…continues, albeit slowly thanks to family visits and summer activities.
I started out by scanning and reviewing my collection of index card notes from about 2009 on, during which exercise I kept finding observations that worked as Silas Hudson quotes (indeed, I found the origin of a few of them that were ultimately used in Redlands). Amused by this, I worked backwards through the (then) five notebooks covering 2022 through 2024, then through the margin notes in several books I had read on topics relevant to the character. Those sources alone filled four books like these with fictional quotes from Silas Hudson:
At some point, I decided to go back to the beginning of the journals (or at least to 2006, when I became a lot more diligent about writing down ideas) and work forward systematically. Which turned out to be interesting for several unexpected reasons.
First, a lot of the content from 2006-2013 related to the citizen journalism project (People’s Press Collective) that I was involved in at the time. Almost one entire 140-page notebook was nothing but descriptions of argumentative tactics I had encountered online, information I had intended to use in training classes for activists. (When we closed down PPC, I had already created over 600 charts worth of class material. There are probably a few hundred more in the notebooks waiting to be written up. Even after combining and culling duplicates, this would have been a somewhat long training class.)
Second, there was a major shift of content in 2014. From about 2011 to 2013, writing-related notes gradually increased from about 15% of each journal to about 30%, and general ideas and observations went from maybe 5% to about 20%. For some reason, this shifted to about 30-35% writing-related and 50% or more ideas and observations starting when I started a new notebook mid-July 2014. I don’t recall anything happening at that time to cause it, but it’s night and day different from the one notebook to the next.
Prior to this point there were maybe a dozen Silas Hudson-relevant notes (very different from the index cards). After this point, they started appearing regularly, albeit nowhere near as often in the 2022-2024 notebooks.
In contrast, there was a constant trickle of Jedediah Thoreson-relevant notes throughout. But these too became noticeably more frequent after July 2014, though not yet as common as those relevant to Silas Hudson.
Third, there are a lot of good notes originating ideas or scenes or details that ended up in various Dispatches and in the second book – and many that did not. Some of the latter are really interesting as different potential paths these stories could have taken, or which future stories may use. Documenting all of that is going to take a second pass through all of the material, however.
At December 2014, I’ve almost filled book #5 for Hudson, and about three-quarters of one book for Thoreson (who gets this journal). The latter character is a little more difficult, as I don’t (yet) hear his voice quite the way I do Hudson’s. Probably because I spent a lot of time fleshing out Hudson for Redlands, while Thoreson in his (incomplete) story is intentionally something of an enigma to the other characters.