Book progress

Well, any planning is progress, right?

My wife and I spent some time this last memorial day looking at our plans for publishing the novel. I started out last year working to produce a homeschool curriculum to go along with the novel, believing that it would be the only way I could sell the novel. Being a critic of my own abilities and work, anything to enhance the marketability of the novel was gold in my book. But, as my wife and I have researched further into the homeschool market, fewer families are homeschooling past the junior high and high school ages, exactly the age group I was targeting.

What plans now? The owner of Gravitas Publications, a good friend and advisor to our own project gave us some good advice: get the novel edited and published first. The novel has been complete now for half a year, but the funds to get it professionally edited have been lacking. We have the money now, but I'm having second thoughts. Self publishing has been what we've wanted to do for many reasons, the biggest being more control over all of everything. But, is that enough? Another friend, owner of Precise Edit has given us a quote for the editing, but now that money is involved and a decision to make I find that I am pausing. We know that we want to have a professional edit done, but we now have to sink or swim based upon this choice.

But, my passion for history and to communicate it clearly has always lead me to research and read as much history as I can lay my hands on. I found that I was languishing a bit creatively as I tried to force writing more essays for the workbook into my schedule, essays that I've lacked passion for completing. The end result? I'm spending my weekends working on this blog and completing another project I lay aside to complete the novel, a screen play set in the battle for Crete in WWII and working on the workbook without a deadline hanging over my head.

Shiloh, that battle that has for a long time engaged my imagination and occupied so much research still lays before me, in maps, in books, and in notes that are so old now that the original ruled lines on the loose leafed pages have faded away. Notes on characters that have been abandoned and notes on regiments no longer utilized in the storyline. The battle lives on, thanks to reenacting and the NPS parks that preserve them. It lives on in history books and memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles. It lives on in my characters and my soggy memories of the 135^th Shiloh reenactment in Tennessee that seemed doomed from the start. Hopefully, it will also live on in this blog.