March 5th 2017
I reached 29 thousand words today, which means I have written a third of the novel since February 4th, so I am still on target to have the first draft by the end of May. When I write a novella or a novel I create the expected layout before I begin the text. So I have a title page, acknowledgements page, contents page in the form of a table with the chapters and their page numbers, and I fill this in as I go along. Helpful, because I can quickly find any given chapter that way. For this novel, I have some references which I am also filling in as I go along. This won’t include all the books I’ve been reading, so much as my main sources of information about Victorian life.
I have reached chapter ten and things are hotting up nicely. The adventure begins. Crystal Palace which was built in Hyde Park and opened to the public in 1851 happens to have come into this story because I noted that it was a major event at the time. Therefore I thought my characters living in central London would have been very aware of it. It’s been a great prop in the story so far, and my main male character and the child Cephalina are about to go there together. I found a photo of Crystal Palace burning down in 1936. It must have been terrible and shocking.
