The Dawn Patrol

I have long known that I do my best work in the early morning. Since I was a kid, I have always been the first one up in the house. When I was a flight instructor I always opted for the early morning hops and when I take a long car trip I leave in the middle of the night so as to see the dawn develop along my route to my destination.

As I start writing this next story, for which the title is evolving, I began the narrative in the hours before dawn on a flying field in France in 1918. My drives in to work help, because in this season of short days, the sun is just coming up as I make my way out of the hills toward my campus office.

This is a time of day when the air is crisp and the colors of the clouds turn with the shafts of sunlight coming through the layers and patterns left from the night. The best part is that there is no one about and for me, in trying to imagine a scene or recollect a place I have been, so that it becomes real in the story I can play with the words and hopefully "paint" the scene.

I have also sensed a change in the process of writing for me. In Shadow Soldiers I kept the pace of writing by trying to get words down on paper as much as an assembly line worker tries to get the pieces of his/her work done. There would be time to finesse things later, I thought. But now it is all about content, feeling and the realities of people's interactions. A big difference for me as a writer and I hope a better story for the reader.