May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
After completing the first… and then the second… draft of Diamonds in Auschwitz, I decided it was time to find an agent. I weighed the pros and cons. Then I hit the agency websites. I looked up each agent, again trying to surmise if they were interested in the type of book I had written. Just to keep you in suspense, you’ll have to see my next blog post to find out the results.
A Blank Canvas
I learned to see a new work in progress like a blank canvas. The blank page is not a sign of failure or backtracking. Where will this new adventure take me? To a haunted cathedral of Charleston, across the sea to England during the Age of Enlightenment, or deep into the rooms of the Constantinople harem during Ottoman Empire? Stay tuned to find out what my blank canvas becomes.
The Death of My WIP
My WIP is not dead. I went through the stages of grief. I bought a stack of different nonfiction books, from different locations and different time periods, to find the next story that inspires me and makes me fall in love. I’m excited for my next adventure. My WIP is resting… waiting... frozen in time, until it’s the right time to shine.
Family Vacations = Memories and More Ideas
I fall in love with places much easier than I fall in love with people. As a historical fiction writer, many of my earlier ideas are from books. I’m finding myself more and more inspired by places than anything else. Hawaii- with its less than perfect history; Charleston, North Carolina- home of uncountable hauntings and ghost sightings; or Istanbul, Turkey home of the Spoonmaker’s Diamond. These places are filling up my coffer of story ideas.
Adoption, Injured Geese and the Patience of Publishing
I’m not one to handle disappointments, rejections, failures, etc. stoically, or even well. I look at my daughter today – this daughter who is the perfect one for me at the perfect time. I know that those stacks of NOs from publishers that I am collecting are not really nos, but just not yets.
Frau Friedl in Real Life
Frau Friedl deserves so much more than the few chapters in which she appears in Diamonds in Auschwitz. Unlike many of the artists in Terezin who were afraid to draw the true conditions and afraid to sign their name to anything incriminating, Frau Friedl encouraged the children to draw what they saw, what they felt, what they dreamed of. Four years later, she smuggled over 4,500 drawings in two suitcases out of the camp.
The Living, Breathing Streets of Prague
I knew nothing of the city, nothing of its people or its experience during World War II. But as the story unfolded itself to me, starting backwards in Auschwitz, reversing in time to Terezin, the origin became obvious to me. It’s more than a place. It’s a living, breathing part of the story.
This book is dedicated to the porch swing
I’d love to tell you some heart wrenching story about how her piano teacher inspired me or encouraged me or motivated me. But in truth, it’s very simple. My book would never have been completed without her. Or rather, without her porch swing.
The True Tragedy of Rachael
In truth, it sickens me to think of what I had to write, but I had to write the truth. As awful as it was to put into words, and as awful as it will be to read, it needs to be remembered.
“My Aha! Moment”
Aha!
I saw the plot immediately. A woman – a prisoner in Auschwitz who had lost everything– picked the ring out of the mud…….