Chateau Lloyd

The arduous process of re-editing Battle Officer Wolf left me a little drained.  This happens every time I finish a book.

I hate editing and having slogged through it for a few days, the last thing I want to do is sit down and write.  This perhaps explain why my earlier enthusiasm for the long-awaited sequel evaporated.

Still, the forced isolation of quarantine was getting to me, and I'd made up my mind to start writing again when a new idea popped into my head: why not try my hand at nonfiction?

Long-time readers may be able to guess the subject, but I'll give the spoiler up front - it's about the Spanish Civil War.

This has been a mania of mine for the last few months and a lifelong interest.  Since last August I've acquired a considerable collection of books on the topic and one of the things that has bothered me is how the information that interests me - the details of military operations - is scattered into bits and pieces.

There simply isn't a single source that provided what I wanted to know.

This book project is about solving that problem. 

It also will give my long-suffering friends and family a break from my periodic lectures on the topic.  Even the military history geeks in my circle of friends are bored with the topic.  I shall therefore "tell it to the page" (or perhaps more accurately, the screen).

This is a new experience since it's bounded not so much by creativity as available information.  There's no plot for me to work out and all the details are in print.

The trick is compiling it, making sure its accurate and putting it into a readable format.

The other complication is that I have no idea what size of book this will be.  With a novel, one can have a sense of how much one wants to drag the story out.  I suppose there will come a point where I decide I'm getting too detailed, but I'm not sure where that will be.

For now, I'm filling in an outline of the topics I want to cover and I've already written almost ten thousand words, which is my fastest pace to date. 

I'm not sure the topic has much sales potential, but I've never worried too much about that.  Writing has always been something I do because I enjoy it.  The money is a bonus.

I don't have a title yet, but one thing I absolutely do not want to do is repeat the folly of all the other historians of this period by calling it "The Spanish Civil War."  That's right out.

Right now I'm flirting with Long Live Death: A Military Study of the Spanish Civil War.

"Long live death" is the motto of the Spanish Foreign Legion, which played a pivotal role in the war.

Catchy, isn't it?