Addictive Research

I recently stumbled across an Ebay auction of a double volume of THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS. Of course, I had heard of that newspaper before (after all, my current academic research focuses on Victorian periodicals), but I hadn't realised what a gem it was. But the person selling his copy on Ebay kindly provided pictures. OH MY! Where are my smelling salts?!?!?!?

That volume on Ebay was in a bad shape and the price was already quite high when I discovered the page, so I decided not to bid on it. The volume that I ended up buying (because, hey, it's for research, right? and I can use it for both my academic work and my creative work -- awesome! it's like "Buy one get one free"!!!) arrived today. In a word: it's gorgeous!

So far I've just leafed through it and took pictures of some of the highlights, e.g.

• intriguing bits of paper pasted into the newspaper (pic on upper right)
• prize cattle
• masses of people emigrating to the New World
• the construction of the Crystal Palace for the Grand Exhibition in 1851
• the new railway station in Newcastle upon Tyne (pic on upper left)
• some sheet music
• the Assyrian sculptures from Nimrod at the British Museum*
• Stamp Duty in action

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* I yelled "Wheeee!" when I came across that particular picture because DEVIL'S RETURN deals with the excavations in Nimrod in the mid-1840s. :-)

That moment when you realise there was no direct train between London & Edinburgh in 1846....

from BLACK'S IRON HIGHWAY FROM LONDON TO EDINBURGH, 1850

... and it totally messes up your story.

Well, a little anyway.

Thanks to the somewhat belated realization that perhaps I should check whether there was indeed a direct train from London to Edinburgh in 1846 or whether my heroine is sitting in a horrible anachronism, I had some digging to to earlier this afternoon. And this is what I 've found:

The Great Northern Railway, that is, the line between Newcastle and Edinburgh, was opened either in late 1850 or at some point in 1851 (a guidebook from 1851 mentions that new connection), so in 1846 my heroine wouldn't have been able to take a train on that line. As to the Berwick-Edinburgh connection, I couldn't quite figure out when exactly this was opened (it was at some point in the late 1840s). So in the end, I decided that my heroine would take the train to Newcastle and from there the stagecoach to Edinburgh. (Grrr....)

In other news, the revisions of A TANGLED WEB are all finished; I just need to type up all my edits. I'm not yet quite happy with the prologue (should I ditch Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott" or not?), but I hope I'll be able to iron this out tomorrow morning. Then I'll just need to Americanize the whole manuscript before I can send it off to my copy editor. Wheee!

Invitation to a Tournament

Today I'm guest-posting on Risky Regencies, where I'm sharing some info about the historical background of THE BRIDE PRIZE. And no, we are not talking about medieval romance here. :-)

Click here to find out more

(There are men in kilts! Noble knights! People in medieval costume!)

Breakthrough!!!!!

As you know, I was working on the revisions of THE BRIDE PRIZE these past few days. These were the hardest revisions I've ever done (mainly because I didn't properly plan the story from the get-go), and there was a lot of red on the pages. Like, A LOT!

In the end, I was so very frustrated that I decided to switch colours to make the pages look a little less horrid. And with a little help from my friends (in the picture below you can see a promo pen Debra Holland gave me when we met at the IndieUncon in San Francisco back in February) I muddled through a few more chapters, until....

....until I hit a major, major roadblock. I grappled with that one scene for days and days and days and DAYS. And it was beyond depressing because I just couldn't figure out how to resolve this dratted scene -- until this afternoon!!! Wheee!!!!

Well, actually, I had already scribbled what eventually became the solution onto a post-it the night before: just before I went to bed, the Muse struck me over the head. :-)

After a final read-through tomorrow morning, both THE BRIDE PRIZE and DEVIL'S RETURN will go to my copy editor, and for me it's then on to A TANGLED WEB (which will probably be a similarly hard nut to crack as THE BRIDE PRIZE - oh joy!)