Procrastinating online, I found my old school had uploaded its student newspapers from early last century. Reading articles about debating societies and cricket by these public schoolboys was kind of enjoyable. War breaks out and they're so excited. A lot of them enlist and start writing letters back to their friends: It's great, no one's making me bathe! Then they start to die and the letters turn raw. Most world war one literature I knew was from the late 1920s, by people who'd spent 10 years processing terrible trauma into something more manageable; these articles were just teenage boys writing for other teenage boys going through this absolutely cataclysmic tragedy. They upset me so much, the novel came pouring out of me in two weeks then I spent a year and a half editing.
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