Star Reviews

 

I’ve been reading The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner, and I recommend the book to anyone interested in historical fiction. The story is told by a German American girl whose family was confined at the Crystal City internment camp during World War II and then “repatriated” to Germany while the war was still going on.  A significant part of the story involves her friendship with a Japanese American girl who she met at Crystal City.

My first middle-grade historical novel, Desert Jewels, is about a Japanese American girl who was living in California when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and was subsequently sent to the Topaz internment camp in Utah. So I have always been interested in the internment camps. Since half of my blood traces back to Germany, that connection interested me, too.

The Last Year of the War is heavy on narrative, which is not my favorite writing style, but it works here. I also found one or two minor factual errors about the Japanese “removal,” but the author admits that she has changed a few non-essential facts for the sake of the story. Other than that, her research matches my own for Desert Jewels.

When I heard about The Last Year of the War, I checked it out on Amazon. I started with the “look inside” feature and moved on to the reviews.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I don’t generally bother with four- or five-star reviews. Reading tastes differ, and I’ve been bored by many books that are heavy on good reviews. No, I head straight for the one- and two-star reviews. Among those, I discount the ones that show a general dislike for the author’s style since, as I said, reading tastes differ. Instead, I look to see if any of the reviews point out excessive swearing or explicit sex or—worst of all—bad research.

As you can see from the graphic at the top of this post, there were no one-star reviews, so I moved on to the two-star reviews. Most of them said more about the reviewers than they did about the book, and they made me angry. Or, more accurately, they made me sad that the reviewers lacked understanding of human nature and the value of recognizing the darker days of America’s history.

Those will be the subjects of subsequent blog posts, so stay tuned.

Technology in Contemporary Fiction

 

Contemporary fiction is often defined as fiction that is set in the current time period. It’s a tall order, but my goal is to write my contemporary fiction in such a way that it will seem as current ten years from now as it does today.

This is a fast-changing world, and many things will be different in ten years. Even so, I’d like to minimize the references that date my contemporary fiction. Unless the political scene is important to the story, which it hasn’t been yet, I can avoid that issue. Unfortunately, there are two other constantly changing matters that affect everyone’s lives, and I can’t avoid them. I talked about slang last week, and this week’s post covers technology.

Lately, I’ve been working on two contemporary novels. One is women’s fiction, and, as you would expect, the protagonist has a cell phone that she uses for long conversations with her sister and for texts to and from her business associates. Since she makes her living as an author, however, she also needs a laptop.

Sending a text drives me crazy because it is much slower than typing or even writing something out in longhand. As a writer, using a virtual keyboard would never work when I am in the throes of inspiration and the words come flowing out. I need a traditional keyboard or paper and pen to keep up with my thoughts. I also prefer a larger screen, so a laptop is a must-have for me, and it makes sense that my author protagonist also uses a laptop.

My other contemporary work-in-progress is middle-grade fiction with a seventh grader as my protagonist. She uses a laptop for her schoolwork and has recently gotten her first cell phone.

With technology permeating our society, the only way to eliminate all mention of it is to create characters who are isolated from the world. Since that wouldn’t work with either of my plots, I can’t expect the story to ring true unless the characters make use of the technology that every reader knows they must have. So my characters have laptops and cell phones, and there isn’t much I can do about it. I’m hoping both will still be in use ten years from now, but you never know. The cell phone might turn into a wrist communicator, and the laptop may be replaced by something that takes voice dictation and recites it back. It may even be the same wrist communicator that does it all.

For now, however, that technology isn’t in common use, and the story would be unrealistic if I imported it into novels that take place today. If I want authenticity, I have to go with the technology that people use now.

Sometimes you just have to work with what you have and hope it will be good enough.

Evergreen Dialogue

 I just finished the first draft of a contemporary children’s novel, and one of my biggest challenges was writing the dialogue. I know it seems counter-intuitive, but it was even harder than writing dialogue for my historical fiction. That’s because my historical books are frozen at one particular point in time, while contemporary fiction should normally be timeless.¹

There are exceptions, of course, such as contemporary fiction tied to current events. I’ve also read books where the writers are so intent on showing how well they understand the current generation that their fiction is outdated by the time it gets published.

Most contemporary fiction aims to stay current as time passes, however. This means that the language choices must be evergreen.

This is particularly important when using slang. I checked several sources and they aren’t entirely consistent about the specifics, but they all agree that slang means words that are used in a casual setting but are avoided in a formal one. For example, people often use “okay” or “awesome” in everyday conversation but you rarely find those words in an academic paper or a formal speech.

So why not avoid slang altogether? Unfortunately, that isn’t an option for a writer who wants to present a realistic picture. Take the book I’ve been working on as an example. The protagonist and her friends are preteens, so they would naturally use slang. If they didn’t, the story would become stilted and lose all authenticity. However, many of the slang words in use today are passing fads and would date the book. Even worse, they might not even be understood by my readers five years from now. The trick is to find slang words that have been part of the language for a long time and continue to be used and understood today. While there is no guarantee, this proven slang is more likely to stay evergreen than new words are.

In the graphic at the head of this page, the girl on the left is using current slang of recent origin, while the boy on the right is using evergreen slang.² I can’t predict what will happen with language in the future, of course. Maybe some of the words on the left will catch on and become evergreen, while some on the right might soon fall out of use. Still, if I don’t want my fiction to become dated, I’ll stick with the ones on the right.

Even so, I’m worried that limiting the dialogue to evergreen slang will make my characters sound too grown up. I’ll see how that works itself out in later drafts.

Next week I’ll talk about another issue that can date contemporary fiction.

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¹ For a discussion of slang in historical novels, see my blog posts from January 25, 2021 and February 1, 2021.

² “Adulting” means acting like a grown-up and doing things a real adult would do; “sus” is short for “suspicious”; “fire” is the same as “cool” or “awesome”; and “cooked” means exhausted or overwhelmed. Hopefully I don’t have to define the words on the right.

"Lonely Rock"

 

Twelve-year-old Jessie enjoys living in small-town Maine in 1925, but then her father takes a job as an assistant lighthouse keeper and moves his family to a remote island. Forced to face her fears and deal with loneliness, illness, shipwrecks, and stormy weather, can she survive the storm in her own heart?

That’s the plot summary for my newly-published middle-grade historical novel, Lonely Rock. I rarely use this blog to promote my own books, but this is one of the few exceptions.

Lonely Rock is primarily aimed at girls ages 8–12, but I hope that it will appeal to an older audience, as well. I am one of the many adults still enjoy reading middle-grade fiction, and, if you are too, give it a try.

With Christmas coming up, consider buying Lonely Rock for your daughter, granddaughter, niece, or anyone else on your list. The novel is available both in paperback and for Kindle, and here is the link to it on Amazon.

Lonely Rock: Page, Kaye, Camp, Kathryn Page: 9798990089129: Amazon.com: Books

If you read Lonely Rock and like it (or even if you don’t), please leave a review. Honest reviews are the best way for readers to decide if a book is for them.

Thanks for allowing me this blatant self-promotion.