REVISITED
(WORKING TITLE)
I began work on this book in April of 2016, and am not all that far from completion of a rough draft. Right now it looks as if I'll get over that major hurdle by at least the beginning of summer. That puts me about four months behind the (very) ambitious schedule I set for myself last fall. There are multiple reasons for the delay, not the least being a lack of discipline with the research. If you've ever been bitten by the research bug, you know already how much fun it can be, especially if you let the flow of data pull you off onto areas that don't really relate directly to your topic.
These last few days I've been working on a brief period of Bretz's life - the summer of 1906 - which stands at about 700 words for the moment. (That's around two book-pages, which is likely to condense to less than a page in the finished book.) I should have banged this section out in a day or so, but I allowed myself to drift off course and ended up in Bulgaria.
Bulgaria? What the hell has Bulgaria to do with a farm boy from Michigan who became famous for recognizing that eastern Washington had once been the site of Mega Floods? Pretty much nothing. But once I'd tucked my head into the material, I had the devil of a time pulling it out.
Here, briefly, is how I got stuck in that fascinating country, during a fascinating portion of its very long and turbulent history:
- J Harlen Bretz married Fanny Challis, his college sweetheart, on June 1st, 1906.
- She was the daughter of the Reverend Dewitt Challis, who was a Methodist Episcopal missionary in Bulgaria between 1875 and 1891.
- Fanny was born in 1881, which means she spent the first ten years of her life on foreign soil.
- Being an American-protestant-missionary in Bulgaria in those days was no picnic....because?
- Etc.
The rabbit-hole turned out to be full of twists and turns, and several centuries deep - millenia even. Ultimately, I was sucked in by an encounter with the word "Thrace." It found and fired off a dim and distant memory from my high school course in Ancient and Medieval History. I loved that subject!
Anyway, I am back in the USA and about to wrap up the Flint episode of Bretz's life, at least for the time beginning. That's presuming I can keep from exploring the deeper roots of Chautauqua - don't ask me how that figures in...