Well, I missed last week’s window to blog.  I wish I could say it was because I was working so hard on the book, or so absorbed in reading someone else’s, but the truth is I was just flat lazy and watched  old episodes of House of Cards and other TV like a slug.

I also missed a deadline to finish one of my unfinished chapters. I did make up for it, however. In the past week I got some notes back on the first half of my first draft and pulled an all-nighter addressing them. I am now confident that I will hit the word-count for a respectable book length. I also connected with a couple of people familiar with the story I’m working on and had very nice exchanges with them. I am excited about where those relationships might lead, although I suspect it will not be of huge direct help in completing the book.

Most exciting, I went to the library and found a memoir by a guy who was in the same Civil War infantry company as my protagonist. It is little things like these that really thrill me–to find firsthand accounts of people who were there, and first-person observations of things I am trying to describe.  It makes me wonder what kind of euphoria I’ll have if I ever work on a book where my main characters have left behind diaries or letters or other materials in their own words that I’ll be able to use.

My plan today was to go to Fredericksburg and do a bit more research, but it snowed in the morning and might snow some more later, and other family members are not feeling up to it, so a 4-hour pleasure jaunt doesn’t appear to be in the cards. Maybe next weekend. Instead, I suppose I will do something exciting like clean the house, or read a book, or … write! Yeah, that’s it! I’ll write.  Although I do still have the second season of House of Cards to catch up on….