I’ve made several references to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn in talking about my Red Slaves series, so it seemed only fair to dedicate a post to this man. He was a dissident born in December 1918 and was the first to expose the western world to the Soviet system of gulags, or forced labor camps, through his writing–which was based largely on his personal experience of that system.

His prosecution under Article 58 for anti-Soviet propaganda operated as an object lesson for Igor in Dust to Blood, and remains a symbol of how repressive the Soviet regime was for free-thinking individuals.

I appreciate him for some of his well-known quotes:

Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience… from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

And the one that could be the cautionary tale for those who would again imprison dragons:

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power – he’s free again.

Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, and the autobiographical essay he penned on that occasion is worth reading for yet another perspective on what repression and secrecy can inflict on an individual. He died in 2008 in Moscow at the age of 89.

Although there is a significant rescue scene in Blood to Fire, and there are thematic elements about rescuing abused individuals throughout the Red Slaves series, they all constitute spoilers. So I’m going to talk about a different kind of rescue near and dear to my heart: Animal rescue.

We rescued our second and third Siberian Huskies. We knew Kyra (the first one we’d gotten) needed her Husky-buddies, after we moved away from the two playmates she’d had in Charlottesville, and I joked from early on that she was a therapy dog for dogs, but that was never more clear than when we saw the listing in the Arizona Husky Rescue for a neglected girl they’d named Chloe. We were supposed to meet her and her foster mom in Tuscon, but ended up driving all the way to Phoenix to see her. She was underweight and her nose was all lumpy in the way that dogs that survive attacks get. She bonded immediately with my husband, and then we had the almost-5-hour drive to get back home.

She thrived in her new home, but needed a name that fit her “enforcer” personality. With the help of an animal communicator, she let us know she’d answer to Wolfee. Even though she was larger than Kyra, and Kyra is not the classic dominant dog, she was happy to be Kyra’s second-in-command.

Then we saw an ad in the monthly Silver City free newspaper from the local humane society listing the animals running out of time. My husband said we couldn’t let them euthanize a beautiful Husky girl, so even though she was the same age and sex as the two we already had (and had been returned to the shelter once already for having killed the cat in her prospective home), we took a visit to the High Desert Humane Society. We took a trial walk with all three, and on the way back, Sasha hopped into the back of our car as if to say “OF COURSE I’m coming home with you.”

While Sasha would have preferred to have been an only dog, and did what she could to get the other two in trouble, she was also so sweet, she won us over despite the trouble.

We had our group of three until the dark year of 2010, when first Wolfee (in March) and then Sasha (in September) crossed the rainbow bridge. Kyra, the oldest of the three, mourned as hard as we did, missing her friends and sisters. We debated getting another rescue, but had learned through both earlier experiences that the adjustment period can be physically rough. Since Kyra had lost weight she could ill afford to lose as part of her mourning, and she was already 12, we decided to get another puppy. But we continue to support rescue organizations, including the one whose graphic graces this post: Best Friends Animal Society out in Kanab, Utah, where their aim is for no more homeless pets–and certainly nothing as barbarian as euthanizing the older, harder-to-home kinds of dogs who enriched our lives so significantly.

I saw this image on Facebook over a year ago, and I’m not sure where it originated… but it is a fantastic visual for where things stand in book 2 of the Red Slaves series.

Anne is holding on to the last vestiges of her human life with her obsession with reading, research, and scientific proof, while the fantastic explodes around her.

Not only does she miss out on some deeply emotional possibilities, but she almost rejects the position she’s fallen into: Queen of the Russian dragons. It’s enough to make a romantic person tear her hair out–and worry for Ivan.

I’m enough of a romantic that I couldn’t leave him hanging, either, but you’ll have to read Blood to Fire to find out what it takes to pry open Anne’s eyes enough to enjoy the bond her transformation has offered her.

I mentioned this word last year in my Cold War post, but figured this would be a good opportunity to revisit the topic. Perestroika literally means reorganization in Russian, and was introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s to try to reform the command economy in place in the Soviet Union at that time. It went hand in hand with Glasnost–openness–and, arguably, contributed to the failure of the Soviet state.

The interesting thing that I’m realizing as I move forward with writing the final installment of the Red Slaves series, is that these concepts, via the setting that is the genesis for them, have contributed a significant thematic undercurrent to my stories. Some of that comes from the natural fear and suspicion that’s par for the course in a population accustomed to continuous, intrusive oversight, but there are pieces to Anne’s evolution that mirror the theme in ways that make me feel like a genius in hindsight.

It’s one of the bonus elements to writing a longer story: The way the various threads play out reinforce both the character arcs and the story arcs and add resonance to the tale. I’m glad my first series decided to set itself in a time and place that offers such rich background–and that I have the opportunity to share some of this background information in this kind of format, for those who are interested in learning more.

The occult is strictly defined as “supernatural, mystical, or magical beliefs, practices, or phenomena.” The word comes to us from a Latin word meaning “hidden from view, covered up, concealed.” For some reason, though, the word has taken on a darker overtone–you can talk of magic all you want without being accused of anything nefarious. As soon as you talk “the occult” people are convinced you’re into dark magic.

All of that, though, is beside the point: In the Red Slaves series, Anne starts out convinced there is no magic in the world. And even through the transitions she experiences in book 2, she clings tenaciously to the idea that things should be explainable. Or reproduce-able.

The legitimately dark, occult magic of the Communists’ entrapment of the Russian dragons, does not play out on the pages directly, but any time you have a strict rationalist confronted with the inexplicable, you have a recipe for Very Interesting Times–in the mode of Chinese curses.

For those of you waiting, those interesting times now include the possibility of the paperback version. I hope all this supplemental material is helping convince you the story is worth reading in its entirety.

I’ve spent several novels, now, naming characters, but book 2 of Red Slaves presented me with a new opportunity: To build fake words in to the world as a representation of the culture and expectations of those beings.

As I mentioned earlier in this challenge, Anne meets ghilen in book 2. While I was able to find one site for a sketchy background, I needed to build more back story for these characters to find their proper place in Anne’s world.

Since the premise is that Communists are behind the drainage of magical powers, and I had intended for more of the story to take place in China, I went with the Chinese interpretation of these beings. So I also gave them Chinese-like names and language elements.

Naturally, the difficulty with that is that Chinese languages are tonally based, so finding words that have some kind of significant meaning could easily be distorted by the wrong kind of sing-song application, but I was interested to find that there are some interpretations of “Niu” as excellent and “Wen” as historical culture. And there’s an “assimilated” artist who bears the name. So there’s a hidden dichotomy for the word I created to indicate a collection of this particular kind of magical beasts.

One of the fun sub-themes of my Red Slaves series is the escape to the banya to relax and enjoy women-only time between Olga and Anne. In book 2, this expands to include the possibility that Anne’s new home can accommodate her desire to find inner tranquility and balance. When I saw the picture at the right, I got shivers, thinking that the rock walls and stalactite and stalagmite formations I had written into my book actually exist somewhere in real life.

Since I chose to have my wedding ceremony in Luray Caverns, and enjoyed several of the mineral springs that were in the area of New Mexico we lived in, there is something irresistibly romantic to me about the intersection of the two elements.

So while Anne is bent on fighting her connection to Ivan and the other dragons in the story, the very atmosphere of the place and the magic it contains serve to subvert her intention to remain apart. And, I hope, draw the reader in more deeply to her story.

For all that I’ve been happily married and deeply in love for more than 15 years, now, this was the first I considered what, specifically, it means to love and be loved. My father decided to divorce my mother after 42 years, despite her objection. It’s been a challenge to understand why, and even more difficult to watch my mother fight through her broken heart.

As we’ve retraced history, trying to find meaning in the incomprehensible, we’ve run across various books and articles that try to point the way to some objective measure of love. I had always appreciated that the Greeks had a collection of words that mean love to convey the range between brotherly love, spiritual love, and lust. I had also mistrusted the French concept of the “coup de foudre”–love at first sight. So what is it that makes for a loving relationship? What external evidence can we point to for deep and lasting regard?

The thing that made the biggest impression on me was the 5 As: Acceptance, Affection, Appreciation, Approval, and Attention. This list was developed by Dyan Yacovelli in something of a textbook context, but it has now formed the basis for understanding character development, as well as the gem I have in my husband.

So my main character gets to have that moment of analysis that breaks through to her heart based on this specific insight. This means book 2 of Red Slaves migrates much further into Paranormal Romance than book 1 readers might anticipate–though Anne and her group still get their adventures.

The Central Asian Republics have held a certain fascination for me since I was a little girl and my dad came back from what we joked was a “literal field trip.” He worked for the Foreign Agriculture Service, and we were posted to Moscow in 1978. Since he was trained as an agricultural economist, it was part of his job to explore the “bread basket” of the Soviet Union to determine what the US could expect in terms of agricultural output and needs.

When he and my mom brought back a long-haired Persian cat from one of those trips, the region cemented itself in my heart.

It’s had a turbulent history for being the ninth-largest country in the world. Probably because it’s the largest land-locked country in the world. According to archeologists, this is the region responsible for domesticated horses. Its culture is an agglomeration of Turkish, Indo-Iranian, and eventually Mongolian, when it was invaded and became part of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century.

Their traditional, nomadic lifestyle led to the kinds of elaborate yurts you see pictured above. The rugs they produce, like those pictured above feature repeatedly in the Red Slaves series, and represent an interesting insistence on cultural expression and independence in the face of sometimes violent Soviet suppression and repression as that region was absorbed into the Soviet Union.

Last year I had a problem with this letter, and stretched to make JAM fit. This year, Anne’s adventures took her into the Himalayan mountains. One of the first ways she tries to identify where she is is by taking a deep breath, whereupon she remarks at the scent of juniper.

Once again, I’d let my fingers do the walking across the Internet nodes to find out what it might be like in that high alpine region. The ubiquity of juniper made it logical for her to smell that fragrant bush.

Not that that really helps anyone figure out where they are. But at least she had something familiar to make her feel like she was someplace she might recognize. Given enough other information.

And for those of you who want to explore some other areas of the regions she moves through, visit Birds of Kazakhstan to see more pictures like what I found above.