My final last-minute changes to A Dream Deferred

Editing well and truly isn’t done until the final moment many times. No matter how much grueling work we do, there are always those few typos and errors that somehow managed to evade notice all that time. Other times we decided to make minor changes to a few details we’d been thinking about for awhile.

Thankfully, the final changes I made to A Dream Deferred were few and far between instead of a sudden swell.

1. Though I had the correct new start date of Part III on its title page, I somehow still had April 2, 1951 listed in the table of contents across all four volumes. I’d corrected the ending date for Part II after changing its stopping point and adding new chapters, but forgot to subsequently change Part III’s start date.

2. Artur’s freshman roommate Jonathan’s surname went from Firestone (né Feuerstein) to Gould (né Goldschmidt). I’d had this in the back of my mind since tentatively planning a crossover with the Firestone family of my Atlantic City books, and it seemed kind of a stretch to write in the backstory of Belgian-born Jonathan being a cousin of the German-born Firestones. Octavia (né Ruchel Oktavia) is one of Sparky’s surviving aunts, and her second husband Florian (the father of her first and seventh children) is an artist and art restorer who’s partially deaf in one ear. Florian would be a perfect mentor and co-worker for Dalibor Brankov, an art history student who’s moderately deaf in one ear and profoundly deaf in the other. The Firestones also have a great guesthouse in Riverdale, and Octavia’s sixth child Artemisia, born in 1938, would be a perfect friend for Sonya Koneva.

Plus, I no longer plan to use Jonathan as Léa’s lavender husband and Kasiodor’s partner. He’s not either of their type! It’s possible he may be written out entirely, either leaving Columbia voluntarily or getting busted on one of his visits to the city’s gay bathhouses and subsequently being expelled. Why waste such a rad surname on someone who ended up not playing nearly as much of an important role as I originally envisioned?

3. The first name of Léa’s art history professor and academic advisor, who has a serious talk with her and her friends and convinces them to stay at Barnard as examples of nonconformity, was changed from Zenobia to Hildegard, after Hildegard of Bingen. I really thought it would be more fitting to give the name Zenobia to her daughter, who’ll become friends with Sonya Koneva in the fifth book.

Prof. Silverthorne originally wanted to be an archaeologist, but her art history classes at Bryn Mawr so inspired her, she decided to combine this nascent interest with her longtime love of the classical world. Thus, it makes perfect sense for her to name her daughter after Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. I was also inspired after learning heroic Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad named one of his daughters Zenobia because of his love of the ancient world.

Marc DEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Mr. al-Asaad evacuated the priceless ancient treasures of Palmyra’s World Heritage ruins before they could be destroyed by ISIS, and refused to disclose their location even under months of torture. He was publicly beheaded on 18 August 2015, at the age of eighty-three. May his memory be for an eternal blessing.

Sunday Snippets—Dangerous, daunting descent

Alas, the long-running Weekend Writing Warriors, the successor to Six Sentence Sunday and a close sibling to the long-discontinued Sweet Saturday Samples (how I miss that hop!), seems to be officially over for all intents and purposes. The amount of people participating slowly dwindled, and then they played hacky-sack with the signup posts. It’s almost always a sign a TV show will be cancelled when a network keeps moving it around and not airing it regularly, and that happened big-time with WeWriWa. With no signup post many weeks, and other times going live in the middle of the night or shortly before the deadline, of course the remaining participants drifted away.

When I saw my blogging buddy Jenna Jaxon had begun doing her own Sunday snippet posts in the spirit of the hop, I decided to jump back in too on my own terms. Since there are no more rules about a certain number of lines, we get to decide how much to include now! I took a little break due to the release of A Dream Deferred and Rudy Valentino’s 100th death anniversary, but now I’m back to regularity.

Since the 25th anniversary of 9/11 is coming up, I’ll be sharing snippets from “Charlotte’s Most Terrifying Prophecy,” from Saga VII (the 2000s) of my magnum opus Cinnimin. Eighteen-year-old Raizel Brandt-van Acker is being carried down from the 91st floor of the North Tower, the highest floor of survival, by two young firemen. Her broken legs are bound with hose straps so they don’t move too much.

Raizel clung even more tightly to Leon and Jeremy as the building violently shook and a loud roaring, like a train coming closer and closer, menacingly blanketed the air. Alongside the roaring were rat-a-tat-tat noises that sounded like lead bowling balls banging against the walls, hundreds at a time. Some of the people on the stairs ahead of them swayed back and forth, and a few lost their balance and slid down a few flights.

“Was that another plane?” Raizel asked. “Maybe today is the end of the world, and none of us will get out of this building alive. Or if we do, we’ll emerge into an apocalypse.”

“This seems to be a premeditated, coordinated attack, but I don’t think it’s the beginning of the Apocalypse,” Jeremy said. “The people who did this will be tracked down and brought to justice. You might get a huge compensation payment from the government for being put through this.”

“How many more floors till the bottom? I’ve already lost track of how many we’ve gone down.”

“Maybe thirty,” Leon said. “We seem to be going down a lot faster than we went up. Let’s keep hoping this pace continues even after we catch up with all those other people below us. Going into burning buildings is part of the job I signed up for, but this is unlike any fire or emergency I’ve ever attended before.”

A quarter of a century since my beautiful swan came in for its first landing

As hard as this is to believe, a quarter of a century has now come and gone since I finally finished the first draft of You Cannot Kill a Swan: The Love Story of Lyuba and Ivan. It was in the later afternoon of 26 August 2001, and I was working on the upstairs shared 1996 Mac and using ClarisWorks. The first draft was written on four different Macs and four different word processing programs (though one of those programs, Word 98, was only used for the first chapter of Part II). Adding in all the editing and rewriting I did a decade later, it was completed on six computers and six programs.

I properly began it on 31 January 1993, just one month after my thirteenth birthday, and loosely drew from an unfinished picture book and ideas from 1990–92. Since my father bought the 128K Mac in 1984, I was able to start and write the entire book on a computer. Though I wrote the first drafts of most of my Atlantic City books by hand, Swan was different and special.

How did I manage to write that book so well, and ultimately tie all the storylines and characters together, at the ages of only 13–21? It truly was hashgacha pratit (Divine Providence). I spent almost the entire span of my teen years working on it, and the first few years of my twenties. It genuinely never bothered me that I had no real social life, since I was so focused on my writing, reading, and schoolwork. Mine was an interior life of the mind, and it paid off big-time when it came to putting my writing above everything else.

On 26 August 2001, I finished Chapter 41 of Swan, later entitled “Who Will Stand, Who Will Fall?” after a line in the chorus of the George Harrison song “The Lord Loves the One (That Loves the Lord),” which depicts the day-long court battle over Tatyana’s paternal rights in March 1924. Then I wrote the brief Epilogue, which returns to Russia and the respective fates of Lyolya and Serafima Lebedeva. The only dialogue in the Epilogue is by Serafima, who speaks the book’s title in the second half of the one line.

Soon after closing out of the final document of this massive doorstopper, I saw on aohell that the singer Aaliyah had just died in a plane crash. I don’t follow contemporary pop culture, since I’ve always gravitated towards the music and films of prior decades, but I’ll always remember that event and its date because it’s linked so closely to the end of my first draft.

Though I junked or radically rewrote 99% of the original 1993 material, there were so many places in my juvenile initial vision that perfectly led into a more mature direction and an actual plot with a real focus. The material from the second major phase, my junior year of high school, didn’t need quite so many severe edits and excisions, but it did require more than light, surface tweaking.

The material from the third and final major phase of the first draft, late ’98 through to the end, needed the least amount of editing. The vast majority of these chapters are largely unchanged but for adding and expanding certain scenes. It truly was one of those times where a book was writing me instead of the other way around.

I wish I’d removed the scenes of Aleksey buying wedding rings on his and Eliisabet’s first anniversary and Lena and Antonina going into the hall with the fidgety kids during the Bible readings at Lyuba and Ivan’s wedding and chatting about their First Wave feminist beliefs. They add absolutely nothing important to the overall story but for the former revealing Mr. Golitsyn was born a prince.

I also regret ending the scene of Katrin asking Anastasiya to design her wedding dress and giving brutally honest negative opinions of Christianity without any concluding line or passage thematically leading into the next scene of Ivan, Aleksey, and Nikolas at the iron factory. But the book is what it is, for better or worse, and that’s just how it ultimately solidified.

Every book unfolds exactly how it’s destined to, and could only come together in that way at that time in the writer’s life, even if we often look back and wish we would’ve done some things differently. I view it as a precious time capsule of my development as a writer from the ages of 13–21.

My entire life long, this will stand as one of the books I’m proudest of having written, one of the books closest to my heart. We grew up together, and it wonderfully demonstrates my writing style during many distinct phases. How many other writers can say that about a book they began writing in junior high?

Reflections on Rudolph Valentino, and what he means to me, on his 100th death anniversary

Today, 23 August 2026, makes it one hundred years since Rudolph Valentino (né Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi), my favorite male actor of the silent era, departed the material world in that incarnation. He was only 31, and should’ve had so many more decades ahead of him. Based on his excellent work as Ahmed, Sr. in The Son the Sheik, I could see him as easily maturing into a fine elder actor.

Since Rudy was so young when he passed, and left the world 53 years before I was born, it’s mind-blowing to think about how, had Fate unfolded differently, our lifetimes might’ve overlapped. Rudy would’ve turned 84 in 1979, and there were lots of silent actors still living when I was younger. I feel the same way when trying to wrap my brain around the concept of Buddy Holly possibly still being alive at going on ninety.

Rudy was such a beautiful person, both inside and out. He didn’t deserve to die in such excruciating agony at such a heartbreakingly young age. Had antibiotics existed in 1926, he wouldn’t have succumbed to peritonitis that advanced into pleurisy. Contrary to persistent urban legends, most silent actors transitioned to sound just fine.

Rudy had only been a superstar since 1921, and had so much acting range, always throwing himself into his roles and becoming his characters. He could’ve had a shelf life as long as Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, or Gregory Peck.

The two known surviving recordings of Rudy’s voice are NOT an accurate reflection of what he sounded like. The technology of 1923 used a brass horn instead of a real microphone, and he was singing instead of speaking naturally. Had he stepped back into the studio to try again two or three years later, we’d have a much more accurate picture of how he really sounded. Rudy did a lot of radio programs, but none of those broadcasts are known to have surviving recordings.

Rudy’s contemporaries said he had a pleasing voice, with low, husky tones commingled with a beautiful accent. Besides Italian, he also grew up speaking French, since his mother was French. The awkward recordings are worlds away from his true vocal abilities.

Rudy was the complete package, harnessing sensitivity, beauty, grace, charm, wit, intelligence, physical strength, thoughtfulness, attention to his appearance, genuine respect for women. While Rudy had undeniably old-fashioned views on women’s roles, I far prefer a guy who thinks we should ideally be home taking care of kids rather than a vile brute who beats his wife, rapes women, and thinks we have smaller brains.

Rudy also didn’t think it was unmanly to display emotions or have a soft side; indeed, he caught a lot of flack from men who felt threatened and challenged by the strange new reality he represented.

Rudy was a sweet, gentle soul who loved animals, was very good with kids (though sadly never had any of his own), respected women, wrote poetry, was intelligent and well-read, appreciated art and the finer things in life, respected his elders and those who’d opened doors for him, had great respect for other cultures and races, and had a very strong work ethic. Who wouldn’t view such a jewel of a man as her gold standard to judge all other guys against?

Rudy once said, “The caveman method I abhor, and I do not believe that it is ever successful with the woman who is worth having. Who could desire a woman taken by force? Who would gain any pleasure from loving or caressing a woman who did not give in return?”

Every time I watch one of Rudy’s films or see one of his home movies, I fall in love with him all over again. It’s such a tragedy we don’t have more films to savor his special talents and magnetic presence, and that some of his films are lost. Still, compared to some other actors of the silent era, we’re lucky almost all of his stardom-era films have survived, and that many of his pre-stardom films are also still here.

I’m long overdue to review the rest of his films!

Rudy was such a special, beautiful person, whom I shall love forever and always. He captivated me even before I first finally saw him in motion and immediately fell in love with him.

Rudy, may your beautiful light shine forever, and may your sweet memory be for an eternal blessing!

Index of all my Rudy-related posts:

Film reviews:

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Part I (Plot summary) (1921)
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Part II (Behind the scenes)
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Part III (Reception and legacy)
The Conquering Power (1921)
Camille (1921)
The Sheik, Part I (General overview) (1921)
The Sheik, Part II (Plot summary)
Moran of the Lady Letty (1922)
Beyond the Rocks (1922)
Blood and Sand (1922)
The Young Rajah (1922)
Monsieur Beaucaire (1924)
The Son of the Sheik (1926)

Fiction:

Concerns for Rudy’s health (excerpt from Chapter 23, “Death of Valentino,” from The Twelfth Time)
Death of Valentino (third section of chapter of the same name)
Commingled pandemonium and sadness at Rudy’s wake (final section of “Death of Valentino”)
A very special namesake (excerpt from How Kätchen Became Sparky)
Celebrating Valentino-related snippets from my books on Rudy’s 97th Jahrzeit

Miscellaneous:

How I fell in love with Rudy
Rudolph Valentino Week, Part I (What Rudy means to me)
Rudolph Valentino Week, Part II (“O, untimely Death”)
Rudolph Valentino Week, Part III (A crazy funeral and wake)
Rudolph Valentino Week, Part IV (Filmography)
Rudolph Valentino Week, Part V (Reception and legacy)
My fantasy husband
For Keith and Rudy, Whenever I May Find Them
Requiescat in pace, my sweet sheik (and Moonie’s birthday)
My sweet sheik
One Jahrzeit, one birthday
June Mathis (Rudy’s mentor, the woman who discovered him and nurtured him into a superstar)

From my names blog, Onomastics Outside the Box:

All about the name Rudolph
All about the name Valentino

Half a lifetime ago today

Today, 19 August 2026, marks half of my life having passed since the car accident that almost killed me. From this point forwards, I’ll have lived more and more of my life post-accident than before. The eleven months I couldn’t walk felt like a cruelly massive amount of time, and now that part of my life is almost a quarter-century in the past.

One of the thoughts banging around in my head like crazed pinballs as the 87-year-old madwoman bumped me onto the hood of her car and kept driving even after I tumbled into the road was that I was about to die at the age of only twenty-three. I was going to have a grave with the tragically short lifespan of 1979–2003.

When you’re in good health and not in a dangerous situation like a warzone or living with an abusive partner, you don’t wake up thinking that day might be your last. You aren’t counting down your potential final hours and minutes. You don’t think you’re about to be hit by a car as you get off the bus and start crossing the street to walk to work. We truly never know when our time might be about to end. Had I been taken away on that day, I would’ve shared my Jahrzeit (death anniversary) with Groucho Marx and Blaise Pascal.

The Angel of Death passed me over, and I was given an indefinite extension on my life. Before my assailant finally stopped driving because my legs became locked under her back driver’s side wheel and physically blocked her from going any farther, I thought I’d soon get to meet John Lennon, George Harrison, Keith Moon, John Entwistle, Stan Laurel, and Oliver Hardy, and be reunited with my uncle.

My uncle was the last person in the other world I called to mind, and I believe down to the very core of my soul he was watching over me and saved me from being much more severely injured or killed. I was also blessed with a Southern Italian body type below the shoulders, which gave me less distance to fall and more flesh to cushion the impact. A taller, thinner person might’ve been thrown or crushed.

Since learning about the superstition that we’re more prone to bad luck during our Chinese Zodiac year, the irrational part of myself can’t help but wondering if perhaps that played a role in what happened. I was born in the Year of the Goat, and 2003 was another Goat year. As an added bonus, it’s also believed we’re unlucky in love, life, and money. Some people take this superstitions so seriously they end relationships or refuse to consider a marriage candidate if they find out that’s their partner’s Zodiac, and many women schedule C-sections and inductions so their babies can be born in the luckier Year of the Horse.

Now I’ve outlived everyone in the 27 Club, Keith Moon, Rudy Valentino, my uncle, John Lennon, Tyrone Power, Steve Marriott (lead singer of The Small Faces), Marvin Gaye, Freddie Mercury, and so many more people carried away in the prime of life. By the end of the next decade, I’ll have outlived Dante, John Entwistle, and George Harrison.

My life would’ve unfolded so much differently had that maniac not hit me, but at least I’m still here to live it. The Angel of Death passed me over for a reason.