Historical fiction is a frighteningly labor-intensive proposition.
It took me many years to write The Poisonwood Bible , most of them spent on research, which fell into several categories. Most obviously, I read a lot of books about the political, social, and natural history of Africa and the Congo. Sometimes, reading a whole, densely-written book on, say, the formation and dissolution of indigenous political parties during the Congolese independence, or an account of the life histories of Central African venomous snakes, would move me only a sentence or two forward in my understanding of my subject. But every sentence mattered. I knew it would take years, and I tried to be patient.