Sweet Saturday Samples

This week’s excerpt for Sweet Saturday Samples continues where last week’s left off. Allen has just come home from work during the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965, and he and Lenore are going out to a restaurant to eat, in the hopes that there will be at least some power and warm food there.

The Mrs. Rossi referred to near the end is the former aunt-in-law of Allen’s older sister Gemma. Thanks to Mrs. Rossi’s wild imagination and mean-spirited gossiping, Mrs. Troy broke up the happy home Allen and his sisters had made for themselves and ruined what would’ve been their first real Christmas in 1962.

***

They go down the fire escape so the full moon can light the way, instead of having to feel along walls while going down the stairs inside.  It feels very surreal to walk past block after block of darkened buildings and to see broken traffic lights in the city that’s supposed to never sleep.  Perhaps this was what it felt like to walk through Manhattan a century ago, before electricity powered everything and everyone relied so much on it for everything.  Allen remembers how there was only a sliver of the moon in the sky the night Adicia, Justine, and Giovanni went from Tompkins Square Park to the Bowery Mission.  They probably would’ve given anything to have had their way lit by a big full moon in a cloudless sky.

Allen holds the door of a diner for her.  When they walk inside, they see a number of other people in the candlelight, with several gas stoves and wood-burning fireplaces working in the background.  Someone has put a transistor radio on a table in the middle of the diner and turned it up.

“Table for two?” a waiter asks.

“Yes, please,” Allen says. “Can we have a table with extra candles?  I want to see my fiancée’s engagement ring sparkling in the candlelight.”

“You’re engaged?” a woman at a nearby table asks. “How soon is your wedding?”

“July twenty-ninth of next year.  It’s going to be the fourth anniversary of the day we met,” Allen says proudly, pulling off Lenore’s left glove. “Show everyone your ring, Lenore.”

“That’s a long engagement,” a man says. “Most people I know are married within three or four months of getting engaged.”

“We just got engaged under a week ago,” Lenore says in embarrassment as Allen holds up her left hand. “We don’t wanna have a wedding during the coldest time of year.  I think I can wait to have it during a nice time of year and on a special day.”

The waiter leads them over to a booth in the corner, with six candles on the table, and hands them menus. “It’ll be on the house tonight, our gift to you for your engagement.”

Lenore wants to protest, but Allen is so overcome with pride at showing her off and letting everyone know about their engagement that she doesn’t have the heart to disappoint him.  She remembers how overprotective of her he is since her illness, and so orders a turkey pot pie, steak fries, and clam chowder.  When their orders come, Allen insists she have some of his double burger with mushrooms, onions, lettuce, and tomatoes, potato skins with melted cheese and bacon bits, and butternut squash soup.  She hopes no one can see her eating from his spoon and taking bites from his hamburger.  At least he wants his woman to have a healthy appetite, she tells herself in resignation, instead of looking down on her for not eating like a bird and keeping herself skinny like a lot of other girls do.

By the time they place their orders for dessert, they’ve found out from the transistor radio that this blackout is more than just a neighborhood power outage.  Almost the entire Eastern Seaboard is bathed in darkness—New York City and much of Upstate; Ontario, including the capital city of Toronto; Maine; and New England.  They wonder how the girls are doing, and Allen secretly hopes his parents were among the people caught in elevators or subway tunnels and aren’t able to come home tonight.

It would serve them both right to spend a night in the dark and cold, surrounded by strangers, many of them probably the very people they preach against so much just because they have some money and live in nice neighborhoods.  And for good measure, he hopes that mean-spirited busybody Mrs. Rossi is stuck along with them.  She deserves some kind of revenge for how she was the cause of Mrs. Troy destroying their Christmas and giving his parents the wild, completely unfounded belief that Lenore is his “bus stop whore.” He knows that means his sisters’ respective neighbors Mr. Doyle and Mr. van Niftrik must also probably be trapped in a subway tunnel or darkened workplace somewhere, but sometimes the innocent have to suffer along with the guilty.

“Have some of my chocolate ice-cream float,” he insists as Lenore nibbles at a banana split.

“Allen, you’re embarrassing me!” she whispers. “These nice people are gonna think I’m some pig who can’t control her appetite!”

“My older sister’s ex-husband’s family were guilty of that, but not me.  She said they forced all this food on her, even when she was ready to pop twenty times over.  I’d never make you keep eating entire extra portions even when you were feeling sick.  I’m just letting you take some bites of my food.” He leans over and whispers in her ear. “Besides, I’m sure you’ll be burning off some of these calories when we get home tonight with my help, if you know what I mean.  I can’t wait to get to bed with you and generate our own electricity and heat.”

Lenore is a hundred shades of red as she takes a few sips from Allen’s straw.

Ready for surgery with Max

Sometimes it takes until the twentieth or higher go-through of a book to realize something isn’t working and needs to change. It’s really a blessing in disguise that I’ve been unpublished far longer than I ever thought I’d be, since it’s given me so many extra years to look over my books and let things percolate. Most writers aren’t ready to consider more than superficial revisions or add-ons right away, but when it’s been a decade or more, you start to see things in a different light.

I’ve realized for awhile now that the earliest titles of my Max’s House series need some serious changes. They’re just so corny, cliché, generic, after school special-worthy. Plus, most of them don’t even accurately reflect what really happens. They were written in one fell swoop in 6th grade, when I was only in the process of writing the first book.

I would cringe, roll my eyes, and put the book back if I went to a library or bookstore and saw a book with a corny title like Making the Grade, Families Stick Together, The “In” Crowd, Who Said Junior High Was Supposed to Be Easy?, Eighth Grade Is Soo Hard, Back to School, Mixed Feelings, or The Party That Got Out of Hand. I really knew how to load on the pathos and force in the angsty issues!

I’ve retitled some of the later (as yet unwritten) titles, as part of having written quick synopses for each book a few years ago. I wanted to make an outline so I wouldn’t be going so blind when I finally resumed this series. I also expanded it from a planned 33 titles to an even 40, and capping it in in 1970, when Great-Grandpa Stanley dies at 110. The series starts with a wedding and ends with a funeral, taking the Sewards and their friends through the full experience of life over a generation.

I know that the first, third, and sixth books need the most work of all, and that the eighth and fifth books could also use some rewriting and restructuring. It’s kind of ironic that my most overwritten books in need of significant editing are all well under 100,000 words, while my long tomes were deliberately planned at that length and written much more carefully.

I see so many pointless, cluttery scenes in the first and third books. In the first book, it was more a matter of being so young and not a very developed writer yet; in the third book, it was clear overwriting and even a bit of mental masturbation. The eighth book was a bit overwritten too. The problem with the sixth book is that it’s telling two stories, one in 1942-43 (past tense) and another in 2007 (present tense). The future story is completely pointless and gives away WAY too many spoilers, kind of like that annoying, gimmicky narrator in a certain massively overrated historical novel. (Hint: ***NEWSFLASH!!!**** In three months, characters X, Y, and Z are all going to die! Heeheehee! You’ll never see THAT one coming! I’m so clever! By the way, Rudy has hair the color of lemons!) And the fifth book just isn’t structured or focused on the right storyline all the way through.

I’ve reached a point where I realize I need to be brutal with editing the first book. Any junky, cluttery ultra-short scene or cheesy dialogue that doesn’t move the main storylines along is history. The book is about one crazy summer vacation, as Max and Elaine deal with their new stepfamily and are later sent home by Mr. Seward when they act up. Along the way, they’re having their first romances, and Elaine has to deal with being the new girl who’s managed to make herself very unpopular immediately, along with drawing the ire of her new boyfriend’s long-time admirer. That’s it. All those pointless scenes and dialogues where all their friends are hanging out serve no purpose. And a lot of the dialogue seems to have come straight from a cheesy melodramatic sitcom.

The whole storyline in the third book about Elaine’s “depression” and eventual elaborate attempted suicide really offends me now. It just came out of nowhere, and feels so overly forced and unrealistic. God forbid I have focused the story on that weird show the Sewards were roped into doing, and Max and Elaine dealing with the arrival of the quints. No, it had to be some stupid “very special” message that completely trivialized real depression and suicide!

I wrote the 4th, 5th, 6th, 9th, 10th, and 11th books pretty much back-to-back over about two years, and began the 12th at the end of that period. It’s easy to see how much I was improving as a writer over that time, and how they contrasted with the handwritten first, third, 7th, and 8th books, and with the long-unfinished, held hostage on an unopenable file on an unopenable disk second book. The 9th, 10th, and 11th books are short, hilarious, and to the point. There are no meandering side tangents contributing absolutely nothing to the main story.

Secondary Characters Bloghop

Rachel Schieffelbein is hosting The Secondary Characters Bloghop in honor of the release of her book Secondary Characters. Winners will receive critiques from Theresa Paolo, Kelley Lynn, Jessica Salyer, Jenny Morris, and Suzi Retzlaff. Kelley and Cassie Mae will also pick a winner to receive either a signed copy of Kelley’s recently-released Fraction of Stone or an e-copy of Reasons I Fell for the Funny Fat Friend.

One of my favorite secondary characters is the Fool in King Lear. Everyone in my English AP class loved him, even the teacher, and none of us could understand why Shakespeare wrote him out midway through and didn’t do more with him. He was great comic relief in such an otherwise heavy story. Years later, when I was introduced to Akira Kurosawa’s incredible Ran, I was really excited to see that the Fool had a much more important role and didn’t just disappear without explanation.

I freaking love Monsieur l’Abbé T. in the classic French Enlightenment novel Thérèse Philosophe, which is classified as philosophical pornography in Robert Darnton’s Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. Basically, it’s an erotic novel advocating Enlightenment philosophy in between all the various forms of sexual activity, both coupled and solo. This priest is on fire in every scene he’s in! He’s got guts to utter lines like:

“Everyone agrees that God knows what will occur throughout eternity.  But, they say, even before he knows what the results of our actions will be, he has foreseen that we will betray his grace and commit these same acts.  Thus, with this foreknowledge, God, in creating us, knew in advance that we would be eternally damned and eternally miserable.”

“We read in the good book that God has sent his prophets to warn mankind and to exhort it to change its behaviour.  But God, who is all-knowing, knew very well that men would not change their behaviour.  The Holy Scriptures suppose, thus, that God is a cheat and a trickster.  Can these ideas be reconciled with the certitude we have of the infinite goodness of God?”

Monsieur l’Abbé T., however, never wins over Thérèse’s dear older friend Madame C. with his frequent arguments in favor of coitus interruptus. Madame C. almost died in childbirth and isn’t willing to risk that happening ever again. At one point she almost gives in, but then he’s the one arguing for abstention. Madame C. totally calls him on how one of his reasons involves self-flattery, saying he loves her and is too much of a gentleman to subject her to the risk of scandal! “Your second reason is so compelling you actually needn’t have bothered to flatter yourself with the first.”

Finally, I loved the gentle puppeteer Amici Enfanti in the late Ida Vos’s The Key Is Lost, one of her middle grade-level books based on her experience in WWII Holland. Amici Enfanti is a family friend of protagonist Eva and her little sister Lisa, and the girls are delighted to be taken to his house as their final hiding place. He tells them to call him Mr. Ami, since ami is French for friend.

Lisa lost her doll Freekie, whom Mr. Ami made for her before the war, and he was so upset to hear of this that he immediately set to work making Freekie Two. He tells the girls that puppeteers have a special kind of magic that protects children, which I’ve always remembered. Vrouw Vos’s books are among the most unforgettable I’ve ever read, able to recall so many details years later, but that’s one of the things that’s stuck out most to me.

During the brutal Hongerwinter of 1944-45, when the Dutch people were eating tulip bulbs and sugar beets to survive, Mr. Ami went hungry so the girls could survive. He had to be forced to start eating again when another adult discovered what was going on. And after the Canadians liberate Holland, he continues taking care of the girls till the railroad system is repaired and their parents are able to retrieve them.

In defence of contemporary historical fiction

My great writing love is historical, and for about 20 years now, I’ve written exclusively 20th century historical. Since I tend towards series and family/town sagas, odds are a story will inevitably end up in the modern era, close to the present day but never quite contemporary. Since recent decades aren’t quite classical historical fiction, but not quite contemporary yet, they’ve been given the label contemporary historical fiction. And within that genre, more recent past history, like the 1990s, would be considered late contemporary historical.

While some people stop considering something historical after World War I, I think most people consider up to World War II historical, and probably the immediate postwar era. But a lot of historical events happened in the decades afterwards, even if some people aren’t comfortable with labeling them as historical. Let’s face it, the world of even 20 years ago now seems like the stuff of history, since technology and society have evolved so much. And to a young person in particular, a book set in a year like 1968, 1974, or 1980 is about ancient history they never lived through.

I was born in 1979. The world I was born into now seems like history, even to me, as much as I hate admitting I’m getting old. The world I grew up in included rotary phones, black and white computers, disks, VCRs, less cable, TVs you still had to get up to change the channel on, typewriters, record players, cassette tapes, boxy cars, and living World War I vets and Titanic survivors. And the world of even 10-20 years before my birth seems like history now, with things like sex-segregated help wanted ads, twilight sleep, no women’s lib, and gas-guzzling boat-sized cars.

If you’re choosing to set your story in the Sixties or beyond, or if it starts earlier and gradually comes into the present, don’t overdo it with the historical references. This should be true of any historical. It’s kind of obnoxious and breaking the fourth wall to show off your research and constantly call attention to the fact that it’s taking place in a given year or decade. Loving any decade or historical event isn’t reason enough to write a book set then if that’s the only reason you did it.

If you’re only writing about this decade to indulge your nostalgia and waltz down memory lane, you should reconsider why this story needs to be set then. No one wants to read a book that’s little more than a recitation of popular songs, fashions, news stories, inventions, tv shows, and movies. That’s actually what badly dates a lot of once-contemporary books, too much of a period feel rather than being a story for all time that just happens to be set in a certain decade.

Things like bell bottoms, beehive hairdos, muscle cars, New Wave music, mood rings, rotary phones, big hair, and classic Nickelodeon (from the Eighties, NOT the Nineties, no matter what my younger university friends think!) should just be seasoning for a greater historical story. A reason to set a story in a given decade would be like a brother or husband being drafted to Vietnam, a family active in women’s lib, dealing with an AIDS diagnosis during the early days of stigma, a father in Desert Storm, a family going through the energy crisis, or the L.A. Riots.

No book should ever feel like it’s just a contemporary dressed up in historical clothes, set in a year or decade with no special significance to the characters or story. You can incorporate things you love about the recent past, like classic rock or old tv shows, without constantly name-dropping. That kind of smacks of mental masturbation, which I’ve been guilty of myself in the past.

I feel so old when I tell kids that when I was their age, computers were black and white and that I never had a damn booster seat. That was reality in my childhood, but it seems like a distant, foreign mystery to a child growing up now. Society changes so much more quickly now than it did in the past. It’s for this reason that reincarnation researchers have suggested that the time between lives is much shorter now than hundreds of years ago.  Someone who lived in the 8th century wouldn’t feel discombobulated at being thrust into the 11th or 14th century, whereas someone from the 18th century would feel lost at even the early 20th century, and someone from 1920 would feel like s/he were in a sci-fi story come to life even in 1950, 1975, or 1990.

WeWriWa—Kurapaty

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors, where participants share 8 sentences from a book or WIP. Now that the semester’s over, I’ll be able to do much more commenting and returning visits!

This is the conclusion of the scene I’ve been sharing from, edited somewhat to fit in 8 sentences. It’s April 1937, and Rustam Zyuganov, the cousin of now-adult former orphanage girl Inessa, has just survived a mass grave. During the second half of that year, a barbed wire fence was erected around the Kurapaty forest, thus making escape even more astronomically difficult. Rustam’s offense was telling a joke about Stalin at work, and Inessa’s husband Roman, a junior professor finishing up his Ph.D. in film studies, was writing a paper about Vera Kholodnaya, a very popular actress who died of the flu pandemic in 1919 and was later declared an enemy of the people.

I’m familiar with the cycles of the Moon because I use a Hebrew perpetual calendar. Rosh Chodesh, the celebration of the new month, indicates a new Moon, and if a Gregorian date corresponds to around the 15th of a Hebrew month, it means the Moon is full.

***

When he finally reaches the top, he’s covered in sweat, blood, sand, and dirt, and the breath of fresh air into his lungs and the solid ground beneath his feet are the sweetest things he’s ever experienced.  Then he remembers that his survival is extremely dangerous, and he drops back onto his knees to smooth the sand over again, so it doesn’t look as though anything were disturbed.

He knows the area well enough to know how to get to his father’s house from here.  It’s too dangerous to return to his own apartment.  For a split second he wonders if God might exist after all, then remembers that no miracle was granted to his cousin-in-law or the countless other victims now buried in the forest.  He just got lucky with very quick thinking and a calm attitude.  He doesn’t attribute the new moon in the sky to a divine miracle either, since that’s just what the Moon does at this point in its monthly lunar cycle, appear as a tiny crescent that doesn’t give off much light.  It just happened to come at a time when he most needs to stay hidden.