Women's Work

A century ago, life was not easy for the average women.  For those of the Siberian village of Unkuda, as their callused hands and bent backs proved, it was even harder, .

Plowing the Fields

One of my favorite scenes in Banners: For God, Tsar and Russia is where Kataya and Ultia prepare the ground for spring planting.  Since Ukurda was too poor to afford a horse, women pulled the plow.  My grandmother on my mother's side was from Slovakia and she thrilled her nearly forty grandchildren with stories of the old county.  Her most memorable the tale told of her uncle hitching her and the other women to a plow.  She said it wouldn't have been too bad if her uncle would not have whipped them when he thought they slowed down.

Women plowing the fields

In Banners,  I teamed Kataya and the elderly Ultia at the plow's lead.  Kataya, being young and brash, made the plowing into a contest of wills.  Despite her small statue, she was determined to show the men her mettle.  Ultia, hardened by years of labor, sought to slow the pace and lighten the load.  The action and dialogue between the two allowed me to develop a story line leading to their mutual respect.

Milk Maids

Akulina Borsikova was a white widow, one of hundreds of thousands of Russian women whose husbands were in the military or in America.  But, as the village harpies oft told her, she was a fortunate among the unfortunate.  They jealously pointed out Akulina had a father and two sons to help, plus a husband who sent American dollars to buy her a Kholmogory, the best milk cow in the village.

Akulina's milk cow, Belyanka

I used Akulina and Belyanka in many scenes where I wanted to show Akulina's thoughts.  Instead of "she thought" or italicized print, I had Akulina carry on a conversation with her cow.  She bared her soul on many occasions and even once got caught doing so by Commissar Bogdanov leading to a poignant scene.

Churning butter

Akulina used her cow to produce milk and cheese.  Her butter was the best in the village and the source of her pride--her very being.  One of the lowest points in her life came when the state confiscated Belyanka, stripping Akulina not only of her income, but her pride.

Akulina's dairy products came with a steep price.  Not only did she have to milk Belyanka, she had to churn the milk into butter and make cheese for sale and barter.  This was in addition to her normal chores: cooking, planting, weeding, making flax into cheesecloth, washing clothes in the river, harvesting plants for medicine, mucking out the stalls, and keeping her two sons in line.

Though I was very familiar with most of Akulina's chores, I had never milked a cow or washed clothes in a river.  Fortunately our county park system has places where you can experience rural life from hundreds of years ago.  Through them I was able to enhance my writing by learning how to milk a cow, churn butter, make cheese and weave cloth. The park's hands-on demonstrations, however, fell short of having me pull a plow.

Show, Don't Tell

An attempt at good writing 

A well known and oft repeated writing axiom is "Show, don't tell."  As a wanna be writer, I strive to let my words show.  One of my better examples, I hope, is a scene where my character Stepha is starving.  Now I could have writen, "Stepha is starving," but that would have been the easy way out.  So in classic writer's style I showed the reader Stepha's circumstances.

What most people leave

To do so I conjured up at memory of my father eating an apple.  One afternoon, I dropped in at my father's barber shop as he was eating lunch.  The last item in his pail was an apple.  As I watched he ate the fruit down to the core and continued until only the stem remained.  In my youthful brashness I blurted out, "Yuk, you ate the whole thing, seeds and all."

He nodded and flipped the stem into the trash.

"How's come you did that,?" I asked

He replied, "Habit."

I used that memory to construct the scene in Slogans where the villagers are being transported out of Russia to Poland.  Food is scarce and the women have been ordered to let the their children starve to death and save themselves.  In an act of love and defiance, Akulina fed her sons and went hungry.  This is how the scene unfolded to illustrate Stepha's hunger and Akulina's love.

An apple of life

"In another time and place he would have flung the apple into the compost heap to enrich next season’s crop.  At best Stepha would have taken his knife and peeled away the fungus spots, cored the rotten center and dug out the worm holes leaving only the rich meat.  But he was not somewhere else.  So yesterday, when in the car's dim light Mati reached beneath her skirt and miraculously produced the two sorry apples, both he and Vanya grabbed the fruits and clutched them against their chests.  Slowly Stepha brought the blemished orb to his mouth and sunk his teeth deep into its softness and with his lips sucked the juice and devoured his treasure; core, seeds, stem, and worm."

Writing Style

Surprisingly, Ikons: Saint Nicholas the Wonder Worker was well received by an audience I did not anticipate -- women.  Somehow they found it to be a romance novel.  I do not understand how this happened since I do not consider myself romantic at all.  All I wanted to do was tell the story of the people who risked everything, albeit they had little, to come to a totally different world to make a better life for their wives and children.  The story should be familiar to any decedent of immigrants who identifies with the foreign words, foods and places.  Everyone has ancestors who endured hardship, insult, and heartbreak to bring us the lives we now lead.  We owe them enough to tell their story.

Sue Grafton of the The Antioch Writers Conference and members of my writing groups influenced my writing style.  Thanks to Ms Grafton, I always try to use strong verbs and nouns and shy away from adverbs unless absolutely necessary.  She and a gifted writer named Rik Newman, convinced me every action has an associated verb and there are dozens of way to describe walking, looking, standing, etc. without attaching an adverb.  I also learned to end each sentence with its main thought.  But these are just mechanics, how do you write a story someone will read.

My favorite historical-fiction writer is Leon Uris and I would like to do nothing better than emulate his prose.  I chose using the third person, omniscient and told my characters' story from multiple points of view, mostly Massey and Akulina's.  It's a relay race where each character carries the plot for a time before handing it off to the next.  Since Ikons is historical fiction, I added narration describing events outside the sphere of the principle characters.  In Banners and Slogans, I made use of newspaper articles and wire reports to fill in the reader about the era.  Because Ikons was never meant for a wide audience, I included anything I thought was interesting.  The result was more than I expected.

Ikons consists of 21 chapters.  When buying a book, I'll thumb through and check out the index or the chapter headings.  Usually, the they consist of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, ... Boring.  I thought I would give my book an edge by having alluring chapter titles.  I used quotes from within each chapter and hoped they captured the novel's content as well as the buyer's curiosity.

Examples of my chapter headings are:

. 4

Chapter 4: "Why Does the Hen Run From the Rooster?". 4

Chapter 6: “Everyone Has a Cousin in America". 4 
Chapter 8: "An Act of Moral Turpitude"

Chapter 9: "We Go Rock-a-dale" 
C. 4

. 4

Chapter 20: "Mama, Mama, Help Me". 4

Chapter 21: "I Saw Skulls"

Whether this helped or not, I really can't say, but I thought it was cool.  Now armed with a two hundred plus page Word document, I began my search for a publisher.

. 4