Now What?

(Source)

Okay, so I've written a book.

Well, most of a book, there is still a lot of editing to do, patching things together, smoothing out the rough edges and the like. But in reality, the hard part is over. The story has been told, perhaps I should say, the first part of the story. While the story is by no means finished, it's enough for now.

This writing thing is hard work. Not the writing itself (though that's hard enough) but the emotional investment in the story. I've literally lost sleep over the fates of the characters in the book. I've also lost sleep by waking in the middle of the night after some interesting plot line has silently slipped into my dreams. Kinda weird.

So really the question is, "What's next?"

I can't go back to regular blogging, there's too much in the world which angers me beyond rational thought. I started writing to get away from all that.

At first this was to be a short series leading up to D-Day. I had done these little fictional series before to coincide with some date in American military history (and one series covered an incident which occurred on the Eastern Front in 1941) but this was the first time it lasted for nearly an entire year.

While I am glad to have finished, I'm already getting the urge to start another long series. I daresay the characters in the first book need to have their stories continued into the post war period and beyond. After all the 26th Infantry Regiment (in which Hernandez, Paddock, Gammell, et al served) provided the guards for the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials. I'm sure there's a story there.

Some of the men want to stay in the army, Korea is not too far down the road, and after that is Vietnam. A number of WWII vets served in both of those conflicts. There's a story there as well.

As to the Pacific Theater, wow...  No one from this story is going to have to fight the Japanese. But I have been reading an awful lot on the Pacific lately, Ian Toll's great series was devoured over the past couple of months, and now I'm reading Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945 by Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio. Which is heavy going at times but covers MacArthur's South West Pacific Area Command very well. (Toll's trilogy was mostly about the Navy.)

Then there are E.B. Potter's biographies of Nimitz and Halsey that were given to me by reader (and friend in the real world) Old Guns not so long ago. They are on deck and won't read themselves, so I might be ready to do a Pacific Theater series at some point in the near future.

I'm also kicking around the idea of something dealing with The French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. All are areas I have read a lot about (and done a little bit of reenacting about as well, as an artilleryman). The Great Tragedy of 1861 - 1865 (what I'll call it today, you know what I mean), is also a candidate for a novel, I'm just worried that doing it as a series on the blog might engender too much controversy. To hear some folks, you'd think that war ended not that long ago!

So yes, I have a few ideas to continue this writing thing, I haven't committed to anything yet. One thing I was always told was to "write what you know about," well, I know a lot of things, some even well enough to write about. But I will entertain suggestions from you, my editors, er, I mean readers. (Though truth be told I'm sure I've had some good suggestions over the life of this series.)

So feel free to chime in on what your ideas are in the comments. I need to let my brain rest for a couple of days...