Always questing

One of the great joys of being an author of historical fiction is that I can spend a whole day on research – running off down all sorts of rabbit-holes – and still claim to be “writing”.  Today I have had two quests, both of which remain unfulfilled, but then that’s part of the fun: if it was easy to find this stuff, everyone would do it.

Quest 1: where was the station house (i.e. home base) for Division E of the Metropolitan Police when they were first created in 1829?  Division E operates in Holborn, and candidates for their station house location are Bow Street (although this was initially the home of Division F), Hunter Street (but apparently not until later in the century), Hatton Garden (but this was actually a magistrates’ court – did they bunk up together?) and George Street (although I can find only one mention of any police presence there).  I have been on police history forums and emailed all sorts of people – and this is just so that Sam can make a passing comment to Martha. He may have to think of something else to say.

Quest 2: a cover illustration for “The Notes of Change” (the novel formerly known as “Plank 7”).  I have found the perfect image – but the man who drew it has died, and the man who published the book in which it appeared as died, and I’m struggling to find anyone who has the authority to grant permission to use the picture.  But I’ll have to persist, as can you imagine the outrage – the scandal, darlings – should I be charged with a copyright offence concerning the cover of a novel about law and order?

No more blank page

After months of pandemic, a three-week holiday, a 14-day period of self-isolation and now a Bank Holiday weekend, I have finally managed to concentrate for long enough to write what may turn out to be the first scene of “Plank 7”.  No promises and all that, but I’m pleased to have at last written something.  As this comes right at the beginning, I am trying to introduce the characters: there might be readers who come to this book without having read any of the previous ones, so I have to explain who everyone is and what they do.  It’s far from perfect, I know, but it’s an almighty relief to be off the starting blocks. (Apologies for the lack of formatting: WordPress has changed its editor and I can’t work out how to do anything at all!)

July 1829

There are some men who pursue change: as soon as they master a skill or see a spectacle, they are keen to move on to the next.  And there are those of us who treasure the familiar.  It’s not that I wish to return to the past –far from it, as anyone who has escaped the fish-stinking alleys of Wapping will agree.  And I am certainly not against improving myself; I read as widely as I can, and keep my ears open when I am with men who can teach me.  But I do not seek novelty for its own sake – a steadfastness for which my wife Martha might be a little more grateful.  Sometimes, however, the world thrusts change upon all of us, and we must make our peace with it.  Next year – God willing – I shall mark my half-century.  And since I was sixteen I have been a constable.  I once told Martha that I wanted to be buried in my uniform, which she said was in poor taste.  With Mr Peel’s innovations, I may no longer have the right.

William Wilson glanced at me as we paused to cross Oxford Street.

“Are you unwell, sir?” he asked.

“Unwell?” I repeated.

“You sighed,” he explained.

“Perhaps at the prospect of being asked ridiculous questions,” I said, and immediately regretted my bad temper.  Ever since Wilson had told me that he had decided to join the Metropolitan Police at the first opportunity I had been short with him – even though I had been the one encouraging him to think to his future and throw in his lot with the new force.  As Martha had observed after seeing me snap at the poor lad, just because the head wants something, it does not mean that the heart has to like it.

There was a small gap between the carts heading eastwards and we stepped into the road.  There was less traffic going west but we still had to wait for a neat little carriage to bowl past us, the coachman calling out a halloo of warning.  The shade cast by the shuttered theatre in Blenheim Street came as a relief; although it was not yet nine o’clock, the day was warm.

“Forgive me,” I said.  “I am out of sorts.  The heat does not agree with me – I have not been sleeping.”  Wilson said nothing but nodded tightly.  He would be quiet for perhaps ten minutes, I knew, but there has never been anyone less capable of bearing a grudge or staying angry.  “And how is young master George sleeping these days?” I asked.

Wilson’s face broke into a smile as he thought of his baby son.  “We’ve given up on clothes,” he said.  “When he’s asleep, he looks like one of those fat little angels you see in church.”

“Cherubs,” I said as we climbed the steps of the Great Marlborough Street police office.

“Less angelic when he’s awake,” continued Wilson.  “His favourite game now is giving and taking, which he can play for hours – handing something back and forth.  Me, I’m not so keen on it – everything he gives you comes with a generous coating of spit.”

“Talking about one of our visitors, are you, sir?” asked Tom Neale.  Our office-keeper was making an annotation in his ledger; I’ll wager that the records kept at the Old Bailey are less thorough than those in that ledger.

“Constable Wilson was regaling me with the perils of fatherhood,” I said.

“And how is Mrs Wilson’s latest project coming along?” asked Tom.  “Is she still troubled by the vomiting?  I remember Mrs Neale suffering terribly.”

“My mother tells me it should reduce,” confided Wilson, “now that we are past the early months.”

Tom nodded sagely.

“When you have quite finished with your discussions, gentlemen,” I said, leaning over the counter and tapping a forefinger on the ledger, “I wonder whether there is some work to be done.”

Excuses, excuses!

Goodness, how long has it been – nearly two months since my last post!
 Along with almost everyone else, I have found it hard to concentrate in
these worrying times – and that’s unusual for me, as I normally have
phenomenally selfish powers of concentration and the ability to shut out all
external distraction. Awash with well-meaning advice about “being kind to
yourself” and “seeing each small step as an achievement”, I have been spending my recent writing time not on the writing itself, but on writing-related issues, such as research and marketing.  And neither of those has gone particularly well either, so you can see why I have been rather quiet with these updates!

People will tell you that going to the library in person is outmoded and
unnecessary, but they are wrong.  Granted, many library “resources” have
now been digitised – it’s a godsend, for instance, to be able to search online
newspaper archives.  But digitisation projects focus – quite rightly – on
items for which there is more demand, and despite my personal obsession, I have to admit that beat records from London’s early police stations (a current interest of mine) are not a high priority for many people.  And although digitisation conveys the content of a piece very well, it cannot carry with it the other aspects: the weight of a book, or its smell, or the quality of the paper that was chosen.  When I go into the Munby Rare Books Room in the university library here in Cambridge to examine a book that might have been in Conant’s personal library, for instance, I want to know whether he would have struggled to lift it down from the shelf or lay it flat on his table – none of this is apparent from a screenshot.  But most important of all, I miss the librarians – those experts who know their stock and how to find it and what bits might be useful but not immediately apparent from the catalogue.

As for marketing, I have been doing a lot of theory: I’ve been taking online
courses (David Gaughran’s “Starting From Zero” is lengthy and detailed but
completely free and seems packed with useful stuff) and reading books and
articles and blogs.  But I have decided that I need to take this marketing
malarkey more seriously, with a more professional approach, and so I am not going to do what I have done in the past and just try a bit of this and a
smidge of that and hope for the best.  Rather, I am going to put together
a proper plan of attack and be much more logical and cold-blooded about my marketing – but not this year.  That’s a big project for next summer, when I will be approaching the publication of “Plank 7” – and one thing David has taught me is that the most potent marketing tool you can have is the launch of a new book.

The other key message from David is that the mailing list is the lynchpin of
everything – and mine is pretty rubbish.  I have tried to get more
subscribers: this month I am running a competition to win a magnifying bookmark – and even with badgering all my friends on Facebook and Twitter to encourage their pals to sign up, I have managed to increase the list by… one person.  But I am nothing daunted: David has written a whole book on how to get mailing list sign-ups and it’s the next one I’m going to read.

But to end on a positive note, you will be glad to hear that during our
three-week holiday in Switzerland (for which I am now paying the price: 14
days’ self-isolation after travelling home through France…) I did manage to
thrash out the plot of “Plank 7”.  It’s a bit tricky, this one, as I have
to ensure that it completes the circle, linking up with the end of “Fatal
Forgery”, as well as requiring some significant research into the advent of the Metropolitan Police.  (For those of you despairing about how slowly
government moves these days: the law approving the creation of the Met was passed on 19 July 1829, and the first men went out on their beats on the
evening of 30 September 1829 – that’s two months and eleven days later!)
 And for those of you who have asked for (demanded…) it, yes, there is
more Martha.

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!

Juggling constables

I rather fear that my blog posts at the moment are a bit dull – there’s not much to say when you’re knee-deep in research.  But I am finding it a mental challenge to live with two constables at the same time.  There are six Sam Plank novels out there and I want to take every opportunity I can to promote them and acquire new readers.  In this endeavour I have help from all sorts of lovely people, including – today – Helen Hollick, who has featured a conversation with Martha Plank on her historical fiction blog Let Us Talk of Many Things.  In an imaginative departure for her blog, Helen periodically features conversations not with authors but with their characters, and today it is Martha’s turn.

At the same time, I am ramping up the research for my new series – the Gregory books – which will be set in Cambridge (but still in my beloved 1820s).  This involves long hours in the library (don’t feel sorry for me – it’s my version of paradise) and even the outlay of £20 on a comprehensive and chunky history of the university (I figure that I’m planning five Gregory books, so it’s a bearable investment of £4 per book).

But what should I do about my monthly updates?  These go out to subscribers on the first of each month (do sign up – I’m currently writing for a very select and loyal audience of thirty-one!) and so far have concentrated on the research that underpins the Sam books.  Indeed, all nineteen updates have been called “Sam Plank update”.  Shall I re-brand them?  Or keep that title and just explain each time that the research – although still late Regency and therefore equally of interest to Sam fans – is being done to furnish Gregory with his life and backstory?  It doesn’t matter one jot at the moment, I suppose, but when the Sam books are picked up for a blockbuster Sunday night telly drama and I’m having to beat journalists off with a stick, I want to have my author profile and presence all neat and tidy.  In the meantime, turn away now if you’re squeamish: I’m off to research facial and eye injuries caused by muskets in the Peninsular Wars.

Sam and the cephalopods

Is there any better way to spend an evening than locked in a closed bookshop and talking to avid crime readers about the Sam books?  Short of having Daniel Auteuil and Luca Zingaretti as waiters, handing out cherries coated in dark chocolate (the cherries, not the actors – although…), I can’t think of how to improve the experience.  And so you can imagine how thrilled I was to be invited to read at the Heffers annual “Murder Under the Mistletoe” festive crime fiction event.  “Heir Apparent” was even in the window of the shop:

It wasn’t just me, of course: I was one of ten authors featured, and we each read a three-minute extract from our latest book and then gave our recommendation for a good book to read at Christmas.  I chose a passage from “Heir Apparent” that doesn’t talk about the crimes at the heart of the plot – inheritance fraud and identity theft – but rather examines the relationship between Sam and Martha, and that between Sam and John Wontner.  I think it was well-received – at least, people laughed in the right places.  Not many of the other readings had much humour, and one is still giving me nightmares.  And for my Christmas recommendation I chose “The Prayer of Owen Meany” by John Irving – he’s one of my very favourite authors, and the description of the nativity play in “Owen Meany” is one of the very funniest things I have ever read.  As Victoria Wood would have said, it made me snort chips up me nose.

In other writerly news, I am working hard on the text of “The Solo Squid” – my non-fiction handbook on how to run a happy one-person business – and am moving onto the exciting stage of thinking about the cover.  I’ve done my research into the differences between an octopus and a squid (both have eight arms, but the former has a round head while the latter has a triangular head with two fins as well as two long tentacles and a backbone) and have told the marvellous team at Design for Writers my ideas of how the cover might look (with reference to similar business-y books on Amazon whose covers I like or dislike).  From this unpromising sow’s ear, they will create their usual silk purse.  He’s no Sam, but I hope the squid will gather his own fans – perhaps I should give him a name…  Only squidding!

I have a dream

At the weekend, for reasons too complicated to explain, I spent a couple of hours thinking about my dreams – not the sort where your teeth are falling out while you’re being chased by your O-level maths teacher for your overdue homework, but the sort where you imagine and plan for the future (as in “hopes and dreams”).  The brief was to dream big – to write down anything, regardless of likelihood or practicality.  Of course several of my dreams related to the Sam books and I thought I would share those with you:

• To publish two more Sam Plank books, taking the series to seven
• To hear one of the Sam books read aloud on Radio 4 as their “Book of the Week”
• To win “The Selfies” in April 2019
• To see “Fatal Forgery” on sale in Tesco and Waitrose [one for the numbers, the other for the snobbery…]
• To open a national newspaper and see one of the Sam books unexpectedly and favourably reviewed
• To have the Sam series recommended by Mariella Frostrup
• To see the Sam series turned into a Sunday evening costume drama on the BBC, with Claudie Blakley playing Martha – Sam is still to be cast.

Here’s Claudie in “Lark Rise to Candleford” – and maybe moody Brendan Coyle would work as Sam…

What surprised me when I went back over my Sam dreams was that none of them mentions money.  Sure, winning an award or getting a review heard/read by thousands would increase sales, but what seems to matter to me is a wide readership rather than earning a fortune.  I do appreciate that I am in the lucky position of having a day job quite apart from my Sam writing, which means that I do not have to rely – thank goodness! – on Sam income, but still, it’s shown me that I am motivated by getting people to read Sam rather than by getting them to buy books.  I’ve blogged before about my unhappy experience with libraries and the PLR system, but despite this I would be just as happy to see more people borrowing the Sam books as I would to see sales increasing.  (I just love checking our local library catalogue and seeing all the Sam books out on loan.)  So that’s the dreaming done – now on with the reality of writing.

Rolling in it

One of the great mysteries of life is the self-assessment tax return.  I have had to do these for years, ever since I left the ranks of the employed in about 1989 and became self-employed, and then my own employee, and now a freelance writer as well.  I’m terrifically organised and gather the required paperwork through the year, so completing the return holds few fears for me – but it is always a complete surprise when I find out (a) what I have earned, and therefore (b) what I owe the taxman.

A couple of years ago I confessed to you that being the author of the Sam Plank novels had cost me £44.87 over the year.  Frankly, that’s a bargain hobby compared to my husband’s spending on cycling and golf, but still, I will admit to a slight disappointment on realising that full-time profitable authorship was so far beyond my grasp.  But the picture is much better this year.

Taking into account my earnings from the novels in all their formats, and the outlay I have made on such fripperies as cover design and celebratory stickers, in the period April 2017 to March 2018 I made – made! – £1,338 from being an author.  I’m in the black!  Granted, it’s only £25.73 a week, which would hardly keep me in Jaffa Cakes and trashy magazines, but it’s something.  And on the bright side, by using the National Archives’ nifty historical calculator of spending power, I see that £25 in Sam’s day would have bought me four cows.  Martha would not have been best pleased.

Puzzling over Plank

The other day I was listening to playwright Abi Morgan on “Desert Island Discs”, and she compared writing a play with solving a mathematical puzzle.  And Abi is right: there is a great deal of maths-style logic in writing: you have to keep an eye on the word count, and the structure, and the distribution of lines, and the chronology of events.  (In the first draft of one of the Sam books, I remember that I had John Wontner taking his hat off three times in one scene.  He looked like a music hall act.)  This weekend I was plotting “Plank 6”.  As I mentioned last time, I now have the overview of both plots – main and subsidiary.  But it’s the mechanics of getting it all to work within the constraints of the structure of the Sam series that is now exercising me.

The Sam books are written in the first person.  This has many, many advantages – not least, I get to spend lots of time in my head with Sam, and you all know that I am in love with him, so this is no hardship.  But the main disadvantage is that it means that I can write only about things that Sam sees, hears or is told.  And the first two are much better than the third.  So – for instance – in “Plank 6” I want a character to have some adventures in the Cayman Islands.  There is no way that Martha is going to let Sam sail that far from home, so it will have to be a third party report, but pages and pages of that can be very tedious.  So I will have to be imaginative – perhaps he finds a diary or some letters, or maybe he attends a trial where some details come out, or…  This is precisely why Sam is such an active constable, and why he is always keen to put on a disguise and get stuck in – I’m always looking for ways to get him into odd places as a direct witness to events!

Stars and walls

It can be something of an anti-climax, the weeks after publishing a book.  And for the purposes of this blog, there is little that I can report on the progress of the new book – “Plank 6” – as I am immersed in the research phase.  But I have promised to keep you updated on the life of a part-time, self-published author, and this week I have two highlights to share with you.

First, two new reviews of “Faith, Hope and Trickery” have appeared on Amazon.  This takes us to a grand total of six reviews and they are all *pause for preening* five star reviews.  This is an enormous relief as, with “FHT” having taken eighteen months to produce rather than the twelve months for the others, I was even less able to maintain any objectivity at all about whether it was actually any good.  And by the end of it, I was in a lather of uncertainty – particularly as I had rather put Martha through the wringer, which I knew would concern some readers.  But she and I have both survived (I don’t think that counts as a spoiler), and I am beaming as I read the reviews.

And second, I went into Daunt Books in Cheapside yesterday to deliver some books.  As is my wont, I wandered into their fiction basement (it’s not imaginary; it’s where they stock the fiction) to say hello to my books.  And what should greet me but this:

I should explain.  This is a wall display of books right opposite the stairs, so you have to see it.  All books are turned cover out – the best angle, of course.  And there are my books…. at eye-level.  Eye-level!  The tippest, toppest place to be.