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?

A phenomenal anniversary for my beautiful swan

Twenty years ago today, 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]”), wrote the Epilogue, and typed “The End.”

I was 21 years old, and had been working on this book for almost the entirety of my teen years, plus my entire adulthood up to that point. Yes, there was a break from working on the novel proper from October ’93 to September ’96, but in between, I wrote several prequel short stories and additional scenes to be inserted into the book, as well as doing longhand editing of a printout of the entire story up to that point.

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. Though I don’t really follow contemporary pop culture, I’ll always remember that event and its date because it’s linked so closely to the end of my first draft.

All these years later, it’s stunning to think back on how young I was when I wrote the first draft, and yet how well I wrote it. Yes, I ended up junking or radically rewriting at least 95% of the original 1993 material, but 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. By that point, I’d begun making and working from short chapter-by-chapter notes and following a real storyline.

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. I look back and marvel at how a good chunk of that was the work of a teenager! In my very late teens and thus technically an adult, but nevertheless still a teen.

And without any elaborate advance plotting and planning, I managed to ultimately link up all these groups of characters and their stories—the main cast, the orphanage girls, the middle Lebedeva sisters, Lena Yeltsina, Natalya Yeltsina, Mrs. Yeltsina and her older daughters. How did I do that?! I doubt I’d be able to pull off such a feat, or even write the book itself so well, if I were just starting out now.

Technology moved on, and I was unable to access any of my files on disks for almost an entire decade, even after buying an external disk drive. Finally, in April 2011, I figured out how to open and convert these documents in obsolete file formats.

When I typed “The End” at 21, I naïvely believed I only needed to really edit the earliest chapters. How very wrong I was! The entire manuscript received multiple edits, revisions, and rewrites over the next three and a half years.

Then I made various edits for a second, third, fourth, and finally fifth edition. Nothing too radical, mostly just some new, brief additions here and there. One of the later editions also involved replacing the cover. Though I remain proud of how those are the best human figures I’ve ever drawn, I’m now embarrassed I ever thought that looked professional.

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 of my development.

Meet Naina, Katya, and Karla

I’m returning to moving out old posts indefinitely stored in my drafts folder. Originally one of a batch of 20 posts I put together and stored in my drafts folder for the now-long-defunct Sweet Saturday Samples bloghop on 24 June 2012, this comes from my first Russian historical and has been changed a fair bit. The published version doesn’t use the pedantic accent marks used here, for starts, and some things have been fleshed out while others (like the pointless roll-calling) have been removed. In the published version, sadistic Mrs. Zyuganova also pushes Klara into the snow, not the mud, seeing as it’s December in Minsk.

***

Possibly my favorite subplots in my Russian novels revolve around my orphanage girls. I’d read about how children of “enemies of the people” were treated in orphanages during the Civil War in Felice Holman’s The Wild Children, which I read shortly before beginning the first book in early 1993, but I wasn’t inspired to create a whole series of subplots set in orphanages and playing out over three books till my second major period of working on the first novel.

When I was introduced to what became my favoritest movie, The Inner Circle, in the summer of ’96, and then resumed work on the novel that November [actually September], I knew I had to have orphanage characters too. They include Vera, Natalya, and Fyodora, some of Lyuba’s future stepsisters, and Anya and Leontiy, the children of the couple who took Lyuba and her friends into hiding. Some of the other important orphanage girls include Belarusian Inessa and trio Katya, Naina, and Karla. Naina is the niece of Sonya Gorbachëva, an important secondary character.

Naina and Inessa have always been my favorite of the orphanage girls. Inessa is a very intelligent, headstrong young girl who’s only there because her parents were arrested for an honest, petty mistake, and Naina is as sharp as nails in spite of her young age. Naina first appears in December of 1919, and at barely eight years old is toting a gun.

***

“These three will stay in this bunk to make up for the three who departed.” Mrs. Zyuganova leads three new girls into the quarters. “Names, ages, and nationalities?”

“Naína Antónovna Yezhova, age eight, from Pétrograd.”

“Nice necklace. It’s mine now.” She grabs a citrine necklace hanging around Naína’s neck.

Naína slaps her hands away, reaches under her dress, and pulls a gun on Mrs. Zyuganova. “No it’s not. My mátushka gave it to me when I was four. Steal it and I shoot you. My papa gave me one of his handguns before I was taken away, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

Mrs. Zyuganova struggles to collect herself. “Next?”

“Yekaterína Kárlovna Chernomyrdina, age twelve, from L’viv.”

“L’vov,” Mrs. Zyuganova growls.

“No, it’s really L’viv!”

“Kárla.”

“Last name and patronymic?”

“I’m two and from Yaroslavl.”

“Last name and patronymic?”

“I don’t know!”

Mrs. Zyuganova picks Kárla up and throws her into a wall. Then she begins beating her.

“Stop beating her!” Naína bites Mrs. Zyuganova. “She’s only two years old! She is Kárla Maksímovna Gorbachëva. She’s my cousin, and if you hurt her again I will kill you. Remember, I’ve got a gun, and I know how to shoot. It’s not just for show.”

“Quiet that tiny one down!” Mrs. Zyuganova screams.

Naína takes Kárla into another room.

“No, you can’t leave the room you’re assigned to!”

“I am well accustomed to the rules of orphanages by now. I don’t like you. In fact, I don’t think we’ll be sticking around much longer. Just try to stop us. You know you can always get three fresh victims where you found us.”

Mrs. Zyuganova spits in disgust. “We’re ready to round people up to cars. Boys first. Leontiy Ryudolfovich Godimov, Andréy Samuelovich Bródskiy, Ósip Yuriyevich Khrushchëv, Iósif Vasíliyevich Klykachëv, Maksím…”

They go into the car obediently.

“Girls next. Natálya and Fyodora Ilyínichna Lebedeva, Yeléna Vasíliyevna Klykachëva, Svetlána Yuriyevna Khrushchëva, Valentína L’vóvna Kuchma, Irína Samuelovna Bródskaya, Ínna Aleksándrovna Zhirínovskaya, and Ólga Leonídovna Kérenskaya.”

“My brother is on that transport!” Klára howls.

“Tough luck. If you sneak on I’ll beat you. Oh. I would love to get rid of Inéssa my traitor niece. Off you go!”

“Fédya!  Fédya!” Klára screams.

Mrs. Zyuganova pushes Klára into the mud. “Would anybody like to sell his or her place to little Klára Mikháylovna Nadleshina?”

“I would!  I would!” Inéssa screams.

“Stay on that train, Inéssa! I want to get rid of you!”

Inéssa runs to the man approaching and flings herself into his arms. “Dyadya Díma! Take me away and adopt me! I’ve been in this orphanage since my parents got arrested, and Tyotya Dásha beats me sometimes! Adopt me!”

Mr. Zyuganov’s forehead is thrust forward, like a ram’s. He has red-brown hair and gray eyes. “Dásha, is this true?”

“Yes it’s true, now adopt me, Dyadya Díma!”

“Dásha, I saw him! The Leader! He’s promised to bring fair work conditions to the mines in Belarus! Soon you won’t have to work in this hospital anymore!”

“This isn’t a hospital! It’s a phony orphanage! Adopt me!”

“Of course, I’ll adopt my niece if her parents are jailed enemies of the people—”

Mrs. Zyuganova yanks Inéssa from her uncle’s arms and throws her into the girls’ cattlecar. “Goodbye, my traitor niece. I hope they treat you even worse at the new place.”

Klára runs with the train and boosts herself up into the window. Ánya, Véra, and Natálya run with her and boost themselves up next. They all tumble on top of the three newest arrivals.

“We hid under the baggage holds,” Naína says. “We’re very sneaky. After seeing how she treated Kárla, I had to say no and move onto another orphanage!”