And the winner is…

As you have probably guessed from the countdown clock on the left, “Plank 5” is now officially to be known as “Faith, Hope and Trickery”.  There were thirty-three votes cast in total in the title poll, and “FHT” garnered fifteen of those.  “Faith Undone” came second, with eight votes, then “Dearly Departed” with six, and “The Confidence Trick” and “Riches Beyond Belief” trailing with only two votes each.  I did not vote, although my husband did and won’t tell me which one he selected.

I am delighted with the choice – of course, I make sure that I like all five options so that I am always happy with your selection!  But I am very grateful to everyone who took part, as I am hopeless at making decisions and am pleased to be able to palm one off on other people.

I am particularly grateful to be able to focus on something other than editing, as I am waiting to hear from my plot reader – tense times in the Grossey household!  This weekend’s task is to finalise the back cover blurb.

Name that book!

Just a quick reminder that today is your last chance to have a say on the title of “Plank 5”.  I will be closing the poll at the end of the day, and then sending the chosen title to the marvellous people who design the cover for the book.  They already have my ideas for the figure and the document that will go on the front, and I’m homing in on the back cover blurb, so the title is the last remaining element.

I’ve had a look at the title poll results so far, and with twenty-nine votes cast there is a clear front-runner, but – as they say in the world’s leading opera houses – it ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings.  And she’ll be tuning up in about fourteen hours’ time.

Let the nail-biting begin…

Well, that’s it: the completed draft of “Plank 5” has just been sent to my lovely beta reader Roy.  So there’s nothing more I can do until I hear from him, and that’s both scary and a great relief.

By the way, I’m now feeling the terrible lack of a title, so please do head on over to my earlier post and cast your vote.

I am currently reading Susan Hill’s book “Jacob’s Room is Full of Books” – it’s described as a memoir of a year of reading – and in it she says that she is constantly being asked to give tips to aspiring writers.  In particular, they ask her how many drafts she does of her novels.  And here’s what she says: “I make some notes… and they are very random and disconnected….  I think a lot….  And then I start.  I carry on.  I finish.  One draft and one draft only, at least for fiction….  Of course I tidy up and tighten up, I correct grammar and punctuation.  But in all essentials, the first draft is the last draft is the published book.”  Of course Susan Hill is a much-respected professional author, not an amateur like me, but it’s interesting to hear that not all authors go through several drafts, as almost all writing courses demand.  It gives great hope to the lazier of us…

[Side note: as I typed the word “constantly” just then, my fingers automatically typed “constable”.  I’ve been spending, as usual, too much time with Sam.]

Caution: plot holes ahead!

I can see the finish line – “Plank 5” is almost there.  And as I wrestle with the final chapters, I have lined up my usual fabulous team to help me to publication: the cover designers at Design for Writers; my husband (for eagle-eyed proofreading – how he does love to catch me out in a spelling mistake); and Roy in Jersey.  Roy’s job, right from “Fatal Forgery”, has been to read the first proper draft for sense, looking for inconsistencies and what he has taken to calling “plot holes”.

Isn’t that a great phrase?  You can just imagine them, nasty great gaps in the story that sit there unseen.  Your reader is cruising along, enjoying the journey, when all of a sudden, crash!  They go into a plot hole and – metaphorically speaking – the wheel comes off and the journey is over.  I’ve spotted a couple of them myself (along the lines of “but how did he know that she would be there?”, or “what made her ask him that?”) but no doubt Roy will see a few more.  Sometimes the writer has her nose so close to the tarmac that she can’t see the plot holes herself…

Sorting out Sam’s diary

In past years I have been lucky enough to enjoy a writing retreat over the summer, where I immerse myself in writing as I reach the final stages of a book.  This year we had a long holiday in Canada instead – oh, what a hardship – and so I have engineered a mini-retreat for myself this week.  My husband is off cycling and visiting family for three days, and I have cleared my desk of “normal” work, and so it’s just me and Sam (and Martha, and Wilson, and Conant, and Wontner, and Freame – heavens, it’s crowded in here).

Yesterday – the first of the three days – I tackled a job that has been much on my mind: timetabling.  When I write, I do not anchor the chapters to particular dates.  But, as anyone who has read a Sam Plank book will know, each chapter in the final version has a specific date attached to it.  This is because I envisage the stories as a sort of constable’s notebook, and in such notebooks dates are very important.  And so, at some point in the process, I have to allocate a date to each chapter.  But of course by this stage there are all sorts of cross-references in the text, such as “only two days later”, or “three weeks earlier”, or “after she had attended four Sunday meetings” – and they all have to be made to work together.  It’s a rather frustrating exercise, involving big blank calendars, a soft pencil and a very big rubber (for my American readers, that’s an eraser…).

Actually, I say “big blank calendars” but that’s not true: on the calendar I first mark any significant dates – such as Sam’s birthday, and important festivals like Easter – and any particularly relevant events.  “Plank 5” is set in 1828, and in that year London Zoo was opened on 27^th April (which is not at all relevant to my story) and there was an unseasonably harsh frost on 12^th November (which is).  So it’s like assembling a rather formless jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box to guide you, and I am very relieved to have done it.

(You will notice that I am still referring to “Plank 5”: don’t forget that my title poll is now open, and you can cast your vote here for the title that you like best.)

Time to name “Plank 5”

It’s a different time of year to usual (winter rather than summer), but don’t think for one moment that this excuses you from your duty: choosing the title of the latest Sam Plank novel, heretofore known as “Plank 5”.  Just to remind you, the four predecessors in the series are called “Fatal Forgery”, “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”, “Worm in the Blossom” and “Portraits of Pretence”.  Of course, no-one can be expected to choose a title without knowing a little about the book, so here we go:

“Plank 5” is set in the autumn/winter of 1828.  Constable Sam Plank becomes curious about religious meetings led by a charismatic preacher at which ‘heralds’ claim that they can communicate with the deceased and pass on messages from them to their mourning relatives.  [This practice gained enormous currency in the Victorian period, with spiritualism and mediums gathering huge followings, but the idea has been there since the beginning of time.]  Some of the messages suggest that the subjects should donate quite a bit of money to the preacher’s cause – and when a man’s wife refuses to allow him to do this, the herald suggests a rather extreme solution, and this is how Sam becomes involved.  Others who attend the meetings because they have lost beloved children are told that, for a fee, replacement babies could be found.  And yet everything suggests that the preacher himself is an honest and godly man, who truly believes that you can communicate from beyond the grave.  Sam’s baffled scepticism is matched only by Martha’s heartbreaking desire to believe and Wilson’s stolid determination to make sense of it all.

As ever, I have thought of five possible titles and will leave the final choice to you.  The poll will run from today for three weeks – i.e. until Friday 9 February 2018 – and then I have to give the title to the cover magicians.  So here we go, the five contenders…

Let us talk of many things!

It’s all happening today!  First of all, the divine Helen Hollick has featured a little piece by me on her terrific historical fiction blog, Let Us Talk of Many Things.  She gave me free rein – rather brave – and I decided to write about how I explore Sam’s London.  And quite by chance I realised that it is an interesting blend of old and new, as my two most-consulted resources are a map from 1827, and the Transport for London online journey planner!

Secondly, I have taken delivery of my “Book of the Year 2017” promotional stickers.  For those of you interested in the financial side of things, I ordered them from Vistaprint, using – with her permission – the logo designed by Helen.  I chose circular, matte, easy-peel stickers to mimic those seen most often in bookshops, and 120 small stickers (3.6 cm in diameter) cost me £26.03 including delivery and VAT.  That’s nearly 22p per sticker and a wild extravagance, but I treated myself.  I have now put them on the copies of “Portraits of Pretence” that I have in stock, added them to the books in my local bookshops, and posted them to the more distant stockists in Ely and London.  I have also been keeping a beady eye on sales for a spike, given all this publicity, but it is so far proving elusive.

 

And thirdly, I will be launching the “Plank 5” title poll at the end of this week.  My creative team and I (that’s me and the husband) are looking at a long list of possibilities in order to narrow it down to the final five.  The big thesaurus is out – the one with its own special magnifying glass – so it’s serious stuff.  Voting will open on Friday.

‘Tis not the season

One of the dangers – well, the joys – of writing historical fiction is that you can noodle around all over the internet and indeed in real libraries, reading whatever you like, and as long as it was written more than, say, fifty years ago, you can call it research and kid yourself that it just about counts as writing.  It doesn’t.  But as it’s nearly Christmas I am not being so hard on myself, and I have particularly enjoyed reading other writers’ blogs.  This festive one caught my eye, as it’s talking about how they celebrated – or, it seems, ignored – Christmas in Georgian times.

Now I know that Sam is not Georgian: he was born in the Georgian era (on 4^th January 1780, if you’re minded to mark it), but by the time we meet him, he’s very definitely a Regency chap.  But even then, Christmas was not the spectacle that it became once Victoria – or more accurately, Albert – got hold of it and draped it with enough baubles and tartan to choke a reindeer.  I realise as I write this that I have never set a Plank book at Christmas, but that has not been deliberate.

As you may know, the Plank books are set in consecutive years: “Fatal Forgery” in 1824, “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” in 1825 and so on.  But when I write my first draft of a new book, I rarely have any idea of precisely when in the year it will be set, and I leave out any references to weather or temperature until later in the process.  During my research for the year in question – I’m immersed in 1828 at the moment – I note down any events that might appear in the story, including meteorological ones.  So in 1828 I know that London Zoo opened on 27th April, and they had a wet summer followed by gales on the night of 9th August in London and the south-east.  If something really sounds fun – like the Bartholomew Fair that takes place in August 1825 – I’ll use it to “anchor” the plot, and so the 1825 book (“Canary”) was set in the summer.  “Plank 5” is still undecided, but I’ll have to make up my mind soon: at the moment poor Martha doesn’t know whether she’s airing the house or stoking the fire.

Sam Plank – a diamond geezer

Well, it’s Sam’s day in the wonderful “Diamond Tales” extravaganza.  As I explained a while ago, the “Discovering Diamonds” blog – which devotes itself to publicising and promoting self- and indie-published historical fiction – is marking the festive season by featuring an excerpt from a different novel each day in the run-up to Christmas, and each has to have something to do with diamonds.  Those of you who have read “Portraits of Pretence” may remember that 1827 marked Sam and Martha’s diamond wedding anniversary, and he decided to buy her something special, in that particularly blundering Sam fashion…  And this is the passage I have chosen for today.

I have so enjoyed reading the other diamonds this month – what a perfect introduction to all sorts of writers who are new to me.  It’s such a treat, having a short story in my inbox every day, written in all sorts of different styles and set in every possible historical era.  And yes, I have been tempted to order one or two – OK, four – books on the back of it.  But, as always when I am in the throes of writing, I have observed my diktat that I will not read anything “within a century of Sam” – because I am easily confused if details get too close to the 1820s.  (And for those of you who track these things, my area of research this week has been printing presses – apparently they were often manned by deaf people, who were the only ones who could stand the constant noise.)

Just write, or something like it

A dear writer friend of mine, Janis Pegrum Smith, has just started a blog sharing her experiences as a indie writer – i.e. one who writes and then self-publishes her own work, just as I do.  The blog is called – aptly – All on Your Jack Jones, and in her first post Janis passes on some excellent advice that she was given by Bernard Cornwell (a chap who knows a thing or two about writing bestselling historical fiction): just write.

In recent weeks I have found myself somewhat blocked as a writer.  In fairness to myself, I have been very busy at the day job (three overseas trips in November alone) and also fighting various minor ailments (the joy that is root canal work, and now a delightful cold caught from one of the eighty-seven people sneezing in my train carriage last week).  In other words, there has not been a lot of quality, unwoolly head-space left for producing top-notch historical fiction.  But over this weekend I have forced myself to turn on the Mac in the back bedroom (regular readers may remember that I keep an old Macbook called Flora [after Flora MacDonald…] specifically for the Sam novels, so that I can keep him entirely separate from the day work on my Windows laptop) and – to paraphrase our chum Bernard – just do something that contributes to the writing.  It’s less snappy, I’ll grant you that, but I really think it might have cleared that blockage.

So what somethings have I done?  Well, I have tweeted about Diamond Tales, the sparkling initiative with which I am involved during December.  I have done a lot of research into London printing presses in 1828 and what they looked like and what they were producing.  (You’ll see why when “Plank 5” comes out.)  And I have allowed myself to add a few more pictures to my Plankish Pinterest board, and experiment with dividing it into book-themed sections (a new Pinterest feature).  I’m not a particularly visual thinker – it’s all about the words for me – but by exploring websites that I might not usually visit I have picked up a couple of very interesting details to drop casually into my plot.  And how I love a casual plot point…

And here’s the real surprise of it all: once I had paddled around in the printing press and Pinterest and plot point shallows, I thought, well, I’ll just write that quick description while it’s fresh in my mind.  And before I knew it, I had written – actually written – nearly a thousand words.  Thanks, Janis and Bernard!