Hello again, dear friends.
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been recapping some of the crazy-extreme events of my past year, but there were also some really amazing moments.
To start, an essay I wrote won an Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest’s 88th Annual Writing Competition. In the past, while I haven’t entered every year, each year that I did enter, I submitted a fictional short story. This time, however, I was pre-occupied with other fiction to stop and write a story that would be limited by how many words I could use. So, I wrote an essay on the families who had been in the news for being separated at the border. I used the theme of all the Ancestry and 23-and-Me commercials we see so frequently offering to tell us where our family roots were planted, then did a compare and contrast with the border situation.
While I would have, of course, preferred to place in the top ten “place” winners for the essay category, I’m definitely not complaining about being in the top fifty (forty of whom “win” in name only) category, or the Honorable Mention. After all, being considered “honorable” is nothing to sneeze at.
But my real proud moment accomplishment of 2019 was participating in my second NaNoWriMo and writing “The Changeling of the Third Reich.” I first had the idea for this story in February, 2014. At the time, I was wrapped up in so many other projects, I set this one aside. It was my favorite story idea to date, and I wanted to give it all the research and attention I knew it would take to make the idea really come to life.
As time marched on, life happened, and the day job happened, and then Gastroparesis, and then Lupus happened, and I lost hope that my great idea would ever come to pass. In September, Sister Michelle’s sister was placed in hospice for her metastatic triple negative breast cancer, and Michelle and I planned a trip up to see her. As we planned our trip, we tossed around the idea of stopping in D.C. on our way home to unwind. While there, we would visit the National Holocaust Museum (which I haven’t seen since 2001, and I highly recommend), and I could research some more of the in-depth parts of my story.
That didn’t happen. We got the call a few days earlier than we had planned our visit and were told to “get here now!” There were no flights the rest of the day, so we dropped everything and took off driving. Susan passed away before we got there, while we were only five states away. (Damn Cancer.) I did all the driving and my knee, ankle, and foot blew up from being in the car for so long. (It’s about a 16-hour drive if you can take it all in one day.) (Damn Lupus.) Family stuff happened, I felt like crap, Michelle was distraught, yada, yada, yada, and I just wanted to be home.
In October, Sister Michelle and I decided to take a girl’s day, and we visited the much-closer-to-home Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Pete. It was very negligible in the way of tangible things to see (compared to the National Holocaust Museum), however, it had one amazing employee who made the visit worthwhile. He was an older gentleman and from Europe, so he had seen so much of the actual concentration camp sites and other such museums in person, plus because of his age, he remembered a lot of stuff first-hand from when he was a boy. An added bonus was that he had met so many holocaust survivors while he worked there that he then had their stories to share, too. The tour was supposed to last an hour, but it was more like two and a half, and he answered every question any of us had, and I actually learned a lot that I was surprised that I didn’t already know.
This visit was exactly the push I needed to declare “The Changeling of the Third Reich” as my NaNoWriMo project. I finished with 81,100 words under my belt and finished the first draft a week later with 93,500 words.
The funny thing was, in waiting so long between the time I originally had the idea and when I wrote the first draft, not only has (of course) my writing become exceedingly better, but I’ve also ventured away from the super dark endings I used to envision, and made it a bit lighter, though still as psychologically thrilling. Meaning – I’m very glad I was forced to wait to write this so I could do it justice. Anyhoozle, without further ado, I submit for your approval, the following synopsis:
The year is 1968, and the Vietnam War is in full swing. Dr. Bridget Castle, a neurosurgeon in Boston, handles the victims of anti-war protests, the casualties of war, and being a woman in a man’s profession with ease. Her husband, her parents, and her patients all love and respect her, but her tight-knit world is in danger of unraveling when someone from her past shows up and threatens to expose her closest-held secret: That she is a Concentration Camp survivor.
For more than twenty-three years, Bridget has walked in the shoes of a girl killed in the Blitz, blurring the line of when her own identity as a German Jew ended and when she assumed the role of changeling. If not for her childhood diary to remind her of all she endured, she would be completely successful in taking on the memories of the girl she replaced. But when a patient from Germany is placed in her care, she finds herself unable to deny her past any longer.
Hold on tight as you travel with Bridget through the twists and turns of this psychological thriller, and watch her claim retribution as the former prisoner now holds the key in THE CHANGELING OF THE THIRD REICH.
Let’s talk: Have you ever planned something so detailed, you had it mapped out to the letter and then life happened and you had to reconfigure everything on a moment’s notice? Have you ever visited any holocaust museum? For the writers, how often do you plan a story and set it in stone, then start writing and take it in a completely different direction?
Rachel Carrera, Novelist 