THE MIDNIGHT COURT

The holiday weekend was quite a productive one for writing, I managed to complete the first, then a second, then a third, and then a fourth draft of THE MIDNIGHT COURT.

The short story is not terribly long at just under 6500 words, but it is the first of what I hope will be a serial that leads to other cool things. Best thing about it: I was asked to write as a sort of proof of concept for the Grantville Gazette. I was given guidelines, the historical figures I should focus on and then set loose.

Special permission and mandate in hand, I went to work.

One thing about Eric Flint's 1632: it's rigorously researched, and people will catch you slipping if you do. Knowing this, I was a bit daunted.  I had to do a great deal of study and research before I could even write word one. Every other thing I have previously written or tried to write involved the use of knowledge I already possessed or things I made up from whole cloth. I had a great deal of research on historical figures from a culture and religion alien to me and anything I had studied before.

It wasn't all drudgery: I have always loved history and learning of times and places I have no experience of, so the research had its pleasing moments, but I did cram reading about 3000 pages of different history texts and biographies into my brain over the course of about a month and a half.

About half-way through the research I started to figure out where I was going, and how to get there.

Then, about two weeks ago, I sat down and started to actually write.

I think it came out well.

Initial feedback was pretty good, though I did get caught on an error: did you know that arab warmblood horses have only been around for a hundred years or so? Arab horses were awesome then, but the sub-breed of warmbloods hadn't been created.

Now, I wait for further word from the editorial board.

Excited.

Fingers crossed.