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.

Week 9

I suppose it’s worthwhile pointing out that Dr. Login—the real Dr. Login of history—never ran an asylum, as far as I’m aware, and that Twickenham’s Cole Park Grange and the Jolly Boatman are figments of my imagination. In a sense they’re an homage to Francis Durbridge’s Paul Temple, which I avidly followed in its weekly radio installments throughout my teenage years.

Practically every story included a doctor, who nearly always ran an asylum on the outskirts of London. At first, the doctor seemed benign, but then you quickly realized that he (or, occasionally, she) was mixed up in some very dodgy business, and in it well beyond his or her depth. If the doctor was a woman, she always had an exotic name and spoke with an undisclosed accent—Greek or Lebanese, perhaps; something middle-eastern. Male doctors, on the other hand, spoke with middle-European accents. They were either Austrian, Hungarian, or—at a pinch—Czech.

Some years ago the BBC released the surviving Paul Temple mysteries—and there are surprisingly few—as CD sets. By a stroke of luck, I discovered them in my local library. They were as fantastic as I remember them. They also launched new radio productions based on a couple of original scripts. Despite the loving care lavished on them by the actors, the director, and the sound team, they were only partially successful in recreating that extraordinary sound-world I remember from my childhood.

Fascinating Paul Temple trivia: Marjorie Westbury, the actress who played Paul Temple’s long-suffering wife Steve, had the most wonderful sultry voice, one that conjured up the pinnacle of a tall, elegant sophisticate. In reality she was a short (four foot ten), stout-ish woman, who, on account of her voice, received regular offers of marriage. She even received a legacy from a listener who died and left her a small fortune.

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: The Independent Shoe Black by John Thomson, used courtesy of the London School of Economics’ Digital Library under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence.

Week 8

It feels very strange, but in order to release Gooseberry for the Christmas market, this week I had to assign it an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), and register it with Nielsen, Britain’s ISBN provider. Why did I need to do this? Because the book has to be in the system before I can post it in the October offer for LibraryThing Early Reviewers—the LibraryThing scheme whereby eager readers receive a free copy in return for an honest review. Why is this important? Simply because it will generate reviews I can use when the book is finally released around December 1st. And, trust me, reviews are important.

Of course, the really odd thing is, I’m not even halfway through the book yet, and I still don’t have an entire plot worked out. I have no idea if I can keep to my weekly quota. I have no idea whether I can finish the novel, let alone finish it in time.

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