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JBC book group tidbits

No sooner do I promise to continue a subject in my next post than something comes along to make me eat my words.
In this case, the Jewish Book Council contacted me about writing a short “peek behind the scenes” article about Rav Hisda’s Daughter for their website, so book groups can add a little extra tidbits to their discussion.

The JBC suggested some questions for me, all of which were very applicable to my novel. I was able to address all of them except the one about what I ended up cutting, which deserves an entire article by itself. I will probably end up writing about that as I describe my editing process. So here are the questions, and to see my answers, visit the JBC link above.

-How you came up with the names of the characters
-If there was a different direction that you saw the book heading when you first started out (without giving any spoilers!)
-Was there something (or someone) in particular that inspired your writing of this story
-Did you discover anything surprising while writing the book
-Was there anything that you ended up having to cut from the book
-Ideas for a themed menu or wine list that would go along with your book (for book clubs that try to match the food with the book)

Editing Enchantress 1

I saw my eye surgeon this week and he was very pleased with my progress. The bubble is so small I can pretty much see around it, which means I can use the computer as much as I want, and hallelujah, I’m now cleared to drive again.

So, you may ask, where does this leave Book 2 [Enchantress] of "Rav Hisda’s Daughter"? That’s what my next several posts will focus on. To bring you up to date, I finished the entire first draft [or puke draft, as some unknown author called that initial effort where the job is merely to get the story down and worry about details later] just before Rosh Hashana.

Like Book 1 [Apprentice], Enchantress consists of two parts. In Bk 1 those parts comprised ten and seven years of my heroine’s life, but while the first part of Enchantress is similar in covering ten years, the second part was quite a challenge since it encompassed her next [that is final] fifty years. Obviously I had to do a lot more narrative summary and skipping of years. Yet plenty of other novelists have written books that take place over a character’s lifetime, even generations, so it wasn’t impossible. But it was a challenge, and I had to leave out many interesting pieces of Talmud and history [more on this later].

I know I write ‘long,’ so to make it easier for myself, I don’t flesh out the dialogues. Nearly everything is ‘said’ rather than whispered or screamed, etc. and many are merely some talking heads rather than set in any particular location. My descriptions of people and places are minimal or nonexistent. I know that when I start editing, more than a few scenes, and even characters, will end up on the cutting room floor [to mix metaphors]. In my early novels, I wasted a lot of time detailing these things only to excise them in subsequent drafts.

My daughter had finished reading, and criticizing, Pt 1 when I completed Pt 2, so I immediately went back to the beginning to start editing. I’ll explain how I started revising the second draft next post.

Magical thinking

My eye is recovering well. The air bubble they put in at surgery to hold my retina in place while it healed has shrunk to the point where I can see around it. My vision with my current glasses is a bit blurry, but not too bad. All things considered, things went much better than when my other eye’s retinal detached, even though that happened in Los Angeles and this time I was three time zones away.

Here is where the magical thinking comes. Whenever I speak at a synagogue, I like to check out the gift shop for amulets. And despite this being the 21st century, I almost always find some. Usually these are hamsas [often with an eye in the center], car mezuzahs, and keychains with Tefillat haDerech [the traveler’s blessing/incantation that Rav Hisda recites in Tractate Berachot]. Sure enough, Congregation Moses had some. But one amulet was unusual and a frankly a little creepy [see photo]. It was a Jewish Star charm hanging on a red fabric bracelet, and in the center of the star hung a small blue eyeball that rotated 360 degrees. In other words, it could turn to ‘look’ in any direction. With the red threads and blue eye, it was clearly an amulet for protection from the Evil Eye.

But what if it was the opposite? My first thought was how strange it was that I noticed my detached retina with an hour of receiving this bizarre amulet – an occurrence that forced me to abruptly cancel a week’s worth of speaking events in Chicago. A week later, after my successful surgery, my husband had me see things differently. Surely my retina was already tearing and starting to detach hours, if not days, before I got this amulet. And look what happened after I actually came into its possession.

Coincidentally, my host turned out to be a doctor affiliated with the local medical school. More amazing, he found an ophthalmologist who saw me in his office and made the diagnosis within hours, and on a Sunday no less. Incredibly, my own retina surgeon back home was on call Sunday night and answered his cell phone, whose number I had on my laptop. After he scheduled surgery for the next day, Monday, I was able to get the last seat on an early morning nonstop back to Los Angeles.

It gets better. The eye exam when I returned showed the tear had worsened, but my retina was still attached. Thus I needed a less complicated procedure than previously, one without general anesthesia. My surgery went so well that I was able to forego the uncomfortably positioning [lying facedown or on one side for 45 minutes out of each hour] that many patients endure for a week or more. Better yet, I had none of the common complications, two of which [bleeding and double vision] I suffered the first time.

So I ask you: did that Evil Eye amulet curse me or did it protect me? Or was the whole an exercise in magical thinking?
By the way, I didn’t even realize I had that amulet in my purse with me the whole time until I got home from the hospital.