Well, I have been doing a fair bit of reading and quite a lot of chatting, having discovered OSDev a couple of days ago.  The site is dedicated to helping developers who aspire to writing their own OS or at least their own kernel.  Many of these projects are pure vanity (as mine essentially is, at least for now) and, of course, many of them fall by the wayside (as with a lot of hobby projects, especially hobby software) but there is a core of dedicated, talented, programmers - some of whom are professionals working on major software projects as a day job and playing with their OS at weekends.

I've been offered a great deal of useful assistance, already, including the code for a partially finished project which the owner has mostly lost interest in.  Clearly I shall still be writing my own but the opportunity to see how someone else has approached issues that I, too, will have to solve is very welcome indeed.  There are other well-known, open source, solutions but this is a case where seeing multiple solutions to the same problems can only be helpful.

Anyway, there is really nothing else to add here.  I shall be doing rather a lot of reading and thinking before I seriously attempt to write any code, even the code for the very basic 16 bit bootloader and Real Mode toy OS.  In fact, I shall probably work my way through the Fasm tutorial, again, before I do that, too.