I love to include real events in my stories, and since the action revolves around a newspaper and its publisher I needed a couple of doozies to be worthy of the attention of the reporters in my novel A Note of Scandal. So imagine my delight, when reading about ships-of-the-line and other nautical footnotes, I [...]
Olivia, my heroine in A Note of Scandal, is a high-born lady (daughter of a marquess), so you’d think she had it made. But what she longs to do – write music and perform it – was considered déclassé, and her parents feel so strongly about it she would never even think to do it. [...]
Today’s six are from A Note of Scandal, which will release next week from Evernight Publishing. Remember to check out the other Six Sentence Sunday posts–and as always remember that some are not appropriate for under 18. “Merry, I told you not to come,” he said. His voice carried no trace of the pure tenor [...]
You might wonder at the idea of a newspaper publisher being the hero of a regency-set novel, but once I learned of John Walter II and what he did, I knew I had to at least try to tell the story. Newspapers in the 1700s and early 1800s practiced a form of “advocacy journalism,” a [...]
Came across this today while doing unrelated research: From the London Times, 7 January 1809, page 3 ACKERMANN’S Repository of Arts, &c. which has just appeared, has adopted a novelty, we are surprised not to have been long since thought of, that of making a periodical publication the vehicle to distribute patterns of different articles [...]
As part of my prep for National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org), which starts next week (eek!), I’m reading through issues of the London Times from 1808. My story this time will be that of a British journalist sent to Spain to cover the start of the campaign there against the French. Amongst the reports on [...]
Look! Second-draft is done! No pages remain on the bottom shelf, no scene notecards above them. All pages on the top — done, done, done! I used up all the 500 loose-leaf notebook pages in my pack, so had to switch to the yellow pad for the last two scenes. Structure is solid, promises are [...]
So yeah, it’s taking longer than I thought, but this story is even better than I thought, so there. I’ll be running silent, running deep until vacation in a couple weeks. I really want to be done with this pass and take a complete break, but as the parents say, “we’ll see.” On scene 50 [...]
So, I’ll be running silent, running deep for a bit (like, 4-5 weeks) as I plow through the big second-draft revise. This pass includes the massive plot revise, character sharpening and combining, story rearranging, scene setting, and fluff cutting. I’m finding this nearly as hard as the scene-for-scene cards I did in April, and for [...]
So, after a sluggish start and some mild howling about the first draft of my Manchester story, I managed to build a weekend’s-full of space to get down to reorganizing and shaping this behemoth. This is the revised sentence-for-scene outline, all 15.5 pages of it. It took me 17 hours over two days and the [...]