Retreating to the back bedroom

Well hello.  If you are still sticking with this blog, when I am so rubbish at writing it regularly, I am very grateful to you.  Lots of people, like me, write alongside a day job, and the methods for doing that are as many and various as the writers.  Some people get up early and write for an hour or two before beginning their normal day.  Some (and I envy these people) carry a notebook or phone everywhere and can concentrate well enough while sitting at a café or on a train or between meetings to jot down a few sentences.  Some – and this is a bit more my style – devote a half-day or day a week to their writing.  My favoured method has always been the “dedicated day” in tandem with the “writing retreat”.  As I write historical fiction – rather than contemporary fiction, or indeed non-fiction – I find that I need time to relocate myself into the past, to settle back into the vocabulary and style of the 1820s, which is just not possible (for me, in any case) in short bursts of writing.  This year – the year of “Plank 7” and a pandemic – I have just about managed the dedicated day, but the writing retreat has had to adapt.

Usually – and yes, how lucky am I – I decamp to Switzerland for about a month, to sit alone in a small flat in an out-of-season ski resort, surrounded by gorgeous scenery, fresh air and really-awkward-to-get-at wi-fi (I have to walk uphill to the local tourist office and sit outside it to get any signal).  I can forget about home responsibilities, and what with that tricky wi-fi, and local telly restricted for me to re-runs of “The Royal” and “Heartbeat” on some peculiar English-language channel, I can immerse myself in the world of Sam and really crank out the words.  (And, perhaps more importantly, get a grip on the whole plot, which can be hard to grasp on that one day a week.)

But this year, no Switzerland for me.  And so I have had to improvise: for six weeks, I have planned my diary so that I work for one day a week, write for three days and spend the fifth day on research and other book-related stuff (like blogging).  My weekends will follow their familiar pattern: one day for exercise (long bike ride, usually) and one day for eating/reading.  I am of course extremely fortunate in being able to plan my own time like this, but I have learned the hard way that if it’s not planned and written in my diary, it doesn’t happen.  My aim – as with every writing retreat – is to have a good first draft at the end of it.  And as my current word count is only about 47,000, I have quite some way to go.  Wish me luck!

A good sort of writer’s block

Goodness, these blog posts are now so infrequent that I am amazed to have any readers left at all!  But please do stick with me: my day job is taking most of my energy at the moment and any writing time I can carve out is being used on “Plank 7” rather than this blog, but rest assured that I am writing slowly and surely in the background.  With my plans to “retreat at home” over the summer, I am quietly confident of hitting my planned publication date of 3 December 2021 – so remember to buy “Plank 7” for everyone for Christmas!

My big news today is that I have discovered a marvellous writing tool.  When I am writing, I will often dart off to check facts – when did the term “big cheese” come into use? what sort of market was in Brick Lane in the 1820s? – and these lead me onto other websites, and before I know it I’ve spent an hour on vaguely related reading and not written a word.  I kid myself that it’s all helping, that I’m filling in the background so that I can write with more authority – but if I’m not actually writing, well, that’s just an excuse.  And then I read about browser blockers.  You can buy them with all sorts of bells and whistles, but there is also a perfectly adequate free one called LeechBlock (so called because it blocks those sites that leech your productive time).  You download an extension to your browser and then set the sites you want it to block, and for how long.  You can be ferocious (blocking everything by using *.com) or select your sites of greatest browsing weakness…. And when you tootle off to those sites during the blocked hours, you get a splash screen saying “The page you’re trying to access has been blocked by LeechBlock”.  I’ve been using it only for a couple of days, and my word count has shot up.  As always, of course, there’s no guarantee that what I’m writing is any good, but – my constant mantra – you can always edit something, but you can’t edit nothing.

Room for improvement

I know that I have been a sorry disappointment to you in recent months – very little blogging, and even less writing of the latest Sam Plank book, “Plank 7”.  The latest on that is that I have written seven chapters, with a total of about 13,000 words, and I am reasonably happy with one of my plot strands.  The main obstacle to writing is that I am, against the odds, working pretty much full time – I’m certainly not complaining, when so many are struggling to make a living, but it means that at the end of the day and then the week I have very little mental energy left for imaginative writing.

To remedy that, I am currently working my way through a book called “The Organised Writer: How to Stay on Top of All Your Projects and Never Miss a Deadline”, by Antony Johnston.  When my husband saw it arrive, he was surprised, as I am famed for my organisational skills/obsession.  (Surely everyone has a “Dish of the Day” list pinned on the fridge, showing what every meal for the coming week will be, so that we can alternate meat/fish/veggie, and potato/rice/pasta, and avoid food waste.  No?  Ah, just me then.)  And it’s true – I don’t need much help with record-keeping, plotting, invoicing and the rest.  But I do need to find a way to prioritise my writing, so that I don’t end up with perfectly filed paperwork and no energy left to write a single paragraph.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

The other aspect of life as a writer that has been exercising me recently is how wonderful it is to have an alternative world to which I can escape.  When I am sick to the back teeth of hearing about the US election and about corruption in the UK government, I can leave the modern world entirely and spend a happy hour or two reading and writing about the horse trade in London in the 1820s.  I pity those who are not readers or writers and are therefore stuck in the moment.  And as I read about Sam’s contemporaries, I do wonder whether ignorance was a sort of bliss: were people happier when they weren’t bombarded constantly with information about politicians and celebrities and sportsmen?  When they knew their family and their neighbours, and only occasionally did news about a world leader filter through – it was certainly a smaller life, but perhaps it was a happier one…

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!

My primitive brain

Usually I am a very focused person: I find it easy to shut off from outside distractions and apply myself to a project, sometimes for hours at a stretch.  But in lock-down, my ability to concentrate has all but deserted me, with the result that I am making glacial progress with “Gregory 1”.  This weekend, for instance, I managed to write just under six hundred words – and most of those weren’t very good.  And to judge from the writers’ groups that I follow, I’m not alone.  With all these empty days and weekends and no competing attractions like meals out with friends or holidays in exotic locations (or even just down the road), we should all be writing fistfuls of books – it should be like NaNoWriMo on steroids.  But it seems that many people are struggling with their concentration and cursing themselves for it – and then I found out why.

An article in the New Statesman (I’m not a regular reader; I was searching for help with “why can’t I concentrate” and came across this piece) explains it all.  This is the key paragraph: “The basic science you need to know is that your brain’s prefrontal cortex (a chunk behind your forehead) processes ‘higher functions’, such as critical thinking, inhibiting impulses and, crucially here, the ability to focus.  ‘The prefrontal cortex has got this built in genie that causes it to weaken with stress signalling,’ Professor Arnsten says, ‘whereas the related stress chemicals actually strengthen the primitive brain systems.’  So essentially, when faced with immediate physical danger, your prefrontal cortex shuts down to make way for the more primitive parts of your brain – the parts that can respond quickly and basically in order to protect you.’  And that’s where we are now: we’re all faced constantly with an invisible, ongoing, potentially deadly threat.  We can’t resolve the threat so our primitive brains remain on high alert – and our concentration (a higher function) is buggered.

In the past I have always maintained that the most efficient way for me to write is to do it in large chunks of time – a half-day or day – to give myself the best chance of becoming immersed in the time period and in the vocabulary that I need to write Sam and now Gregory.  But this system has obviously been scuppered by current events and my grasshopper brain, and so I can either accept that I’m going to spend hours sitting in front of a screen and ending up with six hundred words and a great deal of irritation, or I can adapt.  And I have decided that for the duration of this focus-stealing situation, I will instead aim to write for thirty minutes a day – no more.  I reckon that even I can concentrate for that long; indeed, I might even break it down into two quarter-hour sessions if I’m struggling.  With daily exposure I should be able to get back into the 1820s groove reasonably quickly, and to make sure that I hit the ground running I am going to finish each time in the middle of a scene, or maybe even in the middle of a

Scorching Sam

One of the decisions I have to make for each Sam book – and, surprisingly, I make this decision near the end of the process – is when in the year to set the story.  I already know the year, of course (“Plank 6” is set in 1829) but not the season.  The plot of each book usually spreads over three or four months, and of course the time of year forms part of the background.  “Fatal Forgery” was autumnal, “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat” was summery, and “Worm in the Blossom” and “Portraits of Pretence” were both set in the spring, while “Faith, Hope and Trickery” encompassed the whole second half of 1828.  I am now mulling the season for “Plank 6” – and this decision is difficult because I am sitting here at the top of a mountain in sweltering heat.  And as with all extreme weather conditions, I cannot remember what it felt like to be at the other end of the thermometer.  So if Martha ends up ripping off her stays and jumping into a tin bath of cold water, you’ll know why.

One benefit of the heat here is that I have not been tempted to go out wandering in the countryside – and so I have hit the ground running in terms of word count.  On day one (yesterday) I managed a respectable 2,829 words, while today I bashed out a very pleasing 3,515.  Of course word count is not the ultimate aim – this is only the first draft – but I use it as a handy measure of how productive I have been.  And in those two days I have brought back two characters from earlier Sam books, created a whole new character I was not expecting, and given him a dog called Sloane.  Or maybe Hans – I can’t decide.

And don’t forget: the title poll for “Plank 6” finishes at the end of July, so there’s only a few days left to cast your vote.

Ups and downs

I’ve snaffled myself a writing afternoon in the middle of the working week – don’t tell my clients – and have enjoyed the crazy research threads that you follow when starting out on a new plot.  Among my search terms today: apothecary, infarction, st martin’s lane, acne and butler’s pantry.  Allowing for trips down numerous research rabbit-holes, I am reasonably pleased with just under 890 words written in (what is currently) chapter three of “Plank 6”.

And as if to reward me, an interview I did with the Alliance of Independent Authors – which I joined last month – has appeared on their blog.  I can’t imagine there’s anything you don’t already know about why I love financial crime, but just in case – here’s where you can read it all again.

In other news, I hear from Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden that five tickets have been sold so far for my talk there next Wednesday.  It sounds like it’s going to be an intimate little session but they are often the most fun.  And once you’ve done a talk to three people in a tiny local library, five in a bookshop sounds like riches indeed!

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…

The end is in sight

It’s not toiling in the salt mines, I know (actually, there are salt mines in the very Swiss valley I can see from here and I have been into them, so I know whereof I speak), but this editing stage was Hard Work.  I say “was” because, hurrah and huzza, it is now over, for the time being at least.

When I last left you, I had just finished telling the story.  I then spent two whole days – long days (my mind was so full of Plankish thoughts that on day one I awoke really early and was editing by 0445…) – reading what I had written.  My main tasks were to make sure that the plot worked, by looking for inconsistencies, things that couldn’t have happened that way, lines of enquiry opened and then not pursued, characters being in two places at once and so on.  Which meant that I had to keep the whole story in my mind at once – utterly exhausting.  How authors do this with huge tomes, I cannot imagine: I struggle with 62,000 words and a fairly limited cast list to remember who did what, when and why.  Yes, you can (and I do) write Post-Its and chapter summaries and the rest, but that’s only for the big plot moments and when it comes to the nitty-gritty eventually you do have to rely on your own memory kicking you and saying, “But surely she said earlier on that she didn’t like soup, and here you have her diving into the gazpacho”.  (Not an actual example: Martha would not have much truck with gazpacho.)

BUT I have done it: I’ve read it all, marked it up and made the corrections.  I have also put dates on every chapter – a feature of the Sam Plank novels, as he is a constable and his notebook would be carefully dated.  In the end I went for the very beginning of the year, and the action lasts from 8^th January to 12^th April 1827.  It wasn’t a spectacular year weather-wise; there was a solar eclipse in February but it was barely visible from London, so we can safely ignore that.

So where next?  My husband flies out to join me this evening and I am taking a few days’ holiday.  He is bringing with him a Mac disc that we hope might resurrect my nearly-dead MacBook so that I can retrieve the Missing Chapter; otherwise it will be a prompt visit to the Apple Store when I get home.  When the chapter is found (or – worst case scenario – re-written), it will be slotted into the draft, and the whole thing re-read before I send it for beta reading by 19^th August.  (I find the setting – and indeed announcing – of deadlines to be absolutely essential for the self-published author.)  Then it is in the lap of the gods – i.e. the beta readers.

Meanwhile, I shall be thinking about the book’s cover – the designer is on hols until the end of August but it’s all in the plan – and its title.  (If you haven’t yet voted for your favourite, please do.)  I shall be doing the other bits that I can do – such as getting permission for the cover quote, choosing the review excerpts to include in the front material and so on – and enjoying the feeling of having reached this stage.  I have also, in my research for “Plank 4”, found a few interesting things that I want to include in “Plank 5”, “Plank 6” or “Plank 7”…

The story is told

Thank the heavens: I have done the bulk of the first draft of “Plank 4”.  Owing to technical mishaps it is a rather more confused draft than I had hoped for: there is one whole chapter missing, to be retrieved from my almost-dead MacBook, and all chapters written since then are not numbered but instead have “NEW” at the start of their titles, so that I can tell them apart.  Current word count (minus missing chapter) stands at a whisker under 62,000, which is what I had hoped.  There will be a bit of jigsaw assembly when I get home, but I’ve done the best I can for the bulk writing, and it means that the story is told, which is a significant milestone, and I had an extra chocolate biscuit to celebrate.

However, I still have four days of writing retreat left – husband arrives on Thursday evening – and plenty that I can do in that time.  I need to:

• Go through the confetti of notes that surround me, saying cryptic things like “get Soho address” and (still!) “where does Rambert go on Thursdays?”, and address or discard each one.
• Decide when in 1827 to set the story – it takes only about two months, so should it be spring, summer, autumn or winter?  I need to check the weather reports for the year, and also look at the other three Sam Plank books to see what would work, but I’m quite keen on a wintry January/February setting.
• Having done that, add some comments about the weather – after all, Sam is an Englishman!
• Go through the draft while up at the wifi zone, looking up anything that I have indicated with [[double brackets]] – this is how I tell myself that something needs to be checked, often etymology (would they have said that in 1827?) or trifling historical detail which I love but cannot allow myself to chase down as I write otherwise I would never write (what was men’s underwear called in 1827 – linen?).
• Read the whole thing, making sure that all plot points are picked up and tied off.

Once I am home and can do that jigsaw, two more major tasks remain: putting dates on each chapter, and thinking of a title for each one.  The first job drives me mad (you’d be amazed how often you say things like “yesterday” and “four days later”, so that changing one date throws them all out – I have to print out a Big Calendar for the year and use a pencil only), while the second is an absolute joy.