A friend asked me how long
it took to write Courting Trouble. I told him that I started it in
England in 1990 or there about. I worked on it a couple of years,
doing all sorts of research--to the point of taking archeology
courses at Southampton University, drawing the local flora to learn
it, and embroidering in the style of the times. I wrote during the
couple of hours a day that my youngest child attended preschool. I
remember sitting at my desk, chortling. Then we returned to America
and I let it go. I might have dragged the book out once or twice in
Raleigh, but the rewrites I remember were not in the text that Rob
found on the old computer.
I had written off the
whole project long ago, even though my husband nudged me yearly to
finish it. I had no interest. Then he wanted to get rid of the
antique (at this point) computer the book lived in, but he wouldn't
do it until he found a way to free the imprisoned text. It was a very
big job. It had been written in a version of WordPerfect that is so
outdated that even later editions of the same software cannot read
it.
After he had gone to so
much trouble to rescue the book from oblivion I thought I should at
least read the damn thing. After all this time I read it as a reader
rather than the writer, and at times I had no idea what would happen
next. I remember from time to time saying to myself, "I wonder
where I am going with this?" I was entertained. It made me
laugh, and I thought it would take a month or two to whip it into
shape. It took another 10 or 11 months. So, to answer my friend's
question, it took probably 3 years of actual work and 30 years of
gestation.
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