Elizabeth Winthrop's Blog, page 7

Waiting to Hear #2

I heard.

I received an intelligent, thoughtful, incisive first read on my new book, a memoir about my mother’s early life and her meeting my father in England during World War II.

Here’s what my first reader said.

I read this with great pleasure.

Hooray.

I would like more of you in the book, more about your mother’s decline and your feelings about it.

I expected this. After years of hiding my feelings inside my fictional characters, it’s time to step out from behind the curtain.

Less genealogy.  Your Aunt Dolly and her daughter Ave especially tiresome. (Forgive me). 

I do forgive her.  Aunt Dolly and her daughter deserve a paragraph, not pages.

There WAS real suspense about whether your father and mother would get married after all the obstacles.

This was the best comment of all.  I mean, here I am, the daughter telling the story, so surely the reader knows from the first page of the book, that my parents did manage to get married and have me.  But, during my thirty-plus years of publishing, I’ve learned a few things.  If the story is compelling enough, the reader will stick with you even though she knows the ending already. She just doesn’t know how the characters got there.  That’s where your hook lies.

This is my second attempt at writing my family history.  The first, a short memoir piece entitled DON’T KNOCK UNLESS YOU’RE BLEEDING: Growing Up in Cold War Washington has garnered some lovely responses, the best of which has been, “It ended too soon. Tell me more.” I intend to do that, to go back to my childhood and recount some of the crazy adventures of “the children of spies.” But first, I want the reader to see where it all began… the story of a Yankee soldier, rejected by his own army, who joins the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and meets a 16-year-old British girl in a baronial castle in Yorkshire.

So, it’s revision time.  Hooray!  My favorite part of writing is working with the words on the page/screen –pacing the piece which means expanding in one place and cutting in another; finding the threads I thought were obvious and tying them more tightly together for the reader; searching for the best title; rejoicing over the lovely penciled cheers in the margin where I grabbed this generous and helpful first reader.  You know who you are. Thank you.

Onward…

 

 

Blog Tour # 2

The blog tour continues.  What’s a blog tour? A blog tour gives those on the tour a chance to meet different authors by way of their blogs. The Next Big Thing began in Australia. Each week a different author answers specific questions about his or her upcoming book. The answers are posted on author’s blogs. Then we get to tag another author. On and on it goes. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Next Big Thing went around the world a couple of times. The tour came to me from Oregon.  I was tagged by my friend Eric Kimmel. He was tagged by his friend Pamela Smith.

Next up is Tanya Stone.  You can read her answers to the blog tour questions here.  It’s been fun doing this… a little like a relay race where one runner tosses the baton to the next.  Writers work alone so much of the time that we’re always devising ways to connect with each other, be it in person or virtually. Read Tanya’s blog to find out who she’s tossing the baton to, who’s waiting to take off up the track.

Waiting to hear…

So I’m waiting for my first reader to get back to me about my new manuscript. This is the book I’ve been working on for years. I didn’t weigh it when I turned it in to her, but it’s 312 pages, about 90,000 words. That’s a lot of words. Does anybody care as much as I do?  No, of course not.  I once had a writing teacher who warned us that there’s always a little voice in a writer’s head that says, “Why write a book when you can go around the corner and buy one?”  Now, you don’t even need to go around the corner. You can just click a few buttons.

Nobody might care about the people in this family history/memoir  as much as I do, but hopefully my story telling will engage some readers and those will tell others and the book will find its way to an audience.  That’s what’s happened to so many of my novels. But this is a memoir and I’ve been finding it hard to figure out what’s on the page and what’s still in my head.  If you’re writing about a character, you’re coming to the page as fresh as the reader. But if you’re telling the story of your parents and their love affair in England during the War and you’ve heard versions of these tales over the years, you and the reader are starting off in different places.  I keep wanting to look up from the screen and ask my future reader, “Wait, have I told you that already?” Or, “do you need to know all this?”

So that’s why I’ve turned it over to a person I consider my ideal reader.  She doesn’t know the story of my family, she will come to the page with a fresh eye and ear, and she’ll tell me where I’ve said too much and where I’ve said too little.

In the meantime, I wait.

A Blog Tour!

The Next Big Thing Blog Tour

The Next Big Thing is an author blog tour. What’s a blog tour? A blog tour gives those on the tour a chance to meet different authors by way of their blogs. The Next Big Thing began in Australia. Each week a different author answers specific questions about his or her upcoming book. The answers are posted on author’s blogs. Then we get to tag another author. On and on it goes. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Next Big Thing went around the world a couple of times.

The tour came to me from Oregon.  I was tagged by my friend Eric Kimmel. He was tagged by his friend Pamela Smith. I’ll tell you whom I’m tagging at the end.

Now for the questions.

What is the working title of your next book?

Oh dear, I was afraid you’d ask that.  Until yesterday it was called: MY MOTHER’S WARS, Decoding A British Childhood.  But in March, a new memoir is coming out with that title, so I’m going to have to rethink.  All suggestions welcome.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

When my mother’s memory started to fail, I realized that she’d had an amazing life, but one I knew little about. She was born in Gibraltar of all places, was evacuated to London during World War II, worked as a decoding agent for MI5, a division of the British Secret Intelligence Service, and married my father at the age of 18.  Six months after the wedding, she crossed the North Atlantic in a convoy, pregnant with my oldest brother.  It’s a wildly romantic story, but shot through with the dark undertones of war.

What genre does your book fall under?

Family history.  Memoir.  It’s actually part memoir and part reconstruction. What I couldn’t glean from my mother’s stories and my father’s letters home during the war, I discovered through travel, interviews with their surviving friends and masses of research. Unlike most of my other works, it’s not a children’s book and it’s not fiction although I use the tools of a fictionwriter to tell the story.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

My father looked very much like Robert de Niro, but he’s too old for the part.  Bradley Cooper would do it beautifully.  As for female actors to play my 18-year-old mother?  Anybody blonde, slim, smart and gorgeous. If she’s not English, she should do a good British accent.

Who is publishing your book?

Soon to be revealed. It will be going to my agent soon once it’s polished and “perfect”.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Four years to circle the idea and two to finish a full draft. I took time off to write a short memoir piece about my father, Stewart Alsop and his brother, Joseph. They were famous journalists in Washington and when a play (THE COLUMNIST by David Auburn) was produced about them last spring on Broadway, I decided to tell my version of their story.  It’s called DON’T KNOCK UNLESS YOU’RE BLEEDING, Growing Up in Cold War Washington and it’s published on all the ebook platforms under my other writing name, Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My mother.  She hated losing her memory in old age and about five years ago, I realized that although my father’s story had been told often, both by him in a memoir called Stay of Execution and by others in biographies, nobody had told my mother’s story of growing up in wartime. As a ten-year-old she witnessed one of the first battles of the Spanish Civil. Her uncle was killed in World War I and her brother in World War II, and she survived the bombings in London.

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

The love story. My father was turned down by the American Army and so he enlisted in the British Army and joined the King’s Royal Rifle Corps.  He and my mother met in an enormous baronial castle in Yorkshire, England on the very day my uncle Ian, my mother’s only brother, was killed thousands of miles away in the western desert just before the second battle of El Alamein. Also, my father’s family is closely related to the Roosevelts, so I imagine it’s the kind of story that will engage the fans of Downton Abbey.  Imagine aristocracy from opposite sides of the Atlantic meeting during the war. Cue the swelling movie music.

Eric tells me I can tag more than one author. For now I’m tagging the amazing and talented Tanya Stone.  Her answers will be up soon.

Meanwhile, check out Eric’s blog from last week here.

 

Do You Love the Story or the Physical Book? Or both?

Here’s a provocative article by Joe Queenan about his 6,128 favorite books.

As for me, I love books in all forms. Even though my bookshelves       hold some memorabilia and knick knacks, in general, they are filled with books and for a relatively small apartment, I have many bookshelves.  I fought the idea of a Kindle or Nook in the beginning, but as with many others, I caved when I was getting on an airplane.  What happened to my reading?  It exploded.  Exactly as Jeff Bezos at Amazon hoped it would.

As quoted by Peter Osnos in this recent article in the Atlantic .    “During a BBC interview the other day, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, in an uncharacteristic moment of revelation, disclosed that the company makes no profit on its various Kindle devices. “We sell the hardware at our cost, so it is break even on the hardware.” Why then is Amazon is so aggressive in its development of ever-more refined e-readers and tablets? “What we find,” Bezos explained, “is that when people buy a Kindle they read four times as much as they did before they bought the Kindle. But they don’t stop buying paper books. Kindle owners read four times as much, but they continue to buy both types of books.” The Bezos strategy is clearly aimed at driving profit margins through hard bargaining with publishers, whose dependence on Amazon as a principal retailer has been growing significantly each year.”

I’m more a story gobbler than a paper/ink/spine lover.  So here’s how I “read” books these days. I read fiction either on my Kindle or in a physical book. I listen to nonfiction books as a devoted audiophile.  I am selective about who reads my audio books and prefer English male voices like John Lee or Stephen Fry. Often they put me to sleep better than a tab of Ambien, but they also allow me to inhale information about historical characters or events that I never would take in through my eyes.  If I miss something in a nighttime listen, I “rewind” and listen again.  I listen to books when I’m walking, when I’m cooking, sometimes when I’m sketching.  Here are a few examples of the non-fiction books I’ve listened to recently: THE RIVER OF DOUBT by Candice Millard, THE WORST HARD TIMES by Timothy Egan, CITIZENS OF LONDON by Lynne Olson,   THE IRREGULARS, Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington by Jennet Conant, AGENT ZIGZAG, DOUBLE CROSS and OPERATION MINCEMEAT by Ben McIntyre.  These are just a few entries in a very long list.

I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon (I won’t go into that here), but I have to admit that, on this score,  Jeff Bezos is right.  Since I bought the Kindle, I’m reading/listening at least twice as much.  Perhaps because virtual books in one form or the other get delivered to my bedside table so quickly and seamlessly, it has “rekindled” my love of reading and my voracious appetite for story.

The Man Who Parachuted into France with my father

A couple of weeks ago I went to Florida to meet Dick Franklin, one of the two men who parachuted into France with my father in 1944.

He and I had knew of each other through a mutual friend, Colin Beavan who’d written a book about the Jedburghs, the clandestine operatives who parachuted into France to connect with the Maquis, the French Resistance.  My father and my uncle both “jumped” in the summer of 1944.  Dick Franklin was the radio operator for Team Alexander, the group of three which included my father, Stewart Alsop, and Rene de la Tousche,  a graduate of St. Cyr, the French military academy. I’ve written about this before and will again, I’m sure.

It was a thrill for me to be able to shake Dick’s hand, to know that he sat next to my father with their legs dangling in the air 2000 feet above occupied France, sixty-eight years ago. He told me stories I never would have known otherwise.  The book I’m writing about that time will be all the much richer for his insights, his memories and his willingness to share them with me.

I am grateful to have met him and delighted we found so much to talk about.   I think my father would be pleased.

An Interview with Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop

Click here for a great interview with Elizabeth about all facets of her writing career.

A WONDERFUL INTERVIEW

I love it when interviewers ask me fun and silly and serious questions. Brittney Breakey has made herself a name on the web with her author interviews at http://authorturf.com/?p=4369.

Here are some highlights:
What is your worst personality characteristic?
Impatience.
How did you learn to ride a bicycle?
With two of my five brothers running along next to me.
Can you share your journey from writing to author?
To put it crudely, ass to chair.
If someone rented a billboard for you, what would you put on it?
She never paid for a review on Amazon.

Go to http://authorturf.com/?p=4369 to check out the rest.

A Wonderful Interview

I love it when interviewers ask me fun and silly and serious questions.  Brittney Breakey has made herself a name on the web with her author interviews at Author Turf.

Here are some highlights:

What is your worst personality characteristic?
Impatience.
How did you learn to ride a bicycle?
With two of my five brothers running along next to me.
Can you share your journey from writing to author?
To put it crudely, ass to chair.
If someone rented a billboard for you, what would you put on it?
She never paid for a review on Amazon.

Go to Author Turf to check out the rest.

 

My Mother’s Crossing, December, 1944

I FOUND IT!  The ship my British mother traveled on when she arrived in New York on January 4, 1945. Here’s a picture of the Royal Mail Cargo Ship DARRO.  I’ve been looking for it for days and finally, thanks to that great invention, the World Wide Web and to websites like Shipspotting and their dedicated volunteers, I found her!

The Darro

A little back story.  My mother and father were married in London on June 20, 1944.  Then my father jumped into France to fight with the French Resistance while my mother worked as a decoding agent for MI5, a division of the British Secret Intelligence Service.  In November, when my father came back from Paris, my mother announced she was pregnant. They wanted the baby born in America and so, tough as it was in wartime, they managed to get her a berth on a ship crossing the North Atlantic in convoy.  My mother thought the ship was called the S.S. Orion, but my research revealed that the Orion never traveled to America.  And the ship manifest on Ancestry lists it as the Darro.  Not the S.S. Darro which was scrapped in 1933, but this Darro, a much more humble refrigeration ship.

Here’s a little bit of the story of the crossing from my mother.  “And the ship casts off and we start to trickle down the Thames River.  So at least it didn’t sink.  There was no planking on the deck because we had run out of wood at the end of the war so it was iron girded. ..Then the pea soup fog came down. This was in the estuary.  The U boats didn’t get up there. The place was mined so you went down a channel.  We sat there for ten days.  Ten days.”

Meanwhile, all the people she loved, including her new husband, were sitting in London where the V-2s had begun to wreak havoc all over again on England.

I always thought she’d exaggerated, but no indeed, thanks to this website, Arnold Hague’s Convoy Database, I learned that her convoy did sit in fog for ten days. She’d boarded that ship on December 14, 1944 and it did not leave the UK until December 24th. So my eighteen-year-old pregnant mother who’d survived four years of war in England crossed the North Atlantic in a convoy dodging U-boats in the hopes of starting a new life in a new country.

I don’t think I could have done it.