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.

Celebrating Valentino-related snippets from my books on Rudy’s 97th Jahrzeit

To mark Rudy Valentino’s 97th Jahrzeit (death anniversary), I decided to feature some snippets from various of my books where he’s mentioned. One of the Easter eggs you’ll find in just about all of my books set in the 1920s and afterwards is at least one reference to Rudy. He was such a special person, beautiful both inside and out, and taken from that lifetime far too soon.

You can read longer excerpts from Chapter 23 of The Twelfth Time, “Death of Valentino,” here and here.

Sparky inspected the posters. “I’ve seen some of these people at the movies, except the man in the headdress. He has very deep eyes.”

“You haven’t seen him because he’s been dead for almost twelve years. This is Rudolph Valentino, a famous moviestar from the Twenties. He died when he was only thirty-one, before movies had sound. I was born on the anniversary of his death, and my middle name would’ve been Rudolph had I been a boy. My aunt Lucinda gave me my middle name. She still wanted to honor him in some way, so she found another seven-letter name that started with R, Rebecca.”

“Can you help me find some sheet music, Sir?” Cinni asked. “I’m interested in songs about Rudolph Valentino from the Twenties. He’s my namesake, and I like collecting stuff related to him.”

He responded in a British accent, though continued looking right at Conny. “Is your name Rudolphina?”

“My middle name woulda been Rudolph if I was a boy. When I turned out a girl, my aunt chose Rebecca as a replacement, since it also starts with R and has seven letters. I have lots of posters and photos of Valentino, but no sheet music yet.”

“Miss, I found four songs for you,” Tom called.

Cinni went towards him and took the sheet music, “The Sheik of Araby,” “That Night in Araby,” “There’s a New Star in Heaven Tonight,” and “We Will Meet at the End of the Trail.” Each had a different picture of Rudolph Valentino on the cover.

Jakob fell onto his knees and hugged Rachel’s legs, resting his head against her soft midsection, the way he remembered Rudolph Valentino doing it in one of the silent films Ruud had taken him to see at the film festivals they used to frequent. He felt like a happy little boy when Rachel gently stroked his hair.

“Isn’t it a regular habit of yours to pine for unattainable men?”

“There’s nothing unhealthy about having a crush on someone.”

“What about these?” The lawyer holds up Anastasiya’s two cosmographs.

Anastasiya gasps. “Where did you get those!”

“They’re not the originals. I have my ways.”

“What normal bachelorette has never had unrequited passion for a high-profile man?”

“It’s one thing to put up posters and photographs of your dream men on your walls, and another to make cosmographs like this!”

“I’m not on trial here! And last time I checked, millions of women are also madly in love with Rudy Valentino, and my crush on Grand Duke Dmitriy dates back to when I was a young girl!”

“Those other women don’t make cosmographs of themselves being kissed and embraced by the two men in question. I think we all know now you suffer from delusions, though your delusions are harmless and not enough to have you put away. You may step down.”

“Anastasiya wanted my head on a platter after I gave a bad review to her belovèd Rudy’s latest venture,” Viktoriya chortles, tossing crème de menthe chocolates down her throat. “God, that movie was so awful. After two years away from the screen, you’d think he’d make his return with something a lot better than an overlong, boring costume drama. I could barely keep track of who was who with all those damn powdered wigs and costumes. I understand he was trying to make a point about being true to oneself and image not being everything, but whatever noble theme he was going for got lost in all that damn wig powder.”

“Who do you like more lately, Dmitriy or Rudy?” Viktoriya taunts her. “I’d pick the grand duke over the actor, after that godawful costume drama I had to suffer through. Who finds a guy handsome in a powdered wig and seventeenth century outfit?”

“You little brat, you’re going to pay for that!”

Viktoriya laughs as Anastasiya gets up to chase after her and trips over her high heels and long skirts. “You’re probably the only woman in America under thirty who still walks around in clothes our grandmothers wore.”

Viktoriya shrieks with laughter as she picks up the form and gets an eyeful of the name Anastasiya printed. Katrin looks over her shoulder and starts laughing too.

“What? So what if I didn’t name him after my father or brother and used Russian names instead of Estonian ones? They’re perfectly respectable names.”

“How did we know you’d do something so silly and embarrassing?” Viktoriya asks. “This poor kid will be teased so much when he enters school and other kids find out whom he’s named after.”

“It’s not like they’re the only two people in the world with those names! And it’s in indelible ink, so there’s no changing the name. All you need to do is file it, and we can move on to finding a priest to baptize him.”

“What are you talking about?” Mrs. Oswald asks.

“Princess Anastasiya named her baby Dmitriy Rudolf Voroshilov,” Katrin laughs. “I’m sure you can guess the namesakes.”

Mrs. Oswald starts laughing too. Anastasiya waves her hand dismissively at them and retreats back to her room.

“Instead of being named after your vanaisa and uncle, your namesakes are Grand Duke Dmitriy Pavlovich and Rudolph Valentino,” Katrin says to the baby, struggling to contain her laughter. “At least your mother had the sense to name you for someone and give you names that mean something to her instead of randomly selecting a name.”

“Lyuba did dream Nastya’s kid was named Dmitriy Rudolf,” Viktoriya says. “She dreamt the kid would be left-handed, and so far he mostly sucks his left thumb. We’ll see over time if the rest of her dream comes true, that this kid grows up to marry a future daughter of hers and that she loses the use of her right arm.”

“In addition to tuberculosis, she also has pleurisy,” Dr. Winter continues.

Lyuba shrieks, flashing back to that mob scene at the Frank Campbell Funeral Home and the tragic sight inside. “Pleurisy! That’s what killed Valentino!”

“I wish you were right, but sometimes people remember things that happened before the usual age of memory if they’re traumatic enough,” Darya says. “My first memory is Rudolph Valentino’s wake a month before my second birthday. I can’t remember any details beyond all those screaming, sobbing women, lots of police, broken windows, and Valentino lying dead in a coffin, so pale, sad, and thin. I swear I really remember this and amn’t just saying I do because I’ve heard our family talking about it or saw pictures.”

IWSG—Of book covers and recharged mojo

Welcome back to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. The IWSG convenes the first Wednesday of every month to commiserate over worries, fears, doubts, and struggles.

This month’s question is:

If you are an Indie author, do you make your own covers or purchase them? If you publish trad, how much input do you have about what goes on your cover?

I paid a local cover artist to do my first published book, And Jakob Flew the Fiend Away, and bought a premade cover for the second volume, And the Lark Arose from Sullen Earth. I did the back covers and spines myself when it came time for print editions some years later.

It was quite frustrating how the cover artist for the latter only provided the name Betibup33. That’s not a professional-looking credit! She also said she’d only do the back cover and spine if I bought some photos from her child’s photography profile.

                                    

I did the original covers for Little Ragdoll and You Cannot Kill a Swan myself, but came to regret that decision. They’ve since been replaced by proper cover art from free stock image repositories, which I did some edits on.

Little Ragdoll also has an e-cover from an artist in my old writing group. Initially I had expected to use that for the print edition as well, but there was a problem with the pixelation when I went to enlarge it (regardless of program), and a few tiny spots that weren’t entirely filled in. She also no longer had the artwork to make the necessary adjustments.

                         

                              

Like night and day!

I used real sepia photos for the front cover, spine, and back cover of And Aleksey Lived.

For The Twelfth Time, I found an appropriate free stock image and again fiddled with the colour saturation.

For Journey Through a Dark Forest, I found free stock photos of woods and made them as dark and shadowy as possible. Unfortunately, I was unable to use those dark covers for the print versions, since the printing process may have distorted their appearance on account of how much black there is.

                                 

                                 

For my Atlantic City books published to date, I’ve used another free stock image and changed the colour for each e-book. The print editions’ covers were designed with help from my father (who really knows his way around that software). I’m thinking I may replace the e-book covers with the print ones, since they look more professional.

                                 

                                   

In other news, I’m beyond thrilled my writing mojo seems to finally be back. I needed that humiliation and wakeup call of barely limping across the finish line of NaNo 2021 to start taking steps to pull myself out of that deep chasm. Sometimes we have to sink to the lowest, saddest, most hopeless and depressing point possible before we can start climbing back up to happier, prettier, more hopeful places and get back on track with our lives.

After I finished the Coney Island chapter in the book formerly known as The Very Last, I went back to my alternative history about Dante and Beatrice and finished Chapter VI, “Christmas Celebrations.” Then I returned to The Very Last to finish the World’s Fair chapter, which I’d barely begun in 2015.

I had so much fun researching and writing it! I almost felt as if I were at the Fair myself, and never wanted that chapter to end.

Everything became so much easier when I remembered I don’t need to incorporate every single detail from my research. Rides, exhibits, and holiday traditions are there for worldbuilding and a backdrop to character development and storylines. The entire book isn’t built around them!

The radical rewrite of TVL has also become so much easier since I began turning text blue if I recognize something’s not working, worded poorly, or clutter. Prior, I C&Ped it into a file of discards, which wasted a lot of time and fed into my bad habit of premature editor mode. Now I just make it blue so it’s marked for deletion in the final edit, and continue on writing.

Have you ever lost your writing mojo and then regained it? What helped you? How do you design your covers?

Combining and splitting decisions

As someone who naturally and deliberately writes my adult books at saga length, I’ve developed a very keen sense of when a book’s length is justified by the story vs. when it’s just an overwritten sprawl (coughtheinvisiblebridgecough). I’ve also developed a strong sense of when a long story needs split up into multiple books or volumes.

On the flip side, when it comes to my Atlantic City books, I’ve found several places where these short books need combined, since they lead right into one another instead of feeling like true self-contained stories within a series.

                          

As I’ve discussed many times, I still feel I made the right decision in putting out And Jakob Flew the Fiend Away and And the Lark Arose from Sullen Earth as two distinct books. The most perfect ending opened up, and I was able to turn the rest of the source material into a second book about Jakob and Rachel’s first proper year of marriage and Jakob’s first year in America. Each book truly has its own focus, and wouldn’t feel the same if it were just one long book with an uninterrupted story.

Granted, I was trying for traditional publishing at the time and was aware the first book had reached the uppermost limits for both YA and historical, at a bit over 120K. The second book also has a much more New Adult feel and a number of sex scenes, in comparison to the fade to black on the wedding night scene in the first book. But Fate obviously compelled me to make the right decision about how to present this story.

                        

I was also originally trying for traditional publication with Little Ragdoll, and was shocked to discover how frowned-upon sagas are nowadays, esp. from first-time authors and in YA. At the time, I hadn’t yet realised this is truly an adult book that just happens to feature young people in the leading roles. In other words, a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story like Great Expectations and Little Women.

Thus, I began querying it and submitting pages as a pretended trilogy, and came up with query letters and synopses for all three books (Parts I and II, Part III, Part IV and the Epilogue). However, I soon came to feel dirty and like a huge fraud for diluting my vision and intention. I always meant it as one long, continuous story, not split up three ways. And while Part IV does read the most like its own standalone book, it also only makes sense and feels right as the conclusion of everything that came before. Adicia finally has no choice but to act instead of passively being acted upon, and emerges from that ordeal a much stronger person than anyone, least of all she herself, ever saw her as.

When it came to Swan, I was always very firm about this story being one entire book. It would make no sense to put out Parts I and II as two different books when so much is still up in the air at the conclusion of Part I. The only thing resolved (for the moment) is that Lyuba and Ivan are finally engaged. I also wrote The Twelfth Time as its sequel, not the third book in the family saga.

Plus, the title has significance for the entire book, and appears in the final line.

People at Absolute Write really got on my hide about the length (330K) and tried to convince me to make it into a series or two books. They also thought it was a historical romance instead of a novel that just happens to prominently feature a love story. One person got really offended when he read a blog post I wrote explaining and defending my wordcount and genre, accusing me of being oppositional and not taking anyone’s advice.

Yeah, it’s almost like writers know their own stories far better than random Internet strangers obsessed with “the rules”! Hist-fic is also traditionally very long, with 120K being the bare minimum for a story spanning many years and with a large ensemble cast.

                         

                         

Dark Forest ended up so long, way past my initial guesstimate of 500K, I had to put it out as one book in four volumes. It perfectly worked out so each part read like its own story, with a focus on different characters and storylines. Of course they all lead into one another, but there’s no sense of ending in media res.

I’ll do the same for Dream Deferred, which also ballooned up way past my conservative guesstimate of 300K. Even after cutting aborted storylines that don’t belong there, it’ll still be extremely long. Thankfully, this book too will feel natural in four volumes instead of forcibly chopped up.

Ultimately, it comes down to gut feelings and your own creative vision. Would this work as a single very long book, one book published in several volumes, or two or more separate books? And would a few novella-length books feel stronger if they were combined into one longer volume?

Lessons learnt from post-publication polishing, Part V

It’s been two and a half years since my unplanned Part IV of this series I thought would remain a three-parter. But why not add new posts as I learn new lessons?

I’ve been preparing And Jakob Flew the Fiend Away for its hardcover edition since December. As I’ve mentioned many times, I wish I’d done so many things differently with this book. When I decided to go indie in 2014, I led with Jakob’s story because I felt it was my strongest completed and polished material to date. It was also relatively short, at only 125K (not including front and back matter).

While I can honestly say I’m still proud of this book, and still feel it was the right decision to put out Jakob’s story in two separate books, I’m kind of disappointed in myself for not being truer to my natural voice and style. I let myself get too much inside my own head while I was writing it.

I wrote the originating long short story/piece of backstory in 2006, and turned it into the two books from 9 March–19 August 2012. The first book was written from 9 March–30 April, and the second was 30 April–19 August. Neither had any major edits or rewriting. Apart from a few bits I added here and there, and purging of overused words and phrases like “even” and “you know,” they’re largely just as I wrote them in the first drafts.

I believed so much in Jakob’s story, and entered it in a lot of contests, pitchfests, and virtual conferences. The other participants really liked it too, and helped me to craft a very strong query letter. I knew it was time to quit shopping around already when an associate agent ripped the query apart in a critique I won, taking issue with things everyone else had praised and helped me to change to its final form. Too many cooks spoil the broth.

Since I was in the thick of trying for trad-pub and doing all these contests and related events, I was hyper-conscious of dos and don’ts, and trying my very best to model them in my own writing. That included a lot more descriptions of body language and emotional reactions than I usually do.

As an Aspie, I’ve worked really hard to become better at this, since it doesn’t come naturally to me. Many of my older drafts had really unrealistic, flat, almost matter-of-fact reactions to very emotional events, like when Lyuba is separated from her baby Tatyana several times. Either that, or they felt really forced and corny. So that was a literary skill I genuinely needed to work on.

However, we should always strive to find our natural voice and style, not mindlessly copy someone else’s or go by a checklist of things we think we’re supposed to do no matter what. I now acknowledge I’m just not the type of writer who naturally fills my stories with things like widened eyes, rapidly beating hearts, and punching the air.

You know what does still feel natural in Jakob’s story? Every single description of his fear, terror, anguish, pain, and helplessness related to his broken foot and ankle, the long period of immobility during recovery, bearing weight through that leg again, relearning to walk, realising he’s been left with a limp, going up and down stairs creatively, navigating stairs at all, sharply feeling cold weather in those bones even after healing. All drawn from my own personal experience from my shattered tibia and fibula and being unable to walk for eleven months.

I wish I’d gotten out of my own head and written the entire book in that vein, doing what came naturally instead of going by expectations. E.g., there was no pressing reason I needed to rein in its length just because I intended it as YA. I always described it as upper, mature YA, and plenty of YA hist-fic is well above 125K.

While I still don’t regret making it a more original Shoah story instead of paint by numbers, that shouldn’t have precluded expanding Parts I–III. Maybe not rehash familiar territory, but add, e.g., chapters or sections of Jakob visiting his friends Sander and Elma, working on his scrapbook documenting the occupation, looking out the window at the local streetfighting, his work in the Westerbork restaurant’s kitchen.

I briefly thought about making it first-person, since that’s so trendy in current YA. At least I didn’t go that route, since my natural POV will always be third-person. It’s enough that Jakob’s story is a lot closer to third-person limited than I normally do. There are also a number of first-person interludes with Jakob and Rachel’s letters.

I believe all books take the form they’re meant to, even if that’s not how we originally envisioned them. This book just took a much shorter form than I wish it had. If I did a full rewrite or created an adult version, it might not feel like the same story anymore.