I am in the processes of revising my latest novel. This one is historical fiction with spies and murders and a love interest. Of course, since the main character is a seventeen-year-old boy, there isn’t a whole of mushy love stuff.
The working title is EARTHQUAKES and the main character suffers from nightmares brought on anxieties about earthquakes. I remember having a recurring nightmare about being swallowed up in an earthquake and, to this day, would rather suffer through any other type of natural disaster than ever experience another earthquake. Well, I just as soon not experience a volcanic eruption
I wrote the first draft last November as my NaNoWriMo entry. I’m pleased to say I actually finished the first draft of 50,000 + words four days before the deadline.
Now I’m revising and correcting and trying to get it right. But I’ve realized that my time frame is out of kilter.
If Johnathon is seventeen in 1942 and is the third child in a family of five, he had to have been born in 1925 and his parents had to have been born in the 1890s. Which means they all lived through the Depression. Changes their perspective on the world.
Plus, a number of the secondary characters are Germans living in this country. I originally had two of them being brought to this country as children by Catholic nuns to save them from Hitler’s so-called ethnic purifying. But these characters are in their late thirties and so were born before Hitler came to power or was anything more than an Austrian peasant.
Now I have the make up other reasons for their being in the U.S. The neighbor, who is found stabbed to death, was a PhD geologist and his friend is a Fuller Brush salesman.
Some of the stuff in the book comes from my own childhood, though I was much younger during WWII, having been born May 29th, 1941. But my mother was indeed Lockheed’s first female tool and dye designer and a designated Rosie the Riveter. She did christen several ships.
People keep telling me I should write her story, but I can’t because I don’t consider it my story to tell. Still, I can use my remembrances as grist for the story-telling mill. Things like grieving for the death of my maternal Grandfather and for my own father. And going to the Brown Derby restaurant during its hey-day. And going to ship christenings.
I do remember hearing about my Granny working with the Red Cross to arrange for Hollywood types to visit wounded service members in local hospitals and I do remember stories she and mother told about various movie people and their personalities.
And I do remember that we didn’t feel we should grieve for the loss of our father or grandfather, because that was just the way it was done. One needed to always keep a “stiff upper lip,” and just “carry one.”
Anyway, I still have a long way to go with the revision process, but the story is getting more cohesive every time I work on it. Thanks for spending cyber time with me.
Sarah
sarahsbookreflections 