Go Ahead. Impress Me.

Oh, you should see the list of goodies I’ve dug up from my newly acquired hardback Recollections of Life on the Prison Ship Jersey. It’s amazing! (Note how the nerdiness abounds here.)

No worries though. There will be no hammering of Revolutionary War trivia at you. I will be speaking in general terms alone, so stop nervously glancing at that exit door. There will be time enough for fleeing later.

What has surprised me most in my current fever of researching are the tidbits I find myself jotting down as I read.

Instead of the cold, hard facts about the imprisonment of soldiers in the prison ships in Wallabout Bay, I’ve honed in on the actual words the former prisoner uses to describe his experience.  Such as, what the prisoners would call the ship? What did the guards, both kind and heartless, call the captured soldiers? What terms the imprisoned men used to describe areas of the hellish ship?

The cold, hard facts about how long the Jersey was or how many guns she once held have mattered little to my hungry imagination. (Usually I devour these kinds of facts like M&M’s…. you know, the more the merrier.)

But, apparently, I have actually grown as a writer. I now zero in more on contemporary impressions than numbers and specs.

I’ve finally realized that in writing a historical novel true to the historical characters doesn’t mean a reliance on history.

Hmm. Who knew?

Until tomorrow…

Chloe