the Unknowns

I’m closing in on 110,000 words and this novel is still not done! Yesterday I wrote over a thousand words, inspired in part by this article I found online about the Black baseball teams that competed in Brooklyn prior to and during the Civil War. I knew about the Negro Leagues but I didn’t realize Black men had been playing organized sports in the antebellum period. In a way, I want to shut off my brain and stop absorbing new information about the past because then I feel compelled to put it in the book. But young readers need to know about the Williamsburg Van Delkens and the Brooklyn Monitors and the Weeksville Unknowns. Games between these teams brought the community together, and proved that Black men were every bit as impressive as their white counterparts playing “America’s pastime.” The reporting at the time was full of racist caricatures (read the Brooklyn Eagle article linked to above) so I want to expose and counter that, too. On Monday I had a chance to talk about my books with DNAinfo reporter Rachel Holliday Smith (you can read her article on Dayshaun’s Gift here). She started by asking me how long I’d been writing about Weeksville and I realized I began dreaming about this free Black community back in 2001. If I ever finish this darn sequel, that will bring the total to four books about Weeksville. Later today I’ll be talking to the executive director of the Weeksville Heritage Center about hiring an illustrator for the picture book they commissioned me to write last spring. And a second residency might happen in 2016. Last time I taught a course on historical fantasy, but I think this time around I’ll teach a class on writing for children…

Off to the garden. We have brisk mornings this week…perfect for wandering and dreaming…