Progress Update: Handkerchiefs and Hardships

Well, again, I am still behind where I should be, though I seem to be making up ground rather respectably. I feel good--like I have accomplished quite a bit more in one day than I have in a long while. Chapter 2 has 4500 words and 15 full pages. I am doing well on consistency this book, I think. Again, I must go write another 4000+ word chapter. Here is an excerpt of what happens when Ralph asks Jane what she really thinks of the neo-War Between the States.

She sat up. “Ralph, I understand your side of it. I do. I understand that you need to defeat the Western States of America because that’s what he would have done. I understand that you can’t bear the thought of letting a third of the country slip away on your watch because you think that that will mean you failed to do your duty—by the country and him. I understand that you feel you need to fight his battles now that he’s gone. I understand that, I really do, Ralph.” Her eyes shined in the darkness. “But Ralph, what about your other duties? You have a duty to the preserve the Constitution, which you can’t do while the Nationalist Act is in effect. You have a duty to the people—not to mislead them, not to strangle them, not to have soldiers killed in a losing battle while we are losing another battle an ocean away that we cannot afford to lose. I understand what you’re doing, Ralph, but” she seemed to calculate whether she should say what she was about to say or let it wait until she could see through his eyes to his soul, “it isn’t what I would do.”
If she had been able to see through the darkness, through his eyes, to his soul, she would have known that her words were killing a part of him. His soul screamed silently while he stared on blankly. He had no response to what she had just said. He had expected it, or at least, he should have expected it. But hearing his wife—his wife—as good as say that she would leave the rebels alone and free to establish there own government and do all things which free nations ought to do—it hurt more than the daily pain of missing Mark. He was truly alone in the universe, with the exception of a construct of his imagination and its real-life daughter. He was sinking again, drowning in the depths of his pain.