March 15th 2017:- It is now 40 days since I started this novel, and I’m surprised given the numbers of interruptions in my writing time, that I’ve still averaged 1,000 words a day. I’m building up quite a lengthy list of links to various bits of research or books and today I found something written in exactly the two years that the novel is set in which will help me with expressions and concerns of the time and so on. That was a good find. I also found an interesting Victorian book the other day on Project Gutenberg, only to discover that it was very committed pornography of the time and as interesting as it might be on some level, it certainly wasn’t going to help me write this novel. I came across it while I was reading about the choking fogs they had in London in 1850’s and there was a mention of the fact that street girls always did well in the fog…. didn’t really have to seek out a secluded place. So I followed the reference and found the porno. Funny really that we think the Victorians were repressed and stiff when really the only thing that was stiff about them, and then only the women, were their clothes. The other thing I was going to mention here was that I rely a lot on images and photos for my writing. Back in the day, we might well have written straight out of our own imaginations when describing something, but I can’t see the point of that now when you can find a picture of an over-blown Victorian drawing room and use that as a basis for the description, then it’s only a matter of transcribing from image into word. The picture below is what I mean by women’s clothing… I’m not suggesting anything else about these good women.
