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.

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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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.

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.

How do I get a story idea?  For me, it's a slow, rumbling process punctuated by flashes of ideas.  The early part of the story process is like a gathering storm, and I feel it in my bones more than know it with my conscious mind.  There's a restlessness, an unsettling feeling that something is building within me.  Slowly.  Unseen.  And then ideas start to come.  Some ideas are fleeting, mere sparks that leave little behind.  Many just fizzle away. Others seem brilliant: flashes on inspiration so strong that they burn themselves on my brain.  A very few of those ideas are true strikes.  They light up my mind, make everything seem clear and sharp.  They leave behind the clear scent of ozone, as rarified and pure as the thin air at altitude.

The story known as either Elephants on the Moon or Identity began on a train in 2005.  My family was on vacation and were traveling.  We took a plane to Paris, transferred to a train to Caen, then a bus to Ouistreham.  There we rented bikes to ride the 20 km to Amblie, a little Norman village where we had rented a house for the week.

We ended up sharing a seat with a man named Philippe.  At least, that's what I remember his name to be.  Being a writer, I have to admit that I fill in forgotten details with memories of things that have never been.  At the very least, I polish and refine those memories so that they make more sense to me.  Never sacrifice a good story line for truth.

Philippe was a poet and a playwright.  He had flowing brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and lively, hazel eyes.  He wore a linen poets shirt, the cuffs of the sleeves turned back over hands that had long, slender fingers that had seen their share of hard work.  My husband, on the other hand, remembers a man in a grimy t shirt that was stretched out at the neck, whose hair hadn't been combed in days if not weeks and whose fingernails needed a good long encounter with a nailbrush and soap. He agrees with me that the man, whatever his name, said that he was a playwright.

We talked for a while on books.  Philippe was not very impressed with what I had read of French literature.  Hugo and Flaubert were romantic hacks.  Dumas was quaint and populist.  Camus was almost worth talking about.  But the writers that he considered worthwhile were people whose names I had never heard.  Never mind the fact that I'd read everything in translation.  His English was close to impeccable.  My French was almost up to what a two year old might produce.  It was soon obvious that I couldn't hold up my end of this conversation.

Our talk turned to what we were doing.  We told him our plans: living in the country.  Biking to the Normandy beaches, to museums, to Caen and Bayeux.  Eating locally.  Speaking our terribly inadequate French and relying on the goodness of the French people to put up with us and forgive us our ellipses.  He told us that he was leaving the Parisian theater scene, which went a little slack in the summer anyway, to spend a holiday with his parents in Normanday.

And then the really interesting part of the conversation happened.  At least, for me the talk became interesting because it caused my thoughts to begin gathering.  Philippe talked about growing up in a provincial Norman town and why he had been compelled to move to the big city.  Normandy was such a backwater, he said, the people so provincial.  They cared little for literature or art.  They were concerned with local politics, which amounted to little more than petty family feuds that had raged for decades.  They thought of little except their cattle and crops, their small shops and businesses, their reputations.  And yet, despite all their trivial spats, the Normans were of one mind on one subject; they were better than their neighbors, the Bretons.

At this point, Philippe forgot his urbane, Parisian leanings and began to rant about the people from Brittany: how "unfrench" they were despite years of living on French soil.  How uncouth.  Uncultured.  Foreign.  And as he stormed on, the thunderheads of a story began building in my mind.  What would it be like to live among these people, who had lived together so long?  What would it be like to be a Breton among the Normans?  

Ideas began to rumble about like distant thunder.