Chapter2 Lexington:Anatomy of a Novel

 

The second chapter of my novel Lexington: Anatomy of a Novel. The main character is a British baker in the 1770s who decides join the army and gets caught up in the American Revolution. The book is available at Amazon and other on-line book stores as an e-book or in paper back. Unlike most novels it includes the writer's notes.

 

Chapter 2

Geneva, Switzerland

September

 

BACK IN SWITZERLAND, I decided not to put off writing a novel about an unknown British soldier who died in that first battle any longer. He would be fictitious out of necessity. The events would be accurate.

 

Time to start research using blogs, internet, websites, books and podcasts. I would need to reach out to historians to help me create characters and situations within the context of reality.

 

September always seemed to be more of the start of a new year than January 1. Probably all those years beginning school, my daughter doing the same in September. When I worked corporate the best time for launching something new was when people were back from summer holidays.

 

When I first moved to Switzerland, everyone told me how beautiful the autumns were. September arrived and the leaves turned—to yellow not red. Pretty yes, but a letdown in comparison to New England’s vivid reds.

 

Living in Switzerland is like living in a postcard. When we leave our Geneva studio, we see the Jura mountains. Turn around, the Alps are visible. It’s a five-minute meander to Lac Léman. The lake’s colors can be anything from a light- to navy blue to green. If the Bise blows, the high waves churn the water to a surly brown.

 

 

Autumn wasn’t totally a new writing start. I was doing a final polish of Day Care Moms, strengthening my verbs, doing a global search for ‘ly’ to eliminate as many adverbs as possible, rearranging paragraphs and checking for continuity. When one spends a year plus on a book, it is possible to have a person that was six feet four in chapter two shrink to five foot nine in chapter forty-eight.

 

My Day Care Mom characters Ashley, Sally, Brenda, Anne-Marie and Maura were packing their bags and moving out of my brain where they had lived for the past sixteen months.

 

 

They were being replaced by one of the two unknown British soldiers under that gravestone in Lexington. For some reason that I don’t understand, I only wanted to feature one. The idea of creating a plausible life for a British soldier that would be killed at Lexington grew into an obsession.

 

My knowledge of early American history was rusty. When I was researching Murder in Caleb’s Landing, I had bought The Complete Works of the Mayflower Pilgrims by Caleb Johnson, which included every document from the early colonists. The book is almost three inches thick.

 

Reviewing it for information for my potential novel revealed two major problems. My novel was to be from the point of view of the British, not the Americans; the British wanted to suppress the uprising. The second was that the documentation in Johnson’s book stopped long before the Revolution.

 

I e-mailed Minute Man National Park asking about the British soldiers who had died. Within a day, Ranger Jim Hollister wrote back saying that they didn’t know. He told me that each year the British Consul General based in Boston laid flowers at the gravestone. That so fascinated me, it triggered a second plot for the novel, a modern aspect. Little did I know how Ranger Jim and I would send lots of e-mails back and forth. I would see him in videos that would provide so many details that I wanted to hug him, which, between distance and a pandemic was impossible.

 

He told me about a blog by J.J. Bell, www.boston1775.blogspot.com, with so much information about what Boston was like prior to the start of hostilities I felt as if I were living there. It was then I made a commitment to write the novel instead of just thinking about it.

 

Unlike my other novels, when I had a good idea of the plot before I started, there was so much I didn’t know. I wanted to be as historically accurate as possible without losing the tension. I joked to my husband I couldn’t have General Gage, Governor of Massachusetts in 1775, communicate with his London superiors via the internet. I could, however, make sure he responded in the novel to the communiques he received via a slow ship.

 

I needed to create a British soldier.

 

I am a restless sleeper and often wake around two in the morning and stay awake for a couple of hours. Often my best ideas come at that time. I don’t need a notebook to jot them down. Even if I did, I might have trouble reading my writing.

 

The idea of a woman kept jumping into my head. It was as if she were sitting on my bed saying, “Use me, use me.” She wouldn’t go away. My Third Culture Kid novels combine the past and present, but I wasn’t planning to do this for Lexington. I gave up and invited her in.

 

I named her Daphne after a British friend whom I’d been e-mailing before going to sleep. Maybe I could play with the Daphne character while I was trying to find my British soldier and doing my research. I wanted to align the character with the past but had no idea how to do it.

 

I did know she needed to be British. I decided to make her a new arrival to Boston as the wife of the British Consul General. She would be a newlywed.

 

I tried to contact the British Consulate in Boston. They did not respond to e-mails and their phone system was one with multiple numbers to choose from, and as I worked my way through the menu I was timed out. Good thing my international calls are part of my telecom package. Google images were of limited help.

 

I decided to write around what I didn’t know and have the British Consul General in Boston housed temporarily on Commonwealth Avenue because of repairs to the normal house used by the Consulate.

 

 Visit D-L Nelson's website at www.dlnelsonwriter.com. Her novels are available at Amazon and other on-line bookstores.