World War One

For the past year or so I feel as though I am living a second life inside my imagination while working on my next book.

Whenever I’m writing something so large, I sometimes feel lost inside my own story. As though I’m living two lives, one outside here in the real world and the second swallowed up whole by a different time and place. For the past year, I’ve been living at the dawn of World War One.

For a long time, I never wanted to write anything set during the first world war. When I was a kid, I saw the season finale of Blackadder Goes Forth where the cast of characters goes “over the top” and to certain death. I thought it was the most beautiful and heart-wrenching ending to a cast of zany characters and their historical adventures. I knew I could never write something so achingly funny and beautiful, and so I never wanted to try. Why bother trying to say something which has already been said so perfectly by someone else?

I’ve been thinking about the ending scene often recently. It still holds a place of high praise in my eyes. The humor isn’t dark or morbid, it’s perfect. It makes you want to cry for the laughter it brought you and for the painful truth it tells. Someone like Blackadder is the most fitting cynic to see the futility of world war one through. I still love the ending and it still makes me want to cry, but now I have my own story to tell set during that beautiful summer of 1914 right before the world was torn asunder. I have my own heart-breaking battle scene that makes me want to cry. I’m not sure I’ll ever feel I’ve written something as perfect as the mark Blackadder left upon my mind, but I’ve done my best, and I cannot wait for you to read it.