Category: Writing

And Now For Something Completely Different

11/7/2021

It's November, and for many writers, that means something completely different than what it means for the rest of the population.

When most people think November, they think Thanksgiving.

Unless they are crazily dedicated shoppers, when they might think of Black Friday. (I have NEVER done a Black Friday foray! Have you?)

But for me, like many writers, November means NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. Every November, a huge number of writers from around the world try to write a novel in one month. They begin on November 1 (the most dedicated at midnight. Me? I didn't start until 8 in the morning.). In order to win, each has to have 50,000 words written by the time December 1 comes around. What does one win? Bragging rights. Nothing more.

I've competed in NaNo many times in the past, sometimes on the regular NaNo site and sometimes as a teacher/mentor in their Young Writers Program. I don't think I've ever actually won. Most years I finish in the mid 30,000 range. Each year, including this year, I think will be different.

Whether or not I win this year, it WILL be completely different, because I'm writing about a time period that is very different than anything else I've done in the past. I'm writing about Folsom man in New Mexico.

Folsom man wandered New Mexico 10,000 years ago, a little after the last Ice Age. By the time he got here, the mammoths and a lot of the other megafauna were gone. The first evidence of his (and I use man and him in the more general sense of people of both genders) being here were bison antiquus bones and spearpoints found near Folsom, New Mexico a little over a hundred years ago.

I started thinking about Folsom man in New Mexico years ago, when I first started teaching New Mexico history. I knew nothing about ancient New Mexico. Heck, I didn't know that much about recent New Mexico history. But Patrice Lewis, an experienced and excellent teacher, took me under her wing. She taught me a lot of history - and she taught me a lot about teaching as well.

Patrice and I went to Wild Horse Arroyo, the site near Folsom where the bones had been found. The site is on private land and is inaccessible to the public except during biannual guided tours led by state archaeologists.

The road to Wild Horse Arroyo was little more than a trampled-down path through pasture. Once we arrived, there wasn't much to see; if there were any bones left at the site, they were buried.

But the tour guide was also a great story teller. We stood around by the side of his truck as he explained not only what had been found at this particular location, and the circumstances that led to the discovery, but what the people who had lived here thousands of years ago had been like.

By the time we were driving back to Albuquerque, ideas were swirling around in my mind.

Those ideas have been swirling for nearly a decade now. I've done a lot of reading and a lot of research, and now I'm writing the story of one of the boys who had been there, that late fall day long, long ago. Of course, I can't actually know him, but I have studied and I can imagine.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is a retired middle school English and Social Studies teacher who lives in the mountains of central New Mexico. Her most recent book, A Blaze of Poppies, was published in October 2021 and is a novel set in New Mexico and France during the First World War. Her next book, When Duty Calls, is a novel about the Civil War in New Mexico, and is written for middle grade readers. The one she is currently writing, tentatively titled The Bison Hunters, needs a lot more work before she can even consider publishing it.

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Throwing out the Baby with the Potato Water

1/23/2020

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My critique partners can attest that sometimes I don't remember my own books. They've been through so many revisions that I can't remember what's in them and what's been expunged.
I forget sub-plots. I can't remember characters' names. Often I've forgotten whole scenes.

This became a bit of a problem for me this past week. I'd had the honor of being asked to guest-write a post on Project Mayhem, a fabulous blog on writing hosted by a wonderful group of Middle Grade authors. I decided to address how little historical details can help readers grasp what a period of time was like, and how even the littlest of details could lead to some big questions. As an example, I decided to use a quirky little historical detail from my Civil War novel, The Bent Reed, which will be published in both paperback and ebook in September.

The quirky little historical detail in question is from a laundry scene; After washing Pa and Lijah's shirts, Ma dips them into a vat that contains the water left over from boiling potatoes. Why would she do this, you ask? Because the left-over potato water would have had starch suspended in it, and the starch would have made ironing the shirts easier, and the ironed shirts more crisp.

I remember learning this little historical detail in a Civil War era book of hints for housewives and being fascinated. I delight in little bits of trivia like this. I thought that it could lead to many interesting discussions about resource use and thriftiness.

As I wrote my post last week, I decided that this detail was a perfect example of how little bits of trivial information about everyday life in an historical period could not only bring that period to life for readers, but help readers ask big questions about how history informs the present day. And so I pulled out my manuscript and began searching for the scene.

And this is where I ran into a problem, because the scene wasn't there. I searched using potato and starch and laundry as key words. I found several scenes with laundry, but none involved a vat of potato water or even an iron.
Apparently, at some point in my rewriting and revision process I had cut this beloved little bit of trivia from my story and then forgotten about doing so.

Thinking about it now, I'm not surprised that I'd thrown out the vat of potato water. Even the most interesting bits of historical trivia have to either move the plot along or illuminate the characters. Although I cannot remember thinking so, I must have decided at some point that the potato water did neither.

Now that I think of it, I'm convinced that using the water left over from boiling potatoes show just how frugal Ma was. Like most women in her era, she used a good deal of her own elbow grease and determination to make sure to turn everything to good account.

Maybe I threw out the baby with the potato water.

Jennifer Bohnhoff is an educator and writer who lives in New Mexico. She has written two novels set in the Civil War: The Bent Reed, which takes place at Gettysburg, and Valverde, set in New Mexico. The sequel to Valverde, Glorieta, will be published this spring. This post was originally published July 14, 2014.

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An Interview With The Author

3/13/2018

3 Comments

Recently a high school student sent me an email requesting an interview. She needed to talk with someone who worked in a field in which she was interested. Here are her questions, and my answers. Let me know if you think I didn't explain the writer's life well enough. I'd love to learn how your answers would vary.

1. What made you decide to become a writer?
I don't think anyone decides to become a writer. Writers are compelled - driven by the stories that keep playing in their heads. They can't help themselves, and if they deny their writing it drives them crazy.

I started writing really young, like middle school, but I didn't start taking it seriously until I was a stay at home mom. Writing enabled me to go far, far away without having to hire a sitter.

2. I know becoming an author is a tricky job financially when you just get out of school because of getting your name out. Do you think newly graduated writers should work part time as a writer or submerge them self in their work?

I don't know anyone who was able to just submerge him or herself in writing. You either have to keep a day job, or find someone who will support you, or perhaps win the lottery. The exceptions to this are people who go into commercial writing, like copy editing, advertising, or journalism.

You mentioned an interest in editing, and that's a great way to break into the field, especially if you're willing to move to New York City. These days editors get paid a piddly salary to start out, but they make a lot of contacts and they're close to the big movers and shakers. Many editors write books to fill the "gaps" in their house's line, so they are both editors and writers.

3. What kind of experience did you have, or recommend, before going to college?

Live fully, travel widely, love deeply. And take lots of pictures to help jolt your memory later. I regret I did little of any of this before going to college.

4. How do you get out of creative blocks?

I've never had one. I've always had way more I wanted to write than time to write it in.

5. How do you pull yourself out of procrastination?

I usually don't. There's usually a reason why I'm not writing, and I respect that and do other things until I'm ready again. The story will start to beat on the inside of my head if I ignore it awhile, and usually when I procrastinate what I'm really doing is other stuff I need to get done (like laundry and weeding) while working out kinks in the plot twists.

6. What is your favorite genre to write in and why?

I love historical fiction, because I love researching the period and learning what was going on, how people lived, how they thought, and what they wanted. Some human feelings are universal. Others are not. That's always a surprise when I read primary sources.

7. Do you think living in New Mexico impacts your writing?

New Mexico is a cultural backwater in some respects, but the internet has opened the world up so much that it doesn't matter as much as it used to. And there's so much beauty here and so many untold stories. I think just looking out the window is inspiring.

8. Do you expand your creativity from just story book?

I'm not sure what you're asking here. Do I do other creative things besides writing? I'm a pretty fair cook, and I sing in the church choir but am not a fine enough talent in either to make a go of it professionally.

9. Are you self employed or do you work under a company?

Most writers don't work for companies. They are freelance, and when they've completed a novel (or other kind of book, fiction or nonfiction) they send it to editors of publishing houses and agents. Or, they self publish, which is what I do, because I gathered over 1,000 rejects and finally decided I didn't want to wait anymore and play the game. Getting published is hard. For every 10,000 manuscripts a publishing house gets, they're going to make an offer on one or two.

10. Do you see writing more as a serious or a fun job?
I have yet to have a serious job in my life. I won't do it if I can't find the fun in it. That being said, writing is rarely fun. It's hard work. Editing and rewriting is even harder. And getting rejected hurts. Deeply. But if you're meant to be a writer you do it anyway. And while not always fun, it can be thrilling and deeply satisfying.

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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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Proud Loser

12/8/2014

4 Comments

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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Excuse me While I nano

11/9/2014

2 Comments

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

3 Comments

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

5 Comments

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

2 Comments

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

18 Comments

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.

Add yourself on to the mailing list on the homepage of this website if you want to be notified when Code: Elephants on the Moon becomes available.

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<<Previous

And Now For Something Completely Different

Throwing out the Baby with the Potato Water

An Interview With The Author

Finding a treasure Trove

Proud Loser

Excuse me While I nano

Resurrecting Ghosts

Code Name: Cover

Judging Code Name Verity's cover

Killing the Gatekeepers

Breton Horses

What do you think?

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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