"Scurvy Dogs" Update

I'm not sure when and I'm not sure how, but today I wrote about 2,200 words on "Scurvy Dogs!" This after managing just a couple hundred here and a couple hundred there the last four days. Sometimes it's nice when you can clear the deck and just plug away.

So anyway, the total is now 11,961, which isn't bad. We're making progress, it's (at a wild guess) about a fifth of the way from the end.) And the next chapter will be the best yet. I'm certain of that.

I do really like one part of the last chapter, where the squire is talking about his youth on Jamaica, sailing with Henry Morgan, and Jamie is kind of shocked. He'd known that the squire hadn't always been a middle-aged, mild-mannered man peering over the top of his glasses, but it had never occurred to him that he might have been young and adventurous and – well, of course they didn't use the word this way back in 1690s Jamaica, but – cool!

And I thought about my own folks. We never can know the whole truth about our parents, and it's hard to think about my dad as a young man, marching across Belgium with a rifle, ready to shoot other young men, some of them probably with the same last name – Baur is the Bavarian spelling of a common German name, after all. He talked very little about his experience in World War II, mostly just his Christmas story (perhaps I'll share it at Christmas) and a few funny basic training stories. Whenever, as a boy, I asked for a "war story," he kindly and gently excused himself. It wasn't something he wanted to talk about, so I can only guess. We can never really know our parents.

Anyway, after reading the chapter to the class (I added another bunch of students – the other fifth grade class – so now I've got an audience of about 40 for this) I asked them to do some homework. Go home and TALK to their parents and find out one cool or unexpected or just fun thing their mother or father did when they were young.

I'm looking forward to hearing the stories.