I decided to make my main character immortal so as to tell a series of shorter stories that could be, but didn’t have to be related. The idea of writing two hundred pages felt overwhelming. Breaking the book down into several self-contained, stand-alone tells, mentally felt like an achievable task. It also allowed me to choose an infinite number of settings and timelines. I could place him literally anywhere in history. I did have to be careful, I didn’t want a Forest Gump character who is in every major occurrence. I also tried to be as historically correct as possible. I did make a few mistakes, I added a character who was chewing tobacco a couple of centuries before tobacco was introduced in Scotland. A friend pointed this out to me after my book went into publication. I told him that if he would have read the manuscript earlier when I first gave it to him, the mistake would have been avoided. Therefore placing blame in the proper place. Those were my thoughts as every day I stared at my intro, catchy, sentences. I researched interesting lesser known events throughout history and wrote one simple story after the next. I would later come back and rearrange the stories and edit in connections, or another story to bring it together. I found that writing one story at a time was easier than a long detailed outline, plus for a year I had no idea how many stories I needed, how long the book would be, or how it ended. I have since read several “How to write your first novel,” books and learned the common practice is to always write a detailed outline. (Opps.) But then I read a how-to book written by Steve King, and he does it my way too. So I got that going for me. I chose topics and themes in history that appealed to me. Pirates, war, gangsters, native Americans, and brothels. (I’m very stereotypical and shallow.)