Sunday Flickr babe: Writer Victoria Redel

I began by searching Flickr for “writer,” and after ten pages, found this page of photos for Writers Revealed. From that whole set, all those faces, I picked Victoria Redel. Here’s an interview with Ms. Redel. Snippet below the cut.

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AH: What inspired you to write The Border of Truth?

VR: There are two answers (at least) here. The questions that engage first generation children of immigrants interest me and threads of that curiosity and experience have always been stitched through my short fiction and poems. How do we hold on to the myths/stories/syntax of our families in their homelands? In my case, that’s the Jewish Diaspora. My grandfather (on my mother’s side) was Egyptian born. My grandmother: Bessarabian. My mother: Romanian. My mother’s grandfather was a composer and flautist that lived in Persia. My father is Belgian born and his family is Polish. Egypt to Poland, these were stories that filtered to me, that sang me to sleep at night as I was, (by day) trying to maneuver my way around suburban Westchester.

But the more specific answer is that the path of Itzak [the protagonist of The Border of Truth] from Brussels to America was my father’s path out of Europe. His family arrived in 1940 on a ship called the Quanza. This ship’s story—for personal and historical reasons—was interesting to me. Over time I kept playing around, trying to compose something about boats, refugees, and luck.

(Read the rest here.)

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With Terry Pratchett in mind, I went back to my SF novel today. (Title? That’s complicated. For a long time, it was The Brakan Correspondent. I was never too happy with that Ludlumesque title, though, and felt much better after I broke it up into a trilogy, Nest, Flight, and Shrike. Then I realized it would make far more sense to title the book after the main character — in which case, it should be The Correspondent’s Daughter. But I think I’ll go with USFP: Untitled Science Fiction Project.) Compared to my romance, USFP is, I think, a better example of what I’m trying to do. I want a book to be funny, exciting, and moving, all in one, just like many of Pratchett’s novels.

First thing I did this morning, I decimated the prologue. Um, “Chapter One.” Everyone would have seen through that ruse when Chapter Two began “forty years later.” World’s sneakiest 2000-word prologue. I cut it down to about 200 words, easily less than a page, and in the process wrote a far better hook. 200 words? Good. I can call that a prologue and not alienate too many readers.

No doubt you can tell I’ve been obsessing over prologue-or-not-to-prologue. I’ve heard so many sides to this, from “I like prologues” to “Never never ever never,” I don’t know what I believe anymore. I happen to like prologues, provided they are short and punchy. Hence this morning’s decimation.

One discovery this morning: the text isn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. I hadn’t looked at it in about 18 months, so I wondered if the writing would strike me as primitive. Nope! Great stuff. Good news is I won’t have much editing to do; bad news is I haven’t grown much as a writer in 18 months.

. . . At least, not with regard to technique. Perhaps my judgment has improved, for I found myself making a lot of higher level changes. In the rewrite I have planned, Tui (the Brakan Correspondent) will have a much closer relationship with Nest‘s central baddy, and Cree (the Correspondent’s Daughter) shows her bloodthirstiness in the first chapter.

I worked for a few hours, edited maybe 5000 words, then got to work in the kitchen. Tonight we had cheese-stuffed rigatoni in a wonderfully rich red sauce (finely chopped tomatoes, carrots, celery, eggplant, onion, garlic, and mushrooms, sauteed in bacon fat, then simmered in the oven for three hours), focaccia on the side. Yummy.

Tomorrow, it’s back to the day job. It’s a living.

D.