The Death I Never Got to Finish
January 5, 2010
What’s your favorite scene your editor asked you to cut?
OK, who of us has NOT been looking forward this question? We finally get to pull out that stuff we always wanted to show. I tend to write in a skeletal form and add layers, so my edits are more of “add more” than the “delete more” variety.
But in the first version of A Trace of Smoke I wanted the murder victim to have a voice. I wanted us to know him and love him on his own terms so we could understand what Hannah lost when she lost her brother. So, I had him talking from beyond the grave. Sadly, I could never make it work. My writing group never got it, and the first question my future agent asked was, “If I agree to represent you, would you be willing to consider removing the dead brother’s voice from the manuscript?”
I said I was and I did and by and large I managed to work all the facts and feelings into the novel. I had, however, let him narrate his own death and there was no way I could do that the same way from anyone else’s point of view.
Here it is, slightly edited so it doesn’t have any spoilers:
It happened here. I feel it. He came from shadows. My murderer.
At first I felt no fear. We walked toward the factory through cold night air. Two hours later there would have been workers, but not yet that day. Light glinted off wet cobblestones. Reflected off his set and angry face.
I was still glowing. I told him about love. That it comes once a lifetime. We can’t escape it when it does. It transfigures the world. I hadn’t expected to find it, hadn’t believed in it, but it had found me. Love was suddenly simple and true. R loved me like that. And that is how I loved W.
Walking with the murderer, I knew. It wasn’t about getting old and weak. It was about trust and openness. I never opened up to a man before. I had never trusted the way that R trusted me. But I did trust W like that. And it made all the difference. I held out my hands to him, beseeching him to understand.
He only said, “I heard you.”
He hit me once, right in the chest. I almost laughed. Such a crazy place to hit someone. Metal clattered against stone. The knife, dropped.
I fell. Muddy water seeped into my dress. Could I scrub it out? Not water. Blood. Puddling around me. Nothing would ever be clean again.
The bastard stared at me. He folded his arms across his chest. He squatted down to watch me die. How could he hate me so?
I stared into his eyes while gray lightened the sky. I got colder and colder. I shivered, too proud to speak. I thought of W and our one night. How I screwed around too long before figuring out that I loved him. I did not want to lose him so soon after finding him. I thought of you and Anton. Your lives going on just the same. And I felt alone on the wet ground.
He just watched. The last sound I heard was my chattering teeth.
He never made a sound.
Why I Go to Conferences
November 24, 2009
What big name author is enough to get you to a conference?
By Rebecca Cantrell
I thought I was going to be the first curmudgeon of the week, but CJ beat me to it. She’s right though. I don’t go to conferences hoping to meet big name authors. Not that I’m not thrilled when I do. It was wonderful finding out that Lee Child is as charming as everyone says, the James Rollins is very funny, and when I met R.L. Stine it took all my self control not to go all fan-girl on him.
But the people I spend most of my time with are other writers whom I know and don’t get a chance to see enough of, such as our very own Kelli Stanley and Sophie Littlefield, both of whom are pee-in-the-pants funny. Or wise and funny CJ Lyons. Or the ever charming Tim Maleeny and Shane Gericke. I’ve never met Gabi, but I want to, even if I won’t eat anything she gives me after reading her questions to Lisa Black, whom I also met in Indianapolis.
And then there are the wonderful wild cards. This year I finally got to meet Jen Forbus. I didn’t spend as much time with her as I would have liked because I got cornered by a guy who wanted to talk about Prague in 1589, which was likewise fascinating.
I also met a former world champion fencer and writer, Mitchell Graham, who actually met Helene Mayer (she won the silver medal for Germany in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and was the only Jewish athlete competing on the German team). She shows up in my next novel, A GAME OF LIES, as do references to fencing that are now much more accurate.
I once sat next to a very shy woman at a technical translation conference who turned out to have written her PhD thesis on Weimar Germany and had translated novels and autobiographies from some its major players. This was a few months after I decided to set my book in 1931 (the end of Weimar-era Germany).
You could never get away with this in a movie, as the coincidences are just too great. But for me, conferences are always like that. I just happen to stand next to someone who has the most amazing story to tell. It’s not always a big name, although it sometimes is (I don’t think I can ever look in Joseph Finder’s freezer without cracking a smile). Sometimes it’s another early career writer like me, or a writer who isn’t yet published, or a reader, a historian.
It’s not the big names that get me to a conference, it’s everyone.
The Biography I Want to Read
November 17, 2009
If you were to write a nonfiction book, what would your topic be?
As a technical writer I wrote literally thousands of nonfiction pages. I mean, I thought they were nonfiction while I was writing them, or that they would one day be nonfiction. Because I wrote about products long before the products were completely finished, this wasn’t always true, but I tried very, very hard.
But they weren’t about topics I would have picked on my own. Who exactly would spend their spare time writing the Hyperion Essbase Database Administrator’s Guide? The Sun Java Studio Creator online help? The Sybase APT/GUI Installation Guide for all seven Unix platforms? No, for those I was paid real cash money and my employer got to pick the topics (Data load? Dimension build? Attributes that look like dimensions? You betcha).
If I had an infinite amount of time (that is, enough to be a happy wife and mother and write and promote all the fiction books I want to, plus extra time left over) I would write a biography of Ernst Röhm. 
I almost didn’t want to say it because it sounds so nerdy, but I figured if you slogged through the Essbase references, you are toughened up.
Ernst Röhm was Hitler’s best friend. His right hand man. Hitler once said “When they write the history of the Nazi party, he will be second in importance only to me.” Röhm built up the storm troopers. He was in charge of the secret cache of German weapons after the first World War, and he gave some to the Nazis for the failed Beer Hall Putsch. He was the only who actually accomplished his objective, take the barracks and wait for Hitler. Decorated war hero that he was, the judge let him off easy.
Röhm shows up in my first book, A TRACE OF SMOKE, because he came back to Germany to save Hitler’s butt after the storm troopers rebelled. He’s an interesting guy, for a variety of reasons, one of which is that he was gay and out. And everybody knew it.
But there is no published biography of him that I could unearth. To find out about him, I had to read the bits where he’s mentioned in huge history books (like RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH), plus a few passages in Sefton Delmer’s autobiography, THE COUNTERFEIT SPY, but mostly I read Röhm’s autobiography, published in 1928, then mostly destroyed later by the Nazis, but snagged from some school in Dresden and dragged back to UC Berkeley where it was bound in a bright orange cover. And it’s all written using the old fashioned Fraktur font.
He’s not a good guy or anything, but all the other Nazi figures have been profiled, from the important ones all the way down to the secretary who typed Hitler’s personal letters. But not Röhm. Why not? I think because he’s so gay that Nazi scholars are afraid to claim him, and he’s so Nazi that gay scholars don’t want him either. But somebody should. He was a fascinating guy, albeit a dangerous and scary brute.
How did he die? Hitler ordered his best friend shot in 1934 (yes, that’s in the second book, A NIGHT OF LONG KNIVES). It seems to have been one murder he actually felt guilty about too.
So, would some poor history PhD student somewhere write that book, so I don’t have to?
Spinning off Characters
October 6, 2009
Which character would I spin off from my series?
by Rebecca Cantrell
Finally a question that gives historical writers an unfair advantage! I can jump forward in time, so I can spin off even the children. And that’s just whom I would pick.
In A TRACE OF SMOKE, Hannah comes across an orphan 5 year old boy named Anton. Anton’s been raised by a prostitute. The identity of his father is in dispute. And he talks like he’s an Apache brave. I’ve received more fan mail about him than any other character in the book.
I actually did submit a proposal to write a book with a 22 year old Anton as the main character set in Berlin in 1948. The book was to be called IN MY FATHER’S SHADOW.
In 1948 Berlin is in a state of transition. World War II has ended and American, British, French, and Russian troops occupy the city now stranded deep in the Russian zone. Refugees stream in from the Eastern Zone of Germany, Eastern Europe, and concentration camps. Those returning home often find their houses destroyed or usurped by those who stayed behind. On June 24, 1948 the Russians blockade all train and automobile traffic into the city, hoping to force the other allied troops out of Berlin so that they can occupy it.
The Cold War has begun.
A few weeks before, Nazi doctors were hung in Nuremberg. Attacks on American troops and military bases still occur, although with far less frequency than in the first two years after the war. Fluent in the German language, Anton is still unprepared for the cultural changes wrought by the Nazis, the war, and the Occupation. He works in the Berlin Airlift, where American forces will fly in all the supplies for a city of two million people for almost a year.
Anton’s mother spent her life trying to rescue Jews from Hitler, but the man Anton thinks might be his father helped put Hitler in power and set up the first concentration camps. Nothing is as he expected as he struggles to understand what it means to be German at heart but American in loyalty.
When I sold A TRACE OF SMOKE, they requested a two book deal and both had to have Hannah Vogel as the main character, so I went back to the drawing board and came up with A NIGHT OF LONG KNIVES (June 2010), set during the purge of the same name (because who doesn’t want to write a book that starts with a zeppelin jacking?). I still think someday I might write the book of Anton’s coming of age, but now that I’ve sold books 3 & 4 with Hannah (A GAME OF LIES (June 2011), set during the Berlin Olympics, and A NIGHT OF BROKEN GLASS (June 2012), set during Kristallnacht), I don’t know when I’ll find time.
If you ever read it, you’ll know why I had to make that disclaimer.
I did use a similar character, a young American soldier coming back into Berlin during the airlift, in my short story COFFEE in the anthology MISSING from Echelon Press. But let me say right here that he is NOT Anton and his mother is NOT Hannah. If you read it, you’ll know why I need the disclaimer.
I’d also like to tell Dracula from Mina’s point of view, not quite a spinoff, but a new tale nevertheless…more details on that very, very soon…
Criminal past
July 15, 2009
Not having an actual criminal past that I am willing to admit to on the Internet, I decided to talk about the crimes that started me down the road to publication.
When I was on Spring Break near Munich, I skipped out on Oktoberfest and went to Dachau. Wind moaned through the open wooden barracks. I shivered in my 1980s fashionable black leather ankle boots, transfixed by pictures of some of the greatest crimes against humanity ever perpetrated. One wall held a row of colored triangles: yellow, red, green, blue, purple, pink, brown and black. Above, thick black letters spelled out the categories: Jewish, political prisoner, habitual criminals, emigrant, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, gypsies and asocials (a catchall for murderers, thieves, and those who violated the laws prohibiting Aryans from having intercourse with Jews).
Even though I was just a teenager, I’d read enough to know what the Nazis did to the Jews, the Communists, and the gypsies. But I’d had no idea they’d imprisoned people for being gay.
I stuffed my hands deep into the pockets of my too light coat (with rolled up sleeves and the collar up in the back, because it was 1985) and thought about my host brother. He was the same age as me and we often went clubbing in Berlin until the wee small hours of the morning. The subways stopped running around midnight, and if you missed that last one, you were out until five. My brother had perfectly style 80s blonde hair, an extravagant fashion sense, and he was gay into the marrow of his bones. Forty years before he would have gone to the camps for it.
All the way back home I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It’s been twenty five years and I’m still thinking about it. I wrote my senior history thesis on it, where I discovered that when the Americans freed the camps we sent the pink triangles straight to prison. Because it was still against the law.
Hard to find a bigger crime than the Holocaust, and that’s where my road to publication led me.
* * *
Fun fact for the week: My next book opens with a zeppelin-jacking, so I got to do a lot of research on zeppelins. I’m willing to bet that in terms of miles traveled, zeppelins were far safer than the airplanes of the day. Anyone know where I could track down that statistic?