WeWriWa—Ser Folco wants to talk

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. The rules have now been relaxed to allow a few more sentences if merited, so long as they’re clearly indicated, to avoid the creative punctuation many of us have used to stay within the limit.

I’m switching back to A Dream of Peacocks, my alternative history about Dante and Beatrice. This comes from near the beginning of Chapter XIX, “Beautiful Betrothal.” It’s now late September 1288, and Dante and his much-younger halfsiblings have been staying at the Portinaris’ summer villa in Fiesole since July. They’ve postponed their return to Florence because Beatrice is recovering from a long, serious illness, a brutal beating from her now-deceased husband, and a birth that almost killed her.

Folco Portinari, father of Beatrice

I was reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in an anteroom off of the great hall when I became aware of Ser Folco calling my name. With much reluctance, I closed the book and set it on a small table on my left. Respect for my host came before everything, even my beloved Aristotle.

Ser Folco took a seat on a golden-backed chair with scarlet velvet cushions. “I’ve been seriously thinking about a very important subject for the last few months, which we need to discuss. If you don’t agree with my suggestion, I won’t feel offended or insulted. I also won’t mind if you need some time to think about this before you give an answer. We’ll still be friends regardless.”

I suspected he wanted to talk about money, and began silently rehearsing how I’d politely refuse his charity. It was one thing to stay in his villa and accept some money and other generous gifts every so often, but it would be humiliating to entirely exist on charity.

The ten lines end there. A few more follow to finish the scene.

People already talked about how I had to beg for so many loans and the financial trouble my family had fallen into. They didn’t need any more reasons to laugh and disrespect me.

“What happened last November was a tragedy,” Ser Folco began. “I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like to lose my wife so young and unexpectedly, and to lose a firstborn son before his life began. That obviously deeply affected you, and I’m glad you seem to be past the worst of your grief.” He paused before continuing. “You’re too young to live the rest of your life as a childless widower. It’s not good for man to be alone, and it’s our duty to have as many children as possible. Have you considered remarriage yet?”

Thank God, he wasn’t going to insult me by offering charity. “Of course I’ve thought about it, but I had far more important priorities over the last year, coupled with how I couldn’t leave my house for most of that time. Do you have a second wife in mind for me?”

Ser Folco smiled. “Indeed I do. I’ve discussed this potential marriage with Cilia, and she agrees with me that it couldn’t be more perfect. Would you be at all interested in Bice?”

Reflections on my first published book’s tenth birthday

Today, 9 May 2024, makes ten years since the release of my first published book, And Jakob Flew the Fiend Away. Though this was far from the first book I’d ever written, I felt it was my strongest completed, publication-ready manuscript at the time, as well as one of the shortest ones. We always want to lead with our strongest efforts!

I’ve spoken so many times about how I wish I’d done so many things differently while writing this book, feelings I maintain to this day. Part of that comes from how I was so new to deliberately writing towards publication and querying (before I decided to go indie), and thus felt certain constrains compelling me to somewhat stifle the voice and style I naturally tend towards.

As I explained in “The Story Behind the Story”:

Starting in 2006, I began writing a lot of long short stories/pieces of backstory about my Shoah characters (both during and after the war), to be periodically inserted into my Atlantic City books set at the same time. Originally, they were intended as fairly short pieces serving as a sobering alternate trajectory to the fairly unburdened lives of these American teens who only think they have it difficult, until these characters ultimately linked up after the war. They soon grew so long and involved, they threatened to overwhelm the books they were intended for, and took the focus off the real main characters and their storylines. I realized I needed to spin all these interconnected characters off into their own series.

I started by expanding the story about Jakob (and, later, Rachel) into a full-length novel. Not only was it one of the fairly shorter ones, it was more straightforward due to its lack of an ensemble cast. It was easy to flesh out all the long passages summarizing events, and to fill in the many blanks. Because of Jakob’s age, it also seemed perfect to query as YA (albeit upper, mature YA). Hence, the fade to black in the wedding night scene, and my decision to make it into two books instead of one very long book like I usually do.

I initially intended it to be one book, but because I wanted to pursue traditional publication at the time, and was cognizant it had reached the upper acceptable wordcount limit for historical and upper YA, I felt it would be best if I created two volumes. The most perfect ending opened up, and I was able to turn the rest of the material in the originating story into a somewhat shorter volume about Jakob’s first year in America, and his and Rachel’s first real year as husband and wife. Each volume truly has its own focus, and the second one reads more like New Adult than Young Adult.

I’ve thought a few times about significantly expanding the first book, with more chapters and longer chapters, as a companion volume to the original. The new version would be more for the adult market, while the first one would remain the YA version. There are some books like that. However, that would take way too much time, and I’ve long since moved on from this story.

I still intend to go back to Jakob and Rachel at some point and write more books about them, but trying to retool a book I completed and published years ago seems like a big waste of time. The most important thing was acknowledging how being too much in my own head when I wrote it caused me to adopt a style and voice that’s not naturally mine. Besides the shorter than usual chapters, I had too many descriptions of body language and emotional reactions.

It’s always been hard for me to read back through this book, since much of it just doesn’t feel authentically mine. I wrote all 125,000 of those words, but I wrote them while trying to shape myself into someone I’m not and never will be.

I even briefly (VERY briefly) toyed with the idea of doing it in first-person, since I was seriously trying for traditional publication, and that POV is such a popular default in most current YA. If I’d gone through with that, it would’ve felt even more inauthentic to who I am! It’s extraordinarily rare that I’m genuinely called to writing an entire book in first-person.

The first published book is always a learning experience, and that was mine. Despite all my misgivings and reluctance to voluntarily revisit it, I’m still very proud of it.

A to Z Reflections 2024

This was my lucky number thirteenth year doing the A to Z Challenge on my main blog, and my even luckier number eleventh year doing it with two blogs. For the sixth year, and despite knowing how much stress and mental exhaustion this causes, I didn’t start researching, writing, gathering images for, and editing my posts until the second half of March.

In years prior, I put my posts together many months in advance, sometimes as early as July and August. That way, they were ready to go long before midnight struck on the first of April, and I only had to look over them for last-minute proofreading (in case I hadn’t caught any typos or had forgotten to include certain tags) and add the A to Z buttons hyperlinked to the master site.

I considered doing one of my less intensive themes in my docket, since I once again waited so long to start preparing. However, none of my other planned future themes felt right in the face of what’s been happening to my people since 7 October. It’s impossible to carry on with normal life as though the terrifying skyrocketing of open, violent antisemitism and support of terrorist groups are just a minor blip.

I didn’t have daily headaches from the stress of doing so much work in just two weeks (for two blogs, remember!) as I did last year, but it did cause a great deal of stress in other ways. Putting together the posts for my names blog was even more stressful in some ways. Those posts may have been much shorter and more or less just lists of names with their definitions, but they involved a lot of formatting and flipping back and forth between multiple name lists.

After doing so much nearly-nonstop work for two weeks, I just crashed from the release of stress buildup on the first of April. This has happened every year since I started procrastinating till March, yet I never learn my lesson!

I have an extra incentive to resume my former habit of advance prep next time, since the WordPress classic editor’s most recent final date is 31 December 2024 (or as long as necessary). I don’t want the headache of having to learn the goofy, nonintuitive, less functional, arse-ugly Gutenberg block editor! If need be, I’ll switch to a paid plan so I can use the classic editor as a still-supported plug-in.

Topics I considered but crossed off my list included Versailles Synagogue, Worms Synagogue, xenia (hospitality) in Jewish tradition, Pirkey Avot (a six-chapter book of the Mishnah which is very easy to understand), Uzhgorod Synagogue, Vaybertaytsh (a semi-cursive Yiddish typeface), the Yiddish Book Center (which I’ve visited), Ulpana, Włodawa Synagogue, Bikur Cholim Hospital, and Zoharei Chama Synagogue.

I initially included a few individual people on my list, but decided to only do places, things, and groups of people. I began a post about the Zagreb Synagogue for my final post, but quickly opted against it as not a dramatic or emotional enough closing topic.

Copyright Government Press Office (Israel)

It was very important to me to cover a wide range of Jewish history, culture, experiences, and peoplehood, to combat the nonsense claim that we’re all Ashkenazic (i.e., European) and white-presenting. A number of my posts dealt with the Sephardic world, with Spanish and Portuguese origins. I also had to do Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) as proof we really have lived all over the world and that there’s no such thing as “looking Jewish.”

You can’t fix stupid or ignorant, but you can reach people who genuinely don’t know and are just mindlessly going along with Current Thing because all their friends are doing it. Education and dialogue help towards that effort.

Post recap:

The Alba Bible (תנ”ך אלבה)
Beta Israel (בֵּיתֶא יִשְׂרָאֵל, ቤተ እስራኤል, የኢትዮጵያ ይሁዲዎች)
Chanukah (חֲנֻכָּה)
Dura–Europos Synagogue (בית הכנסת בדורה אירופוס)
Eldridge Street Synagogue (בית הכנסת ברחוב אלדרידג)
Forverts (פֿאָרווערטס)
The Golem (הגּוֹלֶה)
Hebrew language (שפה עברית)
The Israel Museum (מוזיאון ישראל)
The Jewish Museum of New York City (המוזיאון היהודי של ניו יורק)
The Kennicott Bible (תנ”ך קניקוט)
Ladino language (שפת לאדינו)
Mimouna (מימונה, ميمونة)
Names in Jewish culture and history (שמות בתרבות ובהיסטוריה היהודית)
Óbuda Synagogue (בית הכנסת של אובודה, Óbudai Zsinagóga)
Purim (פּוּרִים)
Quai Kléber Synagogue (בית הכנסת קוואי קלבר)
Rosh Hashanah (רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה)
Shavuot (שָׁבוּעוֹת)
Touro Synagogue (בית הכנסת טורו)
U’Netaneh Tokef (ונתנה תקף)
Viddui (וִדּוּי)
The Western Wall (הַכּוֹתֶל הַמַּעֲרָבִי)
Xuetes (צ’ואטה)
Yom Kippur (יוֹם כִּפּוּר)
Zachor, Zikaron, Zecher (זכור ,זיכרון ,זֵכֶר)

Why Holocaust historical fiction matters (and is necessary)

To mark Yom HaShoah 2024, I decided to discuss the importance of Holocaust historical fiction. I don’t understand people who get their knickers in a knot and rant about how it’s automatically offensive, grotesque, sensationalistic, and inaccurate. One of the hallmarks of hist-fic is putting fictional characters in real-life events and showing how they live through it. There’s no rule that hist-fic should only be about shiny, happy moments in history or that there are certain events that can only be in the realm of nonfiction.

Here’s an idea: If you’re so genuinely triggered or traumatised by books and films about the Shoah, 9/11, the Second Intifada, or other very tragic events you lived through, have generational trauma from, or just find generally upsetting, you can choose not to read or watch them. No one is forcing you to do that. But you don’t get to dictate what other people choose to write about.

We’re living in a time when more and more Holocaust survivors are leaving us every year. As of January 2024, there were only 245,000 left. The oldest known living survivor is 112, and the youngest, who were born during the war and survived in hiding or camps like Bergen-Belsen and Terezín, are almost 80. Most of the remaining survivors were children, not adults.

Hence, we won’t have infinite firsthand testimonies and memoirs forever. Eventually, any new books will have to be historical fiction or nonfiction. As long as a fictional story is told respectfully and strives for the utmost accuracy, I don’t see any problems.

It’s also important to combat Holocaust denial. If it’s this bad while we still have living survivors, just imagine how much more insidious it might be when the last first-person witness is gone.

I’ve written before about how to research this subgenre, and why accuracy matters so much. Here are some more things to keep in mind, and original angles to research:

1. So many people bleat about how all WWII/Shoah books are the same story over and over again, just with different names and details. Why not counter that by setting your book in a country rarely, if ever, covered in memoirs and hist-fic? E.g., Greece, Bulgaria, Estonia, Norway, Luxembourg, Serbia, Albania, Slovenia, the Channel Islands.

2. Though most people only think of the Shoah as happening in Europe, North African Jews in Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia also faced persecution and deportation to camps under Nazi and Italian occupation.

3. No two people experienced the Shoah in the same way. Your story doesn’t have to be set in a camp or ghetto to be a “real” Holocaust story. E.g., many children went to the U.K. on the Kindertransport, while other people escaped to neutral countries or open cities like Shanghai. Some people went into hiding or managed to live publicly under a pretended Gentile identity.

4. The camps people were shipped to weren’t random! It would make no sense for, e.g., someone in France to go to Janowska near Lviv, or for someone from Greece to go to Klooga in Estonia. You also need to know dates of founding and evacuation.

5. Very few children were allowed to live at death camps, unless they were being used for medical experiments, in the Czech and so-called Gypsy family camps of Auschwitz, arrived during a rare gas malfunction or after gassing stopped, or chosen for a rare position like a messenger boy or girl. Children who lied about their age also had to look it.

6. As Dara Horn proves in her brilliant, deliberately provocatively-titled essay collection People Love Dead Jews, too many Shoah stories are sugarcoated for a Gentile audience and given a warm, fuzzy moral about loving everyone and a generic lesson about man’s inhumanity to man. Holocaust education is such an embarrassing failure when people believe it arose out of nowhere instead of being the culmination of almost 2,000 years of European antisemitism, and thus a uniquely Jewish tragedy.

7. Unless you live in Poland and are subject to the ridiculous Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, you don’t need to use the goofy, totally nonintuitive, wordcount-bloating phrase “German Nazi-occupied Poland.” Normal people understand the name Poland as a geographical reference, not blame for running the camps. Even memoirs by Polish-born people themselves don’t use that silly term!

Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem

8. Widely read multiple sources while researching! I had to majorly retool my Hungarian characters’ stories because I assumed Isabella Leitner’s searing, haunting memoir was representative of all Hungarians’ experience. Through watching lots of USC Shoah Foundation interviews and doing more reading, I found out most people were registered for work in the main camp or transported to labor camps and factories instead of languishing in Lager C doing almost nothing for six months, before being sent to dig tank traps in the woods.

9. Any escapes (from a camp, ghetto, mass grave, etc.) need to be plausible. Read about real-life escapes and how they were successfully pulled off.

10. There were no escapes from gas chambers! A handful of people managed to survive because they were on the bottom, but they were sadly murdered upon being discovered. The only people who went in and walked out unharmed were there during RARE gas malfunctions.

11. It’s easier to stick fictional characters in camps with large populations. If a sub-camp had only a few dozen inmates, those people would be well-documented, and any fictional people would stand out in that small real group.

12. Above all, don’t forget how bonds of love flourished even in the most bestial of circumstances. So many people survived for one another, because of one another.

WeWriWa—A spiritually muted Easter

Welcome back to Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday, weekly Sunday hops where writers share 8–10 sentences from a book or WIP. The rules have now been relaxed to allow a few more sentences if merited, so long as they’re clearly indicated, to avoid the creative punctuation many of us have used to stay within the limit.

Since today, 5 May, is Orthodox Easter (quite late this year!), I’m sharing an Easter-themed snippet from A Dream Deferred: Lyuba and Ivan at University. In the snippet I shared for the Western Easter on 31 March, 22-year-old Yustina Yeltsina-Baronova made an Easter basket for a handsome former Marine named Nestor Ugolnikov. The year is 1949.

Though Nestor hasn’t been to church in years, he caved to Yustina’s invitation to spend the holiday with her family. Nestor’s parents disowned him in shame and disgust after he lost his leg at Iwo Jima.

Khristos voskrese (Christ is risen) is the traditional Russian Easter greeting. Father Timofey is a crossover character in my Atlantic City books, as Cinnimin attends his church during her 1940 birthday trip to New York and again during graduate school.

All the votive candles around the church are simultaneously lit by a special spark, and the ikonostasis doors are flung open. Father Timofey reappears, having changed his dour black robes for silver and white, embroidered with tiny gemstones sparkling in all the candlelight.

“Khristos voskrese!” Father Timofey proclaims.

Nestor sits and daydreams as the service wears on. Every so often, he crosses himself and mutters, “Indeed he has risen” in response to the constant parade of “Khristos voskrese!” so as not to seem too tuned-out. After the interminable Easter Matins and Easter Hours, Father Timofey invites all the faithful to come up for Communion. Nestor mindlessly crosses himself when Communion is brought to him. He closes his eyes and swallows the wine and bread on the spoon, feeling as spiritually detached as he usually does.

Divine Liturgy then begins, and Nestor goes back to half-heartedly paying attention. Finally, Father Timofey delivers the closing benediction and entreats everyone to forgive one another.

The ten lines end here. A few more follow to finish the scene.

Nestor stands up as quickly as possible, his candle by now having burnt down about an inch and a half. On his way to temporarily depositing it in one of the sand-filled containers used for this purpose, he averts his eyes from all the people hugging and kissing in the traditional end of Easter services custom.

Yustina approaches him, an Easter basket on either arm, right after he’s placed his candle among all the others still flickering away. “Khristos voskrese!”

Before Nestor has time to react or realize what’s happening, Yustina has set both of the baskets on chairs, jumped up on another chair, and hugged him. Before she jumps back off the chair, she kisses him on the cheek.

“Now look who’s being too friendly with men she barely knows,” Milada whispers.

Yustina hands Nestor one of the baskets, with a dark blue bow on the handle. “I made this just for you yesterday. Please don’t try to refuse it.”