A Digital Rainy Day

I've always thought I would like to write a book someday. It is a bucket list item but on the secondary list that may or may not get done before I depart this earth. Many years ago, while researching something else, I came across an article talking about something that happened near where I grew up well over a century ago. Intrigued, I used my genealogy skills to dig deeper and uncovered a story with lots of twists and turns to it that I feel would make an excellent book. I saved all my research into a folder on my computer and there it gathers electronic dust. 

Every once in awhile I dig it out and do a little more research here and there and even started laying out a draft outline of a book. But I never could apply enough focus to just start writing. The last time I worked on it, I started organizing my research into chronological order since the story takes place over a number of years and being more methodical in labeling the files so that I can cite sources when it comes to that point. But with newspapers, especially ones from over a century ago, lots of articles were created into what they called boilerplate columns and used to fill in the gaps of whatever local newspaper. So lots of the articles I had were boilerplate versions of first hand sources in a newspaper I didn't have easy access too.

I was able to retrieve some of those first hand articles over the years and after arranging my files in chronological order, I found that I had significant gaps here and there that I needed to fill in. I made notes on what issues of the newspaper I needed to track down and see if there were more updates and waited for a rainy day.

Well that rainy day came just a couple days ago in the form of an email. It was just a notice from a library newsletter that I subscribe too informing me that all the newspapers from the beginning until more modern times had been digitized with money obtained from a grant and were now available online... and free. In short order, I was logged in and copying articles in those before mentioned gaps and with the search functions, found quite a few more articles in gaps I didn't think existed. I think I have now the complete outline of the story.

So will I start writing it at long last? Probably not. It is too close to spring and I just don't like spending lots of time indoors working on things like that when it is so nice outside. But perhaps next winter will be the year where I sit down and crank out a rough draft. Maybe between now and then I can flesh out the story here and there with additional research of collateral characters. 

It may never go anywhere and if it doesn't, years from now, I can just break it up into chunks and put it here on my blog for posterity. Maybe another, much better writer than I, might find it and turn it into the book that I never could.