March 23rd 2017: What a battle today’s writing was. Something wasn’t quite working with the logic and I had to go back a couple of chapters and read out aloud, and I realised that I had missed out how my main character would have felt when he saw the ghostly child at the séance, and that was enough to throw everything that followed out of kilter somehow. So I went back and put that right… a bit like darning a hole in a sock. Then I had to move the story along even though I didn’t feel like writing at all by then. But having done it, I saw that I am still averaging about 1,000 words a day, and so still expect to have the first draft of this novel finished by the end of May. After that, I’m going to spend a couple of months reading, before I take it up again. By which time, I’ll have some distance from it and will see it more clearly. An interesting thing happened today though. I was researching the phrase ‘rabbit out of a hat’ so that one of my characters could say that in 1851, and I found a man called John Anderson who was a magician known as ‘The Great Wizard of the North’ and it was he who began exposing spiritualism. He apparently said that spiritualism had driven tens of thousands of men mad in America. I could hardly believe my luck, and I enfolded him into the story.
