Breton Horses

 

"Write something about a girl and her horse," an editor had said at a SCBWI conference I had attended that spring.  Living out in New Mexico, I don't have too many chances to interact with editors at major New York publishing companies, so when told me to do something I took note.  And the fact that SCBWI, the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, had brought this editor out impressed me even more deeply.

So here I was, walking with my husband through the little French Norman town of Amblie.  It was evening and we had eaten the dinner of sausage and cheese and fruit and wine and very good bread that I'd carried back from Bayeaux in the handlebar basket of my bicycle.  The shadows were growing long in this sleepy little town.  Every once in awhile a villager would throw open their window and greet us.  "Bonjour, les Americaines!," they'd call.  Obviously we were the only visitors in town.

As we walked I thought about the story possibilities that this town offered. I thought about Amblie's close proximity to the D-Day beaches, the little Norman church, which had parts dating from the 9th Century and sat on a hill overlooking the 12th Century mill house we'd rented.  There were so many possible time periods in which to set a story.  And time period aside, what should the story be about? My French poet friend on the train (See the blog post entitled "Where Ideas Come From" in the April 2014 archives) had suggested the idea of the animosity between Normans and Bretons, but what could I do with that idea? 

We came around a corner and saw this horse, and the editor's suggestion came back to me.  Here was a horse whose story, perhaps, needed to be told.

He was certainly not what I'd call a handsome horse.  He had a very thick neck and a large head, which made him look front-heavy.  He had a barrel body set on short legs.  I snapped his picture anyway, and told myself I'd think about who he was and how I might work him into the story.

When I got back home I began researching my stocky little horse and came to the conclusion that he was a Breton.  The Breton is a horse bred for heavy draft and farm work.  The breed was developed, as one might expect from the name, in Brittany, but the origins of its native ancestral stock, which dates back thousands of years, is disputed.  Some sources say that the Bretons comes from horses that were brought by Aryans as they migrated into Europe from Asia four thousand years ago.  Other sources says that the breed was developed by Celtic warriors who were preparing for their conquest of the British Isles. The ideal Breton stands 15 to 16 hands high, considerably larger than the horse I saw.  Many of the pictures of Bretons on the internet show horses that are even greater in girth and shorter of leg than my horse.   But he had won me over, ugliness and all.  And as I began to write, he became Gallopin, the horse beloved by my protagonist.

Biking to Amblie

Biking through Normandy, suitcases on our backs.

 The Bohnhoff boys laughingly refer to family vacations as death marches.  We routinely try to pack too many adventures into too little time.  Frequently we don't plan adequately for little things like eating and sleeping.

I researched the story known as Code: Elephants on the Moon while on one such vacation with my family in the summer of 2005.  Our plan was to take an overnight flight to Paris, spend one night sleeping and getting over jet lag, then take a train to Caen, and a bus to Ouistreham where we would pick up the bikes I had reserved over the internet, then ride 12 miles to Amblie, a little Norman village where we had rented a house for the week.  While exhausting, this plan seemed doable.  We packed lightly in suitcases that converted to backpacks and headed out with high hopes.

But things seldom go as planned.  We ended up spending our first night in Paris in Dallas after our flight was delayed 24 hours.  Determined to keep on schedule, we got off the plane midmorning and immediately made our way to the St. Lazaire train station, just in time to buy tickets and scramble aboard a train. We had no idea that some seats were reserved and some were not, so of course we sat in seats reserved by others, who happened to be French and not at all entertained by our lack of understanding.  Soon we were on our way.  Without, of course, any provisions for lunch.  But that was okay.  After all, we had gotten a small breakfast on the plane and the train trip was only two hours.  We would be in Caen in time for lunch.

And we were.  But, careful travelers that we are, we decided to first make our way to the bus station and check the schedule before eating.  Of course, we arrived just in time to buy tickets and leap onto an out bound bus.  No problem.  Caen is only 17 km from Ouistreham.  Google maps says it takes 16 minutes.  21 in traffic.  But Google maps didn't account the frequent stops that a bus makes.  I don't remember how long the ride actually took us, but by the time we arrived in Ouistreham we were hungry and tired and jet lag had caught up with us.  Big time.

We must have looked terrible by the time we dragged our sleep deprived bodies into the bike shop; terrible enough that the workers adjusted the heights of the seats, then told us that they would drive us to Amblie in their little car and deliver the bikes the next day  My husband was too proud to accept this offer, but I wasn't.  While he and my two older sons rode through the picturesque countryside my youngest son and I careened through the French countryside in the back of a tiny car being driven by a woman who spoke French as rapidly as she drove. Before she left us she made sure that the proprietess of the property we rented knew that we needed a ride to the nearest market to get supplies.  We were in good hands.

Giving it a tri

 

Yesterday I completed my fifth - and slowest - triathlon.

I've got a lot of different excuses for why I was so slow this time.  
One is that the bike portion of the race went straight up and down Nine Mile Hill, whose name should make a description of the course self-explanatory.  Nine Mile Hills would be grueling enough without the 40 MPH wind that was in my face as I went up and made even the downhill portion dicey.  I'm not the bravest of bicyclists, and when the wind is making your wheels hum and shimmy and is pushing your speed into the 40s, it's hard not to think about crashing.  A number of cyclists did exactly that.  

You can't blame the race directors for wind.  You can blame them, though, for competitors having to stop and wait for cops to let you through an intersection.  I've never had to do that in a race before.  One of the cyclists who was waiting was giving the cop a lot of grief, shouting disparaging remarks at him about his mental acuity.  Knowing the number of people who've been shot by cops in Albuquerque lately made this behavior perhaps as dangerous as careening down a hill with a dangerous cross wind, but danger aside, it wasn't nice and the cop didn't deserve it.  I thanked him for keeping us safe, but I think he made us wait extra long before stopping traffic and letting us through anyway.  

The scariest part of the race was when I got run off the road by a woman in a minivan.  She decided to make a right hand turn in front of me and went all the way to the curb before she stopped, trapping me in the gutter.  She would have sandwiched me had I not banged my hand against the side of her car.  Luckily for me there was a handicapped curb there and I was able to get out of her way, careening up onto the sidewalk and into a chainlink fence.  The driver sped off and the course volunteer, who was standing in the middle of the intersection, yelled "sorry."  The incident rattled me, and I lost a few minutes learning to breathe again before I finished the race, but scary as it was, it's not a good excuse for my slow time.

The real reason I was slow was that I didn't get much training in.  This spring I was an assistant track coach for the middle school at which I teach.  Being at school 7-5 takes too much time to allow me to get in the training I need.  I am no natural athlete; I need a lot of practice to do well.

So no gold medals for me.  And that's okay.  Sometimes the honor isn't in the winning but in the attempt.  I knew before the gun ever went off that I wasn't going to win.  All I wanted to do was the best I could under the circumstances.

Doing the best under the circumstances is not my goal for writing, though.  I didn't make for training for my race because it wasn't that important to me. Writing is.  I make time for it.  I sweat the results of my writing sessions far more than I do my athletic training sessions.  I try hard not to make excuses for my rejects.  Instead, I try to analyze them and figure out what I can do better next time.  And someday, I hope to attain that gold medal.

More Americans in Paris

 

More Americans in Paris
The author and her family
June 2005

Americans in Paris

The author's grandfather in his doughboy days.

John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson may have been among the first Americans in France, but they weren't the last.  Americans have been fascinated with France since the very beginning. 

During World War I thousands of young American men arrived in France as part of the AEF, the American Expeditionary Force.  Although the boys who went "Over There" were called "Yanks" or "Sammies" (from 'Uncle Sam'), their most popular nickname was "Doughboys," a name that may have come from the adobe dust that covered marching foot soldiers involved in American military operations on the Mexican border in 1916. My grandfather was one of these doughboys.

There were Americans in France even before America entered the war.  Many adventurous and idealistic young men, among them Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Julian Green, William Seabrook, E. E. Cummings, and Dashiell Hammett, served as ambulance drivers attached to the French forces before the United States entered the war. Many of these men, both adventurers and regular doughboys, became enamored with France.  “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast,” Hemingway wrote decades after having discovered the adventure of the city in 1918 at the age of 19.  Some, like a character in Code: Elephants on the Moon, stayed to recuperate from wounds (there are some great photos of them, like the one below, at http://www.firstworldwar.com/photos/medical.htm).  

After the war, some of the AEF found that going home and settling down wasn't easy.  A popular song of the period asked "how ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?"  It was a valid question.  Many disliked postwar American culture, seeing its social mores as moralistic, standardized, and vulgarized. Others felt that America had become a civilization of businessmen devoted to the worship of materialism. To them France represented ancient wisdom, history and refinement. 

Because it offered a cultural environment free of the racial obsessions of American society, France also appealed to African-Americans. Writer Richard Wright, entertainer Josephine Baker, and jazz musicians Arthur Briggs, Benny Carter, and Dexter Gordon were a few of the prominent African-Americans who found a home in France after World War I.

Eventually, though, Americans began to leave Paris.  Some, like Hemingway, were addicted to the excitement of war and found even postwar France too tame.  They left for other conflicts, most notably the Spanish Civil War, where Americans volunteered as soldiers, technicians, medical personnel and aviators in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.  Approximately 2,800 American volunteers fought for the Spanish Republicans against Franco and the Spanish Nationalist.  Between 750 and 800 died. Other Americans in France got homesick, changed their minds about France and returned to the States.

France itself was changing.  In the 1930s France was rocked by the same extreme social tensions and class warfare that brought Hitler to power in January 1933.  A year later, in February 1934, several thousand fascists and Royalists mobilized and brought down the French government.  They accused Jews, communists, and foreigners, including Americans, of being mentally deficient and culturally detrimental to France. As the war drew nearer, Americans fled France.  After the German invasion, a considerable number of the French people backed the Vichy regime and collaborated with the Nazis.

There are no official numbers available for how many Americans live in France today, but estimates near 100,000.  Nearly three million Americans vacation or visit France every year.  My family and I were five of the Americans who visited in 2005, and that visit led to Code: Elephants on the Moon.

Americans recovering on French soil.

A Rose by Any Other Name

 What's in a name?  Juliet asked that question.  She swore that she would love Romeo even if he had a different name.  But really, we know better.  Would we still be reading Shakespeare's play if it had been titled Fred and Juliet?

Right now I feel like seconding Juliet when she says "'Tis but thy name that is thy enemy."  Right now, at least, I like the manuscript that I'm busily formatting to make it acceptable to publish as an ebook.  I've written and rewritten and edited and gone through numerous critiques, and I think it's as good as it's going to get, and that's pretty darn good. No, it's not the "dear perfection" of Romeo.  And it's not Shakespeare.  But it's not bad, either. I've talked with a couple of people about producing cover art and I think I've found my man and found a good, solid vision for what the cover should look like.  But I can't make that cover until I settle on the title that's going to be emblazoned on it.  

A title.  A name.  There's the rub, to quote yet another Shakespeare play quite out of context.  Hamlet was dealing with really serious stuff there.  Life and death stuff.  And Juliet was dealing with stuff that, apparently, she thought even more serious than life and death.  She was dealing with love.  Being a middle school teacher, I can attest that matters of love are far more serious that matters of life and death.  And me?  I'm not dealing with love, or even life and death. All I want is a title that is interesting enough to make people want to pick up my novel without being misleading enough to make them mad once they've started reading.

Sigh.  That title is indeed my enemy.

It's not finding a title that's hard.  I've had several titles for this manuscript.  When I first started writing it, I called it Eponine Rides.  That struck me as a dandy title at the time.  The main character's name is Eponine, and she does ride her horse, Galopin, several times throughout the story. Besides, I'd heard an editor say that what she was really looking for was the next Black Beauty.  But several agents, editors and critique groups let me know that this wasn't the title I wanted.  This rose did not smell so sweet.  It downright stunk.  

So out went Eponine Rides and in came Identity.   The new title was suggested by an editor who ultimately rejected the manuscript, but not after telling me that this was the perfect title.  It made sense.  Eponine discovers in the course of the story that she is not who she thinks she is.  Neither is her mother.  Or her father.  Or most everyone else, for that matter.  And she discovers that her situation isn't what she'd imagined, either.  So this new title seemed to sum up the whole premise of the story.  Besides, singe word titles seem to have such authority.  Think Ian McEwan's Atonement and Josephine Hart's Damage.  Not to mention (again) Hamlet.  But then one friend showed me that there are already ten different books that are called Identity.  Others told me that the title was boring, and finally I admitted that this, too, was a stinker.  Identity might be the theme of the novel, but it's not a good title.

Up next: a title suggested by a writing friend.  She suggested Elephants on the Moon, one of the criptic phrases that the Free French used in their BBC addresses to let members of the underground Resistance know what was going on.  It's an important phrase in the story, and it's got appeal because, believe it or not, there's not a single other book out there with that name.  But would someone reading that title realize that the book was an historical novel set in France during World War II, or would they think it was a fantasy like Eleanor Cameron's Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet? The last thing I want is disgruntled readers thinking they've been cheated out of their adventures to Basidium.

So now I'm thinking of Rider for the Resistance, which is almost full circle back to my original title.  Or Resistance Rider.  Or Coded Message: Elephants on the Moon.  Or The Identity of Elephants.  Or Eponine and Galopin.  Or Romeo and Eponine and Fred. And none of those other names smell sweet to me yet.

It's clear I've got more weeding to do.