While I’m sitting around waiting for someone to publish the book I’ve written, I vacillate between thinking I should start on the next project and thinking, “Why bother? Nobody’s taking this one, who’d take the next one? Wouldn’t my time be better spent scrubbing the bathroom grout with a toothbrush?”  Some days, the toothbrush wins.  (And some days, chocolate wins. OK, most days, chocolate wins.  But chocolate is usually augmenting whatever else is going on.)

But some days, planning the next project wins.  Right now, I think my best prospect is to rehash a book that my husband shopped around more than a decade ago—a Civil War history of the Willard Hotel and its owners.

It’s a charming story. The hotel, which was a watering hole and gathering spot for anyone who was anyone during the war, was impeccably run by the Willard brothers, one of whom was a major in the Union army. He ended up falling in love with a woman who was arrested as a Confederate spy, and they got married and had a son.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to it; a whole book’s worth. The good part is the research is already done. The bad part is I’d have to chase down a little more research—and, you know, write the thing. (Well, rewrite it. My husband wrote a pretty thorough history, but it really lends itself to a more engaging love story of the people involved, and probably deserves to be written that way.)

But it’s almost Christmas, and we are closing in on the time of year when there are no sports to distract us, and that means two months of binge watching TV series that we assiduously avoided while they were airing once a week. I think we are going to watch Boardwalk Empire. And maybe Justified.