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).

Death and birth

I know what you’re thinking: I’ve been idling away my time in the sun and not getting on with “Plank 5”.  Well, it’s not true: Sam, Martha, Wilson and I have had a lovely few days together while my husband has been away, and I can report that I have now written a quarter of “Plank 5”.  I know that sounds like slow progress, but with a publication date of March 2018, I’m happy with it.

As tends to happen with my writing style, the plot is developing in unforeseen ways.  I have just killed off someone – no-one central, so no need to worry – and had to do quite a bit of research around that.  I was about to dump the body in Carnaby Market (a fruit and veg market alongside the now-famous fashion street) until I consulted the marvellous British History Online Survey of London (a terrific resource, which describes each individual street and its history) and discovered that the market had closed in 1820 and been replaced by new homes – plus ça change and all that.  So the poor fellow is instead in an alleyway between two new buildings.

I have also spent some time making sure that my character records are complete.  For each recurring character I keep a record of anything significant that I have said about them in any of the books – appearance, family history, marital status, food preferences, odd habits, etc. – so that I can be consistent.  After all, there must be at least a dozen of you out there who have read all the Plank books, and you would notice if someone tall and dark suddenly shrank and went blonde.  My latest challenge has been the Atkins family tree.  George and Louisa Atkins run the Blue Boar coaching inn in Holborn, now home to Alice Godfrey and little Martha, and in “Worm in the Blossom” I casually mentioned in passing that they had six children.  Of course, I did not realise that I would like the Atkins family so much that I would keep hold of them for future books, and now I need to sort out their family tree.  If only I hadn’t made them so fertile…

A vale of tears

Once again I was a golf widow for the weekend, and as the weather was not particularly enticing I decided to get in two solid days of writing.  But it has been a difficult two days.  I am writing some sad scenes and so I have been doing a lot of reading about death and mourning.  And this is one area in which I have to be super-pedantic about timing.

The Victorians – as eny fule kno – were Big on Death.  They went the whole hog, with black clothes (Queen Vic herself wore mourning dress for Prince Albert for forty years – a full thirty-nine years longer than the recommended period for a dear departed spouse), mirrors turned to the wall, black crepe draped everywhere, and big funeral processions (for the wealthy, of course, although even the middle classes would get into enormous debt to put on a good show).  And it is very easy, when looking for drama and pathos, to fall into descriptions of these events.  But that would be wrong, as in the Regency things were much more restrained (and, actually, much more familiar to our modern eye).

It has also been, well, interesting, to research what they did with all those dead bodies at the start of the nineteenth century.  London was overflowing with people, both alive and dead, and cremation was very much not the fashion, so the corpses all had to go somewhere – sometimes several deep, and often (prepare yourself) disturbed (that’s something of a euphemism) during later burials.  In fact, some medical men thought that the graveyards and burial grounds were sources of “miasma” that caused all sorts of disease.  It turns out that they did cause a lot of sickness – but through polluting the water course and not through spreading “bad air”.

So that’s my Bank Holiday weekend: death, mourning, burial and disease.  Hope yours has been a bit cheerier!

The sound of silence

Happy new year to you all – may 2017 be a sight better than 2016.

When people say that in order to succeed (or even survive) in any public endeavour you need to be thick-skinned, I assumed that they meant in order to be able to withstand criticism.  I count writing for publication as a public endeavour – the clue is in the word “publication” – and so I gave myself and my skin a good talking-to.  But it turns out that the most difficult thing to withstand is not criticism, but silence.  That Oscar Wilde really knew his onions when he said that “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”.

I’m not particularly upset about not being noticed – I’ve made my peace on that score.  After all, with millions of books being published every year, I can quite understand how the majority of the world’s readers fail to spot my Plankish one.  But what does depress me is being ignored after I have made contact with someone.  I know, I know: we’re all ferociously busy these days, but if someone contacts you out of the blue with a reasonably-worded communication and plainly isn’t a moonling (that’s Regency slang for a simpleton), is it more than the work of a minute to reply with a polite “thanks, but no thanks”?  I am reasonably well-known in my day job, and several times a week I get these sorts of approaches, from students looking for guidance and from software developers looking for input, and I always but always reply – because I remember when I was a student looking for guidance.

But in recent months I have sent review requests – to reviewers who state clearly that they are accepting submissions in Plank genres – and article requests (remember the airline magazine – I even sent them a whole sample article) and other marketing suggestions, and the silence, as they say, is deafening.

This is on my mind because I have heard of an interesting initiative, designed to promote reading by leaving books on the Tube in London.  (I think it started on the subway in America.)  It’s called Books on the Underground, and although they have a particular day on which they make a concerted push, you (as a publisher or even an author) can do it independently whenever you like.  You get their stickers – which, in essence, say “Please take this free book, enjoy it and then leave it for someone else” – to put on your books, and then leave them on the Tube.  I like the idea very much, I have been sent a dozen stickers, but I’m just not quite sure that I can bring myself to abandon Sam on the Tube, perhaps to end up in cleaners’ bin bags at the end of the day.  And although the stickers encourage readers to Tweet about their finds, and of course to review the books, I’m not sure I am quite strong enough to invite more silence.  My husband says that instead I should spot passengers who are reading similar books, and actually offer them a free books – thus increasing my chances of Sam ending up in the right hands (and perhaps my own chances of being thumped).  What think you?

Plumbing the depths

I am often grateful that my books are set in London because – if you lift your eyes above the gaudy street-level additions and accretions – many buildings and views remain much as they were in Sam’s day.  But yesterday I went to a place that is literally unchanged since Sam was there in 1827, in “Portraits of Pretence”: the vaults in Pennington Street in Wapping, east London.  Back then these vaults were a bonded warehouse for wine and spirits as part of the London Docks (St Katharine Docks did not open until the following year), and every legally traded (plenty was not…) drop of alcohol in the world went through them.  Vaults were best for this because they were easier to secure than a building above ground, and – in the days before heating and aircon – they were able to maintain an almost constant temperature.

Partly as a marketing ploy and mostly out of curiosity, I contacted the development company that now owns this building and much of the land around it and asked whether I could possibly toddle along and take a peek into the vaults.  And yesterday I did just that.  As soon as we went down the stairs into the vaults, I was amazed: they are completely unchanged.  Of course they have functional strip lighting now – in Sam’s time it would have been swinging lanterns casting eerie shadows – and the floor is clear of the sticky residue that used to drip from the barrels, but the form is still absolutely the same:

And look at this marvellous original brickwork:

I cannot tell you what a shiver went down my spine when I thought, “Sam ran through this very passageway, looking for his friend Ben.”  And then I remembered that I made them up.  But they’re real to me, and yesterday I spent a wonderful hour in their company.

Walking the Plank

Several readers – particularly those less familiar with London – have said that they would welcome a map of the key locations in the Plank books.  Sam is quite a walker and covers a lot of ground, but his home turf is Piccadilly; it’s worth remembering that in his time (1820s), the “West End” was all under development – it was the fancy new part of town.

I’ve now checked, and it seems that I can indeed include diagrams in my interior template for “Plank 3”.  Photos and anything coloured or particularly detailed would be tricky, but a black-and-white line drawing, like a map, is perfectly possible.  I now foresee only two problems.  One, London is huge and contains a gazillion streets and roads and lanes and alleys – even in Sam’s time.  So any “map” I include would have to be selective and show only relevant highlights.  And two, I have the artistic capabilities of an arthritic spider.  So I will need to rope in someone with good spatial awareness, neat penmanship and a precise mind – luckily, I am married to just such a person.  All of this means that this little project – the “Walking the Plank” schematic map – has miraculously leapt off my desk and onto that of my husband.  It may still prove unwieldy, but he’ll give it a go.  He’s already talking about royalties…

Mapping Plank’s progress

I will admit that things have been rather sluggish recently.  I have had a busy time at work (the paid, day job) and I’m heading towards a holiday, so Sam has been on my mind but no so much on paper.  That said, I have managed to write nearly two thousand words (so far…) this weekend, in between chores, so am pleased with that progress.

One thing I spent quite a bit of time on was consulting my map.  I mentioned in an earlier post that I am heavily indebted to Greenwood’s 1827 map of London, but for ease of paper reference I have turned to an unusual source: the Transport for London cycling map of central London.  It is a lovely colourful folding map of the area I need, and because it is intended for cyclists on the hoof/wheel, it is wonderfully clear.  I have taken my coloured pens and marked on it all the key Plank locations – Great Marlborough Street magistrates’ court, Newgate prison, the Fleet, Sam’s house and so on – and then use pencil crosses for the more one-off places of interest.  If I then need Sam to hare, say, from home to Newgate, or from the Fleet to a suspect’s house, I can get a good overview of the route he would have taken.  Before mentioning any street names, I then cross-reference with Greenwood’s.  This is essential, as even the most seemingly established London place names might not be all that old.  Ludgate Circus, for instance, was actually called Farringdon-circus until relatively recently – and that’s certainly the name that Sam would have used for this busy junction.

Now that I know that my summer retreat-at-home is happening, I have decided that I will spend one of my precious days down in London, armed with my marked-up map, re-walking some of the main routes taken by Sam, just to add some little descriptive details – and to check that I am not making the poor man walk his boots off.

And for those of you who have requested it, please rest assured that I am considering the idea of including a map in the next book so that you can “walk the Plank” along with Sam.  (My husband is a neat little draughtsman and may be roped in on map-drawing duties with bribes of chocolate biscuits.)  The only thing that might stand in our way is whether I can include diagrams – rather than just text – in the interior template that I use for my books.  I will check it out and let you know.