Rebeca Schiller

Two posts in one day. What’s happening here? Actually, I’m waiting for some people to get back to me with responses to questions for two upcoming articles.

Now that I have this renewed motivation for Julius, I thought it would be fun to list the books I’ve read, currently reading, and used as research. In other words, my novel’s bibliography. Once you go through the titles, you’ll have an idea of the general theme of the story.

Drum roll, please . . . and here they are:

Books:

• Men in Battle, by Alvah Bessie
• Alvah Bessie’s Spanish Civil War Notebooks, edited by Dan Bessie
• Inquisition in Eden, by Alvah Bessie
• Alvah Bessie’s Short Fictions, by Alvah Bessie
• The Un-Americans, by Alvah Bessie
• Spain Again, by Alvah Bessie
• Rare Birds, by Dan Bessie
• The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case, by Sam Roberts
• Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths, by Ilene Phillipson
• New Masses Anthology, edited by Joseph North
• The Inquisition in Hollywood, by

I love research. I can spend hours digging up stuff I know at some point I’ll use somewhere. In Julius, a future story, or even in conversation. My latest obsession is Trotsky. That’s right, Leon Trotsky–revolutionary, part of the Bolshevik troika (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin) and Commander of the Red army.

What’s with the obsession? It appears that I need more conflict between my MC and narrator and her beloved. I made her a very academic Marxist and he’s leaning more towards Trotskyism. Will the two characters knock heads over theory and ideology that it causes a rift in the magazine they plan to publish? That’s my intention. Is Julius a polemic as one person who critiqued the first few chapters accused it to be? Not at all, at least I hope not.

Back to the research . . . because I decided to add this little twist to the story I

For almost three years, I’ve been working on a novel that I’ve titled Julius. It started with the NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month ) challenge to complete a 50,000 word draft in one month. After I completed the task, I saw that the silly and spoofy story I had imagined had become something much more substantial.  Now, two and one-half years after the fact, I’m still researching, rewriting and revising. It’s an endless process.

How did  the story begin and what is it today? For starters, it all had to with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a car drive through the town of Ossining and my father’s comment about prison towns and the electric chair.

How did the novel change? Here’s an example of one sentence I wrote in the very first draft:

Too bad it’s not 1936, we could have run off to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, fight the fascists along