OK, you all know I’ve been struggling with writer’s block for a LONG time. Like, YEARS. After many iterations, I’m going back to an original idea to take this story to another part of WW2–the Manhattan Project. I’ve started doing research again, so far mostly about women and the project, and have come to find that there’s not a lot written about their contributions.

I just finished “Standing By and Making Do”, which is a series of essays from women who worked on the program largely because their husbands were there; it was an “all hands on deck” kind of mentality, so they were teachers, nurses, librarians. They sat on the town council, ferried mail back and forth between Santa Fe and Los Alamos, or greeted newcomers to “The Hill”. There are also a lot of women scientists who participated in the project, although their efforts have been downplayed in favor of their male counterparts. I just started reading “Their Day in the Sun: The Women of the Manhattan Project” by Caroline Herzenberg and Ruth Howes, who were asked to write a short blurb about women scientists on the project and found they had enough material for a whole book. I’ll keep you posted as I read.

The main theme I want to explore in this story is about correcting wrongs; in the last book, Rebecca’s mission was only a small part of the larger conflict, but an essential part; if the Nazis had been able to develop certain technologies, the war could have gone very differently and the fate of the whole world could have been at stake. In this book, her job is to eliminate any obstacles that might prevent the development of the atomic bomb–certainly a mission that feels less positive. She ultimately wrestles with the question: if you could go back and change the actions of the past, should you?