Week 15

Sergeant Cuff, one of the original characters from The Moonstone, makes his appearance this week. I had great fun writing him, and he just seemed to spring on to the page fully formed. As a writer, you know you’re on to a winner when characters immediately start talking and doing things for themselves.

One of the issues the sergeant’s appearance brought up for me was the realization that, apart from Cuff, young Gooseberry has no intellectual equal in this novel. He might respect his employer, Mr. Bruff, but he knows he can run rings around him. It must have been incredibly frustrating for Gooseberry to have his genius go unrecognized for so long.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had to speed up the writing considerably—to the point where I am very nearly finished the rough draft of the whole book. This will need editing before I publish it on Goodreads, and when that’s done it will require a further editing and careful proofing so that it can be formatted in time for LibraryThing’s Early Reviwers giveaway. Winners expect their copies at the beginning of November.

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: Cast Iron Billy by John Thomson, used courtesy of the London School of Economics’ Digital Library under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence.