Countdown: two weeks to go

I’m not panicking yet—well, maybe a little. The first installment is due in two weeks and, as I still don’t have a plot, it rather looks as if I’ll be forced to make one up as I go along. Plots tend to suggest themselves to me when I’m knee-deep in research and, as it goes, I did find the makings of one while I was looking at 1851, year of the Great Exhibition. One of the biggest crowd-pullers on display was the Koh-i-noor diamond—the probable inspiration for the gem in Collins’s novel—which remained in Britain after the exhibition closed in October of that year. Too good to be true? Totally.

Gooseberry would fall flat on its face if I tried to write a sequel. Who would want to read a shorter, hack-written version of a great book? I heard the poet and novelist Andrew Motion, who has already written one sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and is currently working on another, talking on a BBC Radio 3 program recently. He said much the same thing but in a far more poetic way. He went on to cite examples of sequels/prequels that did work well—a case in point, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea—where authors take some of the original characters and make them their own.

So that’s what I’m concentrating on at the moment. Although I’m now officially on annual leave for the foreseeable future, the two weeks I have until I need to publish the first chapter seem like a very, very short time indeed.

Michael


Michael Gallagher’s Gooseberry is serialized in weekly installments every Friday from July 4th 2014 on Goodreads. Michael Gallagher is the author of The Bridge of Dead Things and The Scarab Heart, as well as the popular non-fiction title Why the Victorians Saw Ghosts.