The photo I am posting this morning is of Katharine McLennan, who as a young woman served as a nursing assistant in hospitals in France during the First World War. Like her father, industrialist-turned-historian-turned-Canadian-Senator J.S. McLennan, Katharine would later go on to play an important role at historic Louisbourg.

After writing three Thomas Pichon novels in four years, I’ve decided to take a break (so to speak) before I turn to the writing of the fourth and final novel in that series. I am currently going back to and greatly improving a manuscript I wrote before I wrote Thomas, A Secret Life. It’s a novel that has a fictionalized Katharine McLennan as its focus. I think I now know a lot more about writing immersive fiction, thanks to the Thomas Pichon experience, and I want to see if I can breathe life into Katharine in her novel. Needless to say, the themes, tone and voice for her story bear little or no relationship to that of Thomas in his three books.

Once I have finished my re-writing of this novel set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries I’ll be getting back to the 18th century and the final chapter in my Thomas Pichon quartet.