Today I give you....

... some cover-love. I hope you like it! :-)

First Set of Revisions DONE!!!!!

I'm so thrilled to announced that I've just finished revising the first of the three novellas. Yay!!!

Ornamental Edits

Layering red on the page can render some rather pretty results. :-)

Nearly reaching the end of DEVIL'S RETURN. But first - some male bonding.

Unperturbed, Beaton continued, "I say, Crenshaw, that's all very romantic."

"Yes, in the way of Romeo and Juliet," Mac cut in, his voice a bored drawl. "He will want to slash his wrists next."

As Robbie Beaton says at the beginning of this novella, "No. Cupid, our Mac is not." ;-)

Combative Revisions

I might have to start using two different colours for revivions in order to help me to keep the different edits apart later on when I'm going to work them into the MS Word document....

This, btw, is my attempt at the following suggestion from my editor: "P. 237. The bear scene needs a stronger ending." :-)

The Plot Thickens & a Bear

... or at least the layers of red on the page do. This has turned out to be a bit of a tricky scene. As my editor has pointed out, my heroine doesn't say anything - or hardly anything - in two consecutive scenes, which is not so good. On the other hand, I want my heroine to be somewhat diffident in these scenes, soooo......

I've settled on letting her exclaim "A bear?" at one point.

And now, as my editor tells me, I need to find a stronger ending for the bear scene.

Hm.

*scratching my head*

Revisions!!!

After finishing all the grading yesterday evening, I'm finally free to start with the revisions of my three novellas (as you can see, I'm using the same dark red pen for both grading and revisions *g*). Woohooo!!!! Since I received my editor's revision letter, I've been looking forward to this SO much. I love this step in the publication process: giving the contents of my stories one last polish and seeing how it all tightens up. (Besides, at this point I've usually come to the conclusion that my latest literary outpourings are not lethal after all, which is always such a big relief! *ggg*)

With this new series, I also need to check the continuity, for in the earlier stories there are quite a few smaller incidents that will become relevant in later stories. And then, of course, we have all those recurring characters as well as a number of recurring jokes -- like Matthew Clark's whoopee cushion that makes a sound like a dying goat when you sit down on it. ;-)

Heard from My Editor Today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm hardly able to focus on the grading today -- and I blame it all on my lovely editor! When I switched on my computer this morning, I found her critique of my three novellas in my mailbox. It took me a good 30 minutes to open her mail. What if she didn't like those stories? What if she was going to tell me they were really, really, really bad and how did I even dare to send her such crap? (By now you should know how my mind works, so this mini meltdown will hardly come as a surprise to you. *g*)

Anyways, I finally DID open her e-mail, and -- oh my gosh!!! -- Bev really, really, REALLY liked the three stories. "Did I ever love working on these novellas, Sandra!" her e-mail starts. "Please forgive me for not listing everything I love about them in my critique--it would have been a hundred pages!"

*melts into a happy puddle*

So I've been singing and humming and grinning stupidly and dancing around my flat for most of the day. :-)

Let's Talk Covers!

One of the truly nice things about indie publishing is that you have complete control over your covers. You can pick a design, make sure that the people on the cover match the characters' descriptions in your story, and you can brand a series whichever way you like.

One of the major elements of branding for the covers of the new series will be a blue background. Originally, I thought I'd just use the same sky picture for all covers, but not only would this look boring, but that one picture also doesn't suit all the people I've chosen to go onto the covers.

Sooo, today during my lunch break I went hunting for blue backgrounds. I've already found some nice matches for some covers, but there is one picture of a woman that, as it turns out, is rather difficult to match with a blue background. Hmmmm. Clearly, further experiments are called for!

The Day after....

The day after sending your manuscript to your editor is always the worst because not only does even your tea cup (well, mug) look slightly battered, but you also come up with 1.000 reasons why your book project sucks, why your editor will hate it, why she will probably drop dead while reading it, why it totally would have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs (if dinosaurs had been able to read, that is).

The best thing you can do then is to stagger into the kitchen and deal with the piles of dirty dishes (including the tea mug).

:-)

Stalking Dead People (Again!)

John Leech's first cartoon of Mr Briggs, a middle-class gentleman residing in the suburbs with his family. Mr Briggs's adventures are partly modelled on Leech's own experiences with middle-class life in the suburbs

Today I did some research on the editor (Mark Lemon) and one of the artists (John Leech) of PUNCH, the wonderful, wonderful, wonderful British magazine (of which 70 kilos reside on the shelf in Sandy's sitting room). In particular I tried to figure out how long the Lemons and the Leech(e?)s lived at No. 10 and 12 Brook Green after finding a reference that by July 1849 the Lemons lived in Notting Hill.

So I started to dig.

The letters of Charles Dickens proved to be particular helpful for, as it turns out, Dickens was a very good of Lemon's until the former broke up with his (and PUNCH's) publisher, Bradbury & Evans. Unfortunately, the transcribed letters only seldom give the address of the recipient (grrrr!), and for 1848 (the year I was particularly interested in) only one letter to Mark Lemon includes an address - 11 Bouverie Street, home not to Mr Lemon, but to Mr Punch: this is the address of the PUNCH office. *sigh*

But as if to make up for his shocking lack of foresight, Dickens referred to a most interesting tidbit in one of his letters from 1847. On 3 August 1847, he wrote to a friend: "What a tremendous chance that Leech's little girl was not born on the Railway!" A footnote was helpful to supply further background information: Mrs Leech, heavily pregnant, had gone into labour during an outing with Dickenses and a group of other people. In another letter to another friend, Dickens described how she was brought to the Victoria Hotel in Euston in a Bath Chair and had her baby girl in a hotel room. "She is a capital little woman!" Dickens concludes (11 Aug. 1847).

Ha! You do know how much I love such anecdotes, don't you? :-)

The Joys of Research

One of the great joys of writing historicals, I find, is doing research. I'm curious about how people lived in the past and I think it endlessly fascinating to stumble across new tidbits about their everyday life. Thus, for the story I'm currently writing, DEVIL'S RETURN (to be released in April *fingers crossed*) I explored old maps of London. The National Library of Scotland has come up with the most wonderful feature: not only did they digitalise a lot of their maps, but their website also has a section called "georeferenced maps", where the images of the old maps are laid over a modern map. And you wouldn't believe the details that can be found in some of these old maps! For example, they have a map of London from the 1890s, which shows drinking fountains, troughs, and urinals (!!!) scattered throughout London. Magical!

One of the characters in DEVIL'S RETURN lives in Brook Green, in Hammersmith, and as some of the PUNCH men lived there in the 1840s, I tried to find out as much as possible about the area. Thanks to that very detailed map from the 1890s I was even able to locate John Leech's house (I guess that could be called stalking a dead person....). In a letter to a friend, he described it as being opposite some almshouses "at the corner of Cornwall Road". That bit stumped me for a while until I found out that Cornwall Road had been renamed a few years later and had become Rowan Road by the time the map from the 1890s was created.

 Well, but how to get one's characters from Town to Hammersmith? Because of my studies involving the magazine PUNCH, I already knew that there had been an omnibus service in London since 1829. (The following picture is a cartoon from PUNCH, drawn by my favourite illustrator of the time, Richard Doyle.)

And thanks to Google Books, I had soon found a guidebook with omnibus timetables: MOGG'S OMNIBUS GUIDE from 1844. It has to say the following about the bus to Hammersmith:

Hammersmith, 4. European Coffee House, opposite the Mansion House, daily, Sund. included, every 10 min. from 9 morn till 1/2 p. 11 night, Black Horse Coventry Street, a 1/4 of an hour later, and from the White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly, 1/2 an hour later. Leaves Hammersmith daily Sunday included every 10 min. from 8 morn. till 10 night.

Right-ho. But how long would it take to ride the bus from the White Horse Cellar to Hammersmith? Again, Google Books came to my rescue: in another guidebook (this time from 1871), I found a timetable that gave listed the times of departure in a similar manner as modern bus or train timetables:

Neat, isn't it? :-)