A Slice of Historical Fiction and a Dash of Confusion

The first question my new friend asked me when I told him I wrote an historical novel was "What years does it cover?" I answered that the novel begins in 1901 and ends in 1940. "A family saga after the Spanish American War."

I made a face. "Kinda, but not really."

"Who was the decent woman? Anyone famous or historical? You've named your novel, A Decent Woman."

"I guess you could say that it's a family saga," I said, "but, it's not a saga about one family. My novel is about the lives of two women during this time period and how their lives intersected, deviated and came together at the end."

My friend looked confused. I shared that Ana, my protagonist, was my grandmother's midwife, comadre, and the character of Serafina is based on my Puerto Rican grandmother.

"So, your main character isn't anyone famous, but you include Puerto Rican history. Did you include Hurricane San Ciriaco? That happened around that time." It was clear to me that he wanted to stay focused on dates in history.

"Hurricane San Ciriaco hit in 1900. My story begins in 1901. I investigated, researched, but I wrote about two women's lives."

"This is historical fiction? I thought historical fiction had to be about a real person and real events." Had I written an historical fiction novel or not? Was this a women from Venus and men from Mars conversation?

My friend is quite a history buff and is well-versed on the wars to include the Spanish- American War. We have great conversations about history, but he's not as well-versed on the history of Puerto Rico. He wants to learn about the history of the island, but didn't seem as interested in how my characters maneuvered life during that time in history which is what interested me in writing the novel in the first place!

"So, you kept to real dates in Puerto Rican history?"

I nodded. "Yep. I've included the hurricanes and tropical storms of that time frame and even included the earthquake that hit Ponce, the town where my story takes place. I'm accurate with women's daily lives--how they lived, loved and died at that time. I researched quite a bit, but I've always had a feeling that my novel and characters were set in history rather than an historical fiction novel based on a real person in history. It's the story of two women." 

"Well, it sounds like women's fiction to me," he said. My friend seemed confused and I felt as though we were destined to agree to disagree.

"I read more non-fiction than fiction," he admitted. "But, I am curious how you marry the two." He returned my smile.

I read novels for entertainment and I love historical fiction. But honestly, I don't want a history lesson when I read. I want to be entertained and swept away by events that the characters find themselves in. History by osmosis, perhaps. I'm a people person. I love novels about people and how they maneuver situations and life's challenges. My novel, A Decent Woman, is the story of an Afro-Cuban woman and a Puerto Rican woman who forge a fierce friendship despite differing racial, social and economic situations of the early 1900's. My novel is about how Ana and Serafina lived, thrived and overcame personal challenges while discovering who they were and what they were made of in a tumultuous slice of time of Puerto Rican history. A slice of time. I like that phrase.

I also like the description--a novel set in history rather than an historical novel. That works for me. I wrote a fiction novel that I hope will be as entertaining as it is historically educational in the literary sense of the word.

I'm okay with that.

Peace and love,
Ellie

Memorabilia, History and Shenanigans

There are many things I hold precious in this world and I'm a very sentimental person, so I hold onto items that have special meaning to me.  My kids call me a pack rat and they're right. I need to be better at this, but there are a few things that I would never throw out.

As I looked in the attic for the journal I kept during my walk on El Camino and the photographs we took on the morning we left Brussels and on the last day when we finally reached the city of Santiago de Compostela, I found so many things that made me smile and shudder. I'm in the early stages of my second novel, Finding Gracia on El Camino, and I wanted to set the mood.

I've kept 90% of everything my children have ever drawn at home, on vacation or in school from the time they could barely hold a pencil to their college days. From a tiny drawing, to their first attempts at letters and sentences to their college papers. I know, that's a lot and I keep it all in a huge plastic Rubbermaid container up in my attic. Thank God for attics! Their school trophies and academic achievement certificates are up there with their high school and college graduation gowns, caps and tassels, too. That was the part that made me shudder. I need to go through those papers and keep just the best, but it's tough!

I still have my children's silver baby cups engraved with their names and the date of their births, and I have my ex-husband's baby cup, as well. I've also kept many items, newspapers and magazines printed on the day of their births as well as their belly buttons and first bottles and pacifiers. Nuts, right? Not to me. For whatever reason, my mother didn't save a lot of things for my sister and I, so I vowed I'd do things a bit different. It could have been that we were a military family and hauling all that extra stuff was a pain. Could be. 

My sister and I have tried to split the family albums and shared photographs with each other. Photographs galore. In newer albums, loose photographs and photographs pasted to those old albums with the waxy paper in between the pages and black paper edges. Remember those? All in a container so that the mice don't get to them.

In another container, I keep things from my childhood and young adulthood. I have a Mother's Day card I made my mother on a piece of manila paper. It's a pencil and crayon drawing of cheerful flowers in a blue vase and I wrote in cursive: "To the best mother in the world. Your daughter, Eleanor."  I was always drawing and I remember drawing many things for my mother, but this is the only drawing I found after she passed away in 1992. She kept many cards in the drawer of her bedside table and she showed my handmade card to me the year before she passed away. I often wonder if my mother somehow knew her time was short because that same year, she gave me a pair of my baby shoes and a mint green dress I wore when I was an infant in addition to a silver punch bowl with ladle and 10 silver cups that I always loved. I hope this punch bowl will be included in my children's weddings :)

In an old folder, I have dozens of drawings and a drawing of a woman and a centaur I made in my early teens from a racy ad in Cosmo magazine when I wasn't supposed to read those magazines. Oh, well :) We got a hold of them, anyway. I still have a few school notebooks and black and white composition books from high school as well as an autograph book from middle school. Yearbooks galore. The notebooks and composition books are full of drawings, poems, small snippets of writing, and tons of quotes I collected over the years, thanks to my high school English teacher, Mrs. Diaz.

I have jewelry given to me by old boyfriends, an ex-husband and some remnants of shenanigans I pulled in middle school. I found love notes exchanged during class, a Turkish puzzle ring that I stole on a dare from the Monostiraki Flea Market in Athens, Greece when I was 13 years old and a yearbook entry written by my BFF at the time who made mention of other shenanigans that only she and I know about! I didn't say they were all proud moments, did I? A ticket stub from the ferry from Athens to Aegina and hair tied up in a faded ribbon from a haircut long ago. I found a car emblem that a boy I liked stole from a Mercedes Benz car, trying to impress me and a dried flower in a book of poetry from my second boyfriend who died at 17 in a motorcycle accident. 

Goodness me. The history of a family, my family. The history of a life well-lived. Every item I picked up had a history, memory and stories attached. It's no wonder I write historical fiction and love vintage and antiques, is it? And, it should be quite obvious to you, dear reader, that I did no writing today. I did a whole helluva lot of research, though!

Happy weekend to you!

Peace and love,
Ellie

Necessary Research for Writing Chapter One

How long have we been naming snow storms? Did the naming of snow storms just start or did I just begin to notice this year? I find the naming of snow storms annoying and I'll tell you why. I can barely remember and retain the names of hurricanes and tropical storms I discovered during the research for my historical novel-length manuscript, A Decent Woman. Too many names!

Hurricane San Felipe, Ciriaco, Cirilo, Isabel, Ana, Betsy, George, Irene, the winds of Santa Ana and the Mistral, Snowmageddon and now, Snow Storm Virgil. I think that's where we are today - Virgil - which leads me to believe that I don't know the names of the snow storms that preceded Virgil if in fact, they (who names them, anyway?) are keeping to the alphabet I know.

When I was a kid it just snowed. No name, no saint's name, it just snowed! 

However, since the first decades of the 15th century, hurricanes and tropical storms have had names. Hard to believe, isn't it? I found it fascinating to learn about the hurricanes and tropical storms that either were direct hits or came within a few miles of Puerto Rico in the early 1900's. Research was paramount for my first novel which begins in 1901 in Ponce on the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico, and Ponce took many direct and indirect hits from hurricanes and tropical storms.

Christopher Columbus discovered Puerto Rico on November 19, 1493 and the first Spanish settlement was established years later by Juan Ponce de Leon. The first recorded tropical cyclone (hurricane) to hit the southwest part of the island in 1508 was recorded by Juan Ponce de Leon - Hurricane San Roque. From the 15th century until 1961, the naming system of storms was based on the Catholic tradition of naming cyclones after Catholic saints, the saint of the day in which the hurricane hit. San is the masculine word for saint in Spanish and Santa is the feminine word and there are more names with San than Santa in the history of recording hurricane statistics. No comment, just an observation :)

Many times, I had to remind myself to keep moving my story along and leave the Internet behind, but I couldn't very well write a novel about life in Puerto Rico without adding description, detail and dialogue about hurricanes and tropical storms. Every year, from June to November, hurricanes were/are a constant threat and in the months where the island is relatively safe, people are cleaning up, recovering and rebuilding in the aftermath. Hurricanes were and are a fact of life on the island and no one was/is spared. Nearly everyone on an island is affected by nature in one way or another.

I discovered 67 hurricanes and one major earthquake that I had to think about in the years that my novel takes place! So, I decided that the opening scene of my novel would introduce my main character Ana, an Afro-Cuban midwife, who is assisting seventeen-year old Isabel in the birth of her first child during Hurricane San Cirilo, the first tropical storm of the 20th century. I never hesitated that this was how my book would open. As you can imagine, it's a dramatic scene. I loved writing it and still see it in my mind's eye when I think of the first chapter.

In Chapter One, Puerto Rico is still recovering from the devastating loss of life, crops and livelihood from Hurricane San Ciriaco the previous year, the most dangerous recorded hurricane on the island that claimed nearly 3,400 lives and had the damage estimates at nearly $36 million dollars. The Americans had invaded the island two years prior, food is relatively scarce, many buildings have been destroyed, and it seems that the life the islanders have known has been turned upside down. Many believe that God has turned His back on the island and wonder what sins they are being punished for. Some like Ana know what sins they might be punished for.

It's a story of survival, courage, loss, redemption and love...and white squalls, damaging gale-force winds, white-capped waves battering the coast, ten foot storm surges, flooding, sideways rain, and ominous black skies. There are, of course, days of azure skies with no clouds, calm seas, lush tropical vistas and heat...body and otherwise :)

Snow Storm Virgil dropped four inches of snow in my town this morning and we're expecting three more inches by tonight. I'm hoping that the next snow storm that will begin with the letter 'W' doesn't show its face until next winter!

Peace and love,
Ellie

The Research and the Writing

In my high school years, I received three medals which I was quite proud of - a First Place medal for English (writing), another First Place for Ancient History and the other medal was an Honorable Mention for chemistry which I swear must have been a mistake. That medal surely was meant for someone else. I just don't know how that one  happened, but I still have those medals in a box somewhere.

They were badges of honor for a kid who was enthusiastic about learning, but also had her head in the clouds and her nose in a book (not textbooks). One of my teachers wrote this in one of my high school yearbooks, "Eleanor has the attention span of a butterfly on a flower, but she can tell you all about that flower and its relationship with the butterfly."  He had me pegged at sixteen.

As many first-time novelists might admit and I will, I wrote my novel, A Decent Woman, without a plan. Sure, I had an outline and knew who my main characters were, but when I began to tell the story, I just wrote. I allowed my characters to tell their stories without a story board nor a stack of how-to writing books because I didn't know those books existed. I was in awe of writers and never thought that they didn't know what they were doing at one time nor that they'd been beginners like me. I thought they were born for greatness and were doing what came naturally. God had blessed them, I didn't question a thing.

Naively and naturally, I gravitated toward writing and doing research as questions and the need arose in my story. That seemed to work for me. I'd decided that I would write a chapter or two and then, do the necessary research to flesh out the scene, the descriptions and the characters. Naturally, writing a novel about life in Puerto Rico in the 1900's meant I had lots of questions and blanks to fill, mixed in with my grandmother's stories of how she cooked, cleaned and washed clothes when she was young with the limited resources available to her.

My then-husband, kids and I lived in Belgium when I began my historical novel, A Decent Woman and our library was small. I'd browse the titles and nothing jumped out at me. Honestly? I don't think I even knew what I was looking for, so the Internet became my research tool. Hurricanes - off to the Internet! I learned all I needed to know about the hurricanes, tropical storms and tropical depressions that passed near the island  and the direct hits to the island in the early 1900's. I learned about tropical waves that begin off the coast of Africa and the conditions for the perfect storm. I could easily spend hours doing research on the Web and I did. Soon however, I realized that I needed to keep writing and just research on a need-to-know basis. I had to remain focused and not be that butterfly on the flower! That worked very well for me, so I kept writing.

Questions about indigenous plants and flowers, burial practices in the early 1900s, slavery in Puerto Rico, and the lives of women on the island came flooding in at times. More research to be done!

As my story progressed, I added new characters that came with their own baggage, complications and goals that at times, didn't mesh with my heroine's goals, dreams and ideas. I learned to let go and let my characters loose just to see what would happen. The things my characters got into or were involved in boggled the mind, but I kept writing. I'd often say that my characters were whispering in my ear and looking over my shoulders at every turn. In those early days, I wasn't worried about finding an agent, I didn't worry about what other writers were writing and I certainly didn't worry about selling books. I had a story to tell and I figured that if I loved my story this much, certainly others would find it interesting. No one had read my novel-length manuscript yet. I kept it to myself.

While writing, I'd listen to CDs of period Puerto Rican music, to tangos my grandmother loved, I devoured archives of old photographs taken on the island for details on period dress, architecture and no detail, no matter how minute, escaped me. I interviewed older family members and friends born in Puerto Rico back in the day and asked them question after question. I even sent questionnaires to every Puerto Rican woman I knew about daily life and growing up on the island. Not only was I doing research for my book, I was also learning more about the place of my birth and that of my grandmother and mother. Writing this book has been a wonderful experience for me. The process has been healing, illuminating and yes, revealing.

I brought out my novel several times during the next five years while I got divorced, went back to school and worked long hours. The timing was right to keep the manuscript out in 2011. Timing is everything in life. I then began to read books on writing, plotting, character development, dialogue, story boards, advice, tips and writing the breakout novel. I was ready for those books and didn't mind going back with edits and rewrites. I found a great editor and with her fantastic ideas, suggestions and questions, I continued to edit and rewrite passages, scenes and chapters.

I still edit my novel (when do you know you're done?) with Puerto Rican music playing softly in the background and am surrounded by family photos, many of my grandmother and my mother, taken on the island and in the US. All their beautiful smiling faces encourage me, nod in agreement, laugh with me, and give me that look that says to me, "Keep going, you're getting closer."

Peace and love,

Ellie

P.S. I took the above photo on my most recent visit to Puerto Rico last December in beautiful Rincon.