Small Change

The blog started out as a way to examine a book project — a biography I had been working on about an American woman who spied for the British during World War II — as writing developed though the use of intellectual prosthetics: software.

Then my publisher went belly up. http://tinyurl.com/rdg7k5

That was 18 months ago. Last summer, I got the idea of contacting Rick Shenkman http://home.sprynet.com/~rshenkman/ and asking him if the History News Network would be interested in turning the biography I had been writing into a "digital biography." Rick's quite a guy. He was enthusiastic, and I underestimated the challenge. The project turned into a portmanteau word — part slow plodding, and some occasional progress: plodgress.

Fortunately my friend, Jay Ballenger, was around to help me. He built the solution to the problem, a companion web page that links to HNN and functions like the back matter in a scholarly text, hosting the bibliography, the notes, etc. The page is still under construction, and I hope it will continue to be. In fact, one difference between a digital biography and a book is that while I intend to reach a conclusion, I don't foresee the project really ending. As I learned from my first book, the unfortunate business about traditional publication is that it's over when it's done. Not so on the WWW. There's always time and room for augmentation, elaboration, discovery. A digital (i.e., hyper-linked) writing project is open to others, to some degree. Comments are invited. The curious thing is that HNN project — THE HONEY TRAP: THE TRUE STORY OF MADAME ELIZABETH BROUSSE, A/K/A "CYNTHIA" (http://hnn.us/blogs/74.html) feels like the top tenth of the iceberg, whereas the page Jay helped me create –www.madamebrousse.com — feels like all that underwater mass lurking beneath the iceberg. (No, this is not an allusion to the Titanic, at least I hope it's not.)

Now comes the confession. For all the software I've thrown at this project, over many years, I still can't figure out the first 1,000 words. I simply don't know what the reader needs to know about Madame Brousse, and in what order. Where's the focus? Do I play for hype? Sex? Hell, the woman does a strip tease in the Vichy French embassy located twenty minutes from the White House while Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt are smoking in the Map Room trying to figure out whether to invade France's colonies in North Africa.

The one wise adjustment I've made is to limit the scope of the project. Instead of wringing out my character's entire life, I'm focusing on just one eventful period in her career as a spy, a perfect moment — consequential, little examined (how can that be?), revelatory (where are all the graduate students, they should be on this like white on rice), and a historical turning point.

But I'm stuck on the second sentence, which I write and rewrite and then start over again. And again. No, I'm not turning into Jack Torrance. Maybe I need a better intellectual prosthetic. Or an editor.