At the start of our professional writing career, my partner Reno MacLeod and I spoke often and openly about our writing. Excited and proud of our work, we blogged in detail about our works-in-progress: premise, plot, world-building specifics, our characters and their virtues, their foibles and peccadillos. We discussed our upcoming titles on our blogs, on author loops with our various publishers, on reader loops and other sites.

All good things end, no matter how pretty and shiny they seem at first. At a certain point, due to a specific, unpleasant event, we stopped talking about what we were working on except in the vaguest of terms. Reno and I are both reasonably intelligent people, and we fully realize that the much-quoted maxim that says there are really only seven different stories is largely true. In the details is where any one of those basic seven stories sets itself apart from others of its kind. It's funny how the popularity of certain subject matter seems to go in cycles, and now all the sudden the theme of a story we've been working on has started cropping up all over the place. Enough so that, after much discussion, Reno and I feel the need to share details regarding this enormous project we've been working on for over nine months already so when it's published folks don't think we suddenly pulled this subject out of our asses at the 11th hour because it's suddenly "popular."

Reno doesn't read author blogs at all. I skim the blog entries of a small number of writers (five, to be precise, only one of whom writes gay fiction), and then only when the subject strikes me as interesting and pertains to the business of publishing. As a rule, we don't read books written by others in the same genres and sub-genres in which we write because we don't want them to influence us, even on a subconscious level. We don't monitor what other writers are working on—Reno is too busy with the day job and writing with me in the evenings and on weekends, and I'm too busy writing, revising, and editing new stories, revising and re-packaging stories coming off contract, managing our growing backlist, and vacuuming cat hair off the furniture. We frankly don't care what other writers are doing. Separately and together with Reno, I write the stories I need to write, when I need to write them, with no interest whatsoever in what other writers are doing with their time.

That said, Reno and I have decided to reverse our long-standing practice and talk about our vaguely alluded-to historical novel. We're doing this because we're still quite a few months away from being ready to release this book. At this writing, we're 126,000 words in, with possibly another 25,000 to 30,000-ish or so left to go before we finish the first draft. Then there are revisions, additional fact-checking, double-checking, triple-checking, foreign language verification, and many, many rounds of several different levels of editing after that. We don't want anyone to accuse us down the road of jumping on a bandwagon for something we started more than a year earlier, or of co-opting the thematic ideas of anyone else. This may seem like an extreme, kneejerk reaction, and I'll agree that perhaps it is, but I'm a firm believer that an ounce of prevention is well worth a pound of cure.

In this post, I'll present how and why we happened to pick this particular theme, a topic that will most certainly not be a story suited to everyone's taste. Our stuff rarely is, and for this book that applies even more so. At the end of the post, I'll provide a link where you can read a lengthy excerpt from this forthcoming book, and we humbly ask that you kindly keep in mind that this excerpt has not yet undergone final phases of editing.

I'll be talking about some very personal, uncomfortable stuff in the course of this post. Like the book that blossomed from some of these personal experiences, the information may prove to be a jarring read. No hard feelings should you elect not read the whole thing. No hard feelings should you choose not to read the book when we publish it, even if you've been a dedicated fan of our work up to that point. And I promise we won't show up anywhere online to bust your chops and/or insult you for making that choice not to read our book. That's just not our style.

The inception of this novel, as many of our stories do, began one morning when Reno awakened with a new character buzzing around in his head. As always happens, it took a few days for him to dig deep enough to figure out who this guy was—his story, motivations, appearance, name, his strengths and flaws—and why Jaye should bother to care. Once Reno worked out all those complexities enough to share with me and capture my emotions, the main character I would be writing opposite his became abundantly clear to both of us.

I said, "Do you realize how much research this is going to take?"

Reno nodded. "Yeah, yeah, I know. We said we'd never get into writing historical novels for that very reason. But he's loud, it's personal, and you know we have to write this."

He was right.

We didn't commit a single word of the story until we had slightly over 1,500 hours of research under our belts (yes, I keep records of that sort of thing). I did the bulk of that work while Reno was at his day gig, and I created a Wiki to house the information (as we always do for each book or series of books we write), which to date contains 116 separate entry pages totaling over 40,000 words of notes and 700+ links for this book alone. We spent our evenings for months and months doing nothing but reviewing the day's research, identifying facts we wanted to include, events and historical figures we wanted to highlight. Then we did even more research when facts conflicted or the timeline seemed off. Christ, we couldn't have picked a more complicated era with more contradictory facts but, oh, how we do love a challenge.

Reno wrote the first sentence of the book on Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at approximately 11:00 in the morning. (Yes, I keep records of that sort of thing, too.)

We spent most of last weekend writing (this one, not so much because of the July 4th holiday), and squeezed in several good evening sessions during the week, bringing the total word count to just over 126,000 words contained in 47 chapters. We should be finished with the first draft by the end of July, as we're now able to spend a larger percentage of our time together writing rather than researching. The research continues, of course, but not to the exclusion of writing the story. At this point, we don't feel the need to look something up after every third sentence, and that feels like super-massive progress.

The research, while fascinating, hasn't been easy at times. In addition to the horror inherent to much of the subject matter, we discovered there's also a shitload of missing and/or conflicting information concerning details of the era. Huge informational gaps exist, enormous holes you could drive a semi through mainly because: 1) so few people are still breathing that lived during that time, 2) the accidental and purposeful destruction of records, and 3) not all survivors were/are willing to share their experiences openly. The survivors in my life surely weren't.

I made some incredible discoveries about my own family history during my research, which supported facts I either knew or highly suspected. Like the majority of Americans, I'm an ethnic mongrel, though not so much of a mutt as many of my fellow members of the teeming masses yearning to breathe free. My father was born in the city of Cork in County Cork, Ireland. That branch of my family tree was always an open book, a merry band of freckle-faced, hardworking, hard-playing, hard-drinking, green-eyed redheads who never squandered an opportunity to regale guests with tales of the Old Country, even if the guests had already heard the stories a gazillion times before. Practical jokers all, the relatives on my father's side threw loud parties on every major holiday and on many of the minor ones, too—you've not lived until you've attended one of my Uncle Christian's famous Ground Hog Day bashes. They had infectious laughs that left you unable to resist joining in, and you couldn't swing a cat in my neighborhood without hitting one of my father's kin.

Both the sheer numbers of my father's family and their unbridled joy for life couldn't have been in sharper contrast to my mother's family.

My mother was born in March 1941 somewhere in either Romania or Czechoslovakia (the latter of which didn't technically exist at that time, due to the forced annexation of the bordering Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany and further wartime division of the country). I'm not sure where my mother was born because the subject of her birth was one of many off-limits topics in our extended-family household. I heard those two countries (Romania and Czechoslovakia) mentioned on many occasions, spoken in hushed tones in conversations I wasn't supposed to overhear, but I can't be sure what they were discussing.

My maternal grandparents—my mother's parents—didn't cross the Atlantic to come to America. I don't know if they died, or if they lived and chose not to leave Europe. I suspect the latter, but the matriarch of our household (one of my maternal great-great-aunts) vehemently declared talk of my grandparents as one of many taboo subjects—I don't even know my maternal grandfather's name. I can only piece together what information I could learn via eavesdropping and through questioning my by-marriage uncles on holidays when they were quite drunk and their tongues loose. Putting the puzzle pieces together led me to some startling conclusions, none of which I can prove but nonetheless make logical sense.

In the summer of 1942, my mother, then a little over a year old, came to the United States with her maternal grandmother as her guardian, along with her grandmother's three older sisters. They came first to New York City before settling in what was then the northwestern outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland. All four of these young women—my mother's grandmother was only 33 at the time, and her older sisters respectively 35, 36, and 39—were beautiful Roma woman, with shiny black hair, dark eyes like coal, and light-brown skin. None of the sisters ever spoke anything but English in our house, albeit heavily accented, and I couldn't tell you precisely what language spawned that musical sound aside from saying that I would now classify it as vaguely Eastern European.

I didn't know that I'd come from Roma stock until I was a pre-teen, around 11 years of age if memory serves, when a neighborhood playmate asked me if my mother and the other women who lived in my house were Gypsies. When I asked my grandmother, she gave me a terse, succinct answer: "Yes, we are Roma, and we do not like the word gypsy."

That was the full extent of the conversation, and the exchange set the tone for my subsequent questions. But at least I had something to go on, and when I did some research—the old-fashioned way, by digging through books, magazines, and encyclopedias at the neighborhood branch of the free library—I discovered that some of the things I thought peculiar about our household, as opposed to my friends' families, were actually adherences to Roma law. The women kept themselves covered from neck to ankles with loose blouses and long, flowing skirts, even on 100-degree summer days when the rest of the neighborhood traipsed around half-naked. A neighbor who'd been very kind to us died, but because the gentleman's family was having him cremated, my mother's side of the family politely declined to attend the funeral service. As I found out, Roma law requires burial of the dead "with all the completeness of the body." No organ donations. No autopsies, regardless of the cause of death. Cremation ranked as the greatest sacrilege of all.

My mother's family didn't allow sit-down baths in the tub, only standing showers, in keeping with the Roma taboo that considers the lower part of the body impure. We had unusual laundry habits that I never saw at any of my friends' houses. A row of four clothes hampers sat in the hallway outside the bathroom on the second floor of our house, each bin marked with a neat, handwritten sign: female upper, female lower, male upper, male lower. Clothes of males and females couldn't mingle in the wash, and neither could clothes worn above the waist and below. The women never wore dresses, and neither males nor females wore robes, long coats, or any other garments that spanned both above and below the waist. They all washed their hands constantly, obsessively—after visiting the bathroom, of course, but also after opening a door, shaking the hand of someone not of our immediate family, or doing any number of ordinary, necessary things deemed polluting. All my friends had pet cats and/or dogs, but even suggesting such put my grandmother and her sisters into a spastic tizzy, waving me off with disgust and glaring at me as if I'd grown another head. As they informed me, cats and dogs are considered taboo because those animals can and do lick their own genitals.

The tally of forbidden things grew and grew, year after year, a seemingly endless list of taboos. I found it difficult to follow the rules, for the simple reason that I didn't know a rule existed until after I'd broken it.

Homosexuality turned out to be an enormous taboo, as was dressing up as the opposite gender (even if only for a costume party)—both of which proved problematic for me once I crossed the threshold of puberty and realized I was "different." Between the strict Roma taboo and the machismo demanded by my father's tough Irish clan, both sides of my family jointly showed me the door shortly after my seventeenth birthday, when I no longer acquiesced to their demands that I keep my mouth closed and my proverbial closet door shut with me barricaded inside.

No men came over from Europe with my Roma family, just the four sisters and my mother, the infant granddaughter of the youngest sister. Without going into historical detail in this post, I have absolutely no explanation how those four Gypsy women managed to escape Nazi-occupied Europe with an infant to arrive safely on American shores in the middle of 1942. Sadly, I never will.

I've thought about this a lot, for a very long time, and after running a thousand possible scenarios through my mine, the only reasonable conclusion I can make is that they somehow had inside help. The fact that my mother's parents didn't accompany their one-year-old baby is suspicious. That my mother's parents were a forbidden subject is suspicious. With nothing but green-eyed redheads on my father's side of the family, and with the fiercely separatist Roma on the other side where one would assume to find nothing but brown eyes and black hair, also suspicious is the fact that I'm a blue-eyed blond with fair skin and Nordic features. Nobody else in my family looked even remotely like me, and although nothing can be proven—speaking about the sisters' lives prior to their coming to American was absolutely forbidden in our household, as was the topic of anything related to World War II—but the logical conclusion is, to say the least, unsettling.

Had the formal schooling I received been different, maybe I would have pressed harder and been more insistent in questioning my family, but I attended Roman Catholic schools that conveniently skimmed over World War II as if it were nothing but a quick, meaningless blip on the radar. I have a memory like a steel trap (ask Reno how well I fare playing along with "Cash Cab" and "Jeopardy"). The facts pertaining to World War II imparted to me during history classes in school, I could write in large print on one side of a cocktail napkin. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Adolf Hitler was a bad man with a silly moustache. Nazis wore fancy uniforms with odd symbols, and they marched funny while wearing loud boots. The end of the war came when we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That about covers what Catholic schools in the late-1970s and 1980s bothered to teach.

My education at home provided even less informative, because I couldn't even discuss what little I'd learned in school. I didn't know the terms "Third Reich" or "death camps" until, while at a sleepover at a friend's house in the mid-1980s, I watched a rebroadcast of the television miniseries "Holocaust" starring Meryl Streep and James Woods. Upon returning home, I once again brought the subject up and, once again, my family shut me down. The more I prodded, the angrier the four sisters became, so keep the peace and preserve my sanity, eventually I stopped asking.

All four of the sisters—my great-grandmother and my three great-great-aunts—married Jewish men within a decade of arriving in the United States. The Jewish men were second husbands for all the sisters (that much they did tell me), and I think I can understand now that their choice of new husbands wasn't coincidental. With no Roma men in the area, it made sense that these women would seek out others who also followed Mosaic Law, even if not precisely their own brand of it. All four couples remained childless throughout their lives together, and I don't know if that was due to choice or inability. The Nazis did unspeakable things to Gypsies as well as Jews, singling out the Gypsy population for "racial hygiene" experimentation at one concentration camp in Germany beginning in mid-1942. I don't know why all four of the sisters and their new husbands remained childless and, as with most important subjects, they weren't talking.

The Jewish husband of the eldest of the four sisters was the only family member who would talk to me about such things in any sort of detail. The other three men talked of happy times only, but Uncle Bernie was more tolerant of my questions. My stolen conversations with him took place behind closed doors when the women of the household were out shopping, or while they worked outside in the garden together—the sisters were literally inseparable. Uncle Bernie was an Auschwitz survivor, with a 5-digit serial number crudely tattooed on the inner side of his left forearm. (One of the inaccuracies often portrayed in popular media, in older movies especially, was that all Nazi concentration camps tattooed serial numbers on the prisoners, when in fact only the Auschwitz system of camps did so, beginning sometime in 1941). Uncle Bernie told me about some of his personal experiences, speaking with calm detachment about truly terrible things, and I listened carefully and absorbed as much as I could. In retrospect, he significantly sugarcoated his stories, no doubt due to my young age at the time, and he refused to speak at all of his wife's—my great-great-aunt's—experiences at all, saying it wasn't his place to share what she and her sisters didn't choose to share with me directly. I felt certain that he knew what had happened to them; I could see the pain in his big, sad eyes. His way of making things better after our serious conversations involved homemade challah bread that I helped braid, delicatessen, and little chocolates having a name I can't remember now.

The four sisters and their husbands all passed away in rapid succession in the late-1980s through the early-1990s, all at ripe old ages, al outwardly happy. I can't imagine living a happy life after what they must've gone through, but they somehow managed. If I learned nothing else from them, I learned to weigh my troubles with serious gravity before presuming to deem them "terrible." I'm also a firm believer that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

My mother followed the four sisters to the great beyond in early 2001. She was only 60, not so old nowadays, and I'm convinced she died of a broken heart. I don't think she knew any more about how she, her grandmother, and her three great-aunts had come to live in the United States than I did, or even where they originally came from. I don't think she knew anything about her parents, not even her father's name. I don't know, as the lives of the sisters prior to them stepping onto American soil remained a forbidden subject even after their passing.

For my entire life, I've gazed into mirrors wondering why I bear absolutely no resemblance to either side of my birth family, not even faintly. From my earliest recollections, I truly felt like the bastard child at the family reunion. Perhaps in a way, I was. I wish I knew for sure, but with what I now know about that dark period in history, maybe I'm better off not knowing.

Reno's incredibly imaginative mind and the details (and suspicious lack thereof) surrounding my own heritage gave our story life. We don't expect everyone to read this book or for everyone who does to like it. This book won't be an easy read. In places, the story will surely horrify some readers. In this story, people will get hurt. People will die. People will recognize their own capacity for heroism, and their aptitude for cowardice and casual cruelty. I don't think I'm exaggerating or being overly dramatic in saying that you can't write a story about the Third Reich and not speak of terrible things. This book is not a "romance" in the currently defined sense, although undeniably romantic elements permeate the story. The plot evolved as it needed to evolve, and we did not attempt to mold the story into something it's not.

In the end, I believe we have created a powerful story featuring a group of amazing characters who will demonstrate that rarely is there true black-and-white in this world, but mostly shades of gray—a recurrent theme in our collective works. Themes of painful betrayal, of blind faith and indoctrinated intolerance, the beauty of redemption and forgiveness, and the axiom that evil triumphs only when good men do nothing converge to bring this story vividly to life.

In closing, we proudly offer this sneak peek of our forthcoming historical novel. Following the synopsis below is a link to a generous excerpt (7,900 words, constituting the first four chapters) of the manuscript.

"Night and Fog"

by Reno MacLeod & Jaye Valentine

Some blemishes mark history so profoundly they long outlast the generations who lived through them.

Germany, 1942—the height of the Nazi Party in Europe and Adolph Hitler's infamous Third Reich.

Men committed crimes so disturbing that people would continue to speak of their deeds three-quarters of a century later with a mixture of disgust, shock, and awe. People would remember and share the well-known stories, yet so many smaller tales would remain untold. Stories of people on both sides thrust into the midst of unimaginable horror, a terrible nightmare offering no easy escape. Comply or die. Kill or be killed. Do what you must to survive.

Karl Schumacher—born into a wealthy German family that wanted nothing but the best for their eldest son—lived a life of privilege. Like all Nazi Party members in good standing, Karl's parents fulfilled their parental obligation by sending him off to join the Hitler-Jugend, the Hitler Youth, at a tender age. Karl soon earned a coveted promotion. Through a combination of staunch obedience, a verifiable "Aryan" pedigree, and his parents' sizable coffers, Karl moved with ease into the elitist Schutzstaffel—Hitler's feared SS.

Stationed near Berlin at Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen—the model concentration camp and SS training facility located in the quaint town of Oranienburg—Karl and his childhood friend, Christof Mehler, share the sacred duty of playing God on behalf of the Führer. Trainloads of "deportees" roll into town, with Karl and Christof responsible for counting and determining the fate of Russian POWs and terrified families of Jews, Gypsies, and Poles.

For a while, the constant intake of liberally rationed vodka helps to assuage Karl's moral dilemmas. On the morning a teenage Roma boy, Antonin Novotny, steps off the train, Karl discovers the heart he'd thought frozen by cold German winters and frigid Nazi values might still have some life beating within. Concealing decadent, criminal needs, Karl forces Antonin into a situation the young Gypsy never could have imagined, never would've chosen—a lifestyle obscenely taboo in the eyes of the Roma people.

Antonin's patience forces both Karl and Christof to take a hard look at lives ill lead, at choices badly made to please uncaring authority, at the questionable wisdom of offering obedience without honor. Along the way, Karl opens his eyes to the perils befalling others at the hands of men like him. People like the gentle Magrita Baumgartner, a Jewish prisoner who befriends Antonin on his first day in the camp. People like Rona Klein, the sassy-sweet Polish Jew and her cocky SS lover, Dietrich Schmitz. A man like Kapo Simon Tepper, a Jewish recruit to the Sonderkommado, forced by the promise of extra bread and longer life to prepare incoming prisoners for incarceration, only to usher them out later through a chimney stack.

Enemies, innocents, and causal victims of the Third Reich discover the good in each other, the value of life, and Karl decides he can no longer deny their common humanity, standing idly by under the crushing heel of Hitler's madness.


Authors' Note: This story takes place in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany in 1942, and contains coarse language and graphic violence. Intended for an adult audience. Discretion is advised.

Link to excerpt presented online:
http://www.macleodvalentine.com/night-and-fog-excerpt.html

Link to excerpt in PDF format: