The copper sailboat weathervane is spinning now atop the red sheet metal roof of the cupola and 1.5 of the 4 sides are clad in cedar shingles. One more project nearing completion while others simmer.
I've added one to the front burner. My working title is Battleaxe. Here's the pitch letter I'm sending to the agent, Mike Hamilburg.

The members of the Washington, D.C., church probably were unaware of the peculiar skills possessed by one of their members – Dr. Elaine Foster – when they agreed that she should investigate the congregation’s history. If they had known, perhaps they would not, in the end, have shunned her.
Parishioners did know this: Their church was founded by the very same Scottish stonemasons who built the White House. They took great pride in this and always had.
They must have been impressed with Foster’s credentials as a researcher, because they commissioned her to track down the details of that story for a book they were publishing.
But there was a problem. As always seems to happen when Foster delves into history, the story she unearthed took an unexpected turn or two.
The first side road led to the discovery that the dates were all wrong – that the White House and the church could not have been the products of the same stonemasons.
And that detour led Foster to a preacher who had run the church in the 1890s – a diminutive fellow who appears to have had a need to inflate certain facts in order to enhance his reputation.
Foster was only doing what she always does – laying out the facts as they are revealed by documents found in places such as the National Archives and the Library of Congress – when she wrote her chapter on the preacher. She told the story of a man in the grip of a Napoleonic complex; a minister for whom truth was an inconvenient concept. A man who made up the whole Scottish stonemason story.
And so, she was shunned. But she was proud, too, and to understand why, you have to know a bit about Elaine Foster’s life, starting when she was a child.
Foster is 86 years old. Her work has gone largely unnoticed, in great part due to the limits placed on her during that childhood. But she has taken on historical figures as famous as Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine and as obscure as a Civil-War-era West Virginia folk hero, and her powerful and entertaining writing in each case tells a far different story than other historians offer.
Foster wades into the same apparently clear stream of history in which more famous historians have created whole careers by reinterpreting the stones that pave the stream bed. Foster is not content to walk on those stones but must overturn each one. The results are “The Truth about Tom Paine” and several other tracts that reveal her electrifying intellect and the ruthless honesty of her investigations.
My working title for the book is Battleaxe, a term from Foster’s earlier life that cuts two ways, reflecting the prejudices that for many years kept her brilliance hidden as well as the take-no-prisoners approach with which she wades into the past.