Progress on Between the Crosses is slow, to the point of negligible. To date, this is probably the hardest thing I’ve tried to write in my life. I have the story but research is the dickens. Why is it harder to find things about WWI history (and especially from a West Coast Canadian perspective) than WWII? There seems to be far more written about the latter than the former; is it because WWII is in more recent memory? It’s been almost a year since I got my idea for this story and it feels like almost nothing. Maybe I’m trying too hard.
I have worked on nothing else but this story, and now, maybe, just maybe, it’s time to take a break for a little while and let it stew while I work on something else. I’m not short on ideas, or stories; before taking a stab at historical fiction, I had started writing a different story that was sort of like an alternate history/steampunk-ish (not really steampunk, but for lack of a better term). I’d also tried writing a fairy tale of sorts last summer, and that I still need to polish up and finish – which, before beginning to write BtC, was my toughest to write but now, I realize, is a different sort of challenge.
Back to work!
P.S. Post title comes from a WWI-era song, “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary”, which I learned about when I read Sebastian Barry’s A Long, Long Way, which references the song in the title and that the men sing in the trenches.
Writer's Bone 