The Birth of World of Mirrors

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World of Mirrors is set on the Baltic island of Ruegen in what was then East Germany. It’s June, 1990. The Berlin Wall is down, the 40-year reign of the Communist government is over, and the country has voted to re-unite with West Germany.  This period is called “the year of miracles,” or “the time of the turn.”  

There are no new rules to replace the old rules.  The citizenry is confused.  What will happen to jobs?  To pensions?  To children’s education.  The Stasi, the secret police who spied on everyone in a country where one out of every 30 people was an informer, have tried to melt back into the population.  But have they?  The Soviet navy still sits in the Baltic port of Sassnitz, ready to return home to an uncertain future, maybe even not enough food.  North Vietnamese “guest workers” who were brought to East Germany as little more than indentured servants are clamoring to stay in the West.  Even the dogs that patrolled the wall and the “death strips” no long have a purpose in life and are being adopted by civilians.  Who can you trust?  What can you believe? 

The island, at the end of the road seems like a land that time forgot, unspoiled because the East Germans had little money except for the spies and the military.  Ruegen has hidden harbors, beautiful chalk cliffs, meadows, thatched roof cottages, and “Allee Strasse” where trees arch over the country roads. Many of the beaches are FKK, Frei Korper Kulture, or nude.  There are beautiful but shabby hotels and casinos.  Seamen’s bars where various nationalities congregate.  Is this a great setting for a book or what?

The main character is Zara Gray, a newly-divorced mother who wants to quite her high tech job and find something in hometown Chicago that doesn’t require constant travel.  Her greedy employers insist she take one last assignment, to validate some stolen software in East Germany.  The software is a sophisticated data mining system that is ahead of the curve, even in the West, developed by a New England company and stolen by the marketing manager.  He has hightailed to East Germany where he thought he would be safe, and he was... until the Wall came down.  Zara’s sidekick is T.K. Drummond, a man who she had a short relationship with the previous summer and who has no reason to like her. I’ve assembled an international cast of miscreants who want to seize opportunities as well as the software.

Wait a minute!  Harbors!  Seashore! Islands?  Where are the sailboats?  There is one, a beauty, the Zeesboot, a former working boat used for eeling in shallow waters.  These gaff-rigged schooners are being converted to pleasure boats, and Chuck, the larcenous marketing manager has just had a Zeesboot, The Painted Cow, refurbished.  Much of the action takes place on the boat, in good winds, becalmed seas and fog.

I came to write this book having spent a quick vacation weekend on Ruegen.  When I got home, the island came with me, until I figured out, “there must be a book here.”   I did a lot of reading and we returned for a week the following summer for research and reconnaissance.  There was indeed a book, World of Mirrors. 

The title comes from Marcus Wolf, the former East German spymaster, a paranoid man who didn't trust computers. 

How Novelists Get Their Ideas

It ain't easy coming up with a setting, plot and characters for a full length novel.  Sometimes when people say, 'that would make a good book' they are talking of something that is missing either a beginning, middle or an end.  Or that contains no conflict to drive the plot.  Maybe the setting is blah, the characters ordinary and the plot completely unoriginal or derivative.  You gotta do better than that.  You need a hero with some flaws, a villain with some good points, a setting that puts the reader right into the book, and a story, a good story.

Tomorrow on  Sheila Boneham, I discuss how I came to write World of Mirrors and some of the decisions, ideas and research that contributed to the novel.  Do take a look.   Here's  quick synopsis of World of Mirrors to pique your interest. 

A glamorous high-tech consultant has agreed to retrieve state-of-the art software in East Germany with a colleague and ex-lover who keeps her in the dark. As she navigates a landscape of sociopaths and unrehabilitated Stasi, Zara realizes she's in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man and no exit strategy.

The Warlord's Son

For months I have been savoring, a few pages at a time, the novel, The Warlord's Son, by Dan Fesperman. At some point, I had a feeling that maybe things weren't going to end all that well for some of the characters, and so I peeked into the last part of the book which I never, ever do but I did with this one. There were the 3 main characters, hale and hearty having escaped from the wild lands beyond the Khyber Pass.

So I read on, confident that things would work out well, although the author, now that I think about it, was signalling wildly that everything would NOT work out well. So you believe what you want to believe. Yesterday, on the train, I read and read and finally took the book up to bed last night to finish it.

Yikes, did I get a surprise. There was another twist at the ending a things did not work out, as signalled. It bothered me all night. "It's a book!" I told myself this morning. Why was I so upset? Maybe that one of the protagonists had been betrayed by his countrymen. It seemed like such a likely scenario, and he walked into it so blindly, desperate to put the pieces together of the wonderful story he was going to write. I guess it sounded true. And lately, true has not been good. Not at all. So it was just a book, but it also held up a mirror to our time, and of course I didn't like the image in the mirror. Nobody would.

On the listserve DorothyL, the question was asked about East German mysteries, and I had to pipe up that agents didn't want to touch them, which is true in my case. I always wonder a bit ruefully if I had a bunch of neo-Nazis and low lifes would the agents have been keener on the book. Never mind the Stasi, and the KGB and the Russian navy and even the dog that formerly patrolled the border, an ex-wall dog. Never mind the Vietnamese almost-slave labor. Where the hell are the neo-Nazis? Okay, maybe the story just stinks. But it doesn't. It's pretty cool actually, with a really neat ending with twists and turns.

One can read Proust before bedtime with the assurance that none of the main characters will die a violent death, although right now I am reading the part that introduced Albertine. Whenever I read about her, the image of the face of one of my high school friends inserts itself. She just looks like Albertine.

Some of the Burning Man honchos had dinner at our little place in Nevada this week. But I wasn't there to hostess, alas. Thinking of desperate ways to get to the Man this year. It's like a religion. I see myself on a run up to Lowell to the store that sells whorish dresses to find a costume. And maybe a run by St. Vincent DePaul for some outre duds. I see my credit card bill next month. Gaaaaa!

Onward,

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