Writing a novel

When I returned from NYC in late July, I began writing a novel. I just woke up one morning with a story in my mind and began. That is the reason this blog has not been updated in a while. Six months later and too many hours of research to assess, I am finally ready to piece together the bits I have written. This first part will take my main character from his home in a village in southwestern Russia, to Moscow in the second half of the 1800s, and on to Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East. Chekhov wrote a detailed account of this penal colony when he visited it in 1890. Without Chekhov's book I would not have been able to write this portion. The character escapes from Sakhalin and makes it to Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan and then on to Vladivostok on the mainland of the Russian Far East.

Now the hard part begins. Writing so that the story flows and the words capture what I want to tell is not, I have found, such an easy task. But I begin...