I haven’t posted here for ten days! That’s because I had to take a week off due to an arm injury. Well, RSI caused by too much typing, so this will be brief so I can save my typing time for writing the next book – which still doesn’t have a title! Very unlike me, as the titles usually come during the writing of the first half of a new MS. I still only have ‘Snapshot’ as my working title, but I am now thinking about something to do with a play on the word grave. Why? That will become clear when you read the story.
While I am working on it (50,000 words so far, so halfway through), I am pleased to say that ‘A Case of Make Believe’ is doing well, as is the whole series. So is the Clearwater series, and Larkspur is coming in close behind in terms of page reads and books ordered.
I wasn’t lazy while I was sofa-bound. I read two books about Jack the Ripper, and a couple of short stories by Thomas Hardy I’d not read before.
The JtR books were interesting. One was a collection of all theories and the various ‘solutions’, which, of course, are not solutions, because there never can be a solution, and that’s why the mystery endures. The other was a book written by ex-policemen, and this one doesn’t say ‘This is the solution’ but gives the facts as they were known to the police at the time, and that’s it. We then make up our own minds. The Thomas Hardy shorts were completely different though if you like colloquial language and West Country legends, try, ‘The Withered Arm.’
I thought that title was appropriate considering I was off work with just such a thing.
And today’s highlighted promo is this one (below). Click the banner to find a selection of women’s lit, mystery, time travel and bio books to keep you busy reading.
One of the things I love about writing is the research that goes into it. how often have we heard people say, ‘Write about what you know?’ The other day, I heard someone admit that she couldn’t write a book about XYZ because she knew nothing about XYZ and had never experienced it. Well, I’ve never walked through a London sewer in 1893, but I managed to get a few pages down about the experience. How? By researching.
Researching Matters
Of course, you can write about what you don’t know. You just have to do one of two things:
Research it until you do know
Imagine it
The end result should be a mixture of the two, with the researched information truthfully reimagined.
As an example, this week, I sat down to write chapter 11 of ‘Snapshot’ (working title). In this sequence, two of my detectives meet Doctor Markland in a laboratory at the London Hospital, now the Royal London Hospital. (That was my first fact check/research. What was the hospital called in 1893?) The detectives were there to test some soil and other samples with the madcap but brilliant doctor, and I wanted things to be as authentic as possible. So, how would a chemist or pathologist test soil samples and flesh samples to discover if the soil could have decomposed a body rapidly, and how would they have done it in 1893?
And away we go…
Here’s an edited down sample from the chapter to whet your appetite:
‘Beneath the sink, you will find a small box with a Mackie’s label and a bottle of Hills and Underwood’s. Bring them forth…’
‘That be Mackie’s baking soda, be that.’
‘I know. Not to be confused with arsenic, as so often happens. There was a case last year when a man mistook one for the other with not very pleasant results.’
‘Oh? Would it make him sick, Sir?’
‘Made him dead, Mr Maddiver. This was in Lanark, so it wasn’t a great sensation, but the man was a baker which rather worried the town. I don’t suppose they bought bread from him after that.’
‘Not if he were dead, Doctor.’
‘A very good point…’
‘Your education continues,’ Markland said, waving Ned to his side, and showing him a white powder. ‘What we have here is a mixture of sodium, oxygen and hydrogen otherwise known as sodium hydroxide. Do not touch, and certainly do not do as an unfortunate boy of eleven did recently, and drink it. Poor lad. Mind you, he lived in Liverpool, so… Worse, was the man who, last October, fell into a boiling vat of the stuff.’
‘You be saying the man was two weeks dead when someone then poured caustic soda over his face?’
‘I be saying just that, me hearty,’ the doctor joked in a bad West Country accent.
Ned stared at him, for a second and said, ‘That’s not funny.’
And so on. The point is, I had no idea you could test for alkali and acid by using baking soda and vinegar, but then, unlike my brother, I am not a chemist. As for the chemical makeup of caustic soda and whether you could use it to disfigure a dead body so no-one could see the face… Apparently yes, you can.
Btw., the tragic cases Markland mentioned were cases from 1892 that I found in the national newspapers.
Other, less gruesome things I have been investigating this week include the Zoka Detective Camera Will Merrit could have bought for 12/6.
Then, there was the Nurenburg Pocket Timepiece that could be bought for 2S 6D. (Two shillings and sixpence, or half a crown, or 30 pennies, roughly £10.26 in today’s money according to a converter site.)
Just a few of the things I have been looking at as I prepare the first draft of Delamere Six. It’s all in the research!
This month’s Promo
As usual, I have a few promo pages to share with you this month, and today, I’m featuring Mayhem & Motives, Mystery, Thriller and Suspense reads available on Kindle, Unlimited, Kobo and other platforms depending on the book. There are loads of titles to browse including three of my own, and the novels are varied in time and place.
Today’s brief chat is about the London Borough of Hackney, Stoke Newington in particular, and in very specific particular, the Congregationalist Chapel on Church Street. This post is also about promoting a local service that has helped me find details about this chapel, and it’s all to do with the next Delamere book, currently called ‘Snapshot’ (working title only).
Here’s how one of my ideas soon becomes complicated.
I wanted to find a theme for the next book, and decided on photography. This led me to some interesting research which I’ll talk about another day. However, it also opened up the idea of a mystery story which then became the plot. The inciting event of the story happens, as usual, very near the beginning.
A client comes to the detective agency saying he has just had a great shock and found the body of his late father in a cemetery. So? Well, the body was in a place where the gravedigger was supposed to be digging a grave for an upcoming burial. So? The body they found has only recently been put there. So? It’s his father. Yes, but…? His father died 10 years ago and is interred in the family mausoleum 200 yards away. Ah.
And so it goes on. Just for accuracy, I went to my 1888 maps of London and checked how Abney Park cemetery in Hackney looked at the time, and decided that’s where the body would be found, because I know the park fairly well. (I used to live nearby.)
My map showed me a chapel directly opposite the southern gates, and I made that the headquarters of the vicar who was arranging the forthcoming burial.
Except when I looked further into this chapel, I discovered it was a Congregationalist one, not Church of England or anything I was familiar with. So, that entailed looking into that form of Christianity, so that my ‘vicar’ character spoke the correct terminology.
My vicar soon became a minister, who later became a pastor, as I got to grips with the language of that particular kind of church.
Congregationalism (also Congregationalist churches or Congregational churches) is a Reformed (Calvinist) tradition of Protestant Christianity in which churches practice congregational government. Each congregation independently and autonomously runs its own affairs. [Wiki]
Anyway, the religion isn’t what this story is about, but… For the sake of authenticity, I researched as much as I could about this chapel, only to discover it was bombed in WWII and is no longer there. Could I find its history online? Well, I found some, but not enough, and I became more fascinated. Then, through a variety of search strings, and having found out all kinds of information about the area, the cemetery and so on, I discovered there was a pamphlet.
This was written in 1912 and covered the history of the chapel back to the 17th century, and including the time in which I am setting my stories, 1893. A copy of this pamphlet is held by the Hackney Borough Council Archives Offices, in, unsurprisingly, Hackney, London, and I was welcome to visit during opening hours.
Obviously, I can’t do that because it’s about 4,000 Km, a boat, two flights and far too many Euros away, and I can’t afford that, not for simple background research, so I wrote to ask if they had a digital service. Not as such, but they do have a look-up service and could make me digital copies on request for a small fee. Having worked out the cost, I wrote saying yes please, because by now I was very fascinated, and they wrote back telling me they could do two pages per shot, thus halving the fee, and I said, thank you very much, where do I pay? Payment made, and within a couple of hours, there was my digital file download with the full pamphlet in PDF pages, and how fabulous was that service?
Made more fabulous because it’s only a small team, and all this was achieved within two days.
So, I am singing the praises of the Hackney Archives for anyone who might ever need them. This kind of service, to my mind, goes along with things like libraries and museums, places that collect and store, thus preserve, history.
And that’s how one idea for a story can lead to fascinating in-depth research, all of which makes the story more realistic and believable.
This promo is organised by Book Mojo and they have a Readers’ Central department which gives you loads of ideas for reading in all genres. There’s also a free newsletter to sign up to, and I am featured in today’s copy, apparently.
The pieces of paper have come down from around my desk because the story is complete. The notebook is crammed with scribbles and things to check, but otherwise, the desk is more or less clear. Until the next time.
Things I have to do next:
I want to change a couple of names in ‘A Case of Make Believe’ because I want to use the names Fox and Sheridan.
I want to check over chapters 19 and 27 again because the point of view shifts and so does the tense, and I want to be sure it works.
Then, I must send off a copy of ‘Bobby’ to Shirley Bassey’s admin address in case she’s interested to remember him and her time in London in the 1950s.
Meanwhile, I must prepare the ‘Make Believe’ MS to send to be proofed.
But before that, I must come up with the final blurb and the author’s notes so they can be checked too.
Along the way, we need to apply for Neil’s Irish passport renewal, because it only contains two of his names and his UK one has all three, and the UK office won’t renew his UK passport until he’s changed his Irish one to reflect theirs, and it’s all very petty but has to be done and needs a covering letter.
(Must write a covering letter for Dame Shirley’s copy of ‘Bobby’ too.)
I need to get the ISBN number of the next book, and set up the front matter details.
Which reminds me, I must change the ‘Where There’s a Will’ files now the guys have added the title of the next book to the very end of that MS – this won’t affect sales or reads.
What else…?
Must get a newsletter ready as I have a couple of promos to announce for September.
I think that’s today’s list of things to do once I’ve posted this post.
I’ve been working on ‘A Case of Make Believe’ but I have been going about it in an odd way – odd for me. Usually, I start at the beginning and plough on until the end, then go back and start again. This time, though, I have already written the climax in first draft form, and I have taken the story to almost the crisis just before the climax, and now I’ve stopped and gone back to the beginning. Why? Ah ha! I am glad you asked…
Something was missing. Every story should have some kind of emotional throughline that will engage the reader. In ‘Finding a Way’ and ‘A Fall From Grace’ it was Jack and Larkin gradually getting together, so it was a kind of falling in love throughline. There’s also one in ‘Where There’s a Will’, but for the secondary characters, and not so much of one in ‘Follow the Van’, apart from Jack possibly being misled. However, when we get to book five, ‘A Case of Make Believe’, Jack is settled in his love life, and Will is happy, but there was no emotional tug. Yet, there should be and there is… there was… I just hadn’t realised what it was. So now, I am going back over draft one which is 80% completed, to complete draft two up to 80%, and while I am doing it, I am adding in and highlighting the emotional throughline that was there but not there.
I know what I mean!
Hopefully, I will have the second draft/first draft completed by the end of the month, and then I will set about the other things which need to happen; cover, editing, proofing etc. So, we should be looking at September for release?
Meanwhile, I am thrilled to say ‘Bobby’ is doing very well and my godfather’s story is being widely read – so he will be happy about that. I am also taking part in another BookFunnel/Book Mojo promo, so any clicks you can give the banner below would be greatly appreciated. (No cost to you, but each click brings me a better reputation.) these promos are working really well for me, so it would be great if you could support them with a click.
I should be here on Saturday. I missed last Saturday for various reasons (having a cold and no motivation, mainly), but I’m back up and running now, and I will think of something to tell you by then. Happy reading!
Here’s an update on my current work in progress, ‘A Case of Make Believe’, which is still a working title and not yet finalised. I am up to chapter 17, around 65,000 words and it’s strange…
Usually, a story will flow in order of events, and after I’ve done the first draft, I might go back and move things around. However, I usually start writing at chapter one and wander forwards from there. With this one, I wanted to get the finale down on paper so much I have already written it, and that’s very unusual for me. I needed what was the opening chapter to tie up exactly with the finale/climax, so maybe that was why I did it that way around. Now, though, that opening chapter has become the ‘smoking gun’ and won’t appear at the beginning, it will have to slip in later on, otherwise, I will have given away too much at the start…
It’s still interesting, though, how things can be chopped and changed, and how as a writer you come to instinctively know when something is or isn’t right. At first, the opening (a piece by Larkin Chase published in a newspaper in 1893) seemed to be exactly right for how I wanted things to start. Now, though, 65,000 words in, I can see that it needs to come later. The important thing, though, is that it’s written, and as I always say, ‘Don’t get it right, get it written.’ Then later, you can get it right.
What’s also interesting about this one is that I feel like I want to get to the denouement already. I aim for around 90K to 100K words per novel these days, so the reader has plenty to get their teeth into. This one, at 65K feels like I could be done with it by 70K, and that sets off alarm bells for me. It means there’s something missing, and I know what it is. So, that will have to be written in when I get to draft two.
Still, it’s fun, there are a couple of new characters, a lot of darkness and villainy, and some not very nice things going on in the criminal underworld of London in 1893, making this one probably my darkest to date.
It will also be thrilling, I hope, and talking of thrilling… Here’s another list of over 100 titles for you that will interest you if you’re into thrillers and adventure novels. Click the banner, head to the page and have a free browse to see if there’s anything there you’d like to read while you wait for ‘A Case of Make Believe.’
It’s been a week of varied research for me. Just a quick look through my current work-in-progress folder shows me all kinds of images ranging from the anatomy of a cutthroat razor to the sewer system and the River Fleet. In fact, this week, I have been to so many places, my blog post will simply be a list of them. So, here you go:
I haven’t had time to prepare anything in-depth for this week’s work-in-progress update, so this is only a quick update on Delamere five, ‘A Case of Make Believe.’
I am at 40,000 words of draft one, my team are visiting the London sewers with a guide, and examining the inspection chamber beneath the Egyptian Hall in January 1893. The story is unfolding nicely, not too fast, not too slow (I hope). The new character of Ned (full name Edgar Maddiver) is settling into Delamere house where there is now also a housekeeper, Mrs Sparks. Jack, the MC for this tale, has been to Whitechapel, visited a molly house, in his quest for information, and yet, the case is only moving forward in fits and starts, despite being an urgent matter. There have already been magicians and disappearing acts, and there will be more.
That’s where I am with the book, which I shall return to writing in a moment. I was off yesterday as I had to visit Rhodes and see a doctor about my tennis elbow (which comes from too much typing, apparently), but all is good, and will get better.
Lastly today, the promos are doing me well, and it really does help if my readers at least browse some of the books on offer. The important thing to do is to click the link (the image below), because that registers that I’ve sent people over to view other author’s work, which in turn, gives me a good promo reputation and keeps me in the promos, and that means I get to sell more copies so I can afford to see a doctor about my author’s arm… and so on. Click the banner, and enjoy your reading!
Bobby, a Life Worth Living, is doing well, and I have had some great feedback already. It’s wonderful to hear that his story resonates with so many people, and they have volunteered their own snippets of older relations’ stories. I am waiting for some leads so I can try and copy some of our interviews onto the PC and from there, to this website, so readers can hear Bobby talking about his past. That’s a project for the future, and I’ll let you know if I am successful.
Where There’s a Will is doing brilliantly in the charts, and has already gained some four- and five-star ratings. Good old Will!
A Case of Make Believe
Well now, this is the working title of Delamere book five, and Make Believe is written that way for a reason. The idea is to have someone be made to believe something and it’s all to do with magic acts and the Victorian passion for macabre shows, the famous decapitation tricks of the Egyptian Hall, and the weird and wonderful of Maskelyne and Cooke’s entertainments.
But not everything is going to plan, so the title may change, although the subject of this mystery won’t. I have already changed the first 14,000 words. Let me explain…
I began on the story, setting it in January 1893. On James Wright’s 30th birthday, actually, January 10th. By then, Delamere House has a housekeeper and a new detective. I started the story from Will’s point of view, and immediately had Jack and Jimmy setting off for Paris to solve an urgent case at the Paris Opera House.
This was to set things up for book six, which may well have something to do with a phantom at the Opera House (left), and thus, become the inspiration for the novel by Gaston Leroux, which he will publish in serial form, starting in 1909… but that’s another story.
Back at Delamere, we were introduced to the new housekeeper, and the new detective, and then a new case arrived at the end of chapter one, and in chapters two and three, Will said goodbye to Jack, and was left in charge of the agency and… It didn’t work. As soon as Jack and Will were separated, the thing fell flat. Add to that, too many new faces and too much domestic detail, and I knew I was off to a false start. So, I have set those first 14,000 words aside. (There’s a good idea in there for a short story, and I might well do another ‘1892’ for Christmas, maybe ‘1891’, I’ll see.)
Now, I have started again with the same villain in mind, and the same background, but I’m coming at it from a different angle. The story now opens with a piece by Larkin Chase, and he’s describing a theatrical event that, later in 1897, would become Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, specialising in naturalistic horror shows. My version, in 1893, is a forerunner, if you like, and it’s a bit of make-believe itself because I am sure the mystery shows of the time didn’t go as far as Grand Guignol, but like the Phantom of the Opera, the Delamere case might well be the inspiration for creatives of the future.
So, that’s where we are.
This week’s promo to click on and check out for more reading, is all about MM Romance novels. This is running all month, the books are all available through Amazon, and there are plenty of your favourite niches and tropes included. Have a click and enjoy your reading!
Today, I was hoping to tell you that ‘Where There’s a Will’ was available on Kindle, but for some reason, it’s taking a long time to show up. Its official status is ‘Publishing’, which means it’s passed all the stages and is simply waiting to go live. This usually happens within three hours, but so far, it’s taken two days. They say in the small print that it can take up to ten days, which seems incredibly slow for a computerised, automated process.
Meanwhile, the print version is available for those who, like me, prefer to buy paperbacks, and here’s the link:
Will and Jack Merrit are set a simple task: Journey to an island in the Bristol Channel to attend the reading of a will. Why? No-one knows.
Charles Marisco can guess what’s in his father’s will. Everything will go to his twin brother, Simon, because he was born first. However, Charles has other things on his mind, namely, his best friend, Barrett Newton, a man he would like to know more intimately.
A storm-lashed castle, a remote island, and a cast of eccentric characters set the stage for Will and Jack Merrit’s most baffling case yet—one that grows deadlier as the body count rises.
I have family visiting right now, so I shan’t be starting on the next story until next weekend, when I will get straight back to it. I have several ideas, some situations I’d like to explore, some historical occasions from 1893 I’d like to look at further, and I have several ideas. So, I need to decide which one I am going to run with and focus on that. While I’m doing that, I will also be finishing ‘Bobby – a Life Worth Living’, the story of my late godfather which is also a kind of walk through 20th century gay Britain, or one gay man’s life from 1919 to 2007, and I can tell you it is a remarkable true story. I did most of the work on this book several years ago and then I set it aside as I wasn’t happy with my style. Now, after I’ve matured a little as a writer, I am able to do the story justice. I’ve added some deeper research I was unable to do 20 years ago, and have knocked the MS into a reasonable shape. As soon as I can afford it, I will commission Andjela to do me a cover, get the OWI guys to do the layout, and it’ll be ready to go. Or will be ready to sit in the Amazon ‘publishing’ queue for a few days…
For now, though, it’s back to my enforced holiday; a trip out for lunch, my piano student this afternoon, and a friend’s terrace for the evening. It’s 36° outside most of the time, so we’re going slowly and drinking loads of water. Here are some views to see you through the weekend.
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