The Fall of 1969 and The Winter of 1973

by RS on May 21, 2013

I used to have this fantasy years ago about disappearing, and restart my life with a new identity and personal history. Of course that will never happen because I blog, I have Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as LinkedIn. For someone who borders on the “I want to be alone” edge, I have marked my spot in the various social media venues, and that makes me easy to be found. So I can’t hide from the IRS, the Feds, collection agencies, angry ex-boyfriends, furious wives, future stalkers, curious classmates, or family members.

Now don’t get the impression that I don’t welcome outreach from friends from the past or from members of my family. Those are always lovely surprises and when I get an email or a message on Facebook, I’m flattered that the person made the effort to find me, but then again it’s pretty easy. Narcissist that I am, I have self-portraits plastered all over the interwebs. So, really, there is no hiding for me.

This desire for anonymity strangely dredges memories of my youth in Spain. As I wrote in the Summer of 1969, my mother and I continued to stay in Spain because Americans were being murdered by drugged-out hippies in their homes (well, to be more precise, in two neighborhoods in Los Angeles, CA). And my mother—who had survived the Spanish Civil War in the hot, red zone of Asturias—was no way in hell planning to put her child or herself in danger (at least that was the party line for years). So off we went to Durango—in the Basque country—to stay with my uncle Luis, my aunt Anjelita, and my two cousins Mertxe and Koldo.

And here’s the irony—my mother felt safer in the Basque country where the organization of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA, is based. According to Wikipedia, since 1968 ETA has been held responsible for killing 829 individuals, injuring thousands and undertaking dozens of kidnappings. From Wikipedia, here’s a rundown:

Founded at the end of July 1959 as Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Freedom) by students frustrated by the moderate stance of the Basque Nationalist Party. ETA held their first assembly in Bayonne, France, in 1962, during which a “declaration of principles” was formulated and following which a structure of activist cells was developed.Subsequently, Marxist and third-worldist perspectives developed within ETA, becoming the basis for a political program set out in Federico Krutwig’s 1963 book Vasconia, which is considered to be the defining text of the movement. In contrast to previous Basque nationalist platforms, Krutwig’s vision was anti-religious and based upon language and culture rather than race. ETA’s third and fourth assemblies, held in 1964 and 1965, adopted an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist position, seeing nationalism and the class struggle as intrinsically connected.

ETA’s first killing occurred on 7 June 1968, when Guardia Civil member José Pardines Arcay was shot dead after he tried to halt ETA member Txabi Etxebarrieta during a routine road check. Etxebarrieta was chased down and killed as he tried to flee. This led to retaliation in the form of the first planned ETA assassination: that of Melitón Manzanas, chief of the secret police in San Sebastián and associated with a long record of tortures inflicted on detainees in his custody. In December 1970, several members of ETA were condemned to death in the Proceso de Burgos (“Burgos Trial”), but international pressure resulted in their sentences being commuted (a process which, however, had by that time already been applied to some other members of ETA).

In early December 1970, ETA kidnapped the German consul in San Sebastian, Eugen Beilh, in order to exchange him for the Burgos defendants. He was released unharmed on Christmas Eve.

Nationalists who refused to follow the tenets of Marxism-Leninism and who sought to create a united front appeared as ETA-V, but lacked the support to challenge ETA.

The most significant assassination performed by ETA during Franco’s dictatorship was Operación Ogro, the December 1973 bomb assassination in Madrid of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s chosen successor and president of the government (a position roughly equivalent to being a prime minister). The assassination had been planned for months and was executed by placing a bomb in the sewer below the street where Carrero Blanco’s car passed every day. The bomb blew up beneath the politician’s car and threw it five stories into the air and over the top of a nearby building onto a balcony in a nearby courtyard.

For some in the Spanish opposition, Carrero Blanco’s assassination i.e. the elimination of Franco’s chosen successor was an instrumental step for the subsequent establishment of democracy.

I don’t want to portray my mother as an extremist or a terrorist sympathizer, but as a consequence of the Spanish Civil War, and what she witnessed as a child, she had no love for Franco and his henchmen. So if a Guardia Civil officer or any official of the dictatorship was killed by ETA, it was justified because, from her point of view, the Guardia Civil and any of Franco’s thugs were equivalent to stormtroopers, the SS, and the Gestapo.

What has any of this have to do with being found via the Internet? Absolutely nothing with the exception of this: My cousin Mertxe, the one who lives in the Basque country emailed me on Facebook over the weekend. We haven’t been in touch since 1969 when my mother and I stayed a month with her family in Durango. Her email was a wonderful and welcome surprise, and now for the past few days, we’ve been emailing back and forth. And I hope that sometime in the near future I’ll be able to travel to Spain and reacquaint myself with my Basque family members.

Oh, as for the Winter of 1973 that’s alluded to in the title? Well, the day we landed at Barajas airport in Madrid was the day Carrero Blanco himself took flight. When my mother learned of the news, she said with a smug smile of satisfaction spreading across her face, “Bienvenida, Tere.”

 

{ 0 comments }

It’s All In The Voice Contest

by RS on May 16, 2013

The beautiful and talented Heather Webb of Between the Sheets  is throwing another contest. This one centers on voice. We are submitting the first 250 words and then it’s a blog hop with other participants who will provide feedback to improve it. Once revisions are completed, off they go to Heather to judge.

I posted the original prologue back in February 2011, and it has changed quite a bit. First, it’s no longer from the narrator’s point-of-view. Second, I changed the dates. Third, I added more information,  and cut out some superfluous stuff. The reason I made this drastic change was that I wanted right from the beginning for Alvah to have a larger role. So now without much further ado, here are the first 250 words of Julius.

The Lower Eastside, November 2008

I am watching you, and have been for a long time. The time isn’t right to make my presence known, but soon, soon I will be here to guide you, to be the confidante who listens to you; to be your friend. We are kindred spirits, you and I, no matter how separated we have been by decades, distance, and death.

We are comrades.

I watch you sitting in the redwood gazebo in the small, neighborhood park that preserves the memory of the late Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  Your beloved terrier is whining, pawing at your booted legs. He wants to nestle in your warm embrace. You glance at the sky. It is gray-white—typical of New York winters.

It looks like it might snow.

And you remember.

You remember that first time you saw Sing-Sing that it was a day—like today—a cold, gray-white Sunday.

It was 1980: the year that Israel and Egypt established diplomatic relations; President Jimmy Carter boycotted the Olympics held in Moscow, and the US minimum wage was $3.10. Yet none of this mattered to you because you were only ten years old.

Your grandfather had fetched you from a birthday party and you were heading back to Chappaqua—back to the old, creaky cottage that sagged with the burden of its occupants’ history. It had been your home since you were three years-old when your grandparents brought you from Paris to live with them.

And there you have it. Be kind, be gentle; my ego is fragile.

{ 28 comments }

A Writing Education via Blogs

by RS on May 15, 2013

For the past few years, I’ve been reading a number of blogs that focus on writing. I wish I had discovered these before I spent thousands of dollars taking workshops.

For the purpose of this post, I want to discuss three recent topics that resonated with me. The first one is from Writer Unboxed titled “Rules and Tools” by Dave King. Dave writes of suggested guidelines and the danger of turning them into rules (Never write a prologue! Don’t include a flashback! Sentences should be no longer than a tweet!). Dave succinctly says:

Rules are made to be obeyed. Tools are made to do specific tasks. They’ll do one thing well, and another not so much. Once you know what various tools can and can’t do–what’s in your toolbox–you can pick the right tool for the job.

One the rule that  is always on the top of a list to avoid  is the prologue–a rule that Elmore Leonard  stated in his “10 Rules of Good Writing.” But Dave says the following:

Prologues are certainly the wrong tool for the sort of terse, immediate writing Leonard usually does. But for other kinds of stories, they can foreshadow some key event and generate tension as readers anticipate what’s to come. A prologue showing some major development that happened before the main story begins can be an efficient way to lay in background. Dick Francis started Whip Hand with a prologue that did nothing more than introduce the main character – through a dream sequence, no less. (“Avoid dream sequences” is another popular rule.) Prologues can be useful tools, depending on what you want to do. And so can dreams.

If you’re a frequent reader, you know that I open Julius with a prologue. I’ve been going back and forth whether it should be a prologue or part of a chapter, but after reading this post I feel justified to keep it as I originally intended: a prologue because it sets the foundation for the story.

The second blog that had me nodding was Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds. Today’s post was 25 Things You Should Know About Outlining. Chuck writes pretty much what I’ve encountered, especially point nine:

A GOOD OUTLINE DEMANDS FLEXIBILITY

It’s okay to leave room in your outline for things to change. It’s even okay to leave sections of your outline with big blinky question marks and hastily scrawled notes like NO I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS HERE BUT IT INVOLVES VAMPIRE SEX AND KARATE. An outline must bend with the winds of change, but it must not break.

I tend to take things too literally so when I began to outline and the story drifted into a different direction, I panicked because it wasn’t following my strict outline no matter how much I was forcing the story. I finally determined that I needed to be flexible because what I had envisioned wasn’t logical (and I learned not to force things, but in general that’s a guideline we should always follow with just about everything in life, right?)

Beyond the Margins post was a special treat. Erika Robuck, author of the new novel Call Me Zelda writes of the importance of objects in a story and what they symbolize:

Using a physical object in fiction as a manifestation of theme can act as a hand extending from the page, pulling the reader further into the story. Physical objects trigger multiple senses: an old pink sofa with worn arm rests might smell like one’s grandmother’s perfume or a college dorm after-party. If it is placed well, the object will serve the story.

In Julius, Corinne treasures a signed, first edition of Alvah Bessie’s memoir Men in Battle. Corinne admires the men of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, for their bravery, for fighting that “good fight” to beat fascism, but most of all,  she admires their loyalty, keeping true to their convictions no matter the betrayals they later encountered during the Cold War.

As I continue through my rewrite, I’ve discovered much what other writers have blogged about and shared, but for the individual who wants to try his or her hand to write a novel, this is what I suggest: Before you spend money on courses and how-to books (like I did) —STOP. Check these three blogs, read the posts, check their blog rolls, and subscribe to these sites via an RSS reader.

All your questions will be answered about craft, tools of the trade, and much more. I wish that I had saved myself the expense of signing up for classes (with the exception of one where I made a very good friend). They were expensive, and I didn’t learn much (plus I always felt that there was a mean-spirited competitive vibe going on between the instructor and the other students. So not a good experience for me, but that’s a completely different story).

And there you have it. Read, learn, and write.

{ 2 comments }

← Previous Entries