Getting back to writing

Writing the first paragraph of anything is always difficult, because there’s so much pressure. That first paragraph, even more so, the first sentence, has to do so much: set the scene, get the story moving and grab the reader’s attention.

But I took a lot of pleasure from that pressure last week and wrote an opening for my next book, after a long period of spending my writing time doing other things. Things that are rewarding and worthwhile, but aren’t writing.

What have I been doing?

• editing three excellent and very different books for colleagues, including David C. Cassidy, author of Velvet Rain and the upcoming The Dark
• traveling with my lovely and very tolerant wife to France (well, that was just a week, but still)
• finalizing the print version of my latest book, Army of Worn Soles—print is much less tolerant of mistakes than e-books are
• working on revamping my website, which sad to say, still isn’t done.

In fact, my attempts to improve my website have so far had the opposite effect: they’ve rendered it unviewable by any browser. Oh, I still have the files, but I’ve done something in the coding that creates a looping redirect. So for the past couple of weeks, my spare home-office time has been taken up with researching cheap or free, yet easy-to-use HTML editors for the Mac.

Now, there are some excellent inexpensive programs, but I found one that’s free, and that does (or purports to do) all the things I want to have in my website. There’s something in me that just won’t let me shell out 80 buck US for something when I can almost the same thing for free. The downside is that I had to start all over again to rebuild the site.

Anyway, the revamped site is close to being done, and when it is, this blog will look very different.

This is a blog about writing, not about being a cheapskate

Clio by Pierre Mignard.
Source: Wikipedia 

Thank you, muse of writing. 

The writing. Well, last week, I pushed the website and the book formatting aside for a while to return to writing. I know that I said in June that I would have the sequel to Army of Worn Soles out by December, and we all know that’s not going to happen.

I have had this nagging feeling that comes from knowing that I have been putting off finishing the story of Maurice Bury, my late father-in-law, and his experiences in the Second World War. Now, I feel so much better that I have started to make progress again.

This is a very early draft, but here’s an opening:

Ukraine, January 1942Wind blew the snow smooth, polishing surface of the lake to a dull sheen under the full moon, and pushing drifts higher than a man along a rough fence that shielded the railway. Beyond the rails, more snow weighed down the boughs of close-growing fir trees and covered their trunks more than six feet high. 

The moonlight made steam sparkle as a train emerged from the forest to puff and groan slowly along the edge of the frozen lake. The engineer squinted through the small forward window, which gave only an obstructed view. Periodically, he would lean out the side window to peer at the track ahead, but he could only bear the frigid air, the wind from the train’s forward motion, and the smoke and cinders from the engine, for less than a minute before he had to come back inside. 

He kept the train’s speed low and one hand on the brake lever, despite the commands of the Wehrmacht officers in the cars behind him. He knew the risks of going too fast in this country. Besides snowdrifts over the tracks that could derail the train despite the plows welded onto the front of the engine, the men he knew hid under the dark boughs posed worse threats.

Army of Worn Soles chronicled Maurice’s drafting into the Red Army, his service as an officer as the army retreated across Ukraine and his capture along with half a million other men, his imprisonment and his escape along with the men in his command from the POW camp. The second story is about his experiences after that:

• fighting in the underground resistance against Nazi Germany
• being re-drafted by the Red Army
• fighting across the Baltic states and then eastern Germany, up to Berlin in May, 1945
• and finally, his narrow escape from the Red Army and Stalin’s NKVD to return home to Canada, where he was born.

I think I’ve got it all mapped out now, and about 80 percent of it is written. But I am having one problem, dear readers: the title. So I’m turning to you. In the Comments section below, tell me which of the following possible titles you think is the most grabbing:

• Walking Out of War
• Walking Away from War
• Slipping Through Stalin’s Net
• The Four-Sided War
• Worn Soles Home

I’m looking forward to your comments!

On Remembrance Day, in honour of all who served: Chapter 1, free

Today, November 11, 2014, is Remembrance Day in Canada, Veterans' Day in the US, Armistice Day in the UK. It's a day recognized under many names in countries around the world, marking the end of the First World War, called the "defining calamity of the 20th century."

That calamity, which took millions of lives and changed the perception of war, began 100 years ago.

In honour of all who served, I offer the first chapter of Army of Worn Soles, the true story of a Canadian drafted into the Soviet Red Army just in time to face Nazi Germany's invasion in 1941.

Chapter 1: Prisoner of War

Kharkiv, October 1941

Maurice put the bottle on the ground beside him and took off his uniform shirt. He spread it on the smoothest piece of ground he could find, then laid the bottle near the officer’s insignia on the collar and pushed down. He rolled the bottle over tattered, light-brown material until the lice cracked under the glass. Back and forth, twice, three times. He felt a dull satisfaction at his first pathetic victory in more than half a year.

The effort was exhausting. His stomach ached and his throat burned with thirst.

He slumped back until he leaned against the barracks. Men in grey uniforms stood or walked across the cobbled courtyard of the ancient castle. One came toward him, a slim man with light brown hair and hazel eyes. He stopped in front of Maurice and leaned down.

“Maurice? Is it you?”

Breathing required effort. So did looking up. Maurice had not eaten in days, but he still trusted his sight. He knew the man with the light-brown hair and hazel eyes, even in a Wehrmacht uniform. 

“Maurice?" the young man said again. "What are you doing here?”

He couldn’t swallow. His mouth held no moisture. “Dying. I’m starving to death.” Maurice closed his eyes and hung his head.

Bohdan crouched beside him. “You got drafted?”

Maurice made the effort to look up at his old friend. “The Red Army made me a lieutenant. What the hell are you doing here, and in a German uniform, Bohdan?”

“The Germans kicked the Russians out, something we couldn’t do. Why shouldn’t I join the winning side? And it's ‘Daniel’ now, not Bohdan.” He looked around to make sure no one noticed him, a Wehrmacht officer, talking to a prisoner of war. “I’m glad you survived, that you were captured instead of killed. The Germans killed a lot of Red soldiers.”

“I know. I was there.”

Bohdan looked around again. "How did you get here?”

“Like you said, we were captured, the whole army, outside Kharkiv. They brought us here.”

Bohdan shook his head. “Are you all right? I’ll see if I can bring you anything, but I have to be careful.”

Maurice looked into his friend’s eyes. “Get me out of here.”

“Set a prisoner free? Are you crazy?”

“Bohdan—sorry, Daniel, you’re my best friend. Or you were. If I ever meant anything to you, get me out.”

Daniel—Bohdan, looked left and right again. “I cannot let Red soldiers go,” he whispered.

Maurice took a dry breath. His strength was almost gone. “You’re an officer in a victorious army. You have the power. You can get me out, me and my boys.

Daniel shook his head and stood. “Stalin's going to surrender within six months, and then all the prisoners will be freed. Hitler has promised freedom for all nations. We’ll all be free. Ukraine will be free.”

Maurice looked at the ground between his splayed legs. He could no longer lift his head. “I can’t wait six months. I can’t wait two days. If you wait, you’ll find a corpse. We’ll all be dead. You have to get us out now.”

Daniel hesitated. He looked around the camp again, but no one paid attention. “So the Reds made you an officer, did they? Where are your men? All dead?”

Somewhere, Maurice found the strength to stand up again. He staggered to the barracks door, went in and called his odalenye, the unit he commanded. “Step over here, boys.”

Daniel followed Maurice inside, and Maurice wondered if Daniel wasn’t breaking some regulation by entering prisoners’ quarters unaccompanied by at least one guard.

Daniel scanned the room, taking in the defeated, injured and starving men. No one threatened him. They did not even move. Maurice realized when they saw Daniel, they saw their captor.

Daniel stepped out of the barracks and waited outside the door. “I’ll see what I can do, Maurice. But you’re on the wrong fucking side.”

Maurice picked up the bottle and returned to crushing the lice out of his uniform shirt. It was the only thing he could do to reduce his misery.

He thought about the last time he had seen Bohdan, before he became Daniel.

It was in the gymnasium, the pre-university school in Peremyshl. What used to be Poland. What a long, strange, twisted path my life has followed. 

____

For more from Army of Worn Soles, click the cover image at the top of this blog.

Visit the Worn Soles page on Facebook.

Literary genre: haven or prison?

Creative Commons licence.
http://moon.com/2014/03/hiking-and-recreation-in-parque-nacional-torres-del-paine/

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post for the Guild of Dreams blog where I wondered about how important it is for a writer to remain within a genre. Now that I have just sent my third manuscript to an editor, I find myself wondering about that again. Without asking anyone’s permission, I am re-examine that issue.

When you start out writing fantasy — or romance, or science fiction, or mystery, or any other category — do you have to stay within it? Is writing something in another genre akin to crossing a border into a foreign territory?

For a novelist, is the genre a prison or a haven?

It looks like my career as a novelist is turning into an experiment to measure that.

My experience in the fantasy genre

My first published full-length novel qualifies as epic fantasy. I prefer the term “historical magic realism,” because  The Bones of the Earth has realistic, fictional characters alongside real, historical characters. It’s set in a real time and place, and then adds fantastic or magical elements. But for most people, “fantasy” is the shorthand term.

My next novel, One Shade of Red, stepped way out of epic fantasy and history. It’s a comic, erotic parody of Fifty Shades of Gray, and qualifies as romantic erotica. Or erotic romance. NOT porn.

My third novel (to be published) is one I started over 10 years ago, a memoir of my father-in-law’s experience as a draftee into the Soviet Red Army during World War II. So far, I’m calling it Between the Vise Jaws. But that may change.

Return to fantasy

With that done, I am now turning to a contemporary urban paranormal type fantasy, Dark Clouds. I posted the first chapter on this blog a couple of years ago.

Dark Clouds grew out of a pre-Hallowe’en writing challenge, the source of which I cannot remember. But the challenge was to write the scariest opening line I could, and in a humourous mood, I thought of “Matt always knew when his mother was coming over.”

Photo by Garry Knight via Flickr Creative Commons

And I took it from there, making Matt’s mother a witch, then the Queen of all witches. Then I thought “what if Matt, the Witch Queen’s son, was immune to all her spells?”

Once I finished writing the story, I thought it could be the beginning of a novel, or at least a series of stories. So I thought I would call the novel The Mandrake Ruse, in the style of 60s-era spy stories like Man from U.N.C.L.E. And I could write a bunch of novels about The Witch’s Son.

Now that I’ve been toying with the idea for a couple of years, I realize that I have those titles mixed up, so when I do publish the book, it will be called Dark Clouds, and the first chapter will be “The Mandrake Ruse.” It just makes so much more sense.

Does genre-hopping hurt my credibility as an author?

A number of readers, and my family, too, have asked for a sequel to The Bones of the Earth. And as you can see from the cover, it’s “Book One of the Dark Age Trilogy.” I do have rough plot outlines for two more books about Javor and his adventures in the seventh century, but I also have this burning desire to write some other stories, first.

Had I a contract with a publishing company, my publisher, editor and/or agent would gripe about this. “Readers who liked your first book want more of the same!” I can hear one of them saying. “You’ve proven there’s an audience for that story, and they’ll be disappointed if your next book is totally different.”

I think every artist or creative person faces that dilemma: those who liked your first work will come back expecting more in the same vein. Delighting them with something new and completely different is a steeper hill to climb — you’re working against the very expectations that you created.

On the other hand, I am a writer because there are stories that I want to write, and my imagination doesn’t necessarily fit into categories defined by someone else.

I don’t read in just one genre — why should write in just one genre?

The most commercially successful authors stay within the categories they’re known for: John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer … it’s a long, depressing list.

On the other hand, some of the best writers have written in more than one genre, or have succeeded both artistically and commercially when they’ve gone beyond the slot assigned to them at some point in their careers:

Ray Bradbury — known for science fiction, especially Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury’s also celebrated for Dandelion Wine, the story of a young boy’s “magical summer.”

Stephen King started with horror and is still best known for It, The Shining and Carrie, but he has successfully transitioned into science fiction, non-fiction and, it could be argued, literary fiction.

Guy Gavriel Kay began writing fantasy fiction with The Fionavar Tapestry series, continued with his almost-historical magic realism, and moved to historical fiction with Ysabel in 2007.

Margaret Atwood went the other way. Established since the 60s as a main force in current literature, she surprised the book world with the dystopian science-fiction The Handmaid’s Tale, more recently Oryx and Crake — although she denies they’re science fiction.

The big question

What will this do to future sales prospects? Will readers of The Bones of the Earth who check my new publication be disappointed or delighted by Between the Vise Jaws?

Will fans of One Shade of Red be totally turned off by a war memoir?

Or will my hopes be realized: that writing in different genres will spread my appeal to new audiences?

What do you think? Leave a comment!

Sample Sunday — An excerpt from Army of Worn Soles: Battle at Poltava

Here is a sample from my work-in-progress, Army of Worn Soles, based on the true story of my father-in-law, who was drafted into the Red Army in 1941, just before the Germans invaded. He fought across Ukraine, was captured, escaped a POW camp and made his way home.

This chapter, "Battle at Poltava," is based on his descriptions of fighting as well as historical research. 

Let me know what you think.

Kyiv was gone.

The rumours arrived well before the official news. On September 17, 1941, Stalin finally gave the permission to General Kirponov that he had denied Marshall Budenny: to withdraw from Kyiv. Once the orders went out to withdraw behind the Dnipro River, the Germans pounced and took control of the city in less than 24 hours.

The withdrawal order had come too late. “Hurrying Heinz” Guderian, the great Panzer general, had already crossed the Dnipro in Belorussia in late August and had penetrated far east of the Ukrainian capital, to the area around Romny. General Ewald von Kleist blasted past the Dnipro south of Kyiv by September 10, and on the 14, the two generals shook hands 100 miles east of Kyiv—having trapped five Soviet armies, nearly a million men, in the huge pocket between their forces.

It had not been the first time, nor would it be the last: the Soviet 6^th and 12^th armies had been encircled and trapped in the “Uman Pocket” in mid-August; and after the wehrmacht’s capture of Minsk in July, they had captured another five Soviet armies.

There were many reasons for the Soviets’ collapse; they continued to reel from the shock of Nazi Germany’s surprise attack on June 22; the Red Army was unprepared for modern war; and Stalin refused, over and over again, to allow strategic withdrawals that would have allowed the Red Army to shore up defences further back from the invaders. Stalin instead ordered every man to fight to the death, to not give in to the enemy. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died, were trapped and taken prisoner, or, despairing, surrendered, guns and tanks an armour intact.

Gereral Kirponos, head of the Soviet 5^th Army, had fought hard to break out of the encirclement in September, but was killed by a land mine. A few in his army managed to break out.

Part of the 38^th Army under newly-appointed Major-General Vladimir Tsiganov managed to escape the Kyiv encirclement, and Maurice and his men joined it, heading south-east to defend the bridgeheads between Cherkassy and Kremenchuk. The Germans send more panzer divisions, and in October, the remnants of the army pulled back another 100 kilometres and dug into the eastern banks of the shallow Psyol river to protect Poltava, where Marshall Timoshenko had his headquarters.

Maurice’s unit took shelter in trenches that had been built by the locals, but there were no bunkers this time. Food delivery became sporadic and the men griped continually about the autumn rain, the way the soft soil of the trench walls crumble, the bad and inadequate food. But they could not indulge in this long—the Panzers kept coming.

They stayed awake all night, squinting west across the Psyol River to the invisible, continuous rumble of heavy vehicles. Some of the men prayed. Commissars and officers moved up and down the lines, inspecting and admonishing the soldiers to vigilance and readiness. “At the first sign of the Germans, we counter-attack,” they said.

Maurice doubted it.

That first sign came at dawn. As the sky greyed behind the Soviets, the early light picked out German tanks advancing along the roads, cautious yet swift.

Fear spread from Maurice’s heart through his body and along his arms and legs. His fingers tingled as the rising sun revealed columns of armoured vehicles and marching men, of officers’ staff cars and motorized cannons, lines that stretched for miles. The German army moved in unison, fast and alert like a single predator, fearless.

Two Panzers ventured onto a small wooden bridge. They weren’t even fazed when the bridge collapsed under their weight. The water didn’t reach over the tops of their treads, and they just down-shifted and continued.

An officer shouted to Maurice’s right and anti-tank guns fired. Shells burst on the lead Panzer and flames erupted around the turret, but didn’t damage the tank. Its machine gun fired and then its cannon barked. Maurice saw Red soldiers’s bodies fling up out of the destroyed trenches.

“Fire!” he ordered and Orest pulled the trigger, but the shell went wide. “Reload!” Machine guns fired from behind and then a German armoured car carrying dozens of soldiers exploded. Bodies hit the ground and bobbed in the water.

Maurice’s men fired again, and this time they hit a tank front-on. The shell stuck, burned into the metal plate and burst, but did not penetrate the armour. The tank reversed gears and drew back from the riverbank.

The Panzers halted on the west bank, waiting for something. Then shells fell behind the Soviet lines, bursting and burning among the men. The Germans, prepared for everything, were firing heavy guns at the resistance.

“Down, boys!” Maurice said, pulling his helmet as low as he could. It’s hopeless, he thought. If a shell doesn’t land in this trench and kill us all, it’ll only be sheer luck.

Soviet guns answered, sporadic and uncoordinated. They were only aimed generally westward, in contrast to the German shells, which seemed demonically guided to Red Army targets.

When the heavy fire let up after what felt like hours, Maurice chanced a look over the trench. The German tanks were advancing again. Somewhere, an anti-tank gun fired, hitting the lead Panzer square on. The explosion blew its treads off and it lurched sideways into the river, crippled, smoke pouring from its front plate.

More Panzers kept coming, splashing through the river; behind them came soldiers, running from cover to cover, firing their fast submachine guns. As they climbed onto the near bank, some hit land mines and fell, crippled, but more Panzers drove around them.

“Pull back!” Maurice yelled, and the boys picked up the gun and ammunition and ran, crouching low as they could to the next trench, where they joined several other odalenje. Maurice’s boys hurriedly set up the gun and aimed at the Panzers.

They were too late: the Panzers swept past them, crushing wounded men under their treads. The boys swung the gun around. “Aim at its back!” Maurice ordered. “FIRE!”

The gun barked and the shell hit the Panzer’s cylindrical tuel tank, oddly exposed on its rear deck behind the turret. They explosion Maurice continued to ring in Maurice’s ears for minutes. The tank’s rear end lifted high and Maurice thought it would flip over. Shards of metal flew in every direction and the tank’s hull split and burned.

The Panzers halted and Maurice saw the Soviet infantry charge, advancing in a line, running fast and shooting their rifles. A hundred must have been cut down by German machine guns.

By now, the battlefield was full of smoke from explosions and gunfire, from burning tanks, cars and trucks, from burning trees and grass. Behind the black clouds, the sun rose, red.

“Rifles ready, boys,” Maurice ordered, but he wouldn’t order them to charge before he absolutely had to. Let the commissar threaten me with a pistol, first, he thought. Another wave of Red soldiers charged forward and were cut down in turn. A third wave came forward, tripping over the corpses of their comrades. Time after time, the Red Army charged, sending men with obsolete rifles against the unmatched German machine guns that fired rounds at triple the rate of the few Soviet machine guns. Soldiers fell like wheat before invisible scythes. But they kept charging. A few stopped for a moment to fling grenades or molotov cocktails, which burst and flamed on the Panzers. It didn’t look like much, but gasoline burns too hot for the men inside the tanks to tolerate. The crews threw open the hatches and tried to escape, dying as Maurice’s men emptied their rifle magazines.

Panzer machine guns strafed the Soviet lines, and then the German infantry arrived, charging across the Psyol River on foot or on speedy armoured cars. The soldiers hid behind anything they could find for cover, gradually creeping up on their tanks. They jumped behind any cover they could find, fired to cover their comrades ahead or behind them, leapfrogging toward the Soviet lines. They jumped into the first line of trenches the Soviets had abandoned minutes earlier and set up machine guns that added to the fire.

That was when the Colonel ordered the cavalry to charge. It was like something out of a movie: men on horses, capes flapping behind them, swinging curved sabres or firing machine guns. They fell on the German infantry, hacking at the men. They tumbled over their horses’ necks as the enemy shot the horses dead, or were blown out of their saddles by bullets and explosives.

“Load the high-explosive shells,” Maurice ordered his men. They fired at the advancing Germans and the explosions ripped them apart. Maurice’s boys fired round after round, and then ducked low as the German machine gun fire came toward them.

A commissar appeared among them and ordered the unit to their right to charge the Germans. Maurice saw the fear on the faces of the soldiers. None of them were even 20 years old. They cradled their rifles and stared wide-eyed at the carnage on the fields. An officer ordered “Charge!” and they scrambled over the lip of the trench. Maurice watched as boy after boy was hit by bullets and shrapnel. Raw recruits with little or no training, they clustered together, firing sporadically at anything that moved. A shell — German or Soviet was impossible to say — burst in their midst, killing at least six at once.

Beyond them, Maurice could see a group of German soldiers creeping through the smoke. They lay on the ground, crawling on their bellies, until they stopped in a line, guns aimed at the odalenje that had climbed out of the trench.

Another German group crept closer just beyond the first, aiming their submachine guns, then halted until the first group crept past them. Alternately, the came closer and closer to the Soviet lines.

“Aim your rifles at Fritz over there,” Maurice ordered. The Red unit that had been ordered to charge were between them and the enemy. They crouched, stupidly, in the middle of the field, exposed to fire from all sides. While some fired their rifles occasionally, they appeared frozen. They just didn’t know what to do. They didn’t even see the enemy crawling toward them.

Someone shouted behind Maurice: a sergeant at a machine gun behind him was trying to communicate with the young soldiers. “Get down! Get out of the way! You’re blocking my fire, you idiots!” But the boys didn’t hear him over the roar of battle, and even if they had, Maurice doubled whether they’d have known where to go without their commander. “Get down!” the soldier yelled again; it was futile.

Maurice tried: “Tet back to the trench!” But they remained where they were, shooting occasionally, frozen with fear. One by one, they caught bullets and fell, sometimes screaming.

The Germans kept coming and then Maurice could see their objective: a heavy anti-tank gun that was firing as fast as its crew could reload. It had been placed too close to the front line, and as the infantry had fallen back from the first trench to the second, it had been stranded. Still, it was taking a toll on the Panzers and armoured car, and that was why this group of German soldiers had been ordered to take it out. As they moved closer to the gun, the stranded group of Russian boys was ever more directly between them and the Soviet guns.

The sergeant behind Maurice screamed frantically at the boys to get out of the way. Maurice and all his boys yelled, too, but it was no use. Then two of the Germans raised themselves just enough to throw grenades.

Pop-pop-pop-pop! The machine gun behind Maurice fired. Bullets ripped up the grass between him and the crawling Germans, and one with a grenade in his hand fell forward. Seconds later, the grenade went off in his hand and he disappeared in a cloud of smoke and soil. The other grenadier flattened himself on the ground, then twisted as the machine gun tore into his body.

The other Germans turned their fire toward the machine gun, and incidentally on the company of young soldiers between them. Sick to his stomach, Maurice could only watch as the unit was torn to pieces by fire from both sides. He knew that the machine gun sergeant could not wait anymore — saving the anti-tank gun meant saving a lot more lives than one odalenje that, exposed to fire from all sides, was fated to be cut down sooner or later.

In moments, the whole platoon lay dead, scattered on the ground like broken sticks. The battle raged around their bodies.

Without their comrades in the way, Maurice’s boys starting shooting at the remaining Germany company. Orest and Bogdan fired an antipersonnel shell that ripped the survivors to pieces. For a moment, Maurice let himself fantasize that they might win this battle. Then he heard another roar and he realized the Panzers were moving again.

A commissar dropped into the trench, followed by two NKVD men in their distinctive green caps. “Fall back, comrade,” he said. “Regroup in the village.” He moved along the trench to the next platoonn, ordering them to stay behind as a rear guard. He and the men ordered knew it was a death sentence. The NKVD men were there to ensure that they didn’t break and run. But it was a death sentence for them, too.

The boys took the gun apart, picked up the ammunition and scurried along a connect trench to the next set of fortifications, and from there farther from the battle. Eventually, they reached the half-destroyed village, most of whose building were burning. “Don’t leave anything behind,” said an officer. He ordered Maurice’s platoon to load their weapons onto a horse-drawn wagon. By noon, Maurice and his boys trudged behind the wagon through fields of high grain. Behind them, smoke billowed into the sky as the last Soviets defenders fought to the death to cover their comrades’ retreat.