Back At Last - My Doings, and the Eastern Front

Well, well, here I am again! I have let that notorious Facebook distract me from this blog for quite some time. But really, Facebook is not ideally suited to lengthy posts: not, at least, with the easy suaveness of a blog. In case there is anyone who has been checking this blog for updates, has no access to my Facebook page, and is not a member of my family, here is a brief summation of my recent life.

On Friday, May 30 (I believe Friday was the 30th, but please correct me if I'm wrong), I graduated high school. Since none of my friends live within an easy distance of Southern California, I expected it to be a pretty saturnine affair, though that didn't bother me. So I was in the perfect mood for a surprise - not looking for big fireworks or expecting a whole army of friends at my door. Lo and behold, I come down to check on the progress of dinner, and my brother is sitting in the backyard! It turns out that my parents flew him down without my knowledge, expressly to celebrate my graduation. Needless to say, that was an extremely pleasant surprise. I also received two books from Robert (Moscow 1941 by Rodric Braithwaite and No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton) and from my parents, a stupendously cool mountain bike. Unfortunately, I have only been able to test-ride it once, but it is clearly built to last and well-engineered: it has good tires, very effective disk brakes, and a sort of paddle shifter like one finds in race cars.

The reason I was unable to try the bike out more than once is because, early the next morning I jetted away from Rancho and travelled, via Houston, to Detroit, and was then shuttled to Hillsdale College. I've been taking a 3-week summer class here, Introduction to Western Religion, which is very fascinating if very jam-packed (we're doing basically a semester of work in that time slot). That ends on Friday, at which I will return home, catch up on my beauty sleep, and then celebrate my birthday on Saturday. Believe it or not, this upcoming year will be my last year as a teen. I remember, about six years ago, just after my thirteenth birthday, when I noted the first story I had ever worked on as an official teenager. It was a goofy comedy I never finished, about a hapless lad who is entrusted with a virtually indestructible toad that proceeds to wreak havoc on everything in sight. My writing has changed a lot since then--I've changed a lot since then--but I'll tell you one thing, my comedies are still goofy. ;-)

So, that's about that for a brief update. There is a second thing I want to mention, and that is my love-hate relationship with my idea for an Eastern Front novel. You see, on the one hand, I love the idea because it has for its setting one of the most gritty, vast, terrifying and cathartic wars of all time, into which I can insert some very interesting characters. It will likely be, if I complete it, a very long novel, and a very intense novel. It deals with a war that saw unprecedented advancements in tank design, weapons development, and military tactics. It cost the Russians and Germans (and Ukranians, Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc.) more than 30 million lives--that's the population of California--in just five years. It catapulted Russia into power for the next 40 years. It has every opportunity for battle, intrigue, and tragedy--huge tank battles, brutal house-to-house fighting, aerial combat, months-long sieges, secret police, deserters and informants, partisan warfare, reprisals against civilians, ethnic genocide, and the megalomaniac wills of the two dictators who presided over the whole mess. And in that "mess" we have the ordinary soldiers and civilians reeling before a cataclysm like no other century has witnessed.

BUT, on the other hand, it's very difficult to know how to begin, and considerably more difficult to do the amount of research commensurate with the task. Researching the various aspects of the war and the people involved in it, which to serve in a novel could at least theoretically involve names, clothing and uniforms, weapons, vehicles, geography and place names, cultural icons (heroes, saints, movie stars, writers, etc.), social venues (sporting activities, clubs, cafes, theaters), typical house design, economic conditions, military tactics and strategy, dates, the actual detailed history of battles, troop movements, etc., military structure (squads, platoons, battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, corps, armies, fronts), typical military training, partisan warfare and tactics, and some idea of the current layout of at least Stalingrad, Moscow, and Berlin--all this feels rather like trying to fill out a sudoku puzzle on a 1,000 x 1,000 grid. And so this is one of those novels where I want to get at the plot by its horns, but, since it is an historical novel, the barriers are quite tall if I want to aim for a realistic and detailed portrayal.

I guess, like almost anything else, the best way to tackle the problem will be to take it head-on, one little step at a time. :-)