Hi,
If you’ve been following this blog for a while you’ve noticed that I have been (in between all of the household and medical interruptions) trying to complete two particular tasks, finishing my novella, Flood and Fire, and re-editing its sequel, The Jagged Man. Sadly, I haven’t made much progress on either of them.
Flood and Fire is the problem child of the two, and I have begun to believe that it was a blessing and a curse to have set the large middle section of the book in historical England, during a terrible plague summer in London (1665), and during The Great Fire of London (September 1666). A blessing because it expands the Jagged Man’s mythos with an important incident from his past. A curse because I’m bogged down with historical dilemmas.
The Great Fire of London took place over the course of several days. I need to be accurate in what I write during that section of the novella because there is an extensive historical record of the event. My primary sources for information about it are three diaries, written by Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, and William Taswell; plus encyclopedias and other historical records; and one of the best accounts of the fire, By Permission of Heaven: The True Story of the Great Fire of London, written by Adrian Tinniswood.
Pepys and Evelyn were both writing their diaries contemporaneously, sometimes on the day something happened, or usually within a few days. Taswell was 14-years-old at the time of the fire, but wrote about both the plague and the fire in his autobiography (fifty years later), so his recollections are more suspect than Pepys’ and Evelyn’s. All three of them (plus other historical figures) are characters in the book, so I had to arrange the timing in that whole section to fit their recollections, but their memories don’t entirely agree with each other. I paused the writing (much of which is already done) to make some extensive notes and create a timeline that will help me reconcile the differences between them and finish that part of the book.
After that I need, of course, to do a thorough edit and polish (two separate things — the polish follows the edit), then prep them both for publication (especially doing a detailed line edit to make sure there are no mistakes or inconsistencies), complete the cover designs and the internal imagery for both books, lay the pages out (and do adjustments to the pages as necessary), then convert the final versions to e-book format (for Kindle and Nook, etc.) and to a PDF for printing. Hopefully, after that, I will have some of the year left to start on the next book in the queue.
The next post is about the books I will likely work on after The Jagged Man and Flood and Fire are out in the wild.
See you then,
Michael
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