Research

I hit the library this morning and managed to find a research book I should have had all along for the current project. It told me pretty much everything I needed to know. However, it also told me that I had fouled up several things in the pages that are already written, so I had to go back and do minor revisions on earlier parts of the book and a fairly major rewrite on the stuff I did yesterday. This seems to be an occupational hazard of writing historical fiction. I'm lucky if I only have to do it once or twice per book. I did so much cutting and pasting and moving around and writing new linking paragraphs that I'll really have to edit that chapter carefully to make sure that it all still makes sense. Once that was done I was able to go ahead and write 16 new pages, which I almost certainly wouldn't have been able to do if there hadn't been a lot of shootin' and fightin' involved. (Action scenes are nearly always easier for me to write.) I've got my sights set on this weekend for finishing this book.

I read a couple of stories in that Lumley collection and then said, nah, not my kind of stuff. I like some horror fiction quite a bit, but this volume didn't connect with me. I went back to the Flynn collection and am still enjoying it.