Last week I wrote, ‘I am fast approaching the end of draft one’ (of Starting with Secrets). I also said I was just about to head into the finale, I was at 113,000 words, and on chapter 31.
This week, I have to report I have made little progress. I am at 118,000 words and about to start chapter 33, the aftermath chapter. It has taken me a week to write what I could usually write in two days because of a variety of excuses, and not all of them fun ones.
Last week was our 5th wedding anniversary, 20 years since we came to live on Symi and Neil’s birthday all on the same day. I’d only just got over the visit from our friends we met in Canada, and I was able to get some writing done on Wednesday. However, Thursday came along and with it came a surprise visit from my nephew, and a late-night dinner party for 24 people at the taverna. On the previous Monday, I had woken up with bad hay fever but had to have my 4th Covid jab, so just got on with it. By Wednesday evening, I was feeling pretty done in, but kept going through the dinner party and celebrations the next night. Friday, however, and over the weekend, I was able to do little more than bang out some paid typing (because I had to), sit on the sofa playing SimCity and blow my nose, sneeze and groan. I’m still feeling knackered, and I think the hay fever was actually a cold which, on top of a few late nights and a C4 jab, flattened me.
So, there’s my excuse for only writing 4,000 words in a week. Today, cold or no cold, I am battling on and changing my routine. I intend to pause my typing work when the sun comes up, walk around the block for half an hour, get back to work, and then dedicate the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon to Starting with Secrets.
Check back in next Wednesday for the WIP and I hope to be able to tell you I am about to start the last chapter. We shall see.
Don’t worry, I am not going to give away any spoilers. Today, I’ve put up images of some of the ‘props’ featured in the next Larkspur Mystery. These are very general, so don’t take the images as the actual locations or props, because if I did that, I would be giving away the answers to clues the Clearwater crew must solve on their treasure hunt. When I say props, I mean all manner of things that are used in the story, and I include locations in that—but not the places you will see below.
I find visual aids such as photos help me imagine my locations, many of which I have never been to, and some of which don’t exist. Larkspur Hall, for example, is modelled on a few stately homes and not just one. So, here are a few images that have inspired locations or ‘things’ in the next book (and one or two for part two of the story, The Larkspur Legacy, which will be the next book). This is purely to whet your appetite. If you want to know how the writing is coming along, check the Wednesday WIP blog.
It starts with a compass. (Btw, Neil bought me one just like this for our wedding anniversary last Thursday.)
So, where am I now…? I am up at 113,000 words, and the climax is about to get underway. I have two characters trying to reach three others before they are in mortal danger. A storm has just broken, the land is flooding, and there’s something to do with a crumbling building that holds a vital clue…
It’s all go.
I haven’t been able to write as much as I wanted these last couple of days, mainly because of taking on some necessary freelance work and having my 4th Covid jab, which, on top of a cold, knocked me out for a day. We also had friends visiting yesterday, a couple we met on our trip across Canada in 2020 when we had to race home two days early because Covid broke out. The two days we missed were a stay in Athens we’d planned, but as the city was, by then, closed, it didn’t matter. That’s a story for another day. Today, I am sitting down to write at least half a chapter of Starting with Secrets, and I imagine I have four more chapters to go before I can leave you wanting more. This book is half of a longer story, which will probably bring the Larkspur Series to a close. Kind of.
I have an idea for a book after ‘The Larkspur Legacy’ which will be a companion book on the side. There are things that need explaining which wouldn’t make an entire 100k novel. What I am mulling over is the idea of having some short stories, character outlines, background information, illustrations, cuts and outtakes from the Clearwater and Larkspur series, and putting them together in one volume that fans of the two series will enjoy. At the moment, I am playing with the title, ‘Barbary Fleet and Other Matters’, because one of the things we’ve yet to discover is how Fleet came to be at the academy. What’s his history, and why does he call Clem Mr Yeobright? Then, we might want to know about Frank Andino and his past tribulations. There’s a big gap in the story of Edward and Henry’s four years of survival in the Old Nichol Slum, and what happened to the men who entrapped Chester Cadman? Come to that, what happened to Skaggot from ‘Guardians of the Poor’? I may also write some vignettes for the other minor but fun characters like Doc Markland, the barrister, Cresswell, and Mrs Norwood…
That’s all for the future. For now, I’m heading off into the finale of ‘Starting with Secrets’ and I am fast approaching the end of draft one.
I can’t stay long today because I am halfway through a climax. I mean, I am halfway through writing the climactic scene of ‘Starting with Secrets’ and don’t want to lose my impetus. This is another way of saying I haven’t had time to prepare an in-depth blog for today, or if you like, this is an excuse for laziness. Well, it’s not really, because I have been writing a lot, for my novel and for other people. I am averaging around 7,000 words per day at the moment. It’s no wonder I’ve got a bad back.
I was going to write about what makes a good story climax, and I will do that one day soon, but off the top of my head, I’d say a good climax is the pivotal point in the story, whether it’s an action one (like I am working on) or a romantic one. It’s the point when everything comes together in a section of drama that turns the plot. I use them to insert twists during or after the high-octane action, and also to insert questions marks. I.e., what happens next?
Thinking back, in the Clearwater and Larkspur series, I have set my climaxes in a variety of places and situations.
A burning warehouse
On a runaway steam train
The Royal Opera House during a performance
A disused lighthouse and a London court
At a formal dinner at a stately home
Hanging over a 1,000-foot drop down a mineshaft
At a piano
A race to meet a departing Atlantic liner
A Scottish cliff edge
A sword fight
In a church crypt
A fogu on Bodmin Moor
At a masked ball
Disused smugglers’ tunnels
The Savoy Hotel
All these places and dire situations have seen the culmination of a long and hopefully interesting mystery, and each of them has then led the main character(s) off in a different direction. They also make use of weather, daylight, nighttime and other outside and uncontrollable factors as a way of heightening the tension.
My ‘Starting with Secrets’ characters are about to do battle, there’s a race against time, a storm’s a-coming in, and by the time the climax is over, we will have seen a dramatic twist and you’ll be left hanging. Not literally, but hopefully, you’ll want to know what happens next. That won’t happen unless I get back to work, so with that, I shall carry on climaxing and see you back here on Wednesday for another work-in-progress update.
This week’s update: I am at Chapter 28 and at 99,000 words with, I imagine, four major scenes left to go as we fall into the finale. A scene might be one chapter, or it might be two or three, so I reckon I am looking at around 130,000 words by the time draft one is finished. Remember, this is the first part of a much longer story, which will conclude in the following book. How I am going to make the second one as intriguing, complex and rewarding as this one remains to be seen, but I know I have a fair amount of research to do. How to sail a 19th-century sailing ship for one thing.
Work was briefly interrupted on Monday, and here’s why. For the last couple of weeks, we’ve had a rat living in the lean-to roof. I saw the evidence before I heard it, and wondered how we were going to get rid of it. They come in from the ruins and pieces of wasteland around our hillside village, and we’ve had one before that used to leave its droppings in the spare toilet, though it never learnt to flush. As the lean-to roof is inaccessible without pulling the whole thing apart, we bought some humane poison from the pet shop. I put down three tablets and left the other five in the bag on the counter. The next day, not only had all three gone but so had the bag.
Victorian rat catcher and his dog (Wikicommons)
The rat continued to occupy the roof and our minds, and the ‘treatment’ appeared not to be working (though it can take up to 10 days, they say). However, on Monday, I heard a yell/scream, and called from across the courtyard, ‘Rat?’ to which Neil replied, ‘Yes.’ Attending the scene, I found he had the thing pinned to the spokes of our godson’s bike, which we keep in the laundry room lean-to, and he was using his crutch to keep it in place. (Neil recently had a bout of transient osteoporosis, so he was using his crutch, not his crotch.) We devised a cunning plan. Wearing an oven glove, I lifted the intruder by the tail and dropped it into an old ice cream tub. Holding the lid down but not sealed, I took the thing up to our dustbin station and left it in a paladin with a bag of rubbish on top. The bin men empty these stations at least twice per day and a visit was due. Ratty would have made his escape when the trash was tipped into the back of the truck, if not there, then when it reached the landfill way up the mountain.
And now, with that story told, I can resume work on the next work in progress. Thinking about it, I might have to write in a rat catcher because that was a busy job back in Victorian times, and now I know what it feels like to be one.
If you have read my previous blogs about how I write, you will know I am always looking up words. I don’t just mean finding an alternative word from the thesaurus, although I do that too, I mean discovering if the word I want was in use at the time I set my stories. (Currently 1888 to 1891.) Recently, I have had to change what I’ve written because some words didn’t exist back then; paperwork, acerbic, acidic, gobbledygook, for example. I also like to look up words to discover where they came from. I guess you might call me an amateur etymologist.
Imagine my excitement the other day when a visiting friend presented me with a present, a Reader’s Digest book, ‘The Origins of Words and Phrases.’ Once I have read the parts about how our language was born and developed and other interesting linguistic facts in the introduction, I will house the book on my shelves alongside my other handy reference guides ready to be used at a moment’s notice.
Talking of such books, I thought I would name a few of them today, in case you want to build up your own reference library and add to your writers’ toolkit. While I am about it, I’ll drop in random examples, and I’ll start with my latest addition, ‘The Origins of Words and Phrases.’
The Origins of Words and Phrases
A dictionary of over 3,000 of the most intriguing, amusing and surprising stories of the origin of some words.
Random example: Lunatic derives from the Latin word for moon, luna. Why? Because it was once thought that people went mad during the time of the full moon. Werewolves and British politicians are good examples.
The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms
Provides clear definitions of phrases and sayings with interesting facts and examples.
Random example: Roman holiday. An occasion on which enjoyment or profit is derived from the suffering of others. Origin; from Byron’s poem, ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, where a dying gladiator is described as having been butchered to make a Roman holiday.
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary
This is a great resource for finding old words, those that were in use then (1755) but which aren’t now.
Random example: Gymnospérmous (adj,) [γυμνος and σπερμα.] Having the seeds naked.
Well, I said they would be random! If you want a more up-to-date definition of this word, I managed to find this one: Gymnosperms are other types of vascular and non-vascular plants of the Kingdom Plantae, which produce seeds directly (without) bearing any flower.
Here’s another random one: Réremouse (n.s.) [hreremus, Saxon.] A bat.
An Unkindness of Ravens
A collection of collective nouns arranged in various headings. I could spend hours in this book, but here are a few fun ones:
A worship of writers. A kindle of kittens. A glaring of cats. A glozing of taverners.
Clichés Avoid them like the Plague!
This book is basically a list of our top clichés and where they came from. It doesn’t just go for the low-hanging fruit, it plays hardball, and hits the ground running. You might cry, Houston, we have a problem, but the book certainly kicks ass. When you’re writing, you might find yourself between a rock and a hard place because of not knowing if a phrase is a cliché, so this book is handy for sorting the wheat from the chaff. Yes, you might have to buy it, but then, there’s no gain without pain.
Mark Forsyth’s Ternion Set
Three books by the lexicographer, Mark Forsyth, are both informative and fun to read. I’ll never remember all the information in them, but I dip in now and then to discover the meaning of, for example, syllepsis. Syllepsis is when one word is used in two or more incongruous ways. The author gives an example of the word took being used in nine ways, and I’ll use it to give you an example of my own.
It was late, and the party was winding down, so I took my hat, my coat and my leave.
The set of three books also includes The Etymologicon, ‘A circular stroll through the hidden connections of the English language’, and The Horologicon, ‘A day’s jaunt through the lost words of the English language.’ For example: Breakfast (somehow) comes from the Greek word, ariston, therefore the study of breakfast is aristology, and if you like eating breakfast, you are an aristologist.
There, I bet you didn’t know that.
The Vulgar Tongue
This is one of my favourites, and I use it a great deal when writing characters such as Frank Andino, and the new character in the Larkspur Mysteries, Bertie Tucker. This is a collection of slang and cant from 1785. I have a PDF version of it as well as a hardback because the PDF is easier to search. When doing so, I come across words like davy for affidavit. Crank, brisk and pert are all words for a mix of gin and water. A member mug is a chamber pot (or was). Seeing as how I am fast becoming an old fogey, I can tell you that it’s actually a very noble thing to be. Fogey derives from the French word fougueux, meaning fierce or fiery, and referred to retired soldiers.
Knowing your… stuff
I have plenty of other books in my collection, from dialect dictionaries to Brewer’s Fact and Fable, and from Strunk and White’s ‘Elements of Style’ grammar guide to the more succinct Joanne Adams book on the subject, ‘Grammar. Know your shit or know you’re shit.’
The shelves also contain an Oxford English dictionary, a thesaurus, a dictionary of quotations, a rhyming dictionary, and a guide to the English language, among others, and my online reference bookmarks include a glossary of Scottish words and an Irish one. Ship rigging diagrams, men’s clothing of the late Victorian era, a dictionary of idioms, a Cornish dictionary, a Gothic glossary, there’s a whole file about prisons and another about workhouses, and then there are digital, online copies of some of the print books mentioned above.
You don’t need all of these in order to write, but the point is, if you’re writing, words are your tools and how to use them is your craft. Understanding where words came from, and exploring how the language developed is background research for the writer in the way a painter understands what colours go together.
Apart from anything else, reading about words is fun and educational.
I must leave you with that thought now, because I’ve been sitting here for ages without a break, and I need to use my member mug.
See you on Wednesday for the Work In Progress update.
Here we are at 80,000 words of the next Larkspur Mystery, and I have characters all over the place. I have some in London chasing one clue, others on their way to Shropshire chasing another, and a third team about to set off to Kent. ‘Starting with Secrets’ is a treasure hunt at the end of which lies ‘A great treasure and a great secret’ according to the two women who set Archer, Lord Clearwater, the quest. From one clue grew four, hence we have three teams. The fourth clue has not yet been addressed.
I am nearing the beginning of the staggered climax of the story. I say staggered because there are three storylines to resolve, and the first has reached a dead end, leaving two more set pieces to write before the final climax and the resolve. Except, in this case, the resolution will have to wait for the book that comes next, ‘The Larkspur Legacy.’ You see, ‘Starting with Secrets’ is the first half of a longer story, and thus, its ending is the halfway point of the overall tale.
It will all make sense when you read both books, but when that will be is anyone’s guess. ‘Secrets’ is coming on well and is turning out to be one of those first drafts that writes itself. In the second and subsequent drafts, I will address and expand the emotional side of the story, because, at the moment, we are action-driven. I don’t mind that, but I don’t want it to be one of those Clive Cussler-style books where we leap from one action scene to the next with very little human relationship thread and emotional throughline that will engage the reader.
If you like solving clues, you’ll love ‘Secrets’ and, as usual, they are all based on facts. Obscure facts at times, but still…
And so, to chapter 23 in which I return to clue two and a journey from Hertfordshire to Shropshire to hunt down a clue that reads like this:
By now, I think, you should have found, Numbers lead beneath the ground. 52.62 -2.31
We’re up to 67,000 words now folks. I’ve been beavering away at around 3,000 words per day and the story is progressing well. This is going to be something of an epic because I am building in four strands emanating from one initial clue. I’ve got Silas, Joe and Dalston in London, James and a new character, Archie Tucker, in Hertfordshire, Thomas and the others at Larkspur, and a fourth strand/clue yet to be addressed. Meanwhile, our villains are out and about, and we still don’t know where the evil Tripp is or what he is up to.
I am trying to give previous characters cameo roles now and then, so yesterday, I had a scene with Jake O’Hara, who appears in ‘Unspeakable Acts’ in the Clearwater series, and pops up now and then in other books. I even mentioned Oleg, one of Lady Marshall’s footmen who turned up in an early Clearwater, and more characters will pop in as the story progresses. There are reasons for their appearances, though, so it’s not a gratuitous thing.
In fact, there are reasons all characters have appeared in previous Clearwater and/or Larkspur books, and ‘Starting with Secrets’ and the one that will come after it, draw them all together in one way or another for the ultimate ‘chase the clues before the deadline’ story. What I still need to include more of is an emotional throughline or two. I have one running, and I know where that is going, but there needs to be more. That will come with the second draft which, at this rate, will be ready next week. (Only joking; this book is going to take some time to get right and ready.) As a teaser the mystery actually starts here….. with Victorian flatware cutlery…
The start of the mystery in ‘Starting with Secrets.’ (Victorian flatware cutlery)
Yesterday, I was pottering around the British Museum in 1891, and today I have to return to Larkspur to catch up on what’s happening there, so if you will excuse me, I’ll head off there now and see you on Saturday for my next blog post.
Stock Photo – British Museum interior of the Egyptian gallery from 1890. Electric lights enabling the museum to be opened to the public in the evenings
When we talk about the Victorian period, we are talking about the years of the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837 to 1901. It was a time of significant change in the United Kingdom. The industrial revolution, the age of the steam train, steam-powered factories, a rise in industry and exploration, inventions, and the growth of the British Empire across the world. It also saw the rise of the middle class, a great divide between rich and poor, and a move from agricultural labouring to factory work for many, because it was in the cities where wealth could be made.
When you’re sitting down to write a novel set in these times, you really ought to know what you’re talking about. Or at least, do your research.
Alison Weir, the writer of many a great historical novel, says that,
“You can’t write a historical novel without being familiar with the sources. You have to have an idea of how people lived. It’s a completely different world and you’ve got to get in the mindset, the zeitgeist, that informs the language.”
If you were writing a book set in, say, the 1990s or 1980s, you may remember what it was like to be around at that time. It depends on your age, of course, but if I was writing about the 1980/90s, I’d remember the clothes, the TV shows, the politics, the way of life, the new-fangled thing like CDs, DVDs and BluRay. I’d know what it was like to be a young person of the time because I was there, so my characters would be drawn from my experience of the zeitgeist, the culture, and the language of the time.
Zeitgeist is borrowed from German and literally translates to “time spirit” or “spirit of the times.” It comes from the German Zeit, meaning “time,” and Geist, meaning “spirit” or “ghost” (as seen in poltergeist, which means “a noisy ghost”).
Clearly, I was not around in 1888 when my Clearwater Series begins, so how do I know how the characters spoke? How did I know what the streets of the East End smelt like? How do I know what it was like to exist in a workhouse or live in Belgravia? And how could I tell what it was like to fight a villain on top of a moving steam train hurtling towards certain death?
I didn’t, and I still don’t. Not 100%, because I’ve never fought a villain on the top of a moving anything, and as a novelist, one must use imagination. But your imagination must be confined to the times in which you are writing. I have to admit, when I started writing the historical series, my mind wasn’t 100% in the times because I started Deviant Desire with the intention of setting it all in a fictional London. Now, with the Larkspur Series (and in the later Clearwater books) we are firmly in London and the world as it was at the time because I have learnt as I have gone along. It’s too late now to change Greychurch to Whitechapel, and Limedock to Limehouse, but it is never too late to learn from mistakes. This is why, a little way into the Clearwater series, I returned to the earlier books and struck out every use of the words okay, teenager, adolescent and others. I’d learnt by then that those words were not in use until the 20th century. They weren’t in the Victorian era zeitgeist. (Nor was homosexual, which was only used in medical terms from the 1860s, and which gets a mention in my next novel.)
Research Ideas
Where do I get my information from? You may ask, and that was the point of this post; to share a few resources with you. I have previously mentioned particular books, but today, I wanted to highlight a few websites I regularly use. These will be useful if you’re starting out on writing a book set in the Victorian period, or you might simply find them of interest. I currently have over 150 bookmarks in my ‘research’ bookmark folder on Firefox, and within it, there are several sub-folders such as ‘travel’ and ‘maps.’
My go-to source for writings of the time is the Dictionary of Victorian London at http://www.victorianlondon.org, an excellent resource created by author Lee Jackson. I have some of his books on my shelves, but I’m talking about online resources here. If you head to this link you will find the index for the Dictionary, which is actually a list of categories, and within them, you find collected pieces from various sources written in the Victorian period. Each section has subsections, so, for example, I want to look up Prison life, and within ‘Prisons’, I find Executions and Punishments, Prisons, Rehabilitation of Offenders and Remand. I go to ‘Prisons’ and there’s another sub-list. Following one of those links, ‘Pentonville’, I find several pieces from newspapers, reports and other publications written between 1843 and 1879.
The point is, at a site like this, I have reports and information directly from the time in which I am writing. By reading them, I gain a sense of the language and how it was used, and also the zeitgeist of the time.
I also use the British Newspaper Archive, where I can search for newspapers published on specific days, and read what was happening in the world on that day in 1891 or whenever. This archive is also useful for checking what day of the week a date was, the weather, finding advertisements to mention in my books to add authentic detail, and finding interesting asides, like actual cricket scores for my character Dr Markland.
Another of my favourite sites is The National Library of Scotland. Why? If you click the link, you’ll find an incredible resource for maps. Ordnance Survey, Military, County, there’s an endless list. I have a bookmark that leads me directly to a London map of 1888. It doesn’t give me street names, but I can see where the railways ran and other details, and, by using a slider, I can reveal beneath it the modern-day map of the city to make a comparison.
Victorian Gay
Specific to my novels is the theme of homosexuality, and if you wanted to know what it was like to be gay in the Victorian Period, you only need to head to Rictor Norton’s sourcebook. His list of articles dates from 1800 to 1891, and it is from here that I find inspiration for the court cases, characters and histories of some of my stories. There is a full collection of reports about the Cleveland Street Scandal, for example. If you have read ‘Speaking in Silence’, you can find the original reports here.
I could blether on for hours and give you the full list of what’s in my research bookmarks folder, but instead, here’s a list of some others that you might find of interest.
‘Always put the weather in’ is a top tip from many authors, and I always have weather in my books. I also have accurate sunrise and sunset times, and phases of the moon too, and I get all that from Time and Date, where you can search by year and place for accuracy.
I have links to various dictionaries, such as Cockney Rhyming Slang, one for Irish phrases and slang words, and a dictionary of the Cornish dialect. I always check words were in use in my time period, and to do this, I use Google’s online dictionary because it gives a graph of printed usage of words. I have a dictionary of idioms bookmarked along with some oddments such as a list of Latin mottos, a Gothic glossary (Gothic architecture, that is), a glossary of carriages, and my favourite, The Vulgar Tongue (1785) for slang words.
The points of this post are:
Always ensure your characters are acting, talking and thinking within the zeitgeist of the time, and make sure your/their language is time-appropriate.
You can do this by reading novels written at the time, but better, newspapers and other journals, such as those you find in the online archives.
Keep every useful page you come across and bookmark it, making separate folders in your bookmarks if necessary.
You can’t beat a book on a shelf, but for speed, I use the net. What I don’t do, however, is take a search engine’s results as 100% accurate in their information and I always double-check what I read on online encyclopaedias with a website run by experts. If in doubt, do your research.
[I’ll be back on Wednesday with an update on the work in progress, ‘Starting with Secrets’.]
Well, I’m not sure how this happened, but by the end of today, I shall be at 50,000 words of the next book in the Larkspur Mysteries series, ‘Starting with Secrets.’ This is only WIP blog 2! One of the reasons this one is going so smoothly is that I have been planning it since starting book four, and it’s already plotted, I know all but a few of the characters, and I started writing scenes for it while I was writing ‘Speaking in Silence’, which, I am pleased to say, is doing well. Thank you for your reviews!
But 50,000 words? That’s like half a novel already and yet I am only a third of the way through the planned story. This book is either going to be another epic like ‘The Clearwater Inheritance’, or it’s going to end up being two books. It is, in fact, the first part of a two-part finale to the series, and I intend to write on and on until I reach the end and not worry about word length. Then, when it’s done, I will take a look and decide if it’s a) is over-written and needs massive editing, b) it’s a two-parter or c) it’s just a long book with lots of mystery, thrills and spills.
It is a very simple story: Archer is left a treasure hunt which he wants to solve. However, the clues are obscure and, it turns out, they are also many. This means the ‘crew’ has to split into three teams, including the academy men, and among them is a new character, Bertie Tucker. While not being sure of why he is at the academy, Bertie becomes a distraction for Edward and that means he becomes a concern for Henry, and it’s down to James (Jimmy Wright) to play the part of mentor while investigating one line of clues. Meanwhile, Silas takes the lead on a London-based hunt, leaving Tom to consider the last two cryptics back at Larkspur. Behind all of this, there is a villain trying to stay one step ahead and bringing in other characters to his evil team, and there will be moments of danger, excitement and, of course, bromance.
I’m putting a lot of background research into this one, as I usually do, but as the story is so big and diverse, so is my background reading. All will be revealed in time, but for now, I am ploughing on with chapter 14, and wondering what the word count will be this time next week. Be here then to find out.
