Writing Archives - Page 2 of 4

A Memoir of Love and Travel Van-Life Style

Travel is my passion and my way of learning about the world. What was the most influential journey of your life? How has travel changed your perspective? The first question is an easy one for me — it was my honeymoon! Granted, my honeymoon was a bit different than most. It lasted for two years in the early 1970s and featured four continents via Volkswagen microbus. For years, I resisted writing about the experience. When we were traveling, I took notes, thinking I would write a travelogue or a food essay for a cooking magazine when we returned home. However, by the time I was back in California, I realized that most of my notes, by then as much as two years old, were already out of date. I set the idea of writing about our trip aside and proceeded with my life [...]

Katie Slattery2020-03-23T08:45:38+00:00October 1st, 2017|Tags: journal letters, memoir, travel, writing|0 Comments

A Summer Book for Young Readers

After two years promoting my adult novel, Immigrant Soldier, I decided go back to my roots – children’s literature. As a result of the publication of the novel, I now have my very own publishing company. Why not publish a children’s book? Last February, I pulled out one of my favorite children’s manuscripts - a work where I continue to own the rights. Based on a childhood memory, it tells the story of a little girl with a big idea in early chapter-book format. I checked the manuscript over, made a few changes and improvements, and sent it to my editor, Lorraine Fico-White. She encouraged me to go ahead with the project. “I love Caitlin and can easily see this becoming a series,” she wrote. So preparation work for publishing the manuscript began! In a children’s book, illustrations are primary. However, I never wanted to do the illustrations myself. I turned to a friend who is [...]

Katie Slattery2020-02-07T22:53:44+00:00April 26th, 2017|0 Comments

My Mother’s Secret – A Self-Publication Success

I have to admit, Amazon has my number! Whenever I sign in to my account on their website, I get a display of “featured recommendations,” and when I order a book, I am shown selections that “customers who bought this item also bought.” It was one of these suggestions that lead me to the wonderful little novel, My Mother’s Secret by J. L. Witterick. The description on Amazon says, “Inspired by a true story, My Mother’s Secret is a captivating and ultimately uplifting tale intertwining the lives of two Jewish families in hiding from the Nazis, a fleeing German soldier, and the mother and daughter who team up to save them all.” There was no way I could resist this introduction. Last week, after finishing a group of three dense nonfiction books, I chose this thin book from the huge stack on my bookshelf because I needed a quick read with a compelling plot. [...]

Katie Slattery2020-01-12T19:04:52+00:00March 11th, 2017|0 Comments

A Writers’ Workshop -“Turning a True Story into Fiction.”

Last summer, as I planned a trip to the Dayton area, I contacted several organizations in southwestern Ohio which I thought might be interested in hearing one of my presentations and was pleased when I heard from the Dayton Metro Library that they were intrigued by my proposal for "More Than Simply 'Based On': The Evolution of Immigrant Soldier from Fact to Fiction." In this presentation, I give a brief synopsis of the origins of Immigrant Soldier, followed by how I slowly moved the story from nonfiction to fiction and the difficulties I encountered along the way. I especially enjoy giving this talk because it allows me to share my personal journey as a writer and self-publisher. When I talked to the librarian in charge of program scheduling for the Dayton Metro Library, she asked if I would be willing to expand my talk into a short writers’ workshop [...]

Katie Slattery2020-03-01T00:45:32+00:00October 2nd, 2016|0 Comments

The True Story of General Patton’s New Boots

My last blog explained the process of expanding and fictionalizing the true stories Herman told me. This imagining and expanding of Herman’s memories was great creative fun. Far more difficult, but equally important, was culling redundant or irrelevant sections so the novel maintained a momentum to keep the reader engaged. Some interesting segments of family significance needed to be severely shortened or removed entirely. Several chunks of historical background exposition were also deleted or converted into conversation, mainly between Herman and his friend Goldschmitt. One tale told to me by Herman, a tale he loved to recount, stands out in my mind as the most difficult to remove. Here is the true story of General Patton’s new boots as it appeared in an earlier version of the Immigrant Soldier manuscript. ************************************************************************************************ A few weeks after the race horses had been delivered, Herman was summoned [...]

Katie Slattery2020-01-12T21:11:26+00:00July 30th, 2016|0 Comments

Truth vs Fiction: A Book Group Question about Immigrant Soldier

When I am speaking with book clubs who have read Immigrant Soldier, one of the questions I am most often asked is: “What parts are true and what bits are totally from the author’s imagination?” Naturally in the limited time we usually have, and in the limited space of a blog post, I cannot go through the pages of the novel from beginning to end. However, to give a sense of when and why I infused fiction into what is essentially a true story, I offer an explanation similar to the one that follows. The structure and plot of Immigrant Soldier remains faithful to my Uncle Herman’s memories as he told them to me over many taped hours of conversation. However, his memory, always sketchy when it came to details and distressing events, became more and more vague over the years. This led me to substantial background research and many interviews of family and [...]

Katie Slattery2020-01-12T21:17:17+00:00July 9th, 2016|0 Comments

Meg Waite Clayton – A World War II “Nut.”

I recently had the honor of hosting best-selling author Meg Waite Clayton for a weekend in my home. She had come to Laguna Beach in order to speak at the annual fund-raising Literary Luncheon for an organization dear to my heart .* Earlier I had been asked by the organization to write a short piece about Clayton for the local newspaper. In order to do that, I had already enjoyed a long phone interview with the author and knew when she arrived we would hit it off. Clayton’s most recent novel, The Race for Paris, is, like Immigrant Soldier, historical fiction set during World War II. She has published five novels, but The Race for Paris was the second novel she began writing and it was the one she came back to repeatedly over 15 years as she completed a string of best-selling novels about women’s friendships – The Wednesday Sisters, The Four Ms. Bradwells, and The Wednesday [...]

Katie Slattery2019-12-01T07:37:28+00:00April 7th, 2016|0 Comments

Did That Really Happen?

Readers of Immigrant Soldier often ask me how much of the novel actually happened and how much was born from my imagination. The earliest finished manuscript, with the somewhat deceptive title of Becoming an American, was written as nonfiction for young adults. When I decided to rewrite it as a novel for adults, I wanted it to remain a true story. But if it was to be a good novel, it would need to have the elements that make for good fiction—characters who experience difficulties and growth, an exciting plot with ups and downs, details of setting, and dramatic scenes that show rather than tell. In my late college career, as a graduate student in Fine Arts, I took a sculpture class. We started with an armature that formed the structure underneath and roughed in the basic shape we planned for the finished piece. Herman’s story, as he told it to me, was [...]

Katie Slattery2019-12-01T07:37:57+00:00August 1st, 2015|0 Comments

Faction—What Is It?

Since the publication of Immigrant Soldier in February of this year, I have been actively marketing it to museum gift shops. I am proud that through these efforts, the novel is now available at quite a few Holocaust and World War II museums across the country. However, several important museums let me know that their policy is to only take nonfiction works. Considering how closely Immigrant Soldier follows the true story of my Uncle Herman, this is very disappointing. However, because the book is listed as historical fiction, I felt I had to accept the nonfiction-only policy of these few museums. Then a friend reminded me that Schindler’s List, by Thomas Keneally, was originally marketed as fiction and even won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1982. Schindler’s List, a classic of Holocaust literature, is known to readers and film-goers alike as a true story based on extensive research, in-depth interviews, and the cooperation [...]

Katie Slattery2019-12-01T07:38:11+00:00July 25th, 2015|0 Comments

Molly Speaks on Love and War

In Immigrant Soldier, the Story of a Ritchie Boy, Molly is Herman’s first love. She is based on a real young woman, though I have changed her name and added details too private for Herman to tell me. I thought it would be interesting to look into Molly’s heart. How did she feel about her brief affair with a young refugee from Hitler’s Germany? Molly Speaks on Love and War. I can’t believe I’m so sad. I knew Herman for less than a year, but he burrowed his way into my heart and found that warm, soft, passionate spot I had forgotten was there. The golden sun of the April afternoon and Betsy’s happy companionship had already made me quite giddy before I met him the first time at his uncle’s tennis court. He was earnest when he shook my hand after Father introduced us. I couldn’t help myself—I wanted to [...]

Katie Slattery2019-12-01T07:38:32+00:00May 3rd, 2015|0 Comments

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