Having a little trouble picking up my writing computer this morning so I thought I'd write a little about my two dilemmas: first, the one I'm in the middle of writing, and second, the huge idea that has kind of derailed it.

The one I'm writing: a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in Thailand. I get a little into it, and what derails me is not having a complete overall plan that would guide my step-by-step progress through the story. In other words, slightly confused about how to proceed. But that's not the issue really.

The issue is that this other idea is somewhat all-encompassing. That idea is this: Write a series of about 45 biographies of American presidents. Actually we are on 47 now, but he was also 45, and there was another one earlier that was two. You get the idea. Eventually hit them all.

Make them all uniform, just biographies, find meaning in their lives if possible and do more than a wikipedia page can do. Of course on some level it's designed after the wikipedia page. Who were they? What did they do? Why were they important? The goal being having about 45 of them. I can do them in any order I wish, and can rewrite or add when when I find things; I'm good at that. I figure writing 45 books might take about 8 years.

The obvious problem would be getting caught in the culture wars. Some people are already very unhappy at the way we teach history and this is not going away or getting any better. Some of us like myself are rewriting history to include the violent and degrading treatement of native Americans by Presidents like Jackson - what do you say about the Trail of Tears? The point is to be blunt, truthful, historically accurate. It was the undoing of the Cherokee and several great empires were reduced to prisoners in a short while. How do you put that in a biography and not make enemies?

Yet Jackson is the one I want to start with. The reason is that he is very much similar to the one we have now. Getting absorbed in the 1830s is one very effective way of dealing with an onslaught of news that basically is difficult to absorb. I know quite a bit about Jackson already, so this will be a kind of first challenge: make a good clear book that shows how he's important, and at the same time does not contain anything inaccurate.

As I think about it I think the process of writing presidential biographies would be a minefield, or rather, 45 minefields, each one with a fair number of mines in it. Careful now! Remember how unhappy everyone is about simply the way things are now!

I kind of want to make them an ongoing history lesson, so that we really get the whole picture of the times, as well as a good view of this guy's life. Each of these people is after all a product of their times.

Now, having stumbled around on all these worms that came out of the can, it's back to my original story, about wayward travelers in Bangkok, and pure magic. Traveling is after all, magic. If I can make someone experience that, I'll have succeeded with my Beauty project.