Decatur is a stud. I always thought they should make a major motion picture out of his part of Tripoli campaign. I've done quite a bit of reading about Theodore and more reading about the early U.S. Navy but I've never read his book on the U.S. Navy, seems like an over site. You got me poking around my library where I found Lords of the Lake: The Naval War on Lake Ontario, 1812-1814. I remember it being a good read. Maybe I'll crack it open but I got a pile of stuff that that I've not read that I intend too read ahead of it. I don't seem to get much reading done between work, family and the internet now a days. I've never thought about history writing. I've only taken two history classes in my life, Ancient Greece and Economics and neither involved much writing. Always a consumer, never a producer.
I have two young children as well which makes a blog a luxury. You may find that writing about a subject changes your perception. Re-formulating ideas in your head onto paper creates connections that may not have occurred to you otherwise. I consider writing to be part of the learning process. Without publishing, try to write a one page summary of a topic, any topic, and see what you think. What would be interesting, write a summary of something you remember from Lords of the Lake and then read about it to see if you remember it the way its written.