Day -46 and counting

What's really strange when you start writing is when your own family falls for your BS and starts asking you advice on various subjects. Today my own sister who was raised in the same home that I was raised asked me how to store onions and how to store carrots for the winter. I have some ideas, but I'm not going to depend totally on my own knowledge of the subject. I'm going to be looking the information up in books, I'm going to be researching on the internet. I'll use information that follows my own philosophy that is basically about doing things as organically as possible. Then I'll write articles on the subject and I'll send my sister the link and she might be really impressed about what I know about storing onions and carrots for the winter. In the meantime, I'll be learning about it myself through my research.

I did some more research for my new book A Coward's Solace yesterday. I'm really enjoying what I'm learning. Remember when I said that Andrew Lewis was an interesting character but I thought I had the wrong person? Well, as it turns out, I really did have the right person and it's really amazing the connections he and his brother Thomas had with George Washington who plays a big role in part of this book. It's like I'm really putting my main characters into a real situation, where the characters really did know one another where they actually had history and the lives are interrelated. The best part of this is that it really could have happened this way. My characters could have been involved with the situations as they are played out. I love it.

I'm starting to get really involved with wanting to begin working on the actual writing of this book but I'm holding back, trying to get these other projects completed before November. The other projects are starting to seem like work. It seems harder now. It's like blackberry picking. I'm in the middle and the work is going show. I don't see the beginning of the projects any more but neither do I see the end. To use another metaphor, I'm in the middle of a long tunnel and I can no longer see where I came from but neither can I see the light at the other end. If I keep walking and putting one step in front of the other, I will see the end. But it sure is dark right here, where I am now.