Kathleen Heady's Blog, page 4

Fiction Meets Real Life

In my latest novel "Lydia's Story," the main character helps a group of Jewish children escape France during World War II. I just came across this website that shows the real life route across the Pyrenees that many people -- Jews, downed RAF and American airmen, and others in danger from the Nazis -- followed to reach the safety of Spain.
I found it humbling to read about the dangers faced along the way. The Pyrenees are no easy mountains to cross even today.
My fictional characters exist to honor those people who risked their lives to escape, and especially those who helped others escape.
http://www.ariege.com/histoire/chemin...

Special Offer for "Lydia's Story"

"Lydia's Story" available on Kindle for special price of $3.95 for a limited time.
http://www.amazon.com/Lydias-Story-Lo...

When a Book is More Than a Story

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I have probably read thousands of books during my lifetime, but I don’t ever remember reacting to a book as I did to this one.

The Language of Flowers is the story of a young woman who was abandoned as an infant, and lived in a series of foster homes, never becoming part of a real family. The woman who almost adopted her taught her the language of flowers, the meanings assigned to flowers during the Victorian era, when red roses came to symbolize love, yellow roses infidelity, and most other plants you can imagine. The story begins when Victoria is eighteen and is released from “the system” to live on her own. She refuses to look for a job and ends up sleeping in a park, until she is hired by a florist. The story alternates between her progress as an adult and her childhood, when she is moved through the foster care system, and finally, through a tragic sequence of events, becomes “unadoptable” at age ten.

These two parallel stories held so much tension that I could not put the book now, but at the same time, if something horrible was going to happen to Victoria, I didn’t want to know. Just like Victoria’s conflicting emotions about the people in her life, I loved and hated this book at the same time.





View all my reviews

Killing a Cockroach with Kindness

I was walking through the hallway of a local high school where I sometimes substitute teacher, and encountered a teaching standing in the hallway holding a small spray bottle in her hand and staring into a trash can.

"I'm trying to kill a cockroach with essential oils," she said. She gave it another squirt. "Or at least make it drunk enough that I can step on it and it won't crawl up my leg."

"You need a cat," I commented. My cats make short work of any kinds of varmints that they find.

The teacher continued to stare at the cockroach, giving it an occasional squirt of the essential oils. "We are out in the country. Well, we aren't in the city. What is a cockroach doing here?"

The encounter made me think about how we react when we find something in an unexpected place. The teacher thought that cockroaches belonged in the city. It surprised me to see someone spraying a cockroach with scented spray. Somehow a discovery like this jolts us out of our everyday routine and forces us to think in a new way, at least for a moment. This is a valuable experience for writers in particular, but it works for anyone. We all need to be prodded every once in a while to just look at life and laugh or cry, or both.

As Ferris Bueller said, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

What Makes a Great Book?

Essentially, a great book is one that grabs you on the first page and doesn't let go, not even at the end, because you walk around thinking about it for the next couple of days.

A great book also is written with beautiful language. The author knows how to play with words to create sensations that go beyond the story. The words make you fall in love with language. This can happen in any language, and even in translations. Few novels are as beautifully written as One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but my Spanish isn't good enough to read it in the original.

A great book has characters that make you empathize with them, even if they are nothing like you. When Sydney Carton sacrifices his life for his love in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, it touches my heart. "It is a far, far better thing . . ."

As a former English teacher, I am attracted to books with a strong universal truth. Some of my favorites are Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits, and Kate Mosse's The Winter Ghosts. And a new one with a strong theme of family and the secrets we all keep in The Hiding Place by David Bell.

A great book needs to stand the test of time. It may become dated, but there is still a truth within it that means something to readers. I think of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. It never failed to delight me when high school sophomores, even within the last ten years, would say how they loved Holden Caulfield, and he reminded them of themselves.

A great book can be old, new, an established classic, or a genre book like The Hiding Place.

What are your "best books?"

The Importance of Reading Fiction

I read an interesting article in the New York Times yesterday entitled "What Should Children Read?"

Whatever the "experts" who have written these national standards might think, reading fiction has a value far more than just time-filling entertainment that has no practical use and cannot help in the job market.

We have become obsessed with thinking of education as a road to employment, and have forgotten that education is a road to life. If you do not have the tools to think critically and examine your own life, your potential in any career will be minimal.

Reading fiction allows us to learn about other lives and other times and apply them to our own. It allows us to compare our experiences with the experiences of characters who have been created by writers to make a point. Reading fiction allows us to learn to appreciate the beauty of the language, and to be articulate speakers and writers. And reading fiction is often just plain fun.

To cite just one example, the generation that has grown up reading the Harry Potter books has learned more than just a story about a school for magicians. They have learned about friendship, the struggle between good and evil, bravery, sorrow, disappointment and many other human emotions and circumstances. All of these factors are important for grown-ups as well as children. And they have learned all of this while enjoying that great story of the school for magicians, which I think makes it more meaningful.

For some reason, the English classes in the high school I attended did not assign novels to read as a class. My parents brought me up with weekly visits to the library, so I read anyway. Later as an English teacher, I taught many of the classics, but also encouraged students to read for fun. Instead of cutting back on the reading of fiction, we should encourage students to read more.

Some of my favorites are To Kill a Mockingbird, Jane Eyre, A Tale of Two Cities, Of Mice and Men, Slaughterhouse Five. There are many more, of course, and they teach timeless truths that are so much more meaningful because they are fiction.

Fiction may not be true, but it is the truth.

What novels have meant the most to you?

NaNoWriMo

This year, for the first time, I participating in National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. The goal is to write 50,000 words during the month of November. This is a pretty short novel, but a darned good start.

I have been so caught up in the release and promotion of Lydia’s Story that I haven’t been doing much “real” writing lately. I have not been working on anything new. True — I have some unfinished pieces hiding away on my computer that I could resurrect and turn into something readable, but I had the urge to work on something new, something challenging.

So I am devoting the month of November to writing 50,000 words of my new project, which has the working title Magic Words. The title may have more to do with me typing the words than the actual words themselves!

I did a little basic arithmetic and figured out that to write 50,000 words in a month, I need to write 1,666 words per day. This is not out of reach. When I write a first draft, I write fast. I get the words down. And I do have a plan for this story. I know where I’m going. But since like most people, I have a lot going on in my life, I think this is what will happen: I will try to write 1,666 words each day, but most of the time, I won’t make it. Then every three or four days, I will have a marathon writing day when I will catch up with my goal. As of November 3, I have over 5,000 words.

Anyone else out there doing NaNoWriMo? What are your tricks for reaching your goal? And does the goal matter if it gets you writing?

Reading Outside the Box

I read mostly mysteries and suspense novels, because that is what I write and because I review books for Suspense Magazine. But occasionally I read something outside of those genres. I find that a different type of book and writing style can spark my own writing and stretch my creativity.

Last night I downloaded The Book Thief to my Kindle, as a borrowed book from my library. I have only read a few chapters, but I was struck by the originality of the writing. The first person narrator is Death. He (or she?) tells the story of a young girl, the book thief, who manages to cheat Death more than once.

The story is set in Nazi Germany, so it is clear in what direction this book is headed. But I know that although the story may have been told before, it has not been told in this way.

As a reader or a writer, it is good to move out of the familiar and try something new. I would never have thought of writing from the point of view of Death, but it would be a good writing exercise to write from the point of view of an inanimate object — the cave where the body was found, or the diaries that held the words of Lydia, the main character in my book Lydia’s Story.

As a reader or a writer, what do you do to climb out of the box of familiarity and try something new?

Giving Birth to "Lydia's Story"

My newest novel, Lydia’s Story, is now available all the major book sellers.

If you are a writer, you know what a wonderful rush comes along with writing those words. If you are not a writer, just think of any major project you have embarked on in your life — giving birth to a child, completing a college degree, running a marathon. And as with any major project, the work isn’t done yet. I want people to read my book!

I describe Lydia’s Story as a sequel/prequel to my first novel, The Gate House. I took the main character, Nara Blake, and moved her forward in time by about a year, but then I gave her a challenge. I placed a stack of her great-grandmother’s diaries in her hands, and posed a dilemma. The family has always held that Lydia and Allan Roberts died in the London Blitz in 1940 or 1941, but the diaries go up to 1942. As Nara reads and learns more about her ancestors, she finds that she is on a collision course with a brother and sister from France who are also looking for their lost heritage, but theirs are valuable works of art that were lost during World War II.

I loved the research into how the British worked to preserve their precious art works and cultural heritage as well as protect their island from invasion by the Germans. I loved putting the pieces of the novel together, melding past with present, and tying the sections together with Lydia’s diary entries.

My “baby” is out in the world now. I wish her the best. I will support her as best I can, and at the same time, I am ready to start something new.

Why Set My Story in World War II?

My newest novel, Lydia's Story, is a sequel/prequel to my first novel, The Gate House. It is a sequel because the same main characters, Nara Blake and her family, continue their story of life in a small English town, where too much seems to happen. It is a prequel because the book also tells the story of Nara's great-grandparents, who died in World War II under mysterious circumstances.

I decided to tell this partially historical narrative because I wanted to bridge the family history in Nara's family, as I try to bridge that history in my own family.

My dad was an American soldier in World War II. He and my mom married in 1942, and after three weeks of marriage, he went overseas to North Africa and Europe and did not return for three years. I have always considered this one of the greatest love stories I have every heard. At the same time, I am fascinated with British history, and the heroism of the British during World War II is beyond remarkable. We in the United States do not know what it is like to have our country bombed consistently for months on end. We have never had to send our children away to the country to be safe from the bombing, as Londoners did during World War II.

I put together my thoughts and feelings about that remarkable period of history, and the result is Lydia's Story.

Coincidentally, my own great-grandmother's name was Lydia, and she was half Welsh. But that's another story.