Hello, all! It's been too long since I wrote, as tends to happen. In fact, I have been writing -- just not blogging. To be specific, I wrote another novel, my first foray into non-romance historical fiction. It's also my first tentative movement toward telling any of the amazing stories about my family and how its members survived long enough for me to exist.
I've always been intimidated by the thought of trying to do justice to these stories, and by the related presumptuous task of putting words in the mouths/thoughts in the head of people I know and love (including some I love from across the unfathomable gap between the living and the dead). This story, however, while possibly crucial to my father's family's survival, springs from an incident in the autumn of 1938 that took no more than ten minutes from start to finish. The central character: a Berlin policeman about whom my father and brothers learned only three salient and contradictory facts:
-- He wore, under his jacket and uniform, the brown shirt of a Nazi storm trooper.
-- He witnessed a bicycle accident that one of my uncles caused, heard my father's confession that he and his brothers were involved, and further heard my father admit that they were Jewish.
-- Rather than detaining them, he quietly but insistently commanded them to "DISAPPEAR."
Why did he make that decision? How could it possibly spring from the life story that led him to don that brown shirt?
For that matter, what was his name?
I wrote a novel trying to solve this puzzle. And I gave the policeman the name "Hans." The novel is, aptly enough, called The Decision, and the Kindle edition is now available for preorder.
I've also collaborated with watercolor artist Tomasz Mikutel, who illustrated my previous picture book Wind, Ocean, Grass, to tackle my first nonfiction picture book, a biography of the great Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo. This book, A Boy Who Made Music, is available for preorder in paperback and will soon be available (again, for preorder) in hardcover. I'm moderately optimistic about putting out a Braille edition as well -- which is very much appropriate because Rodrigo went almost entirely blind at the age of three. (In a future post, I'll talk about how the conventional picture book deals with that transition.)
But wait -- didn't I tease a resurrected website? Well, yes. I don't remember just how it happened, but I stopped by my website several weeks ago and discovered, to my horror, that the newsletter signup link didn't work. Or rather, it worked to send visitors to the wrong place, a page for book excerpts and other extras. Which may explain why nobody has signed up for my newsletter recently.
The obvious fix didn't work for some mysterious reason, so I rebuilt the link. While I was poking around, I checked my master list of book reviews and saw that it was woefully out of date -- so I redid that page and either updated or added all the particular books' review pages as well. PHEW. I also cleaned up the home page a bit and added the two upcoming books to it. So to reward me for all that work, how about dropping by and (to quote a certain blog name) looking around?
