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.

 

French Battles

 

Last night we watched a program about Roman museums in French. I felt smug understanding it all. Yesterday, I had a conversation with one of my neighbors in French. I read a French message on FB.

As my mother would have said, "Who'd have thunk it."

My first experiences in French were not happy ones. 

At university I needed four semesters to graduate. The first three were a waste of time. The teacher, I can't call him a prof, covered about 10 pages, but we learned enough about his life to write a biography.

I was married with a man who barely tolerated my going to university and only if all my wifely duties were WELL performed. This was pre-Betty Friedan. I worked 20-30 hours in a dry cleaners and still made Dean's List grades in subjects I loved and I wasn't about to fight not having to study one more minute for the French course.

However, by fourth semester I couldn't take it any more and signed up for an advanced French Modern Drama.

The professor was a woman who lived in Boston and breezed in wearing a full mink coat on any cold day. I knew nothing about Boston at the time, but when I lived there I suspected she lived on Beacon Hill or in another snooty neighborhood.

The class was entirely in French. Oooooppppssss

Fortunately, my best friend was bilingual in French and English. She took the class too. Using her notes and a dictionary I was able to do word for word translations.

I learned about Beckett, Ionesco and more. I loved the content.

All went well until I had to write my first test. She wrote on mine "Me voir."

"WHAT are you doing in this class," she asked in English when I stood before her desk.

I couldn't tell her the truth. She was friends with my first idiot teacher. "I really wanted to know more about modern French drama."

She sat back. "Would you retake the test in English?" I did. She gave me an A-.

For the rest of the course, I was able to write everything in English. She graded me on content not French. I can't remember if I ended up with an A- or a B+ plus an appreciation of French Drama perhaps with the exception of the play "Waiting for Godot" which I've seen several times hoping against hope, Godot would finally show up.

Today it would have been so much easier with translation aps and programs. I wish I could find her and tell her I live in two francophone countries, and I've mastered the language to a functional level. 

Note: Tomorrow I'll publish the second chapter of my novel Lexington: Anatomy of a Novel.

 

 

 

The introduction to 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 1

Lexington, Massachusetts

September 2017

 

 

THE SEPTEMBER DAY was sweater-wearing cool when we arrived at the parking lot of the Minute Man National Park in Lexington, Massachusetts. The trees, dressed in red and yellow, held on to most of their leaves. A few had drifted to the ground making tiny patterns of color, reminding me of my childhood autumns.

 

My husband Rick and I had traveled from Europe where we live part time in Southern France and part time in Geneva, Switzerland.

 

Despite being senior citizens, we’re relatively new newlyweds. This was our memory tour. He had shown me where he had grown up in upstate New York. It was my turn to show him my childhood Boston and its surrounding area. I wanted him to see the battlefield where the first battle of the American Revolution had been fought.

 

Bruce Davidson, an artist friend living nearby, joined us. He was a second-generation friend. His father and I had been lunch buddies for years. My love for Bruce only grew that night in Geneva when he called to tell me his dad had died.

 

At the end of the call, I said, “I’m sorry you lost your dad.” His reply was, “I’m sorry you lost your friend.” His empathy when he was suffering reaffirmed what a kind man he is. Time with Bruce, whether in France or New England, is always a gift.

 

A tour bus pulled in and spit out a flock of men and woman in our age group. One woman looked at the green grass through the battlefield leading to the Visitor’s Center and said in a strong southern accent, “I’m not walking that. There’s nothing to see.” I wanted to tell her, “This is where men died so you could have your American country,” but I didn’t.

 

Like other battlefields I’ve visited, including Bull Run and Normandy Beach, Lexington, is peaceful now. The horror of what happened 245 years before has disappeared. To me, the ghosts of those who sacrificed their lives for a cause are still present. There’s everything to see: peace at a price.

 

Rick, Bruce and I walked toward the battlefield. I’d been there several times. When I lived in the area it was a good place to take visiting friends.

 

As always, I stopped at the gravestone of two unknown British soldiers. As always it bothered me. I wondered who they were. Why had they joined the British army? Did their families, if they had any in Britain, know they had died? What was their life like in the army? Were they really devoted to their King?

 

I’d done half-hearted research to find out more about these unknown men, thinking maybe I could create a novel about them. It had never passed the thinking stage.

 

I had learned the general history of the founding of the United States in school from the American point of view. At university, in an English history class with Professor Peter Blewett, a British native, I was given the other side. It was an awakening. However, his two lectures on the subject several decades ago were not enough to create a novel.

Christmas/Solstice/Revels

 

 I had never heard of the Christmas Revels, but if Dan and Barbara said it would be fun, I was more than happy to buy their extra ticket.

Sanders Hall, where it would be performed, is part of Harvard and has an old English feel to it.

The first act included people in medieval dress, singing and dancing to music from medieval days with some audience participation.

Than the Morris Dancers came out and "Lord of the Dance" was played. The dancers led the entire audience out of the theater where they continued to dance.

I was hooked.

Every year there after, I tried to get tickets, not always easy. Sometimes it was necessary to usher or become a subscriber. Fortunately, one the years I did get them, I was able to include my then Yugoslavian exchange student. That year my daughter was studying in Germany.

Each Christmas in Europe I felt a bit of nostalgia that I couldn't attend.

Right before Covid struck, my husband and I spent Christmas with my daughter in Boston. "Get tickets. Become a subscriber, I'll pay," I told and she did.

It was a snowy and cold evening as we walked across Harvard yard to Sanders. I so wanted Rick to share the experience with Llara and me It was just as wonderful as I'd remembered it. 

Covid shut it down BUT BUT BUT they did a wonderful on-line compilation. There in the coziness of our French flat we were able to see favorite bits and pieces.

2021 they offered it on line. They will do the same this year and we've already subscribed. We will probably watch it on New Years Eve.

To get a bit of the flavor.

               https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6CD5ETkvXU 

To add it to your Christmas celebrations, sign up on line at https://revels.org

Note: Maybe it is appropriate that the late John Langstaff, founder of the Revels, was born 24 December.

 

 

 

Freckles

 When my daughter was in kindergarten, we read a book about a little girl that had freckles.

"I wish I had freckles," she said one night as we did one last cuddle before turning out the light.

The next morning I suggested I give her temporary freckles by putting dots of eye liner on her cheeks. She went to kindergarten proudly with her freckles. Adding freckles became a morning part of getting dressed.

In the supermarket one day, a woman came up to me and my freckled daughter. "You know," she said, "I'm sure you could find a plastic surgeon to remove those freckles.

I know she meant it kindly so I resisted calling her an interfering old biddy or other B terms. I also resisted saying, "And a wash cloth will do the same." Instead I said, "Thank you."