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The word count of my biography just hit 70,000, so I thought I’d pause to celebrate with this blog post. It’s a nice milestone, but it’s not altogether welcome. The paragraph I’m on concerns the outbreak of the Great War, so I’m in August 1914, which means I have 4.5 years to go, and the original aim was for an 80,000 word biography.
Back at the end of August I set a plan to write a chapter a month, taking me to the end of the biography during 2017. I’ve been meeting my targets, but I’ve become painfully aware of how naive my plan was. The years I’m writing about in Katharine’s life have proven to throw up far more intriguing stories, characters and events than I anticipated. A good problem to have, I realise. I’ve already added two chapters, and I expect to have to keep adding them.
Writers often get obsessed by word counts and I think it can be a trap; words are cheap, quality words are hard. But it’s a balancing act: measuring, celebrating output can be a necessary and powerful incentive along the way and I feel my ambitious and naive targets have energised me. So far. Most days.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 
I thought you might celebrate with a little KSP story. I think she was in London when we left her last, was she still there?
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Yes, still in London! The Chelsea Barracks were on her street. She was taking a little summer trip that week, I suspect: “The countryside had never looked more tranquil and beautiful than during those first days of August. The stubble of cornfields lay golden with fringes of poppies… It seemed incredible that war should break from the clear summer sky.”
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Nathan, did you know that KSP gets a brief mention in Australian Women War Reporters? See https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/01/04/australian-women-war-reporters-boer-war-to-vietnam-by-jeannine-baker/
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So glad you reviewed this book – I had it on my reading list, thinking KSP probably wasn’t in there, but it would be good background. Turns out Baker has done her homework, given how brief KSP’s war journalism career was.
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Your reading list must be huge!
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Too true!
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“The stubble of cornfields lay golden with fringes of poppies” – is this a Hobby original? Nathan, really? Are you writing a biography or simply bad poetry?
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It’s a quote from KSP!
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The reference to poppies appears to be an unintended irony to how poppies have been associated with WW1 since then; most writers around the start of WW1 include passages describing an idyllic past such as this when compared to the changes that followed the start of the war.
KSP’s reference to poppies is seen in a different light when in May 1915 John McCrea wrote his famous “In Flanders Fields” poem – verse one:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
John McCrea was killed on 2nd May, 1915 in the gun positions near Ypres.
I have digressed a little from your subject, but the quote range a bell with me; funny how this happens.
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