I’ve been working on another Miske-related story for about a month now. Too long. Somehow, it has been extra difficult to wrestle into publishable form. And that is very, very frustrating.

All because there’s been a lull in the court action as the trial, scheduled to begin in January, gets closer, and attorneys have to be preparing a round or two of pretrial motions, challenges to categories of evidence, and hone their planned legal strategies. That has left me time to look at less obvious stories to tell that I’ve got on my long “To Do” list.

This one started with a surprising tidbit that I found buried in an obscure court filing. It involved a violent incident that, at the time it happened several years ago, appeared to have no relation at all Mike Miske or his alleged racketeering enterprise. The newly revealed link back to Miske seemed, to me, of interest and worth reporting.

My first thought was that it would be simple. Describe the new information. Remind people of the earlier case and why it made news. Explain how we now know it is somehow related to the Miske case. And then also explain that the substance of that relationship has not been revealed.

But I didn’t have enough to fill out a story other than the intriguing new connection. So I started research the context of the original violent incident. This involved digging into the background of several other related incidents, figuring out how they were related to each other, and hoping that I would stumble onto an “aha!” moment when the pieces would fall into place and the relation to the Miske case would be obvious. I was wrong, but I didn’t know it when I started down that rabbit hole.

Now, several weeks later, I’ve talked to a bunch of people, been cursed at by a lawyer for who-knows-what, I know a lot more about those other incidents, too much, really, but still know very little about what they could have had to do with Miske and his co-defendants.

I intended on taking a breather today because it’s my birthday. But this unfinished story is nagging at me. I hate to invest this much time in an admitted tangent without ending up with a story worth sharing. I’ve now dragged the project back to the drawing board where I’ll try again to tell the story directly, avoiding complications, sidestepping the fascinating but unnecessary details, and trying to see what how the story looks when cut it back to the basics. I really should walk away from it for a few days and let the pieces slowly fall into place in my mind. But it’s created this mental itch that I really want to keep scratching until its gone.

But, hey, it’s been another year and I’m still here. That’s something to celebrate.