Plodding along

Goodness, I had forgotten quite how slow it is writing the first book in a series.  To be fair, I didn’t realise at the time that “Fatal Forgery” was the first in that series – I thought it was a standalone book until Sam caught hold of me and wouldn’t let go – but I certainly noticed that I speeded up the writing through the series.  I thought maybe it was just me becoming a really good writer (hah!) but it turns out that the magic ingredient was familiarity: familiarity with my characters, and familiarity with the location.  And as I embark on “Gregory 1”, both of those are missing.

Yes, I have been canny enough to stick with a familiar timeframe: “Gregory 1” is set in 1825, which is the same year as for “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  But I’m already finding that 1825 in modern, exciting, capital city London is not the same as 1825 in staid, academic, market town Cambridge.

And as for the other things that are slowing me down, it’s the usual stumbling blocks for the writer of historical fiction.  You start out with a simple sentence: He turned left into Sidney Street and headed for the market to buy fish for his meal.  Now, was it “Sidney Street”, or should I go with the nineteenth-century alternative of “Sidney-street”?  And I’m writing about a Tuesday – was the market in Cambridge on Tuesdays?  And were the fish sellers there every market day?  And were they actually in the main market, or near the “beast market” around the corner?  Perhaps he can do without a meal today!  I’m not complaining – well, not much – but it’s been a bit of a shock to go from days when I could quite happily pour out two or three thousand words, to feeling exhausted after only five hundred.  But at least this time, as I know already that it’s a series, I can comfort myself that time spent now on learning the details will be a good investment for future books.  Now, back to that fish: will Gregory choose Colchester oysters, salmon or herrings? Or even a tasty eel…

Don’t mute the messenger

I appreciate that this may have passed you by – mainly because it’s all still in my head rather than actually happening – but now that I am giving being a professional author a go, I am revamping my communications with readers.  I have a very minimal Facebook and Twitter presence for Sam Plank (nothing yet for Gregory Hardiman), and then I have this blog and my monthly research updates.  And there’s my website for me as an author, which covers my fiction and non-fiction writing.  My husband has kindly volunteered (that’s not a euphemism – he genuinely did) to update my website, which is looking a bit tired; like everything, websites have their fashions, and my rather static, page-driven one is now the website equivalent of the Ford Granada.  So I’ll leave that to him, and weigh in with praise/complaints/biscuits as required.  But my job now is to think about my more proactive engagement with readers.

This blog has always been ad hoc – in other words, I make a post when I feel I have something to say.  But again, this seems to be a bit passé: looking at the output of other, much more successful authors, the trend these days is for regular newsletters sent to subscribers.  Some of you will already receive my monthly research updates, and I am wondering whether to unite the two – in other words, to send out a monthly newsletter that contains some background research information as well as other updates on (for instance) how my current book is going and who has agreed to play Sam in the Sunday evening drama commissioned by the BBC (well, an author can dream…).  So the blog would cease, and only newsletter subscribers would hear actively from me.  (Signing up to the newsletter would of course be free.)

And so I wondered whether you had any views on the subject.  To make life simpler I have put together a few questions – but you are more than welcome to go off piste and ignore them completeley.  Here goes:

1. Would you be interested in receiving a monthly newsletter from me, which would focus on my historical crime writing (i.e. both the completed Sam series and the new Gregory series, and whatever comes after that)?
2. Looking at possible content, are you interested in:
   • The research that I do behind the writing – my current monthly update has only 46 people signed up, so perhaps it’s not as popular as I think
   • My progress on my current book
   • The writing process
   • The self-publishing process
   • Me as an individual and not just as an author – some writers share their holiday photos and pet photos, for instance
   • Anything else?
3. It is likely that I will work out how to sell my own books – in e-formats only – via my new website.  Would you prefer to buy this way (for about the same price as on Amazon, but with a larger percentage of the sale price going to me)?  And would the promise of special subscriber discounts interest you?

I think that will do for now.  As you can see, what I am trying to do is gauge whether this is the right approach, and – if it is – what would tempt you to become a newsletter subscriber.  Thank you so much for any thoughts.

Founts of wisdom

I spend a great deal of time on research – no, don’t feel sorry for me because I simply love it.  But sometimes even the most diligent research leaves holes in the information, and when that happens, you can be sure that someone – a real-life person – will know the answer.  And for me, one of the joys of writing has been to discover how enormously helpful experts are with their information.

Last week I mentioned to someone that I am planning a series of books whose narrator will have a military background in the Peninsular Wars, but that with no military service in my family (my grandad worked in an aircraft factory but that’s it), I am something of a novice and find it rather confusing.  Ah, he said, I did an MA on the history of the cavalry and can probably help with that – would you permit (permit!) me to take the skeleton character details and create for you a credible military history and timeline for your character?  Would I ever!  And then yesterday I contacted a man who has just published a book on the two men who were the first Commissioners of the Met Police, to ask if he had any details about the swearing-in ceremony for the first cohort of officers, and he has responded with all sorts of juicy specifics (it involved parchment).

I already try to pay it forward by sharing my own research in my monthly “behind the scenes” updates, but I shall have to up my game and make sure that I am always as generous with my own research as other people have been with theirs.

PhD by proxy

For many years I flirted with the idea of doing a PhD.  The academic world suits introverted swots like me, and I am a past master at concentration and at spending a long time learning a great deal about very little.  (Hence my quarter-century career in anti-money laundering; that’s one crime, folks, for twenty-five years.  You can’t call me flighty.)  I thought my area of study would be something to do with money laundering (I know: colour you surprised), but every department of criminology I spoke to said, well, of course there will need to be robust statistical underpinning to your research, and so I lost interest.  Statistics and I parted company by mutual consent shortly after my “O” level exams.

But the PhD has come back into my life in a big way in recent months.  As you know, I am currently knee-deep in research: first I was working on the Gregory series, and now I have returned to more familiar ground with the Sam series.  But things are changing for Sam and Wilson: the first patrol for the Metropolitan Police took to the streets at 6pm on Wednesday 30 September 1829.  There is an enormous amount to learn about the genesis of the Met and about its first few months of operations – I’m not complaining!  (Far from it: the words “lots of research” are catnip to me.)  And an unexpected source of terrifically detailed information has been PhD theses.

When I was researching the Gregory series, I knew pretty early on that I would need an educated man with whom Gregory – largely self-taught and endlessly curious (yes, yes, I know: so far, so Sam) – could discuss his cases and concerns.  (Like Conant and Harmer in the Sam series.) No-one at the University would be suitable (too political, too linked to a specific college, too snooty) and suddenly the idea of a coroner came to me.  In Gregory’s time it was a part-time role to which a man – usually a solicitor – would be elected for life.  And (joy of joys) I realised that I knew very little about coroners and would need to do lots of research.  One of the sources I turned up with a Google hunt was a PhD thesis on “Coroners in London and Middlesex, c. 1820–1888: A Study of Medicalization and Professionalization” by an Open University student called Yvonne Fisher.  Readers, the wealth of information!  The clear explanations!  The pages of references to sources for further research!

And so when one of my Met Police truffle hunts revealed another thesis – this one called “Criminal and Constable: The Impact of Policing Reform on Crime in Nineteenth Century London”, by Gregory Durston of the London School of Economics – I knew I was in for a treat.  Mr Durston and I have been together for two days now and my understanding of the early days of the Met has increased immeasurably.

So if you’re doing research, don’t discount those unpromising-looking PDF file links you find: they might look dry and dusty, they might be clunky scans of paper documents, but they are gold dust. Imagine: someone has spent three years or more distilling and digesting all that information, and we get to swoop in and reap the benefit.  We’re the top-level carnivores of the research world – yum yum!  (And here’s a site to get you started, with links to more than five million theses and dissertations.)

A Big Decision

I have some big news.  I know that back in the day (August last year) I asked your opinion on which book I should write next: the final Sam Plank book or the first Gregory Hardiman book.  Votes were fairly even, but in the end I decided to let Sam rest for a while and to embark on a new relationship with Gregory.  Since then, I have tried – I really have.  I have immersed myself in research into Cambridge and the University [everyone capitalised it in the 1820s] and the university constables.  I have worked out who Gregory is and where he comes from and how he reaches Cambridge, and what happened to him in Spain [spoiler: it’s not pretty].  But I just cannot get going with the writing; even with twelve weeks (and counting…) of lock-down, I’ve managed only about 5,000 words.  And after listening to one of Joanne Harris’s excellent Youtube tutorials, in which she talked about putting projects aside for when their time is right, I have come to a conclusion: I’m reversing my decision.  In other words, I’m going to do “Sam 7” before “Gregory 1”.  (Not instead of “Gregory 1”: I have done enough research to know that I really do want to do the Cambridge series, but just not right now.)

Before coming to this decision I had to make sure that I hadn’t hamstrung myself with “Fatal Forgery”.  You may remember that I did not plan a Sam series: it happened because once I had finished “FF” – which was intended as a standalone book – I just couldn’t bear to say goodbye to Sam.  But did I say anything in “FF” that would make it tricky to write the final Sam book, which sees the advent of the Metropolitan Police and a significant change in Sam’s working life?  With trembling hands I opened my copy and found this: “I continued working as a constable for the magistrates in Great Marlborough Street, and when the policing of London was reorganised in the summer of 1829 I was one of the first to transfer to the new Metropolitan Police Force.  I could have stayed with the magistrates, but I had a deal of respect for the two new Commissioners of Police, and London had grown so vast and so wild that I agreed with their view that the city was now sorely in need of an integrated police force.  With my years of experience, I was quickly put to work training new recruits.”  I then revisited “Heir Apparent” – the most recent Sam book – and at the end of that Wilson talks about joining the new force and encourages Sam to think about signing up to help train the new recruits.  Who would have guessed it!

I am so excited at the thought of being able to wade once more into the history of policing – Gregory is a university constable, which is not the same.  As for an actual plot, I’m quite taken with counterfeiting, coining (that’s the counterfeiting of money) and gambling.  I’m thinking of publication in October 2021.  And before you can ask, yes, there will be MORE MARTHA!

The advertising game

It’s been a weekend of two halves, with regard to my writing.  On one hand, I have made a tiny bit of progress with “Gregory 1” – the first Gregory Hardiman book, set in Cambridge.  I have learned a lot about coroner’s inquests, and I have decided on a couple of confidants for Gregory – yes, a coroner, and perhaps a surgeon as well.  I found John Conant – a magistrate – an invaluable part of the Sam series, as the two men were able to discuss their work, and I feel I need someone in a similarly educated position for Gregory.  (I have also discovered that he doesn’t like being called Greg; Samuel Plank was perfectly easy with being called Sam, but Gregory insists on the full Gregory.  I wonder why…)

And on the other hand, I have been running an experimental Facebook ad for the past five days.  I have a dedicated Facebook page for my non-fiction business book “The Solo Squid: How to Run a Happy One-Person Business”, and for weeks now they have been tempting me with a £5 “credit” to try an ad to promote the page.  And in a moment of weakness – OK, a moment when I should have been writing but convinced myself that doing something commercial to promote a book was actually just as good as writing [spoiler alert: it isn’t] – I went for it.  I signed up to spend up to £1 a day for five days promoting the squid page to potential buyers of the book, with an ad to entice them to click on a link taking them to the Amazon page for the book.  I will admit that I didn’t put a great deal of thought into the ad or its settings, simply accepting the Facebook defaults for most of it, on the basis that as this was my first ad, they would do their best for me in order to suck me in for future campaigns.  I did limit the ad a little, by asking for it to be shown to both genders in the age range 25 to 58 [I figure that the very young aren’t setting up their own businesses quite yet, and those at the end of their working lives aren’t looking for guidance], in the US and the UK [prime English-speaking nations] and with a declared interest in entrepreneurship.  This netted me a potential target audience numbering 11,000,000, which Facebook assured me was ideal.  And off we went.

Five days later, Facebook informs me that my ad run has finished.  Over the five days it was seen by 1,399 people, eleven of whom clicked the link.  That cost me £4.80 of my £5 credit – or just under 44p per click.  Looking at the Amazon sales figures, I see that in the same period (10 to 14 June 2020) I sold no copies of “The Solo Squid”.  I’ll keep an eye on the sales in the next few days in case one of the eleven clicks put the book in their basket for later purchase, but based on this small and most unscientific experiment, I can safely say that I will not be investing the Grossey fortune in Facebook ads.  Back to the writing board.

Stop start

Goodness, I had forgotten how slow it is writing historical fiction when you’re not already immersed in the time, place and characters.  After six Sam Plank books I was spoilt: I could hear his voice, I knew how his home and workplace and surroundings looked, sounded and smelled, and I had his entire history at my fingertips.  But with Gregory, heavens, what a difference!  I’m back to that painstaking sort of writing where every tiny comment needs checking.  He was an ostler – so what did an ostler wear?  Where did he live?  (Usually in an ostry, thanks for asking.)  In chapter two he walks from his workplace – the Hoop Inn – to visit a friend in Castle End, which meant he had to walk across what we now call Magdalene Bridge.  But in those days it was Great Bridge, and it was often collapsing thanks to poor maintenance, so was there scaffolding?  A toll-booth?  Would it have been busy at that time of day?  Sooooo many questions.

I am now back to my old habit (from the early days of Sam) of trying to keep the flow of the writing, such as it is, and not stopping to check details as I go but instead putting uncertainties in [[double square brackets]] for revisiting.  Chapter [[two]] now looks [[quite a bit]] [[like this]].

On an entirely cheerier and more positive note, I watched an excellent Society of Authors interview with Tracy Chevalier (“Girl with a Pearl Earring”, “A Single Thread”, etc.).  She’s an American living in London and just the most warm and encouraging person – I recommend the interview (and you’ll learn lots about her writing process).

A man of many words

As I mentioned a little while ago, I am concentrating some energy on making sure that Gregory sounds sufficiently different to Sam – but when I get caught up in the plot and am steaming ahead with the action, there we are again with Sam.  So I have taken a little break and have been researching suitable Norfolk and military words with which I can make Gregory sound like his own man.  I don’t want to make him a comic figure – far from it – but a few choice words of dialect and we’ll soon having him sounding a world away from that metropolitan Londoner.

It seems that the Norfolk dialect – sometimes called Broad Norfolk – is itself a blend of many influences.  Several words still in use today – such as spink, meaning finch (the bird) – are Anglo-Saxon.  Others – staithe (landing place), flag (yellow iris) and grup (shallow trench) – are Danish in origin, left over from the Viking occupation of East Anglia in the ninth century.  Still others have entered the dialect from the continent, brought in by the seventeenth century influx of Protestant refugees from Flanders and France.  A good example of this type of word is plain, which in Norfolk is used to signify a town or village square. The same word (spelt slightly differently) is found in exactly the same context in Eindhoven in the Netherlands and in Beziers in France.  More useful perhaps for Gregory’s everyday life will be blar (to cry or weep), loke (a blind alley) and – my favourite – fumble-fisted (clumsy).

Perhaps understandably, most of the period-specific military slang I have unearthed concerns insults, alcohol and army life.  The different branches of the forces had a friendly rivalry: the cavalry called the infantry foot wobblers, while the navy called soldiers being transported on their ships shifting ballast – and everyone called the Grenadiers bacon bolters (it seems to be a reference to their greed).  Drummers were sheepskin fiddlers, ensigns were rag carriers, and anything French was parleyvous.

It seems that my usual glossary at the end of each book is going to be a mixed bag, with words from the Regency period, and from Norfolk, and from the military – I shall have to devise a code to avoid confusion (of me, I mean, not of my savvy readers – and there’s another word from French).

Decisions, decisions

Sam Plank was not meant to live as long as he has done.  When I first wrote “Fatal Forgery” he was only a bit player, but I liked him so much that I rewrote the whole thing from his point of view.  And then I loved him so much that I turned it into a series.  So the Sam in “FF” was a bit accidental: whatever characteristics I gave him there, almost unthinkingly, I then had to carry on into subsequent books.

But Gregory is different.  He already knows that he’s going to have five stories, so he’s in it for the long haul – and so the choices I make now carry much more weight.  I already know quite a bit about his background – his age, where he’s from, what he did before coming to Cambridge – as these were part of my initial research into whether writing about a university constable was even practical.  But as for his life in Cambridge, it’s still all to play for.

Where did he work?  Now, I know what you’re going to say: he worked at the university as a constable.  But that was only a part-time job: constables did most of their work in the evenings, making sure that “junior members of the university” (undergraduates) were safely tucked up in their colleges by 10 pm.  So what did he do with the rest of his time?  (Spoiler alert: I’m fairly sure he’s an ostler.)  And where did he live?  Whatever I decide now, he and I will have to put up with it for at least five books.  It’s nail-biting stuff.  But I think we’re there.  And one enormous, unforeseen benefit of working on Gregory rather than Sam is that – even in times of lock-down – I was able to go out on my bike yesterday and gaze at the house where he lived.

(My husband has just looked over my shoulder at my to do list: the last entry reads “Decide where to find the body”.  That will teach him to be nosy.)

Every book starts with a single paragraph

The good news is that my plan has gone, well, according to plan.  I did my last bit of general, background, “I don’t know quite what I’ll need but this sounds interesting, and oh, that’s good too, I’d better read that just in case” research on Sunday.  I tell you, those Victorian chroniclers were a gossipy lot – so much so that it sent me off down a rabbit-hole researching defamation law!  Surely you can’t say that, I kept thinking, but apparently they did.  Symbolically I have moved the towering pile of research tomes off my writing desk and onto the floor and will now rely on the notes I took in Scrivener (my research and writing program).

The really good news is that I have indeed started the actual writing.  Well, to be fair, it’s only one paragraph – but it’s a whole paragraph!  This means that I have settled on the outline plot for the first Gregory book.  It’s set in 1825, because that’s the year of the Act for the better Preservation of the Peace and good Order in the Universities of England – which gave Oxford and Cambridge universities the powers to appoint constables.  The Act was passed in July 1825, but my story is starting in February of that year – and that’s all I’m telling you.  Except that valuable artworks, books and bottles of wine are disappearing from one of the colleges…

And the bad news is that no-one has bought a single one of my books – or even downloaded the free guide to the Sam series – since last Thursday.  Here I am, slaving away, wearing my fingers to nubs writing whole paragraphs (well, one whole paragraph) and no-one cares.  Harrumph.