 A lovely person who bought my non-fiction history ebook Military or Civilians? The curious anomaly of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War was (in her words) blown away by the resources I had collected.
Over the three years I accumulated and read every book I could find on the subject, I merely added each one to the list after finishing it and went searching for the next one.
Maybe we don’t give ourseves enough credit for the research we do, whether writing historic and alternate historic fiction, historical biography or traditional history.
If you haven’t downloaded Military or Civilians? yet, here’s the resource list, or more properly, the bibliography. But most of it’s in German. If you want to othe untold story of 500,000 women in the Second World War, you’ll have to buy my book!
Military or Civilians? The curious anomaly of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War is available as an ebook on amazon.co.uk (link below in box), amazon.com, amazon.de
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Ten days ago, my mother-in-law died. Born in 1929 in a working class family in Birkenhead, she’d lived a modest childhood, endured separation from her parents and siblings as an evacuee during wartime, returned to a bombed-out city, married, had a child at the start of the space race and witnessed the technological age from its start. She supported her husband in his devotion to the Royal Naval Association and the British Legion. Devasted when he died after 51 years of marriage, she became ill herself and succumbed to Alzheimers’ and dementia shortly before her 83rd birthday.
This isn’t a eulogy, though she deserved one for her open, friendly nature, the wilingness to go an extra two miles and for her kindness in praising others for their achievements, irrespective of whether she understood what they had achieved.
But she didn’t have the educational opportunity – she left school at fourteen. She didn’t have the chance to develop any aspiration other than the traditional one of wife and mother. She didn’t have the opportunity to widen her horizons, so stayed in a narrow, closed and uninformed world.
Perhaps she may not have been any different, but she didn’t have the chance. Little wonder she couldn’t understand it when she saw others squandering the rich choices before them and living only to grab money and kick others aside as they blundered on.
But she understood what it meant when her grandson went to a good grammar school – she’d worked in the schools meals service at one. When he gained a place at university, she didn’t know what a Bloomsbury Group university was, but she was happy he was happy there. She was only anxious that he would “get a good job” afterwards. And he did.
As she slid into the brain-rotting illness, one of her constant questions was “Are you happy?” and she always smiled when you reassured her you were.
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 I’m not going to list, discuss or make any judgement about self-publishing – plenty of people have done that; blogs, conference workshops, books, newspaper articles abound. Just enter “self-publishing” in the search box on Google and wait for the flood.
I want to write about the confusion facing a fledgling writer. Me.
I’ve drafted three thrillers set in an alternate reality. Experts have given me feedback, some challenging, some encouraging, always plenty to work on. And now my polishing cloth is well-worn. Agents have given me praise: ‘well-written”, “intelligent”, imaginative”. Authors whom I respect immensely have been rocks of support and encouragement. Beta readers have raved about my work (Read the comments!).
Rejection is a normal part of the path to publishing. I blogged about it here. And any guidance or information gleaned from the process can do nothing but help/guide/refine. But the siren voice of an immensely attractive alternative is getting louder. Both traditionally published and not-yet-published writers are putting their books up on Amazon, Smashwords, etc. and finding success (whatever that is 🙂 ).
But there is so much opinion out there for the relatively inexperienced writer. My friend Talli Roland summed it up neatly in her recent post:
“If we believed all the rhetoric on the web these days, writers wouldn’t know which way to turn. Many seem to be divided into traditional versus self-publishing, each slinging dirt at the other for the decisions they make. But aren’t we all writers, struggling to make a living? Shouldn’t we be celebrating the options now available to us, instead of decrying how naive someone is when they sign with a traditional publisher, or looking down at a writer when they self-publish?”
So here’s the crux: we have so much choice and so much opinion about choice that we find ourselves in the middle of a whirlwind.
Writing a book is hard work, but marketing and selling a book is also hard and is a business. So there’s instant brain-split. Do not think that if you self-publish you can do it all yourself. How do we find a good editor/cover designer/publicist? A traditional agent/publisher mix would do much of the business work for you, but would you be content with a small percentage of the book sale price or does Amazon’s 70% beckon you? Do you yearn to walk into a bookshop and burst with pride as you reach up and touch the book with your name on or do you want into the digital bookshop at a few keystrokes?
One guideline to steer by may be to think why you want to publish your book? Is it working through a story that’s been in your head for years? Is it proving something to yourself or others? Do you want to make your living out of it? Do you have a message for other people? Or is it that you can’t you stop tapping on that damned keyboard?
I’m still out. I’m editing book3 but by the end of the summer, I will stop dithering and make a decision. Are you facing this same dilemma?
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 My friend and fellow writer, Liz Harris whose book The Road Back is out later this year, has recently started blogging Welcome to my World
In her last post, she asked for help from fellow authors. It’s such a good question, I’d like to ask something similar. She’d introduced some well-researched period vocabulary in her new novel, but some critique group members had suggested they were too obscure and she should substitute something more generic. So she asked her blog readers for their opinion.
I and thirty-thousand others urged her to leave them in.
These words, such as cuirasse, buckler, poke bonnet, castrum, stanchion, frigidarium, photon torpedo, palla, goose grease, etc. are what give our books their unique flavour.
As a reader, do unknown words put you off or intrigue you? Would you rather have an easy, grey novel or do you enjoy learning as you read?
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 Since I published my first book, a non-fiction title called Military or Civilians? The curious anomaly of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War on Amazon last Wednesday quite a few people have asked me why I did it.
Comments have included:
“I thought you wrote alternate history thrillers with a Roman theme.”
“Aren’t you looking for agent representation and the trad publishing route?”
“What’s German women’s history got to do with the Romans?”
All good questions. Here are the answers:
Yes, I do.
Yes, I am.
They’re both history.
OK, that’s a bit glib. Here’s some history, or maybe it’s archaeology…
Picture me at fifteen, making O-level choices. I had to chose two out of three of Latin, History and Geography. As a budding linguist, Latin was easily chosen. But the other two? Both deep loves. Geography won as I needed it if I wanted to do A level (which I did). But History – I felt I was abandoning a child in an Arctic wind. My History teacher was ‘disappointed’.
But I knew history would stay with me. It coloured my entire thought process. It was licenced nosiness. Why did people do that? What were the circumstances? How did they achieve it? What did this object mean? Why was this so important to them? What do they tell us with their “messages across time”?
On every holiday/business trip/family outing I couldn’t and can’t help it: buildings shriek out at me, monuments beg for attention and the latest news always has a historical context. I’ve been lucky enough to see Roman palaces, roads, art, to marvel at the Bayeux Tapestry and the sadness of Oradour, and see Berlin before and after the fall of the Wall. I’ve handled Commynes’ commentaries and my own great-great grandfather’s medals from the Boer War.
But where were the women in these stories? In the small universe of my family, I discovered although my mother was in a reserved occupation as a student then a teacher in 1939, her two sisters had joined the WRNS and my father’s sister the WRAF. All survived the Second World War.
When I was choosing my MA History dissertation topic, I remembered a German friend mentioning her late grandmother had worn a Wehrmacht uniform during the Second World War. A woman wearing a Wehrmacht uniform? I’d never heard of such a thing. But my friend pulled out an old photo of a young girl in a size-too-big greatcoat, dark tie around her neck, a side cap with badge; she looked straight to camera, at once serious and so young. The result was my dissertation and a few years later, with the digital revolution making it possible, the book I published last Wednesday.
The Romans? Now my German women’s history book is in the world, I’m back in my Roman-themed thriller world again.
Now where did I put my stylus?
Military or Civilians? The curious anomaly of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War is available as an ebook on amazon.co.uk amazon.com, amazon.de
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A lovely person who bought my non-fiction history ebook Military or Civilians? The curious anomaly of the German Women’s Auxiliary Services during the Second World War was (in her words) blown away by the resources I had collected.
