Summer travel means waiting in airports or to catch a ferry across the channel… or waiting in a busy train station. Plenty of time to write a quick postcard and send it home.
No, wait. Send a selfie back home on your phone with a quick text. Fast, fun, but will it end up in a box of memories?
Or deleted?
The memory lost…
Yes, times have changed. We still waiti n airports or train stations, but the fine art of writing a travel postcard someone will cherish are gone. That personal touch of scrawled handwriting… a quick moment in time captured forever, a tangible memory of a card sent from Paris with the distnictive handwriting we know so well…
Remember when you got a travel postcard from a faraway place? It was like magic
Imagine receiving a handwritten postcard from Paris in 1940. Intrigue, romance, and spies…
Paris is my #BoldDestinations for this summer’s celebration of places where we set our books like The Orphans of Berlin and the Kindertransport from Berlin to Paris.
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Exciting news on SISTERS AT WAR!
A story of two sisters caught up in the side of war few talk about…
A very special story that looks at sexual abuse during wartime… and how it affects two sisters in Paris.
SIGNED PAPERBACK COMPETITION
Win a signed paperback copy of my upcoming book #SistersAtWar!
To enter, follow @BoldwoodBooks on Twitter and sign up for my newsletter: https://bit.ly/JinaBacarrNews
Competition ends 25th September! T&Cs: http://bit.ly/boldwoodtcs
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/BoldwoodBooks/status/1677724331772637185
0 0 Read more@jinabacarrauthor WIP woes… #booktok #authorlife #writersoftiktok #amwriting #ameditingfiction #womensfiction #booktoker @bookandtonic #writer #authorsoftiktok #heartbreakingstories #amediting edit
No, this isn’t a trick question.
It’s the challenge we ladies of the pen all face in our social media, digital, crazy, mad, mad world…
The answer is: BOTH.
The writer is me in total chaos working on an insanely difficult book about rape in France during World War II with a deadline looming. My office is a mess, I’m a mess… the manuscript, thank God, is NOT a mess but it’s not finished yet. Weaving such a trauma against the backdrop of the Nazi Occupation is the most gut-wrenching task I’ve ever faced. It’s taken me a while to get a handle on the story of two sisters and how the rape of one of them affects them both.
That’s the writer me.
—–
Now for the author me.
That’s the me writing this post because this is my chance every month to reach out to you guys and let you know what’s going on in my world. It’s how we present ourselves to the book world and at times is as just as trying and difficult as the writer me.
Hence, my TikTok confession.
I hope you enjoy my video showing me in my office drowning in research material… oh, Lord.
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And now for some good stuff, if I may.
My WW2 story THE ORPHANS OF BERLIN is now FREE to read in PRIME on Amazon
THE OPRHANS OF BERLIN
Meet the Landau Sisters barely surviving in Nazi Germany… and Kay Alexander, the amazing debutante from Philadelphia who will stop at nothing to save them from the Nazis in 1939 Berlin…
And of course, there’s a British pilot hero to die for…
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0 0 Read moreIt’s always exciting when a new story you’ve labored over for months… and months finally makes its debut… like a Broadway show opening out of town.
Philadelphia has had its share of out-of-town openings, so it’s only fitting THE ORPHANS OF BERLIN with my Philly debutante heroine had its opening this weekend on NetGalley.
To celebrate, I pulled out memorabilia from Berlin… my red cloche hat and red leather driving gloves… Berlin postcards.
And three of my favorite dolls that I carried around in a special pink trunk when I was a kid every time we moved.
Doll friends I could hang with since I was always the new kid in school (I went to 15). I’d eventually make friends, but these 3 ‘sisters’ were always there for me as they are today when I introduce you to the three Landau Sisters during WW2, Jewish girls in danger when the Nazis come to power…
Rachel, Leah, and Tovah.
Through a twist of fate, their fate is changed forever by Kay Alexander, a candy heiress with a dark secret that haunts her. Kay has no idea what’s in store for her when she visits Berlin in 1937… once she meets the Landau family, she’ll do anything to help them survive.
I spent part of a summer in Berlin years ago, visiting the city’s museums and shopping on the Ku’Damm, but the most memorable part was visiting East Berlin before the wall came down. I remember what the hotel clerk told me when I asked him for directions to Checkpoint Charlie. ‘They’ve forgotten how to smile,’ he said. I didn’t understand then what he meant until I was lost in that world of gray between East and West like a lost shadow.
During WW2, the Landau Sisters also forget how to smile as their freedoms are slowly taken from them because they are Jewish. In The Orphans of Berlin, you’ll meet Rachel and watch her grow up during the 1930s until the day her parents make the hardest decision a family should never have to make.
To send her and her sisters away… so they may live.
But how? Will they survive? Where will they go? Find out in THE ORPHANS OF BERLIN.
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If you’re a book reviewer and you’d like to request an ARC here’s the NetGalley info:
THE ORPHANS OF BERLIN
US https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/270880
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PRE-ORDER NOW:
0 1 Read moreWhen I recently checked out the DVD for “Black Swan,” it brought to mind another dancer.
Anna Pavolva.
What would it have been like to see her dance?
I decided to go straight to the source: Lady Eve Marlowe, the heroine of my Spice novel, Cleopatra’s Perfume. After all, who would know more about Berlin in the 1920s than someone who was there?
When I asked Eve to take over the blog, she was quick to point out she didn’t come to Berlin until 1928.
I reminded her that she had inhaled the sights, smells and sounds of the city–an elixir of the finest perfume that was Weimar Berlin. Hadn’t she often whispered in my ear about the decadent goings-on in the cabarets, the entertainers, artists, literati? I said. And partaken of the delights that hypnotize with the telling?
That’s when Eve smiled and I saw that sexy gleam in her eye, knowing what she was thinking, how much fun it would be to once again live through those wild times and indulge in the poetry and fantasy that was Weimar Berlin.
And so I give you Lady Eve Marlowe, who will guide you through Hot Weimar Berlin.
********
Thank you, Jina, for giving me this glorious opportunity to write this post.
Sitting at a café, I write the words: Berlin 1921 and it unleashes a completely different world, people racing through a time when they struggled to find their life rhythm in those trying times.
You mentioned several readers were interested to know more about Pavlova’s impromptu dance that night in the cellar club. Oh, how I wished I could have been there, but I was fortunate enough to hear about it from another dancer who knew someone who was there that night.
According to her account, Anna Pavlova was out for a night with friends, sitting in the corner and not drawing attention to herself. Someone recognized her and the buzz began–everyone started looking in her direction.
This was in 1921–she would have been around forty then (she died in 1931). I can see her in my mind, this sophisticated woman with the long, elegant neck and willowy body, knowing she possessed a beautiful gift that belonged not to her but to the world.
Pavlova embraced the wonderment and homage the customers showed her and rewarded them the best way she knew how.
Her dance.
According to this eyewitness, she was wearing a suit and shawl–she removed her jacket and whispered something to the violinist, who no doubt never dreamed his music would accompany the famed ballerina.
Then she began to dance…
Her body floated across the tiny nightclub floor with elegance and grace, her spirit ethereal and dreamlike, her steps as light as the gossamer notes of The Dying Swan played by the violinist, her art of dance shaped by a lifetime of diligence to her craft…but it was her passion that all who were there would never forget.
A beautiful swan who lives on…
–signed
Lady Eve Marlowe
Berlin 1958
On November 11th, we celebrate our veterans. But mothers are also veterans of war. Here is a story about such a mother written by Lady Eve Marlowe, the heroine in my novel, Cleopatra’s Perfume.
Before Lady Eve married a member of the British peerage, she was a cabaret dancer in Berlin in the late 1920s during the wild days of the Weimar Republic.
The scene in what I call a “story vid†(story video) takes place after one of the girls in the show is murdered and Eve goes to visit her mother.
Happy Veterans Day!
Best,
Jina
The Blonde Samurai: “She embraced the way of the warrior. Two swords. Two loves.â€
Jina Bacarr is also the author of The Blonde Geisha ,Cleopatra’s Perfume, Naughty Paris, Tokyo Rendezvous, a Spice Brief, and Spies, Lies & Naked Thighs
visit my website: http://www.jinabacarr.com/
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