Week 10

I lost the plot this week. Literally. Things started well, and I was able to write considerably more than my allotted 500 words per day. But as soon as Gooseberry “gets ears” on Miss Penelope and James, I realized I had no idea where the story was going. The writing dried up instantly.

Worse, when I managed to get writing again, I noticed that the back story I’d constructed (involving Mallard, Hook, Treech, the real maharajah and the impostor, and James’s brother Thomas) was so full of holes, it might have been a sieve. I’d patch up one glaring discrepancy only to find another. I’m not even sure that I found them all.

I now have a ridiculously complicated back story to deal with, which Gooseberry never directly gets to see. If I were ever to repeat this kind of project, I would want a good four or five months for preparation, not the six weeks that I had, and I would DEFINITELY want any back story to be perfectly plotted from the outset.

London Zoo provides the setting for this week’s chapter. The source I used comes from the journal “The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction”, Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828, which you can download for free from Project Gutenburg—just click on the link. Eagle-eyed readers will see it is nearly twenty-five years too early for Gooseberry, which is set in 1852, but it’s an attractive source that includes a detailed map of the zoo’s layout that I found extremely useful.

Till next week,
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.

Photograph: Clapham Common Industries by John Thomson, used courtesy of the London School of Economics’ Digital Library under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence.