My first book that I've written is called The Horrors Within and it's a historical fiction book. I'm going to break this up into different sections because it's much more organized and easy!
Plot
The book is about a group of people during the time of the extermination camps. The first part of the book takes place in the Czestochowa ghetto and ends up in the Treblinka camp. It basically covers the horrors of the ghettos and camps and all those different elements. It also contains the lives of the people in the camps. Which contain personal problems, death, and grief.
Character Development
I wanted a huge selection of characters so I created a character roster of more than thirty characters which include prisoners and the guards. This was my favorite part! I loved creating the diverse amount of characters. Keep in mind that the Jews weren't the only group of people that were rounded up. Homosexuals were also mistreated and rounded up during this time so I had a few characters that represented that minority. Now things weren't picture perfect for homosexuals in the camp so they were often mistreated practically everywhere they go. Now I'm no expert on the minds of criminals and murderers but I wanted to shine some light on the guards. Some were good and some were bad and some were questionable. Oddly enough I think I did better with the guards than the prisoners.
Preparation
The only reason I wrote this book was because of a project for history and I only had a month to do it so I had little time to prepare for this huge project. But a week before writing I had to depend on Google for all my information! There were awesome websites that provided me with the essential stuff to prepare for the book. I also watched a bunch of documentaries about the camps and I'll be honest, researching this stuff made me a bit queasy. The worst was with the whole medical experiments, god it was inhumane. BUT the websites never sugar coated any of this stuff so I had to make the nasty parts descriptive. Or it was probably just my adolescent mind.
The Procedure!!!!
Oh I can't begin to tell you how stressful it was writing five pages a day. If you have big handwriting it might be easy but my handwriting is small and some days it was soooo hard to write! With the month of April being the only month to work on it I had to force myself to write. Of course if I had no homework or tests to study for it would be easier but life isn't that easy! There were days where I was in the zone and I was jamming out words left and right! And then there were days where I just sat there and looked at my notebook with a blank expression on my face. I had to listen to depressing or scary songs to get in the zone and it actually helped. Nevertheless I finished on time!
My Criticism
I'm a huge critic on myself and I must say this book is a bit l-a-m-e. Sure there were some parts that were good or exciting but to be honest it was inconsistent. My characters sometimes didn't act like their age or their emotions were a huge roller coaster. On one page they can be struggling with personal problems and then on the next they could be a completely new person. Sometimes I threw in personal problems and then you wouldn't really hear about them later on in the book. It sounded like they got over it and moved on. These were really novice mistakes BUT it was a learning experience. I mean aside from the grammar errors and inconsistency I think I did an OK job. I could have done better but then again my expectations on myself are way too high for everything.
So yeah there you go! I gave you inside information on my first book so you better feel appreciated because most the people I've told don't get this information! I should post a small snippet later on so you can see just how bad my grammar is. Overall I'm a bit excited to share this because to me it's an accomplishment. On my notebook I ended up with 150 pages but on the document it turned out to be 270 pages... that's how small my handwriting is! One day I might go back to it and fix all the errors and add in a few things or completely change the ending. I hope you enjoyed this super duper long post because it took me a long time! Now if you'll excuse me I need to read some Harry Potter.
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