Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Blitz Spirit

I've gotten through the biggest of the "Diary" scenes. There's more to explore, but I've at this point said all I'm going to say in this book about the Blitz experience and particularly sheltering in the Underground.

I've been archive-binging at the History Girls blog, and they have some wonderful stuff on W.W.I -- particularly in late 2018.

Yeah. Because rotten historian I am, I set out to write a book set in London in 2018 but exploring secrets of the Blitz, and it wasn't until I'd worked out the main plot I realized that the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day falls right in the middle of the story (the first weekend of the three-week span of Penny's adventures, in fact).

Well, it does reach out; she gets to take part in some W.W.I reenactment activities at the Imperial War Museum London, and she watches one of the candle lighting ceremonies they were holding at the Tower of London over that week. And the Captain Wentworth who appears in the W.W.II diary discovered in the Nine Elms shelter is a veteran of the Great War (as well as several other less savory campaigns in the interwar years).

Once again, I'm at a place where I am depressed about or afraid of writing for at least as many hours as I actually write.

(And, yeah, I finished the Steve talk and the Who's on Pants routine. And two days later, cut the first completely -- it isn't in character, it puts the focus places I don't want it, and it slows the narrative to be where it is. And edited the second and am thinking about cutting it, too.)

Yeah, and the scene this was all supposed to lead up to, I've already decided won't work in the original form.

***

So I took the day off to write and to do some errands. Around ten, took a walk around the block, picked up groceries...suddenly felt tired, lay down, half-slept until six feeling terrible the entire time. This isn't right. I am spending far too much of those valuable waking hours struggling to concentrate. And I don't have a solution.


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