Losing the Plot

Bill, I'm pleased to report, appears to be much improved. He went to work this morning and even volunteered to cook dinner last night. He seemed quite perky yesterday evening. I was as well, but come the night time I could not sleep. It wasn't hot, but I'm thinking the humidity was uncomfortably high. In any case, at 12:45 am I gave up and turned on the computer, re-entering the dark world of genealogy that has possessed my brain almost exclusively this past week. I finally escaped at 3:46 am when I noticed the night sky wasn't dark anymore.

There is a lot going on in my family tree just now; I'm finding loads of interesting stuff and the Coal County Genealogical Society sent me a package of papers that I'm still pulling information from. My cousin, Sharon in Perth is my partner in crime. We feed each other back and forth and she seems to be a periodic night owl like myself. I've not checked, but given the time difference and adding in contributions from Sandra in California, I expect we keep the family tree busy nearly 24 hours a day!

These people - 95% of them named Patrick, Margaret or Bernard -- live in the back of my mind a good deal of the time. In fact, I keep thinking about writing a story -- a novel even -- about these family members. I'm not a writer of fiction, it feels like lying to me, but take my great grandmother, Sarah. We have her basic details like birth in Scotland, death in Oklahoma, marriage, places of residence and family members from most of the Censuses. Add to that the births of her children and grand children, the where abouts of her siblings in Scotland and Australia and the welfare of her parents back in Scotland, which will all have occupied her mind even more than she does mine just now. One could put down a pretty busy outline with just those facts. Fill in a bit of back ground political and social history, some details about the life of miners and their families, and then comes what I think is the hard part: coming up with a plot and developing the characters.

I think it's highly unlikely I'll be writing any novels. The fact is, I keep losing the plot in my own life and my own character is still greatly in need of development.