A Sadist and a Saint?

My WIP Veiled in Storms keeps rolling on.
I am writing what I have found the most difficult sections of the story at the moment.

In a plot development truly the brainchild of my Inner Sadist one of my main characters is arrested and sent to Siberia. To be more precise she is sentenced to 25 years in Stalin’s GULAG system. Some of you may know something of the GULAGs as reams have been written about them, most famously Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn’s books The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, essentially they were a forced labour camps of the Soviet Union.

The majority of people sent to the GULAGs were there on trumped up charges. Some were never charged but were sentenced because of the “actions” of friends or relatives. Depending on when a person was arrested and where a person was sent in the system things varied from very hard to being worked and starved to death.

The problem for me as an author (even one who consults an inner sadist) is experiences in the system were quite simply terrible. Entry into the system typically involved interrogation by the NKVD. The NKVD routinely used torture, both psychological and physical. As if that wasn’t bad enough, women (my character is female) were frequently raped as part of the process of breaking them.

Once in the camps there is also plenty of options for my Inner Sadist to throw at my poor character. Work details, starvation, violence of all kinds from prisoners and guards. According to Solzhenitsyn the worst curse possible was to be not only a woman but an attractive woman in the camps. My poor character ticks both boxes.

So somehow I have to explore surviving the impossible with my character. I have had experience with writing difficult material, a component of my first book Veiled in Shadows is the Holocaust. I don’t pull too many punches in that book, but I think I managed to find a balance between telling a harrowing story and keeping it light enough to read. As a by the by I think my reviewers agree with me.

You can find reviews here:
(Kathleen Jones' Review - Reviews on Amazon - Reviews on Book Depository).

So the trick is to tell a story that is realistic (even dismally so) but to find a way to balance the hard with the not quite so bad.

I guess that is where my Inner Saint comes into play. To avoid giving too much of my plot away I’ll quote from Anne Applebaum’s book Gulag: A History. “Certainly many women survivors are convinced there were great advantages to being female within the camp system. Women were better at taking care of themselves…better able to subsist on low amounts of food... They formed powerful friendships and helped each other in ways that male prisoners did not.”

So my Inner Sadist might throw the intolerable at my poor character. At the same time my Inner Saint will throw some lifelines. How many she catches along the way… well you will have to wait and see.

Oh by the way - my Inner Saint wants me to tell any concerned readers of Valentina’s extracts that the character who goes to GULAG is not her. Do you believe me?

Tanks and other distractions

Today I have been climbing in and out of and all over a World War II vintage tank.
To be specific I have been getting to know a tank like this.

A Russian T-34 produced in various models from 1940 to 1958.
And from inside
I should probably do the right thing and note the photos of the tanks I am using today are not mine. They are from the Wikimedia Commons and are either in the public domain or available for reuse. To check attribution just click on each image.

There now, copyright is sorted out I can go on. So what is an Aussie lad doing mucking around with Soviet military hardware?
Well for a start I should confess, I have not actually been anywhere near a T-34 today. It has all been via my imagination liberally assisted by a number of videos, images, and just as important memoirs and other recollections of real users. It is all about authenticity.

As I have already said on this blog, I am trying to get my first book Veiled in Shadows published. In the meantime I am continuing to work on a sequel (tentatively titled Veiled in Storms). No, Sequel is too strong a word.

Some of the characters of the first book feature in the second, but Storms does not really follow on from Shadows. The two overlap in time with Storms finishing about eight years later. While the first looks at the human impact of the Holocaust and the war in the West, the second looks at the war in the East, but also looks at the nightmare that was Stalinist Russia. I am writing them so it will not matter which book people read first. Each book stands alone but readers will meet characters they already know as they go through whichever they choose to read second.

How did I get onto this? T-34 tanks! One of my characters in Storms will spend some time in the Red Army, so from my point of view I need to know everything I can about that institution and its equipment. Call me picky, but I hate it when I read stuff in fiction that is just plain wrong due to poor research.

When I develop characters, especially an important one, I spend hours, days, sometimes even weeks fleshing them out, and often writing quite involved stories and histories for them. Most of that detail never appears in the final version, or if it does it might be a single sentence in a chapter. For me it helps make a character more authentic, somehow more tangible. If I understand someone’s history before they ever show up in my book I feel I can write them better. That I can “know” what they would do in any given situation.

You'll have to forgive me I've finished with this tank, but I see a stack of rifles over there. See you later.