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Day 3 of my WWII Tour

We started the day in the radar museum, located at the location of the main German radar station in Normandy. They sent intelligence to Berlin and to Hitler in Berchtesgaden. And by the way, they did pick up on the invasion but because the square mileage of the invasion fleet was so gigantic, their warning was dismissed on the early morning on June 6th, thinking it was a false alarm. Thankfully.

We had the unbelievable luck that it was re-enactment weekend here, meaning a load of French volunteers were playing German soldiers, showing what daily life was like for them at the radar station. They were the nicest men (NOT Nazis, just to be clear but history buffs who also play Frenchmen or British, American, or Canadian soldiers, depending on what kind of re-enactment it is) They knew a lot about all kinds of details and even though most of them spoke little English and no German, we managed in French. Like I said yesterday, I understand far more than I speak, especially if they speak slowly, which they did. I learned a lot and it resulted in some amazing pics, as all of these bunkers are usually empty… They also had some amazing antique vehicles, like an old BMW motorcycle, a Horch radar-vehicle (Horch was the same guy who later developed Audi), and two beauties of old Peugeots.

Our second stop was Arromanche, a beach town, where we visited the Museum of Debarkation. Arromanche was the location of one of the two famous “Mulberry harbors”, which were harbors built on the spot from pre-fab materials brought from England. They were necessary so ships could unload men and materials, which they did in unprecedented numbers after June 6 1944. This innovative engineering brilliance had never been tried before, and even though the Germans caught some of the plans, they didn’t understand what the ultimate goal was and never managed to prevent them.

The museum explains how these harbors were built, how they functioned, and much more. It’s a brand new, professional museum and very informative, thought it lacked some of the charm of the older, more amateurish museums.
If you look out over the sea at the shoreline of Arromanche, you can still see the leftovers from one of those Mulberry harbors, the only remnants left. This was British ingenuity at its finest, and in hindsight, these harbors have been crucial for the war effort, especially for the British and Canadian sectors. The Americans were able to offload through the port of Cherbourg, once conquered.
We walked around the town for a bit, stopped a little further along the coast for a view of the anti-tankwall (a stone wall the Germans built to prevent tanks from landing on the beach and rolling straight onto the shore) and called it a day. The weather was humid and hot, and they’re expecting severe thunderstorms tomorrow. We’ll see. Plenty of museums still left on our list if the weather sucks…

Day 4 of my WWII Tour

The weather forecast was crappy and in hindsight, accurately so, and so we decided to hit a lot of museums today and spend most of the time indoors. A smart decision, as we got quite some rain throughout the day.

Our first museum was “Dead Man’s Corner” near Carentan, named such because the body of a fallen US tank commander sat in the turret of his tank for days before being removed after D-Day. That same spot was the headquarters for the German paratroopers and later on, became HQ for the 502ndParatroopers regiment of the 101st Airborne. The museum mainly shows the life of the German paratroopers there, and it’s small but well done.

Literally around the corner is the D-Day Experience museum, which is also small but offers a lot of personal stories, pictures, and effects from US soldiers and paratroopers who fought in that area. Fans of the series Band of Brothers (which includes me) spotted some familiar names…

Next up was the Utah Beach Landing Museum, which is located at the same spot where the first men to land on Utah beach encountered fierce resistance from a German defense post called Widerstandsnest 5. Due to strong currents, they had landed more than a mile away from their target and within range of the very defense post they’d tried to avoid. This museum is big, but I really liked it, as it gives you an excellent idea of what the situation was like on Utah Beach on D-day. It has a lot of personal effects, a B-26 Marauder, some tanks and flak (German anti-aircraft guns), and more. Around the museum are several monuments dedicated to various branches, regiments, and specialist groups within the armed forces.

After that, we headed to the Normandy Victory Museum, which was surprisingly interesting, mainly because of the vivid way they had rebuilt scenes from the war in Normandy. Focusing on more than just D-Day, they showed stories from the French resistance, the impact of the war on civilians, and more. They used “dolls” combined with accurate clothing, a lot of details in terms of equipment and stuff, and very specific backgrounds that really made the scenes come to life.
We still weren’t done and hit the Museum of the Battle of Normandy in Bayeux. This was the weakest one out of all of them, partially because it was older and contained information that is now known to be incorrect, but also because it offered mostly generic stuff and few personal stories.

And last up was something that had nothing to do with WWII but reached much farther back the Bayeux tapestry, which is over 1000 years old and tells the story of the Battle of Hastings (1066 – William the Conqueror). The thing is massive, and I was deeply impressed by the level of detail. I had to use a Google search picture here since you can’t take photos inside.

All in all it was a long and busy day with loads of information and impressions, but I loved it. Tomorrow, the weather should be better again, and we’ll be visiting some outside places again, including the American cemetery at Coleville.

I’m in the middle of a three week treck to visit historical sites, museums and more of WWII. One of my best friends and I have been planning this trip forever!

I wanted to share some of the adventures with you, and if you’d like to see more photos you can join my reader group on Facebook.

Day 1 of my WWII Tour

We drove from The Netherlands to Bayeux in Normandy, a gorgeous, old city with a spectacular cathedral in the center. This will be our home this week from which we’ll explore all the WWII history of Normandy. It also has a famous tapestry, which we’ll check out later this week.

After checking in into our Bed and Breakfast, we walked around in the city center for a bit and saw the cathedral. As always when visiting a church, I lit a candle in remembrance of my dear friend Susi Hawke, who is so deeply missed. Yesterday marked a year since she passed away, and not a day goes by that I don’t think of her. By lighting a candle for her wherever I visit, it feels like she’s traveling with me, and that’s a lovely thought…

Our Bed and Breakfast is lovely, and I impressed myself by how much of the French of our hostess I understood. Speaking is difficult, as my head is already full with Dutch, English, and German, but I understand it just fine if they don’t go too fast.

Day 2 of my WWII Tour

We had a fantastic first full day here in Normandy. The theme of the Day was the “Atlantic Wall”, the defenses the Germans had built along the entire coastline from France all the way to Norway. These consisted of massive fortifications like pillboxes, bunkers connected by trenches, clematis, and much more. Luckily for the Allies, not everything was fully finished in June 1944…

We started in Ouistreham, where we visited a German “Flachturm”, a defense tower with anti-aircraft guns on the roof. Several stories high, it had a formidable line of sight on the beach and any incoming ships.

Next up was the beach of that same town, where some of the old defenses are preserved, namely “dragon’s teeth”. They’re much smaller now and small in number, but these were built all along the coast to prevent landing crafts from landing.

Then we headed to the famous Pegasus Bridge, which was a crucial bridge over the Caen Canal that British paratroopers secured early on D-Day in a brilliant operation. The original bridge has been removed and preserved in a museum, and there’s a new, similar bridge over the canal now. That museum also showed one of those gliders the British used to land on D-Day, and holy crap, you need balls of steel to get into those. Mad respect.

The Hillman battery consist of the remains of a German stronghold of several bunkers, connected by trenches, a few kilometers inland from the coast, but with view over the sea. Their guns had enough range to hit the beaches.

And our last stop was a similar complex, though much bigger and better preserved and restored, called the Merville Battery. The original plan to capture this counted on 600 British men, plus a lot of weapons and support. Because the British paratroopers landed all over the place, they ended up with only 150…but still got the job done. Half of them perished, but the battery was silenced in the crucial hours of D-Day, where it could have hit the men storming the beaches.

The weather was perfect and we had a fantastic day and a great start to our trip.

I write my books in a program called Scrivener, and one of the fun things is that it keeps statistics about how much you write each day. That means I can see from each of my books how long it took me to write them. Of course, that made me curious one day to see which books took me the longest and which I wrote the fastest. Wanna make any guesses?

My Fastest Books

Now, to make it fair, I’m only looking at full size books. Of course, this still isn’t completely fair since my books vary in length between 60k and 108k, which is almost twice as long. But calculating that to a fair comparison would involve way too much math to make it fun, so whatever. 

My fastest book ever was Professor Daddy (then called Kissing the Teacher), which I cranked out in 10 or so days. Pretty insane, but the muse was strong and loud for that one.)

Coming in second was New Daddy at Forty-Seven, which only took me 15 days all in all, and Captain Silver Fox was only 16 days. In all fairness, both books are on the shorter side. Generally speaking, stand alones are much faster to write than series because you don’t have overarching plot points and characters to keep track of.

Firm Hand was a fast one, too. I remember starting that one by hand because I didn’t have my Mac with me while traveling through Australia, and Vicki (my PA) had to type those pages out, haha. Once I had that idea, it was so strong that I had to write it.

Slow Hand was a quick one as well. I finished it in 23 days, which is amazing if you consider this book ended up at 110k originally. I had one day where I wrote over 12k words on that one…in one freaking day! Those boys were talking a lot. I love it when that happens. 

My Slowest Books

The White House Men books took me long, especially the last four, purely because of all the research and the plot lines I had to keep straight. The same was true for the last few books in the Irresistible Omegas series. SO many things to wrap up and so many characters to keep track of…

An odd one is Coming Out on Top. I originally started writing this one back in December of 2017, intending it as the second standalone after the No Shame series. The story was called Outcast back then, based on a premade cover I bought. But I got stuck with the story in a bad way, and I abandoned it in January 2018 after much debate. I didn’t pick it back up until almost two years later, in December of 2019, and finally finished it in January of 2020 (it originally released as Snow Way Out). I’m SO proud of how that one turned out, but it needed time to percolate, I guess. 

Before there was Netflix (I know, I’m old, haha), I used to binge-watch a lot of TV series and would have to wait eagerly for the DVD boxes to come out. Two elements were always my favorite: the blooper reel and the deleted scenes. The first was laugh-out-loud funny, of course, but the second was even cooler. It offered even more of my favorite characters…

Then, and I still don’t know what changed it, I slowly started feeling differently about deleted scenes. I came to realize that there’s a reason they’re deleted. Sometimes, it was because network shows run on a tight time frame and they were just too long. But other times, I found myself watching them and agreeing that it was for the better they’d been deleted. As much as I love the Lord of the Rings, for example, the extended version is really, reallllllly long. 

In book box sets, I loved deleted scenes as well. Again, why wouldn’t I, when they offered more of the characters I loved so much? But here, the same thing happened. I would read them and then agree that yes, they didn’t belong in the book. Only rarely did I feel a deleted scene should’ve been included in the original book. I still love them, don’t get me wrong, but I could almost always see why they weren’t included.

I only have one box set with deleted scenes, the No Shame box set. My other box sets only have bonus materials in the form of extra chapters (for example in the Irresistible Omegas box sets) or sometimes even a whole novella (like in my Ignite box set). Part of that is because I don’t often have deleted scenes anymore. The No Shame series was my first series, so I’ve learned a lot since then and my writing process has become more efficient. I usually detect much earlier when a scene isn’t working so I can still change course.

But even when I released the box set for my No Shame series, I debated long before including some deleted scenes. In the end, I decided to put them in. Funny enough, the most important reason was because I felt they don’t belong in the original. Well, some of them. Two of the deleted scenes were taken out because I decided to start the fourth book, No Shame, at a different point in the timeline. But I’d already written two scenes when I realized it didn’t work, so those offer truly a behind the scenes view that doesn’t change the original story. 

The other two, I still feel I was right to take them out. Don’t get me wrong, they’re both hella sexy and I did use some paragraphs of them later on, but they didn’t really fit the vision for the series. 

So why did I decide to include them? Maybe because some readers will feel differently about deleted scenes and will love the extra time with their favorite characters. And maybe because I wanted to show that there are reasons why authors take whole scenes out, even when they’ve spent hours crafting them. It hurts to “throw away” words like that, but there’s usually a good reason. 

But now I’m curious how you feel about deleted scenes: yay or nay? Do you love them, hate them, or couldn’t care less?

But Nora, why are you starting a new series when you haven’t finished the No Regrets series yet? I’ve been asked this question and variations on it a number of times lately, and so I thought I’d explain a bit to you about how my release planning works. 

1. Characters Need to Talk

This is sometimes hard to understand for non-writers, but characters don’t always “talk” when they need to. If I don’t have a clear idea for a story and the characters aren’t revealing themselves to me, I can’t write their book. It’s as simple as that. Oh, technically I could, but it would take me much longer and I don’t think the final results would be as good. A good example is the spin off series from the Irresistible Omegas. I’ve been wanting to write it since that series ended, but the idea wouldn’t come to me. I didn’t want to write more of the same. I needed something different, an idea strong enough to carry a whole new series. And so I had to wait until that idea took shape, and only then was I ready to write it. 

2. I Need Variety

As an author, I need variety as well. Take the White House Men series, for example, which I wrote pretty much back to back. That was tough at times because it wasn’t an easy series to write, both emotionally but also because it’s so plot heavy. That’s why I released No Surrender in between because I needed a break. I can’t write a whole series one after the other anymore. It’s just not as fun for me, and believe it or not, but I still want to keep writing fun.

3. Readers Need Variety

I’m not the only one who needs variety. Readers need it too. Some won’t read mpreg, for example, so if I just write mpreg for six months, I’d lose them as readers. Or they’re just not fan of a particular trope/series/set up, etc. so they won’t pick up certain books. By switching between different series and stand alones, I keep everyone happy.

4. Sometimes, Ideas Strike

Sometimes, my whole schedule goes out the window simply because inspiration hits me hard. I had not planned to write the 47 Duology, for example. But when I saw those cover pictures, the story was just there in my head, and I knew I had to write it. I’ve learned to give in to these moments because usually, they result in some pretty amazing books… (Firm Hand was another one of those spur of the moment ideas, just saying)

I guess it all comes down to this: I try to plan but life happens and ideas strike and characters can be annoying little shits, so I adjust where needed. And you as readers get to go along on that journey with me!