I’m trying to write a short story based on true events. The last story like this took three and a half months and will be published in an anthology, probably in November. My contract says that I will promote the anthology on my blog and I will! When it’s out!

What concerns me right now is that I’m trying to write another short story in about six weeks and finding it hard going. For example, a ship goes up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore, and then goes to New York. Did it go back down the bay and out into the Atlantic there and then travel up the coast? Well, it must have. That raises the question of why it went to Baltimore anyway. It looks inefficient.

Then I discover that there is a canal between the Chesapeake and the Delaware river which cuts out that long voyage back down the Bay and around the Delmarva Peninsula, It was thought of in the 1700’s and built in the 1800’s. In fact it existed at the time of my story. Bingo! Or, not Bingo. It probably wasn’t deep enough at the time for my bark to travel through.

It is fourteen miles long and it cuts three hundred miles off the water distance between Baltimore and Philadelphia. Not of course, the land distance.

And it doesn’t seem to be useful in my story, nor to explain why the boat I am researching went to Baltimore, and then New York. Why didn’t the people who wanted to be in Baltimore do something else?

Now I have to look up trains. UPDATE: Well, that boat probably did make the journey up and down the Chesapeake Bay in 1857. There was a rail line to Philadelphia from Baltimore, barely. But then it was a tossup whether the journey continued on land or on water to New York. Steamships made the water option very attractive before better railroads came along.

I checked out ports on the Eastern shore because that’s where some people wanted to be, so why not just land there? Eventually I established that most of those ports were simply not deep enough for a real ocean going ship. All this for one or two sentences in a story with a maximum of 8000 words. I think that more experienced writers know how to cut their losses sooner.

Here’s the National Blackwater Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore. Lots of water, not very deep. Image — By Ataraxy22 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27571197