The Lighter Side of German Music
When most of us outside Germany think of German music — especially the kind that was popular in the 1930s — we tend to go stereotypical: Wagner, “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” “Deutschland Über Alles,” and so on. But German Jazz-Age pop could be just a fluffy and fizzy as its American or French cousins. As it turns out, […]
The End of the Beginning
In the end, it would always come down to this…I finished the first full draft of Bluejay Rises this morning. That doesn’t mean the book’s finished. (See this post’s title.) What it does mean is that it exists as a completed work. What happens now? I let it marinate for a couple of weeks while […]
Kate’s Songbook: Chapter 4
In Chapter 4, Kate has escaped from Oran after doing something unwise and ends up at Oran’s civilian airport, where she’s taken into custody by the local gendarmes and turned over to Inspecteur Principal Agassiz of the Sûreté Nationale. Luckily for Kate, this isn’t the first time Agassiz has handcuffed her and they’ve played bad […]
Why historical fiction is hard: Part 1
(First in a series of occasional rants about how confounding this genre can be.) …wherein our author discovers that even what should be easy is not easy. Our heroine Kate, an aviatrix, lands in the Barcelona of 1936. (Yes, there’s a war on.) I figured this would be easy — it’s called Barcelona Airport, she […]