germanwriter.com

Margot, Kolya, and five of their six children in front of the half set-up merry-go-round Kolya designed and built BLOG ----------------------- email me! Meanderings By Sonja Herbert
04-06-08 The first draft of my romantic suspense novel, Steamboat Springs, is done and I'm working on the second draft. 10-10-07 We have traveled to Stuttgart to see Margot, who is now 87, and on to see my sisters in Bruchsal, Darmstadt, and Cologne. Ken and I also spent a weekend in Heidelberg and in Berlin, the most amazing city I have ever seen. I have visited the house where Margot grew up in and Kurfuerstendamm, where the fashion store Busch stood. My writing is going fine also. I have written about my experiences in Germany on these pages:
9-10-07 The weather is fickle here in Germany. The sun shines for a few minutes and then the clouds close in. It drizzles for a moment, then it darkens more, and a hard rain starts, and stops as soon as the asphalt is all wet. A moment later, the sun shines again. The air is fresh, but never really cold this September. The weather brings back pleasant memories. We live in a small town, in an apartment that belongs to Antje, the friend of my youth. In town, we can walk the main street in fifteen minutes. And what a walk it is! we start at an Apotheke, a drugstore, pass by the old church, and are in front of a bakery with a small butcher shop next to it. The wonderful smells of fresh sausages and other wurst envelop us right after we admired the cream tortes and fresh farmer's bread in the bakery window. A bit later we pass by the Turkish grocery store, a small place where we get fresh vegetables and fruit, and the hot chili and pepper my husband loves so much. I'm delighted to be so close to the town I used to call my home when I was a teenager. A friend took us into Wetzlar last weekend, and it still looks as amazing as I remember. Some of the old houses, built sometime around 1600AD, have been restored and look even better. I have posted a picture above. We are settled now, have Inernet, and are back to work when we aren't out and about, admiring small town life in Germany. 8-8-07 Things have been a bit slow in the last few months, but I've been busy copy writing, and when I get discouraged, I look at my website and all the great things that happened last year. Here is some good news: Vivian Reed of the Writer's Ezine has written a great interview about me and my life. She has put links to some of my stories for the readers, and has given an interesting and accurate glimpse into my life. Check it out here T-Zero Expandizine 8-6-07 Only three more weeks for our move to Germany. I'm going start packing seriously now. Next week, when my youngest gets ready for the next semester, I'll see what she can use of my stuff, and the rest we'll give away or store. I won't have a lot of time to write, but I'm hoping to finish two more non-fiction pieces before we go. So far I've been able to steadily work on Steamboat Falls. I might not be finished by the end of the years, but I'm sure it will be close. I've made preparatory research on my memoir about Monument Valley and hope to finish it while in Germany.
7-20-07 We went to Utah, Colorado, and California to tell the last set of children good-bye. In our free hours we are already packing, and soon will rent the storage we need to put our things. Only five more weeks before the move to Germany! In the meantime, I keep writing. I am planning to keep a journal about my experiences in Germany and will post it here, on a page dedicated to Germany. I have been doing preliminary research on my memoir about Monument Valley and will probably start seriously writing on it once we are settled in Germany. In the meantime, the story about Steamboat Falls unfolds. I'm not happy with the beginning, but will get back to that after I have the rest in shape. I'm steadily writing essays and smaller stories and hope to have some more of them published soon. 6-05-07 The second draft of Steamboat Falls is coming along, but slower than I thought. Ken and I are making preparations for our move to Germany the end of August. I will visit my mother's birthplace and the apartment she grew up in, I'll get into closer contact with my sisters and other relatives. And hopefully, Ken and I will do some serious traveling while we live in Germany. We are planning to be there for two years, but could change that to more or less, as it seems to be the right thing to do. Tightrope! did not place in the Gather contest, but I have revised it one more time with the help of an editor. It is now in the hands of Bill Hammond, the agent who suggested the revision. I expect to hear back from him in the near future. With everything going on in my life, I haven't looked very hard for an agent for Cross and Carnival, but will hopefully get back to do that soon. Another book with one of my creative non-fiction stories, called A Cup of Comfort Book of Prayer, should be out by next month. Up to now things have been going slowly this year, but with the revision of Tightrope! and everything else going on, it's all right. I hope things will pick up again soon! 2-21-07 My new computer has broken down twice so far and it's in the shop right now. I hope it will work more reliably when it comes back. I have entered the Gather.com First Chapters Contest, and have just survived my two weeks for the first chapter of Tightrope!. The second chapter, if Tightrope! gets chosen to go on, will be posted on or after March 15. When that happens, I'll post the link here, so you can go and vote for it. The revision of my NaNoWriMo novel, Steamboat Falls, is coming along slowly, but surely. I will spend more time looking for an agent or publisher this month for Cross and Carnival. The New Lands editors have decided not to publish their book, and have given me the rights back to my little story "Culture Shock." I will look around for a new place for that, too, this month. I have also planned to write two pieces for the Chickensoup for the Soul anthologies, and hope I'll get them done before the deadline. 1-6-07 The new year is starting, and I have made some specific New Year's resolutions. This year, I will find an agent for Tightrope!, find an agent or publisher for Cross and Carnival, and finish revising Steamboat Falls, the novel I wrote in November. I will also be working on Peace in the Valley, my memoir of living on the Navajo Reservation. And I will also send out at least one small story per week. In Semptember Ken and I will move to Germany for two years, which will give me a chance to re-connect with the child I was, and for my children to discover their heritage. 12-14-06 I have successfully finished the Novel Writing Month, and have a working first draft of a romantic suspense novel geared to the Christian reader. I will start revising this draft in January. Right now I'm working on a rewrite of Tightrope! for a writing contest for young adult fiction. I am also working on several smaller things I'd like to get done by the end of December. With Christmas coming, everything is in flux, and excitement is in the air. I hope to write a Christmas story sometime in the next few months, for next Christmas! 11-12-06 My Novel Writing Month project is coming along. I'm close to half finished, and don't feel quite as bad about this first draft. So far I have managed to meet my goal of 2,000 words a day every day. (But not yet today!) I had the first book reading and signing at Borders Bookstore on the Sunday before last in Gresham. In spite of the torrential rain that day, all two other authors and the book's editor, Colleen Sell were present. A small group of interested people was delighted to hear us read our stories, and afterward sign their books. I got to know the other authors a little better, and the store personnel were very friendly and accommodating. The next Monday, our signing was held at the Borders store in Vancouver, Washington. Again, the rain came down so heavy that even traffic came to a standstill. I was on the road for almost four hours, for a distance that should have taken me forty minutes. I was so glad my husband was driving. I made it just in time for the reading and signing. Several relatives of the authors attended, including my husband's son and his family. Again, we read our stories and signed several store books, besides the books the attendees bought. Last Saturday, in Beaverton, we had a very large crowd. The signing was held during the middle of the day, with sunshine outside. The store had to bring more chairs several times, because of the crowds. Many people attended, amongst them my two youngest daughters, children of other authors, relatives, and friends of the writers. My whole writer's group from Forest Grove made it! Thank you, guys! As a special treat, another author read her story from A Cup of Comfort for Christmas, and again the authors signed many books for the people who attended and also for the store. My two daughters had tears in their eyes when I read the story about their brother Daniel and their Grandfather, who died when they were just babies. We had a great time, and I'm sure the store was happy to have us there! 10-31-06 Interest in the Holocaust is growing. I see school children spellbound when I tell about my mother's experiences at the local high school. A kid from Australia contacted me for a project she was doing about the Holocaust for her school. I will be busy November, working on my next novel and trying to stay with the NaNoWriMo requirements, but after that I will seriously look for representation of Tightrope! and Cross and Carnival. Today I will enjoy the Trick-or-Treaters, and finish up lose ends on Cross and Carnival. 10-27-06 We took a ten day trip to California to visit some of our children and spend some time at Disneyland. Right before we left I got the good news that Tightrope! had won the Eaton Literary award for best book length manuscript for the year 2006. And, the first two chapters of Tightrope! have also won the first prize at the Joyous Publishing Contest for September. Tightrope! is a great story and needs to be out there, for everyone to read. 10-24-06 I have joined the NaNoWriMo for this year, and so will be busy spending the month of November writing the first draft of a novel. I have put the NaNoWriMo icon here. But I hope I will still have time to search for an agent for Tightrope! and do a last revision of Cross and Carnival. 09-09-06 In the last two weeks, I have written a whole lot of small children's stories, based on different pieces of art. I was amazed at how easily the stories came to me, and how much pleasure it was to write them. One of these stories was accepted for the Delaware Art Museum's Story in Art Project, and the other ones I will send out soon, to look for homes for them. I am still polishing the memoir, but have already sent out some queries for it. And, starting tomorrow, I will get ready for NaNoWriMo. That is the National Novel Writing Month, which is November. I want to have an outline all together, so I can accomplish the goal of finishing a first draft in one month. My copy writing parameters have changed, so I am also working on getting a feel for the new way I have to write them. My youngest is off to college now, but it still feels like there still aren't enough hours in the day to accomplish everything I want to! 08-02-06 My memoir proposal is all ready, I have my business cards and my CV, and I'm ready to brave the Willamette Writers Conference. Tomorrow evening I'll check it out and register, and on Friday I'll have an interview with a non-fiction agent. Needless to say, I'm quite nervous. I'll probably have a lot of fun, make some new friends, and come home excited and enthusiastic. 07-20-06 A friend sent me a new program to search the internet, called "Stumble." It's quite interesting and lots of fun, but it does take away from my time to write. On the other hand, the things I find there can be new ideas for other writings. Presently I'm writing a series of children's short stories, based on certain arts of work. I'm sending these stories to the Delaware Museum of Art, which will select from the stories they get, probably from all over the world. Their project is to match the best stories with the artwork it relates to, to have the children who visit the museum to listen to the stories while they admire the art. I think this is a wonderful way to introduce art to children, and I hope some of my stories will be picked for the project. 07-20-06 I went to an award ceremony from the Marylhurst University yesterday, where chapter ten of Cross and Carnival, called "Tschilper," won finalist. I read part of the story and really enjoyed doing that. I also enjoyed and appreciated the other writers I met there. In the last few weeks I have steadily been working on this website. I have designed and implemented a new homepage, and have bulleted my awards and forthcoming publications, to make it look better and easier to overview. I will be going to the Willamette Writer's conference in two weeks. This is one of the largest writer's conferences in the United States. I hope to make a few more connections there, especially with agents. I have joined the Willamette Writers, and am in the process of joining the National League of American Pen Women. Also, I have written my Writer's Curriculum Vitae, and have put it onto this website. I'm pretty much finished revising the memoir Cross and Carnival, and am in the process of writing a proposal and a query letter. After the writers conference, I'll start sending it out for publication. This is a smooth and easy summer. My baby Meagan has found a nice summer job close enough to walk to, and she's getting ready to move to the university the end of next month. Check out the new additions and improvement I made to the website over the last few weeks. 06-13-06 It's been an exhausting and delightful two weeks. The youngest of my six children graduated from high school, and all her brothers, sisters, and most of her step-siblings came to celebrate. Meagan is not my first to go directly from high school to a university, but she is maybe the most focused one. She'll start this fall in the nursing program at the University of Portland. While hosting for all my children and their significant others, I still found time to send out some queries. And the most delightful happenings are the two acceptances and the one contest win I received last week. I hope to have the memoir finished by the end of June, so I can send it out, too. But in any case, the more of my stories I get accepted, the more I will come across as a serious writer, and the more the agents will consider my submissions. Today I'm focused on improving my website, so check it out. I hope it's easier to read now and more interesting! 05-24-06 I just watched Elie Wiesel on the Oprah show on TV. Elie Wiesel went with Oprah back to Auschwitz one more time, quietly walking the empty barracks that still look so much like they did then. It breaks my heart to see the genocide that has since been perpetrated on other innocent groups of people in Africa and Bosnia. It seems that in spite of our promises to never again let this happen, it does. And still, groups of people murder others because they have the wrong religion or ethnicity. It doesn’t make any sense. Maybe our most important task right now is to educate our children, and how can we do that better than by having them read about and become emotionally involved with the survivors? No dry account can accomplish that. May our novels and biographies cry from the dust, and revive the people that were so wronged. May our children become emotionally so involved that it becomes personal for them, and that they will never again forget this voice calling from the grave. Tightrope!, the story of Margot Edel’s survival is by far not as grim as so many others were. Margot survived and raised a large family. And she still is alive now. But the mental and emotional scars from that time will be forever with her. It’s hard for her to show love, even to herself, and it took her many years to develop some kind of faith in a Higher Power. Maybe by the time she goes to see her Maker, which, I hope won’t be for many years yet, she will have overcome her fear of death and of life that the Nazi regime instilled in her when she was but a child. 05--01-06 Today is a holiday in Germany and all over Europe. It's Mayday, the European version of Labor Day. I'm imagining my mother, Margot, wandering through Stuttgart, where she now lives. Maybe she'll go to a park and listen to an improptu concert. Maybe she'll go downtown to window-shop and admire the street artists. Margot still is a city girl, at 85 years of age. She never took to the small towns where we traveled with our carnival when I was a girl. Even when we settled in a medium sized town, Wetzlar, she hated it. As soon as we kids were gone, she moved to Stuttgart. She tells me it's a lot warmer there than in Berlin, and Berlin just isn't what it used to be when she was young. So, ignoring her age and her doctor, she goes out wandering the big city streets every day. After all these years, I have learned a lot of respect for my indomitable mother and her determination to make the best of her life. Go on and enjoy Mayday, Mutti! 04-24-06 A few days ago the German government released the records of some 17 million Jews and other enslaved persons of the Nazi rule. According to the news, these records, between 40 and 50 million, are now accessible for historians, Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Even though these records have been accessible to the Red Cross all the time, this is the first time historians and civilians will be able to search and investigate them. That makes me think of the German people I knew and still know, who were also survivors -- survivors of an evil and totalitarian government, survivors of fear and oppression, and even survivors of propaganda and misinformation. The children I grew up with were young Germans. Most of them never heard their elders speak about Hitler or about the war, but they did get the underlying attitudes of their elders. And as far as I could tell, these attitudes were of tolerance and relief. Only once in my childhood did I hear someone talk badly about Jews, or in any other way deride them. I can only imagine the large burden of unspoken guilt the Germans of my generation grew up with, and had to live with. When I immigrated to the USA in 1973, I occasionally met other German immigrants. Most of them didn't want to be recognized as German, and tried hard to lose their accent. I thought then, and I still think, that much of this desire to blend in, to not associate with other Germans, comes from the war guilt. But also, Germans seem to have a cultural trait to do the very best they can in anything they have decided to do. And when a German has decided to immigrate and become American, he or she will do the best they can to achieve that goal as quickly and as completely as possible. I know, I have that trait. I've lived here for over thirty years now, and I'm glad to be a naturalized American citizen. But ask my husband, and he'll tell you he has never met anyone so proud of their German heritage as I am. And I'm only partly German, considering my father was Polish and my mother half-Jewish. The grand heritage of German scientists and achievements is still paramount in the eyes of my American fellow citizens, and because I still have my accent, I'm often asked if I am German. When I say yes to that, most people will proudly tell me of their own German ancestry. So I will claim the best of the German folk for myself, and also the best of my Jewish heritage. And I will never forget my Polish father, who gave me my Slavic background. I think I am the best of all possible mixtures. 04-20-06 The last year was the 60th anniversary of the end of WW II. One hardly heard anything about it here in the United States. That chapter of the world's history seems to be done with and finished. But it isn't, really. In Europe, the fact of WW II's sixtieth anniversary was very much in the minds of the people. After sixty years, the grandchildren of the Germans who fought in the war are maybe ready to face the guilt they, their parents and grandparents have lived under. Most of the generation that lived under Hitler is now gone. It may not be an exaggeration when the survivors still insist they hadn't known what happened to the Jews they knew. It may also be true that so many non-Jewish Germans also feared and loathed the government they had to live under. Maybe if all who didn't agree with Hitler and the Nazis would have risen as one and confronted the hated system, things would have turned out differently. But family fathers are seldom rebels, and fear is an effective damper, if it's tempered with some advantages. The Third Reich had a wonderful system for the youth in place. Parents didn't have to wonder where their children were and children had a group to identify with. And if they were taught some things the parents didn't agree with, they took that in stride. After all, nobody really knew what exactly happened to people the Nazis considered inferior. I believe people are still the same as the Germans were under Hitler, the ones who are the grandparents of today's Germans. It's human nature to put our families first and to protect what is near and dear to us, before risking our lives and our loved ones' lives to help strangers. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it isn't. You decide. 04-17-06 It's important that we never forget what happened in Germany in the 30's and 40's. The last two generations know about this only from hearsay, and rarely from Holocaust survivors they knew personally. I'm always amazed at the attention and the interest I receive when talking to high school classes about Margot Edel and her survival of the Holocaust. It seems the young generation wants to know and wants to understand. They are wildly interested, if someone just makes it personal. And it's not difficult to do that. You don't have to have a Holocaust survivor in your family to feel the fear and desperation they had to go through close up and personal. The stories of that time speak to everybody's heart. Everybody knows hardship and struggle, and everybody knows someone who is intolerant or ethnocentric. It's easy to show how a general dislike can turn into hate, how a feeling of "I'm right, the others aren't," can turn into discrimination, if not tempered by obedience to laws that guarantee all of us freedom of expression, no matter who we are, and what we want to express. The Holocaust was possible because such freedoms, guaranteed by law, were done away with. Then what was left was a big, empty space where hatred, discrimination, and a conviction of superiority spread like weeds. And the end result is a generation of people who still have trouble believing in themselves and in any government, even if it grants them such rights. 04-10-06 What probably helped make Margot become the woman she was when I was small, and the woman she now is, is that she grew up during the Third Reich. She was raised with the belief that she wasn't as good as everybody else around her, and I think deep down she still sees herself that way . My mother still needs constant approval, and easily gets demanding and unreasonable. Because she never learned to love herself, she focuses on herself exclusively and so misses out on a lot of love that might come her way otherwise. And because I am her child, she raised me with my own insecurities and fears. I wonder if I also have carried forward this legacy of self-doubt and shame. I hope not. May that be as it is, it shows that the Holocaust still haunts us. We, the children of the survivors, also survive, with our own emotional scars, and our own children, the third generation after Hitler, have to cope with that. Where does it ever end? It doesn't seem fair that the Third Reich still has repercussions in the lives of the grandchildren of its victims, but it does, even if we and they don't always realize it. And maybe some of these repercussions are positive. I wonder if I would have been a writer without them. Maybe so, but I probably wouldn't have all this material to work with! 04-05-06 Writing can be draining and exhausting, almost more so than physical work. All I could do in the last two weeks was getting my copy pages done. I have also learned how to put together a press release, an email newsletter, and other kinds of internet writing. It has been a busy two weeks! However, that shouldn't be an excuse for doing my creative fiction and non-fiction writing. So far I have kept to my New Year's Resolution and have written on the revision of my memoir almost every day. I have to admit, though, that it hardly has been two hours a day, as was my goal. But writing on it everyday is far better than what I did last year, where I was lucky to get to it twice a week. ---------------------------- email me!
I have decided to write this more or less informal blog at least once a month, to keep this website interesting. So keep checking for what else I have to say!

Modify Website