The (Almost) Lost Manucript

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 It had been written in a version of WordPerfect that is so outdated that even later editions of the same software cannot read it.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.