Comments: Rant

First excuse:
As a reaction to the world peace marches last Saturday I started, what I thought would be, a nice little story about my Great-Grandma and how a picture of her reminds me of the need for peace (it does, honest). But after finishing the seventh page I came to the conclusion that it was much too long to be a blog entry, and possibly needed to be fleshed out even further as a full fledged novel(la). This is a good thing, right? Well wrong, it's all been an utter disaster so far. Since the story starts in the first and ends during the second World War, I can't seem to escape the inherent schmaltzy-sappy "Greatest Generation" overtones already beaten into our skulls by good folks like The Tom Brokaw, or still burning our collective retina's thanks to The Spielberg, or any of a thousand late-night sober-up sessions in front of The AMC. So there's that. All ideas on eradicating the schmaltz factor would be welcome.