amblie's close proximity to the D-Day beaches, the little Norman church, which had parts dating from the 9th Century and sat on a hill overlooking the 12th Century mill house we'd rented. There were so many possible time periods in which to set a story. And time period aside, what should the story be about? My French poet friend on the train (See the blog post entitled "Where Ideas Come From" in the April 2014 archives) had suggested the idea of the animosity between Normans and Bretons, but what could I do with that idea?

We came around a corner and saw this horse, and the editor's suggestion came back to me. Here was a horse whose story, perhaps, needed to be told.

He was certainly not what I'd call a handsome horse. He had a very thick neck and a large head, which made him look front-heavy. He had a barrel body set on short legs. I snapped his picture anyway, and told myself I'd think about who he was and how I might work him into the story.

When I got back home I began researching my stocky little horse and came to the conclusion that he was a Breton. The Breton is a horse bred for heavy draft and farm work. The breed was developed, as one might expect from the name, in Brittany, but the origins of its native ancestral stock, which dates back thousands of years, is disputed. Some sources say that the Bretons comes from horses that were brought by Aryans as they migrated into Europe from Asia four thousand years ago. Other sources says that the breed was developed by Celtic warriors who were preparing for their conquest of the British Isles. The ideal Breton stands 15 to 16 hands high, considerably larger than the horse I saw. Many of the pictures of Bretons on the internet show horses that are even greater in girth and shorter of leg than my horse. But he had won me over, ugliness and all. And as I began to write, he became Gallopin, the horse beloved by my protagonist.

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The Bicycles of War

5/24/2014

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Private R.O. Potter of The Highland Light Infantry of Canada repairing his bicycle, France, 20 June 1944.

We didn't exactly storm the beaches when my family traveled through Normandy on bicycles. We tottered along back roads and through the narrow streets of villages. We were no army; just five Americans doing our best to absorb the sights, sounds and scents of a beautiful land.

Not everyone who's been on a bicycle had such idyllic purposes.

Bicycles were used more extensively during World War Two than I had ever guessed. In 1939 every Infantry Division within the Polish Army had a company of bicycle-riding scouts. that included 196 bicycles. The Jaeger Battalions of the Finnish Army used bicycles to deploy rapidly against the 1941 advances of the Soviet Union, switching to skis when the snow became deep. The Finns were still using bicycles in 1944, when the Germans had destroyed so many Finnish roads that tanks and other heavy equipment had to be abandoned.

Bicycles were used in France by the occupying German forces. They used bicycle patrols to cover areas quicker than patrols on foot and to send messages. They were used more often as gas became more difficult to attain.

The Allies used bicycles in France during World War II also. Canada's Highland Light Infantry used bicycles to cover the French countryside quickly. You can see pictures of their bikes stacked within the landing craft that took them to the beach on my pinterest board: http://www.pinterest.com/jbohnhoff/

Even some of the American forces in France had bicycles. US forces dropped folding bikes, called "bomber bikes" out of planes behind enemy lines for use by our paratroopers and for messengers and French Resistance fighters who were supporting us.

I haven't included a single bike in Code: Elephants on the Moon. Perhaps I should in a future revision of the manuscript. Maybe by the time this book comes out in print (as opposed to an ebook) Sergeant Johannes Hegel will be leading his patrols through the narrow streets of Amblie and Reviers on bicycle.

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Biking to Amblie

5/18/2014

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Biking through Normandy, suitcases on our backs.

The Bohnhoff boys laughingly refer to family vacations as death marches. We routinely try to pack too many adventures into too little time. Frequently we don't plan adequately for little things like eating and sleeping.

I researched the story known as Code: Elephants on the Moon while on one such vacation with my family in the summer of 2005. Our plan was to take an overnight flight to Paris, spend one night sleeping and getting over jet lag, then take a train to Caen, and a bus to Ouistreham where we would pick up the bikes I had reserved over the internet, then ride 12 miles to Amblie, a little Norman village where we had rented a house for the week. While exhausting, this plan seemed doable. We packed lightly in suitcases that converted to backpacks and headed out with high hopes.

But things seldom go as planned. We ended up spending our first night in Paris in Dallas after our flight was delayed 24 hours. Determined to keep on schedule, we got off the plane midmorning and immediately made our way to the St. Lazaire train station, just in time to buy tickets and scramble aboard a train. We had no idea that some seats were reserved and some were not, so of course we sat in seats reserved by others, who happened to be French and not at all entertained by our lack of understanding. Soon we were on our way. Without, of course, any provisions for lunch. But that was okay. After all, we had gotten a small breakfast on the plane and the train trip was only two hours. We would be in Caen in time for lunch.

And we were. But, careful travelers that we are, we decided to first make our way to the bus station and check the schedule before eating. Of course, we arrived just in time to buy tickets and leap onto an out bound bus. No problem. Caen is only 17 km from Ouistreham. Google maps says it takes 16 minutes. 21 in traffic. But Google maps didn't account the frequent stops that a bus makes. I don't remember how long the ride actually took us, but by the time we arrived in Ouistreham we were hungry and tired and jet lag had caught up with us. Big time.

We must have looked terrible by the time we dragged our sleep deprived bodies into the bike shop; terrible enough that the workers adjusted the heights of the seats, then told us that they would drive us to Amblie in their little car and deliver the bikes the next day My husband was too proud to accept this offer, but I wasn't. While he and my two older sons rode through the picturesque countryside my youngest son and I careened through the French countryside in the back of a tiny car being driven by a woman who spoke French as rapidly as she drove. Before she left us she made sure that the proprietess of the property we rented knew that we needed a ride to the nearest market to get supplies. We were in good hands.

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Americans in Paris

5/9/2014

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The author's grandfather in his doughboy days.

John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson may have been among the first Americans in France, but they weren't the last. Americans have been fascinated with France since the very beginning.

During World War I thousands of young American men arrived in France as part of the AEF, the American Expeditionary Force. Although the boys who went "Over There" were called "Yanks" or "Sammies" (from 'Uncle Sam'), their most popular nickname was "Doughboys," a name that may have come from the adobe dust that covered marching foot soldiers involved in American military operations on the Mexican border in 1916. My grandfather was one of these doughboys.

There were Americans in France even before America entered the war. Many adventurous and idealistic young men, among them Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Julian Green, William Seabrook, E. E. Cummings, and Dashiell Hammett, served as ambulance drivers attached to the French forces before the United States entered the war. Many of these men, both adventurers and regular doughboys, became enamored with France. “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast,” Hemingway wrote decades after having discovered the adventure of the city in 1918 at the age of 19. Some, like a character in Code: Elephants on the Moon, stayed to recuperate from wounds (there are some great photos of them, like the one below, at http://www.firstworldwar.com/photos/medical.htm).

After the war, some of the AEF found that going home and settling down wasn't easy. A popular song of the period asked "how ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" It was a valid question. Many disliked postwar American culture, seeing its social mores as moralistic, standardized, and vulgarized. Others felt that America had become a civilization of businessmen devoted to the worship of materialism. To them France represented ancient wisdom, history and refinement.

Because it offered a cultural environment free of the racial obsessions of American society, France also appealed to African-Americans. Writer Richard Wright, entertainer Josephine Baker, and jazz musicians Arthur Briggs, Benny Carter, and Dexter Gordon were a few of the prominent African-Americans who found a home in France after World War I.

Eventually, though, Americans began to leave Paris. Some, like Hemingway, were addicted to the excitement of war and found even postwar France too tame. They left for other conflicts, most notably the Spanish Civil War, where Americans volunteered as soldiers, technicians, medical personnel and aviators in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Approximately 2,800 American volunteers fought for the Spanish Republicans against Franco and the Spanish Nationalist. Between 750 and 800 died. Other Americans in France got homesick, changed their minds about France and returned to the States.

France itself was changing. In the 1930s France was rocked by the same extreme social tensions and class warfare that brought Hitler to power in January 1933. A year later, in February 1934, several thousand fascists and Royalists mobilized and brought down the French government. They accused Jews, communists, and foreigners, including Americans, of being mentally deficient and culturally detrimental to France. As the war drew nearer, Americans fled France. After the German invasion, a considerable number of the French people backed the Vichy regime and collaborated with the Nazis.

There are no official numbers available for how many Americans live in France today, but estimates near 100,000. Nearly three million Americans vacation or visit France every year. My family and I were five of the Americans who visited in 2005, and that visit led to Code: Elephants on the Moon.