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When you think about writers researching their next book, you probably don’t think about them waking at up 2 a.m. with an unexpected coating of sand on their body, but, well, the realities of being an author aren’t always glamorous.

I’m working on a project about Florida’s notable women — my publisher rejected it because they already had a book about Florida’s notable women, but both Barry and Rick have encouraged me to write it anyway and self-publish, because the world needs more books about amazing women (do publishers reject books about, say, Andrew Jackson because one already exists?) — and I’ve started plotting the book based on road trips to learn about each woman’s legacy.

Last month, we camped at Huguenot Memorial Park in Jacksonville. We had a spot nestled in the sand dunes, and the weather was gorgeous. So much so that we didn’t need the air conditioning and instead opted to live with the windows open.

We arrived Friday and I had all day Saturday to enjoy the cool breezes and camping before I headed to Jacksonville University to explore the archives on Sunday.

My topic? Carita Doggett Corse.

If you’ve not heard of her, don’t worry, you didn’t sleep through history class. No one talks about her in history classes. But wow, was this lady something, and she changed the way a lot of the best writers write about history.

Carita Doggett Corse ran the Federal Writers Project for the WPA in Florida.

My first book, Backroads of Paradise, retraces the routes that the Federal Writers Project created for the Florida book, The Guide to the Southernmost State. When I first followed the roads, I really only knew about how Stetson Kennedy and Zora Neale Hurston contributed to the book. Some people would, in fact, make it seem as though Kennedy was the driving force behind this book. And, while he was a talented writer, he was still new at it in the 1930s.

Carita Doggett Corse was not. She’d already penned a few books, including one about the founding of New Smyrna (Dr. Andrew Turnbull and the New Smyrna Colony of Florida), and — more to what I find fascinating — Shrine of the Water Gods: Historical Account of Silver Springs, Florida (that link will take you to a free download for the book).

Why does she matter? She matters because she believed history should be storytelling rather than names and dates, and once she accepted the role of editor for the Guide, she let that dictate how the work progressed. Having a master storyteller in Zora Neale Hurston working on the project didn’t hurt, either, of course, but Corse’s guidance allowed for this seminal work  about Florida road trips to outshine books from other states.

And what a better way to research the work of a writer whose work inspired my first book than with a road trip? So that’s what we did. And that brings me to the epic sandstorm.

Now, our RV has some wonderful screens. They keep out biting midges (you may know them as no-see-ums) and other critters.

You know what they don’t keep out?

Sand.

I bet you can tell what’s coming next.

The weather the end of April in Jacksonville was absolutely perfect. We slept every night with the windows open and the breeze drifting gently through the RV.

But then I woke up in the middle of the night and everything felt… gritty. The gentle breeze was not quite so gentle as it was when I went to bed a few hours earlier. But I’m not at my best when roused from a deep sleep, so I brushed off my face and went back to sleep.

When I woke the next morning, sand covered everything. The stove. The tope of the fridge. There was a pile of it underneath me when I got out of bed.

Needless to say, I was not amused. We wiped down the RV as best we could — our little handheld vac was no match for this sand — and then Barry turned his attention to the outside.

It seems, during the night, the sand dune we’d backed up to had shifted.

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The rear bumper of the RV was buried in a few feet of sand. Our area rug — the one we bought explicitly to keep us from tracking sand into the RV — was invisible, buried under several inches of sand (as were the empty propane canisters we’d used to weigh down the rug).

If we wanted to leave, we’d have to dig out.

Did we have a shovel?  No, gentle reader, we did not. Banyan the wonder hound never got the memo about digging, so she elevated herself to a supervisory capacity while Barry used the best thing on hand to dig out the RV: a frisbee.

The digging out started at sunrise (I should note that was all Barry because, well, we only had one frisbee). We left the campsite around 10:30, then made the five-hour drive home, unloaded the camper, and didn’t do too much else. We slept quite well that night.

Thankfully, Jacksonville University has Carita Doggett Corse’s papers digitized, so there were no sandy mounds of paper for me to contend with. The research librarian sent me the files later that week, and I’m able to sort through them sand-free.

We still need to take a shop-vac to the inside of the RV, and when we retract the mirrors on the pickup, sand still comes out of the cracks, but hey, those files — and I’m having a great time going through them — remain sand-free.