Blowing on a dead man's embers: the process of writing historical fiction

..I've been struggling with the third draft of The Next Novel, in part because it has been taking me so long to get these first four chapters moving. It's July already!

In off hours, I've been working on a guest blog on the definition of historical fiction, and in going through my files I discovered the first stanza from a wonderful poem by Robert Graves:

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start.

I'm blowing on the emb...