I love autumn. It’s the best time of year for me. I love the scents of the fallen leaves and the crisp mornings. It’s great to light candles again and snuggle under blankets after the warmth of summer. And, of course, there’s Halloween.
I’ve heard Halloween called the day of the dead when the year, too, dies and it always gives me a delightful shiver. I’m not sure how much I want to buy into the mystical side of things, but I love an excuse to get spooky.
Last October I did an entire month of stories featuring Kane, the hapless young man that communicates with ghosts whether he likes it or not. That collection will shortly be coming out as an anthology on Amazon as An Apprenticeship of Ghosts. I’ve got different plans for this October.
I’ve never met a plan that I couldn’t complicate, confuse, lose, and then fail at, but hopefully this will work out. While transferring all the stories from one blog site to another, I found plenty of old, slightly spooky, maybe a little bit uncanny or paranormal, stories that were just hanging around. It seemed a shame to leave them just loitering, so that collective hodgepodge of miscellaneous stories will be re-posted, one for every day of October. I’ll be adding in some new stuff as well, to be fair, so that there’s plenty to enjoy.
Once everyone who’s interested has had a chance to dip in, the stories will disappear on 30th November, like a ghost at daybreak. They will then return, as an anthology on Amazon, hopefully some time before Christmas, depending on Amazon.
This is part of my plan to try and avoid losing my stories, especially in transit from websites. It fits in with the re-issue of the stories from the White Hart, and I’ll be turning Under Dark Hills, Invitation Accepted, and The Guest into books on Amazon as well. However, once that has been done, I’ll be concentrating on bringing out some new stuff. I have a list of things I want to write, so watch this space.
I’ve just renewed this year’s subscription to my WordPress blog, Always Another Chapter, and I was thinking. I’ve never really clicked with WordPress, and I’ve been using that blog since 2018, so I’m unlikely to start now. On the other hand, I’ve been posting on Blogger for my mum/personal blog since 2012, and I’m quite comfortable there. I think that I’ll be able to get adverts on there, as I managed to add them accidentally to my mum blog, so that’s a plus. And it’s free! Of course, I could just switch to the free version of WordPress without using the company that help with domain names and support, but I still like Blogger, so Blogger it is.
I’ve decided that I’ll be posting on my writing blog on WordPress until the end of October. I always like to do something spooky in the run up to Halloween and I’ve already started scheduling some posts, so I’m keeping going until then. After that, I’ll move everything over to Blogger, leaving a redirect notice on the WordPress blog until the subscription runs out. That’s the easy, on-the-surface stuff. It doesn’t sound so bad, just switching across to a different platform. If only it was that simple.
The main reason that I renewed the subscription this time is because I would lose a lot of work if I lost the site. I’ve already lost a few pieces because I’ve posted directly onto other people’s sites and then lost the work when those sites went down, and I’m sure that there’s a few pieces in the aether from when I tried with other blogging platforms, so I feel quite attached to the bits that I’ve managed to hold onto. It’s not entirely at the mercy of my blog, though, as I automatically save to the Cloud, and while my laptop is chaotic and I can’t find a thing, I’ve recently gained access to an elderly PC and I’ve managed to keep things in better order on there.
Photo by Carles Rabada on Unsplash And a great representation of the chaos of my laptop’s filing system
However, I really can’t find anything on my laptop, and my PC is so elderly that it is physically unable to run Windows 11. In fact, the PC crashed two paragraphs ago and I had to do a hard reboot and give thanks for the automatic save function. I’m not sure that I can be trusted to keep a USB drive safe, but I’m going to have to invest in a couple I think, just to keep the work safe. I have two potential fallbacks. One method is to convert as many posts as is feasible into book form, so goodness only knows where I’ll go from there. After all, I’ve not had stellar success with the posts for the White Hart. The other is to preserve stuff on my blog. My WordPress site has functioned as storage over the years, and there are about 360 draft entries that function as a trail of what I’ve worked on and when. If I stop paying my subscription then I lose all those pieces. I’m going to have to transfer all those posts over to Blogger. What fun – not!
So I skimmed over all 598 posts, including drafts, on my WordPress blog, which was more fun than it sounds as I got to dip into a few stories that I’d forgotten, and that I absolutely want to tidy up and show off again. I made some wildly optimistic notes about what I could potentially do with a few bits, and then I had a rummage through some bits on Blogger. Many years ago, I posted fiction on Blogger under the same banner, Always Another Chapter, and that site is still there. Some posts from there ended up on the WordPress site and others have drifted into obscurity. I had a quick rummage through the 164 posts on there as well, and there are a couple of duplicated posts.
But when faced with overwhelming administrative odds, the first thing to do is to make a list, and I have just shy of 100 posts to transfer between WordPress and Blogger not including all the posts for Invitation Accepted, Under Dark Hills, Dark Picture and The Guest. Posts for the White Hart and Kane are already elsewhere, and I’m not too worried about those, at least for now. I suspect that I’ve quite a few posts missing from those as well, but I’ll see how it goes. I can see many more lists looming in my future.
So because I’m my own worst enemy, I’m now going to be playing around with just shy of six hundred posts and making sure that I don’t lose anything, while still trying to do all the other stuff that I want to do. But I hope that it’s worth it and allows me to move forward with a better idea of what’s going on, and a free platform to play on. And that can’t be bad.
Let’s talk about researching names for characters in contemporary fiction. I’m never going to be brilliant at naming characters. I have no problem imagining the way that that a character moves, the way that they tilt their head when talking, and even their food and drink preferences, but if I’m not careful, they’d all end up called John or Jane Smith. Or I’d subconsciously name them after a player on a soccer team, or a character in a soap that I don’t watch but that I’ve heard about, and then I’d feel ridiculous. What is more, if I unintentionally pick a name of someone in the public eye and make them a devious and unpleasant villain, it could be seen as hurtful or even directed, and who wants to accidentally get involved with that?
I created this image using Canva without the help of AI and I’m a little surprised that it turned out this well.
I am a research junkie, and until they come up with a 12-step programme to get me away from it, I’ll always turn to research when I’m faced with a conundrum like names. And, for me, a carefully chosen name can have a significant impact on the initial description of a character. In fact, if it’s just a side character that will appear briefly, the name can do most of the work. After all, stereotypes are useful if you’re careful and deliberate with your writing. If you name a character Antonio Rossi, the reader immediately gets a certain amount of background, just as they would for a character called Hamish McDonald or Bjorn Gundersen. Any name has put a stamp on the character, and the reader will have certain expectations. You may as well make use of them.
If you’re writing a short story, doing research for names can be something of an overkill, but, as I mentioned, a name is part of defining a character. You perhaps just need the first name, so you don’t need to worry too much about getting confused with a character in a film or a person in the public eye. You don’t have to look up James to know that it’s a fairly popular and timeless name, and can be tailored to your character as James, Jimmy, Jim, Jimbo, Jamie, etc. The same goes for names like John, Mary, Jane, Elizabeth, or Peter. Those names settle nicely in most English speaking countries without much trouble. They are a little bland, though, so you may want to change it up.
Other names are very much of their time. In my part of the world, the names Sharon, Kevin, Tracy, or even Darren are mainly common in those born in the 1960s. If you want to show age, a name is one way of doing it if you choose carefully. You can have a quick internet search for something like ‘popular baby names of 1990’ and take your pick of something that sounds good and that would potentially fit the character.
Another way of finding a first name is to look at sources for the meaning of popular names. It can help support your vision of your character if you choose a name that fits in with their personality. For example, Richard means Brave Ruler, Arthur is linked to Bear, and Ciaran means Little Dark One. I haven’t checked those meanings, by the way. I found them on a site called Honey Name which I bookmarked and intend to use shamelessly.
I find surnames far harder to choose. First names are undefined and could be anyone, but full names are different. There are so many names out there on the internet that it’s unnervingly possible to pick a name of someone that’s at least well-known by some readers. I’m clueless when it comes to reality shows, and I don’t watch many soaps or films, so a name that sounds perfect could actually belong to someone real. If you think of a name and it sounds perfect, for heaven’s sake do an internet search on the full name plus possible nicknames. The point of research is to stop the author looking like an idiot.
It could be a name that is genuinely unknown to the author, but crazily famous elsewhere. For example, I’m British and I’ve not had much access to American football. I’ve heard of the Superbowl, and I’ve heard of quarterbacks, but I had to check the internet for who was the quarterback in the 2026 Superbowl winning team to know that it was Sam Darnold. It would be unnervingly easy for me to call a character Sam Arnold, or Sammy Darnold, or similar without realising, and for those who read my work and also watch the Superbowl, it could cause confusion. In fact, depending on how many readers I got and how awful the character was, I could get some uncomfortable comments on the internet.
Finding a surname is tricky. I know that when the first writers of the long-running British soap Coronation Street were starting to put the idea together, they went to a local cemetery and looked at names on gravestones. That could be a fun day out in the right circumstances, but if you’re deep into a writing marathon, then you’ll want to forge ahead. As my stories are primarily set in England, I’m happy to use English place names as a last name. I can look on an internet map for obscure districts and then add a first name. A quick internet check will tell me if the name belongs to someone famous, or at least potentially known, and I have a name. The hero in my book Out of the London Mist, John Farnley, got his last name from a district in my home city of Leeds.
‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland’ https://maps.nls.uk/ which shows a map including Farnley from the nineteenth century
You can pick up surnames from obscure sports teams, trade directories, newspaper stories – all sorts of places. The important thing is to not use the name as a whole.You don’t want to try and take the identity of a name in the paper. The idea of research is to make your life easier, not to get into trouble. Let’s look at a sports team as a source. Yorkshire County Cricket Club had a player called John Thewlis who scored the first century, or one hundred runs, in County Cricket for Yorkshire in 1869. Thewlis sounds like a good surname, and according to Honey Name, Brenna means Little Raven which I thought sounded intriguing, so I now have a potential character called Brenna Thewlis. It’s not a bad sounding name and I didn’t find anything for that when I did an internet search. There are a few traces of Brenda Thewlis and Brendan Thewlis but I should be safe with Brenna, and I think that she sounds cute.
If you are writing a novel, particularly if it’s part of a series, getting the right name is important enough to take a little time. I absolutely think that it’s worth spending time on research. If you’re in the middle of a sprint or marathon, or if you’re on a deadline, and you don’t have time, being able to pick names from lists is easier if you have a couple of sites bookmarked from your research into names. Research is supposed to make life easier for the author so don’t overthink things, get a name that supports your character, then send the hapless hero or heroine out into your amazing story, and have fund doing it!
You can find more articles about research and the author collected here.
Please note, I normally avoid AI because I’m clueless about it, but for the purposes of this article, all images are AI generated unless otherwise stated.
I’m not comfortable with AI. I don’t really understand it, and that makes me reluctant to use it. I typed in a question about motivation once, and got some good advice, which I promptly ignored, but otherwise I’ve watched with caution. You can find previous posts on my blog here and here.
The internet has never been a place of unrelenting truth. Right from the start, there have been emails and posts and so-called advice that have been unfounded, fictitious or downright malevolent. There are even new words to describe some of the more predatory online practices, like phishing or catfishing. I’ve always taken the view that I can’t trust the internet when it comes to health, wealth, or religion. I can access sources, and some will be more reliable than others, but if I’m in doubt, I need to speak to someone qualified.
Image created on Canva using AI with the prompt ‘create an image for a blog post about phishing’
These days, that’s not such a guarantee. I know that there are accounts of AI being invaluable in all sorts of ways, but the professionals who use it are human too. There have been cases, including one quoted in the Law Gazette here, where the AI has had a dream. An AI has been asked to provide documents that includes supporting cases. I guess that the instructions should have included real cases that have previously been heard in a real court. As it was, the documents were plausible, persuasive, and absolutely undermined when it was shown that the supporting cases that had been quoted didn’t exist but had been dreamed up by the AI. The qualified legal professionals who were getting the documents together didn’t check. I can imagine the absolute fits that the judge had at that lack of diligence.
To me, dealing with AI is like dealing with the Fair Folk. You have to ask your question so carefully or the answer that you get is like fairy gold that turns to dead leaves in the light of day and is useless. I’m okay asking for help with a route if I’m driving to an unfamiliar place. I know that I’m going to go over it on the map anyway and I’m quite happy to adjust it to suit myself. In theory I could ask for recipe suggestions, like Weary Wolf on their YouTube channel who asked for 21 meals for one to cover a week on a budget of £20, and got an okay, if potentially uninspiring, result, here, if you’re interested.
It reminded me again of dealing with fairies. These weren’t malevolent fairies. They wanted to be helpful and useful. But when there was excess money, the AI suggested that it was all spent on cheese, because more cheese makes everything better. Obviously, the AI had seen a lot of the ‘cheese makes it better’ memes and took it literally, like a brownie or elf trying to understand mortals and not quite getting all that they saw. Thinking about the recipes, I would have suggested more fruit and veg, or perhaps more seasonings, but the AI was going from its instructions and insisted on more cheese.
One of my friends, posting as Supernovauk, is using AI to make music. They’ve got it on YouTube, here, if you’re interested. It’s light and pop and fun, and it reminds me of the days when I was young enough to dance the night away. I know how hard they’ve worked on that music. The lyrics are all from them, and they’ve spent a lot of time and effort getting the music exactly where they want it. It’s absolutely not some slop thrown together, but a real creation using AI because the access to musical instruments and the time to master them isn’t available to them.
Image created on Canva using AI with the prompt ‘please create a blog post image for electronic music
I feel like it’s a deal with the Fair Folk, making a deal with fairies, which is a dangerous thing to do. My friend has put in so much effort and care, but because it’s AI, they can’t copyright it. It could just slip through their fingers. Other AI efforts, particular in the romance book area, are like dreams or perhaps like fairy gifts. They lack an indefinable something, like fairy cheese made without salt or lumpen bread made without an iron oven. Or, frankly, are plain awful.
Authors have a few different problems. The publishing world is getting overwhelmed by some extremely poor AI books, churned out with little regard for a reader. Romance has been particularly vulnerable to this. As a voracious reader of romance novels, I have lost count of the number of books that I’ve picked up, read the first page and then rejected because the AI writing is appalling. However, if a determined AI user is willing, they can publish dozens of books in a day, bung it on Kindle Unlimited, and if enough people like me read the first page, they’ll get plenty of single pennies from the Kindle Unlimited accounts and make a nice living from it.
This pic may be generated by AI, but the text of the story is absolutely AI free and you can read it here on Wattpad
Those AI collections of words have sparked a backlash and there is a witch-hunt against anyone suspected of using AI. There have been a lot of accusations thrown around, and not all of them have been grounded in reality. It’s not always obvious whether it’s AI or bad writing, or even if the author’s writing style is one of those that has been heavily copied by AI models. I’ve been acting as a beta reader for my friend Holly White and unfortunately their writing style is one of those that has been copied. And it’s not AI! They’re writing a series of fan fiction romances, based on Quidditch teams in the Harry Potter universe, and I’m loving them. I’ve been with them every step of the way and those stories have been hammered out on their keyboard, tap by tap, in evenings after work. As they’re caught up in the joy of writing in a genre new to them, they are racing ahead and so books are coming out quickly. Not only that, the writing is, in my opinion as their trusty beta reader, awesome and not comparable to the AI autochurn that’s been thrown together and dumped on Amazon (and you can find Holly’s work on Wattpad here, if you’re curious). I’m not sure how that will protect them, though, if accusations are launched at them.
I had just booked a cover from GetCovers for An Apprenticeship of Ghosts, which will be coming shortly, knowing that they don’t use AI, and I wondered what I could do with Canva, AI, and a little time. They have an AI function, and I clicked on it, nervously, and put in a prompt book cover with a raven flying holding a ring on a ribbon. I got this.
I didn’t give a title. I certainly didn’t give it a subtitle or tagline. I absolutely definitely didn’t invent the name for the author. I was unnerved enough to check, and at time of typing, there wasn’t a book or author with those names on Google. AI had dreamed a story to go with those twelve words that I used as a prompt.
I came away with two thoughts. One is that I want to write that story. The other was that I gave the seed to the AI for this dream. I wonder what unbidden dreams haunt AI.
Most authors are absolutely desperate for reviews. Those reviews can make or break a book when it comes to sales, and authors know it. It makes sense – would you rather read a book with half a dozen reviews that give interesting feedback, a book with hundreds of glowing reviews, or a book with no reviews at all?
Authors will often send out free copies, known as ARC copies or Advanced Reader Copies. The deal is that the reader gets a free book just before publication or just after. In return, the reader leaves an honest review of the book. As long as the review is honest, and at least tactful about the bad bits, it’s a win-win result.
Some influencers on Instagram, Facebook, and on their own websites, can make a few pennies from ads and affiliate marketing. I’ve heard rumours that some of the biggest ones will charge authors for their reviews, which is strictly against the rules for Amazon. Most ARC readers are more interested in the chance of reading new books that they may never have discovered by themselves than playing the system.
If you ever decide to become an ARC reader, I found a post here, How to Become and ARC Reader and Acquire Books for Free, that covers some of the basics, including book review sites like Net Galley. Net Galley may have a formal set up and have certain requirements, but not everything is so regimented. There are ARC reader groups on Facebook, and I think most social media sites that have any sort of author groups will have posts looking for ARC readers.
I’ve had a rummage around, and I found some common rules and requests for ARC readers.
Be Honest. If the book is brilliant, then it’s great to share the good stuff. If, however, you struggle through a novel, or if you find parts problematic, then it’s okay to mention it in a review to warn other readers, but think about point number two.
Be Tactful. The book may not be perfect, but the author is a human being who has poured their soul into their work. When I write a review, I strongly believe that it’s better to be kind than leave a witty but cruel comment. That goes double if it’s really tempting to put in something that sounds hilarious, is possibly true, but would be unnecessarily hurtful to the author.
Be Prompt if it’s Possible. Publishing algorithms are unrelenting and a review left within a month of the book going live will have have considerably more weight than a review left three months later. However, any review at any time is significantly better than no review at all.
Be Aware of the Rules. Amazon is incredibly strict about reviews. It’s entirely appropriate to mention that you recieved a copy to review. It’s not okay to say that you recieved the copy in exchange for a review. Amazon are very clear that all reviews should be honest and freely given without incentive. If you mention any form of payment for a review, you’re getting the author into trouble.
Communicate. Talk to the author. Let them know about any problems and delays that you have, together with any technical difficulties. Ask them if you have any questions. If you feel that you can’t finish a book, or that you can’t give a good review, let the author know.
Spread the Word. Share the review where you can. You may feel that you can only share among your friends, but it would mean so much more if it’s posted a little further. You don’t have to have a fancy presence or loads of followers. Just the existence of the review is important, but sharing it is a bonus. You could post to your own blog, Amazon (the biggest deal), Goodreads, Storygraph, and any social media where you would normally post. And if you tag in the author and give permission for them to share your opinions, so much the better!
And be warned – if you recieve an ARC and you neither post a review nor let the author know that you didn’t feel able to review, then you’re not likely to get other ARCs offered to you. It’s also vital that you remember that the copy is for you alone, and not to be shared around. You have privileged information.
I write the odd review, list here, and as I hope to get back to it, I’ve bookmarked How to Write a Book Reviewon the Reedsy site to use for guidance which may be useful for anyone else wanting to indulge. In my view, reviews are there to give other readers information to help them decide whether or not to read that particular book. A review doesn’t have to be clever or fancy, or even particularly long. It’s just there to say – I read this book, this is how it made me feel, and these are a few words about what to expect if you also read this book.
Authors who also write reviews are in a tricky spot, as anything that looks like a review swap is extremely frowned on by Amazon, but I like writing an occasional review as it helps me to look outside my comfort zone and to read wider. So I’ll very carefully get back to reviewing and enjoying it in the near future.
I’d love to know what you think about ARC reading, reviews and this article, so feel free to drop a note in the comments. This article was written with the use of em dashes but without any sort of AI assistance.
This is another part of my series about Research and the Author. I’ve talked about time and variable sunsets, finding information about an unfamiliar location 3000 miles away and some of the pitfalls around places in Victorian London. This week, I’m taking Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn out of Victorian London as they chase the vampiric Count Dominic.
For convenience, the date is the same 10th November 1875. It’s still useful to keep this in mind as a date can make all the difference. For example, if Count Dominic is preying on the people of the East Coast of the United States then it’s good to have the detail. Railways were being built, towns were being founded and the Mississippi River changed course dramatically at Vicksburg in April 1876. And while it will be obvious to any Americans reading that not all of the states in the USA came into being at the same time, it’s good for the rest of us to remember that in 1875 while Nebraska was a state, Colorado wasn’t quite there yet and became a state 1st August 1876.
And it’s also good to put in a reminder that this is fiction. The story is about two valiant vampire hunters and a vampire. It’s not about real things. If the research gets in the way of a good story, junk the research.
Let’s start with Count Dominic. He’s leaving London for places abroad – but where? There were a lot of options from London which was at the heart of a huge communications network at the time. If he was heading to Canada or the United States he could sail from Liverpool. The main train line to Liverpool from London has its terminus at Euston Station, London. If the dastardly count was headed to Europe, he would head for either Charing Cross or Victoria to get one of the boat trains that are organised to take passengers from London to places like Amsterdam, Brussels or Paris. Paris would be the perfect place to catch the luxurious Orient Express, but it didn’t start until 1883.
The real problem with research is that it can take you to strange places. I can’t even remember what I was looking for, but I found that for most of the nineteenth century, maps of Africa included a mountain range called The Mountains of Kong. It’s a wonderful name, deep in the jungles and forests of West Africa, near the source of the Niger River and close to the relatively well known Ivory Coast and Gold Coast. I have an atlas that I inherited from my great great aunt
which she dated 1898 but which I suspect was printed earlier. It has this map.
And if you zoom in, you can see the mountains – very faintly.
A comment from OneVikingGirl, who has a Baedeker, has left me deeply envious as I would love something so informative about travel at the time. I purchased a Times Gazetteer of the World 1899 edition a few years back. I bought it from eBay when under the influence of alcohol and it cost a fortune in postage.
I checked if it had a reference to the Mountains of Kong, and it did – it reported that it was a mistake, that someone had once believed that the mountains were there but in 1899 people knew the Mountains of Kong didn’t exist. At least, those with up to date maps. And those who thought that the new maps were just hiding a great lost city stuffed with gold. Or those who had heard travellers’ tales about these Mountains.
People love strange travellers’ tales. Back in the Middle Ages, stories of Prester John told tales about lands with dog headed men and people without souls. The conquistadors and adventurers who sailed to Central and South America came back with stories of El Dorado and Pirate Islands. The nineteenth century was no exception, and as more and more people became literate and had access to books and libraries, those tales were in desperate demand. Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1872, was incredibly popular and there are five separate versions in Project Gutenberg. Later books in the same adventuring flavour are King Solomon’s Mines (1885) by H Rider Haggard, The Lost World (1912) by Arthur Conan Doyle and Tarzan of the Apes (also 1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I read Tarzan of the Apes when I was far too young to deal with the racism, misogyny and dubious interpretation of the Theory of Evolution. I loved the adventure, though, and wondered about lost cities, forgotten kingdoms and strange worlds. If you are taking the flavour of an adventure, perhaps it’s good to remember that while everyone loves an adventure story, some ideas need to stay firmly in the past.
Now that I know that there is a reference to fabled and non-existent mountains, I have to send Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn there. How could I resist? I know that boats sail from Southampton to South Africa at the time, where diamonds were discovered in 1867 (gold was discovered later) so there would be ships along the West Coast of Africa. Some may have called in to supply missionaries, traders and forts along the coast. Looking at a grossly inappropriately named map which you can find here, but I feel uncomfortable sharing, even if it was normal to use those terms back in 1736
The mountains shown at the top appear to be the fabled Mountains of Kong. They aren’t labelled but there are no mountains in that area on the current Google Maps. Looking at the combination of this elderly map and current Google maps, the best course of action, from my point of view, is to get a ship to St Louis in Senegal which was a French colony at the time. Then Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn could sail along the Senegal River to where it joins the Niger River, and then, at the right moment, head north to the mountains, no doubt silhouetted against the tropical evening sky.
Image from WikiCommons in the public domain and a wonderful pic of the actual Senegal River near St-Louis
St-Louis is near the Tropic of Cancer and going back to the old variable sunset, the sunset on 10th November is 6.33pm, no doubt hauntingly beautiful and strange to the English lord and his awestruck companion. Looking at weather averages for St-Louis, it is going to be hot but dry. Rain rarely falls during November and the temperature range is from 21C to 34C but is most likely around 28C or 82F. It isn’t exactly the depths of the Sahara Desert, but it’s an arid, hot area. It’s hard to imagine a vampire heading to a desert. Apart from anything else, prey would be scarce for the bloodthirsty Count Dominic. My research has led me down a dead end street. I love those mountains, but I can’t imagine sending a vampire there. Perhaps they may go back later for a different adventure. As it is, this is a great example of too much research leading the story astray. It won’t work.
For now, Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn arrive at Southampton only to find that the dastardly count has misled them. He’s not heading to those fabled, deserted mountains. He’s headed somewhere else. That mission can wait. Next week I’ll share some ideas of locations for Kurt the Barbarian and Gwendolyn the Healer in the fantasy city of Tarsh.
In the first of this series on research, I wrote about the manly Kurt and the sweet Gwendolyn in three different settings. The first was a modern day romance, the second was Victorian vampire hunters and the third was a fantasy adventure, and I talked about how timings like sunset could vary and why keeping it consistent could support the plot. After all, if Kurt is escorting Gwendolyn through autumnal fallen leaves on Monday, it needs a very good reason for him to be meeting her under spring blossom on Tuesday.
In the second of this series, I had a quick browse around an unfamiliar location where Kurt and Gwendolyn could enjoy a gentle romance in a current setting. It’s unnervingly easy to find out menus for restaurants that are around 3000 miles away.
This time I want to write about the issues an author can have if they’re writing alternative history, such as steampunk. If you are an author writing an historically accurate work, then you already know far more about research than I do. In those settings, details matter. However, in alternative history, it’s not quite as important to be immaculately correct. Instead, the author can insist that the detail may not apply to our world, but it’s like that in his work of fiction. There are pitfalls, however, when writing about the past, and it’s worth being aware.
In the first article, our heroes were chasing vampires in the foggy heart of London in 1875, and I’ll keep to that. And the first important note is that modern maps can’t be completely trusted. If you look at an online map of London today, you can see all sorts of details about roads and houses and features. It’s a great resource if you are going to visit, and a lot of London is exactly the same as it always was. The Tower of London is in the same place that William the Conqueror left it, and Buckingham Palace is still suffering bad feng sui at the end of the Mall. However a lot has happened to the city between 1875 and now. London was badly affected by bombing between 1940 and 1945, but it was even more damaged by the reconstruction, urban renewal and modern architecture that followed. If a detail of a road or building is important to the story, it’s best to check that things were the same back in 1875.
Let’s set the scene. It’s 10th November 1875. The fog is falling heavily and the streets are shrouded in a typical London Peasouper. Our valiant vampire hunters are stalking the bloodthirsty Count Dominic through the lamplit streets. Count Dominic sweeps his way out of a theatre where he has been charming the lords and ladies of high society and heads for the sordid slums of the East End of London. There are a number of contemporary maps around for London online but I’m going to use current Google Maps (other online maps are available) for ease of reference and to avoid getting sucked down my usual rabbit holes of research. I don’t know London well in real life, but I’m not letting that stop me.
Embarrassingly, I wasn’t sure where exactly the West End of London was in relation to the East End, so I put ‘West End, London’ into the search bar and found it. According to the map, it’s near the Ritz, the Savoy and the Embankment and includes Covent Garden and Soho. As this is not an exam under test conditions, I’m not going to stick rigidly to the area shown by the map, but it’s a start. I zoomed in and looked for theatres. The Garrick Theatre looked promising, but according to its website, it wasn’t opened until 1889. As this is fiction with vampires, I don’t have to stick to that. However, the reason I stick to things like dates is so that if I go back to theatres later on in the story, I don’t need to remember which ones I’ve made up, which ones I’ve opened ‘early’ and where I’ve put the dratted things. I can just quickly check online on the sites and move on. It’s laziness, but it’s also efficient.
I scrolled around a little more and found the Lyceum Theatre. This was a little better, as it had been on or near that spot since 1765. I had a quick look at the website, then went on to Wikipedia. That’s when I realised that I had been lucky. Not only did it talk about the famous Victorian actor, Henry Irving, being resident at the theatre, but Bram Stoker was a business manager there. The author of Dracula worked at that theatre! Now that I know that snippet, I have to use the Lyceum Theatre. According to Wikipedia, Bram Stoker started work there in 1878, three years after Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn are creeping through dark places, but perhaps he heard stories. Or I can fudge the dates as long as I remember what I’ve done. Looking around for locations has helped with plot and story ideas and that’s the useful side of research.
Back to the locations – how far is it from the Lyceum Theatre to, say, Whitechapel? It’s around three miles, which isn’t very far, certainly not for the vampiric Count Dominic. But if it’s a dark, foggy night with the cold creeping in, it’s quite a way for the intrepid Lord Kurt and the dauntless Miss Gwendolyn. They could get a hansom cab, but would a cab driver be willing to take them down Whitechapel Road at that time of night? If it’s useful for the story, then Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn can absolutely rattle through the dark streets behind a horse and driver. But perhaps they take the Underground with trains running underneath London?
Trains are tricky. Lots of people are really keen on trains and are willing to share their knowledge with the flimsiest of excuses. If you get details about trains wrong without a good reason in the plot, there may be complaints. The nearest underground station to the Lyceum Theatre is the Temple, and Lord Kurt could stride in and purchase tickets there without any problem as it opened in 1870. If he wanted to go to Whitechapel Station, however, he would have something of a wait as it didn’t open until 1884. It’s going to have to be a chase by hansom cab.
The slums of the East End of London were notoriously cramped, crowded and difficult to navigate, full of alleys and small yards. I personally wouldn’t try and use the exact streets of the East End in fiction. The chances of getting things wrong are a little too high for me even if I could find a decent map of the correct date, and it would take far too long to be completely accurate. Instead, I would focus on the things that I know that I could get wrong and that people would easily notice. That includes things like – is Whitechapel north or south of the River Thames? If Miss Gwendolyn is searching through documents in the British Museum (Reading Room opened in 1857), is it easy for Lord Kurt to hurry back to her from a meeting with a German professor, Dr Ernst Baum, at the Reform Club (the starting point of Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, published in 1872).
And taking inspiration from Jules Verne, perhaps Dr Baum has news that Count Dominic has left London and travelled abroad for his own dark reasons. In the next article, I’ll discuss the pitfalls of charting Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn’s journey away from the well-trodden paths of Victorian London and into the wider world.
I’d love to hear what you think, and if I’ve made any mistakes I would seriously love to know as it will help me learn. Thank you for reading and I hope that you enjoyed this
In the last post, I talked about Gwendolyn, our soft and sweet heroine, and Kurt, our strong jawed hero, meeting at a very variable sunset. You can read about it here, as I discussed the effect time could have on their meetings. Now let’s talk about place.
I feel more comfortable describing places that I know or are close to what I know. For the purposes of this article, however, I’m going to push outside my comfort zone and show how I pursue research in unfamiliar places. But let’s keep to the sweet Gwendolyn and the manly Kurt.
Starting with the modern day romance, let’s head to the United States. I’ve never been and I don’t expect I’ll be lucky enough to travel there in the near future, so I’m almost going in blind. I’ve picked up bits from films, tv, social media and books, so I have a place to start and it could be worse. This is a great point to find all the bits that I’ve got wrong and point them out in a kindly way.
I thought I’d pick a place in Maine and randomly chose Machias as a reference point. Because I’m unfamiliar with the area and don’t want to get into trouble, I’m going to give a fake name but use the town as a starting point to look up climate, sunset times, seasons, languages and all that fun stuff. I’ll use Morley as the name of the town, picked at random after a quick check on the internet to make sure that there isn’t actually a place called Morley, Maine, USA. As in the last article, we’ll use 10th November as a starting point as Gwendolyn first meets Kurt at sunset. Sunset at East Machias (just down the road from Machias, and a point on the Time and Date website but with far fewer houses) on 10th November is 4.06pm so Gwendolyn has just popped out from her work at the local library as it starts to get dark.
The local library has been in existence since the early 1800s according to its website, with the first catalogue printed in 1843. As an author who breaks out in supernatural unless I’m very careful, having old and possibly haunted things around is useful. There doesn’t seem to be many staff according to the website but I’m writing fiction so Gwendolyn has left her good friend Becky in charge as she leaves to do something – but what? I’ve checked the map on Google (other internet maps are available) and there is a USPS post office right across the street. Gwendolyn is obviously picking up a parcel for the library. By checking the map I’ve given Gwendolyn a reason to be crossing the road around the time of sunset to bump into the manly Kurt, and the delay of their first encounter means that she misses the pick up time at the post office (closes at 4pm according to their website). This gives me conflict and interactions to play with straight away.
Kurt has just bought a local auto repair shop and has called into town. Checking on the map, there is a cemetery a little further down the road. Perhaps he was on his way there to visit the grave of an ancestor when he bumped into Gwendolyn for the first time and was dazzled by her loveliness. He may wonder if he could see her again and if so, where could he take her on a date? According to the local Chamber of Commerce, there are no festivals on in November (the Wine and Beer Tasting Festival in October looks fun, though) but there is a local Chinese restaurant that does Shrimp Lo Mein for $13 which may be good.
Just by picking a location, having a rummage around and playing with ideas I have found all sorts of possible starts to a story. What is more, I’ve found out all this information without leaving my very comfortable chair at my home in Leeds. You should never put the research and detail before the story. If you feel that Kurt would like to take Gwendolyn to an Italian restaurant but can’t find one on the map – invent it! You are telling a story, not swearing an oath in court. The story always comes first. However, if you take time to look around a location, it can be a wonderful boost to the start of a story and a great store of inspiration.
I’ll go into historical locations in the next article.
The reason for doing research is so that you don’t look like an idiot.
The reason that you stop doing research is to avoid boring your reader and losing your sanity.
You should only research when it makes life easier for you.
In my opinion, when you are starting a piece of fiction, when should be a question that is asked early in the process. If you nail down that time then you make life a lot easier for yourself.
Let’s consider a sweet and gentle heroine, Gwendolyn, and a strong jawed hero, Kurt. They first meet during a magical moment at sunset. In the soft glow of the fading light, they smile and perhaps their hands touch as they part and go their separate ways towards… towards what?
I live in Leeds, UK. If they met today, 21st June, at the end of my street (possibly the least romantic place in the world), sunset would be 9.40pm. She could be wearing a floating dress and cute sandals while he would be wearing jeans and a tight t-shirt that of course showed off his manly muscles. They would part and go towards their separate beds. However if they met, say, on March 21st, then sunset would be 6.20pm and they would be going back to their evening pursuits, perhaps in snug sweaters and waterproof jackets. Gwendolyn will be embroidering a picture for a friend and Kurt will be rebuilding a motorbike. And if that first, tingling meeting was on 21st December then sunset would be at 3.46pm and they would be rushing home for their evening meal. They are wearing warm boots and scarves. Gwendolyn’s meal probably involves a cupcake while Kurt is definitely having steak.
Most readers will probably not go around marking in pencil the different times of day and keeping track. On the other hand, those who notice that Gwendolyn and Kurt are suffering from irregular sunsets will find it incredibly annoying. Having a sunset at 5pm one day and 8pm the next isn’t great continuity and could jar if it’s noticed. It may not only stop them reading the book, it could stop them recommending the book and, worse, stop them buying more of your work.
It doesn’t matter if you are on the exact second. To a normal mortal like me, I couldn’t tell you the exact minute that the sun sets as I’m going about my daily life. I just know that the sun sets later on some days than on others and hang out my washing accordingly. When I’m writing, however, I know that I can use a rough rule of thumb to know whether the exciting chase through the woods is in dappled sunshine (which makes it harder to spot the dropped clue in the light and shade) or in darkness (which makes it easier for the dastardly ambusher to creep up on them).
Setting the time based on the present is one thing, but how about having Gwendoline and Kurt battling Victorian Vampires. They are creeping around 19th century London, valiantly stalking the bloodsuckers. If the vampires struggle with daylight, knowing when the sun is likely to set is really important and, fortunately, sunrise and sunset times stay roughly the same for millennia. You can look up the times for this year and apply them whenever. In this scenario, the year is the important detail.
Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. She died in 1901. That’s roughly 64 years, or the difference between 2023 and 1959. A lot of stuff happened in science, industry and politics and many people know enough about that time to quibble. If the characters are huddled together under a streetlight, is it powered by gas (from the 1820s) or electric (in general use from around 1878)? And as Lord Kurt has one manly arm around the fainting Miss Gwendolyne, does his other hand hold a Colt Walker (introduced 1847), a Colt Peacemaker (1873) or a Colt New Service (1898). While someone in 1898 could absolutely be using a well-maintained Colt Walker or even a blunderbuss, it’s slightly harder to have a Colt New Service in 1847, but that depends on the plot.
In general, on the whole and by and large, it doesn’t matter too much. If you are getting complaints, you can look the critic firmly in the eye and tell them, ‘It’s like that in my world.’ After all, vampires aren’t real, so what does it matter if a young Charles Dickens is using a commercial typewriter? If you want to give your story authentic bones (with room to fudge a year or two if the plot needs it – plot comes first) then if you pick a date at the start then you can always look up information as you feel you need it. Perhaps Bram Stoker writes Dracula after learning about vampires in a chance encounter with Gwendolyn and Kurt. Dracula was published in 1897, so let’s have the story set in 1875. That means that Kurt can have a shiny new Colt Peacemaker and Gwedonlyn will be wearing rigorous corsets and a bustle. And as you rattle through their amazing adventures, if you are in doubt, you can just have a quick look to see what was around in 1875, fiddle with stuff to make the plot work and carry on.
Fantasy writing is not too different when it comes to time. You may be creating a new world that is stuffed with elves and goblins and magic, but if you do a little bit of research at the start, you can make life a lot easier for yourself.
Kurt the Barbarian may be meeting the sweet Gwendolyn the Healer in the fabled city of Tarsh, but unless you feel like worrying about planetary physics, you can use the same rules for their daylight hours. Are they meeting as the sun sets and the gates of the city are closing? You can absolutely use the prosaic timings of Leeds. Perhaps it’s winter, and the sun dips below the Virnoth Mountains early and Kurt the Barbarian, resplendent in his furs, wraps a warm woollen cloak around Gwendolyn the Healer before leading her to a sustaining meal in a local inn. Or is it later in the year and the hot summer winds are swirling up from the plains of Redumar as the incense rises from the temples on the soft evening air.
By the way, did you know that sunrise and sunset are different depending on where in the world you are? Let’s take a sunset on 10th November. In Leeds, where the modern day romance between Kurt and Gwendolyn is progressing nicely, the sun sets at 4.16pm. If you are being extremely detailed, the Victorian Vampire Hunters in London have sunset at 4.18pm on November 10th (and the chance of those two minutes being significant is extremely small). But perhaps Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn have followed the vampires across Europe to the capital of Romania. Sunset at Bucharest on November 10th is at 4.54pm. But wait, the fanged fiend has fled to an unexpected lair in Hong Kong. As they scull across the bustling harbour on that fateful 10th November, the sun sets at 5.41pm. Alas, they miss their chance, and the bloodthirsty Count is now in Santiago, Chile. November 10th is late spring or early summer in the Southern Hemisphere and as Lord Kurt escorts Miss Gwendolyn into the International Exposition in the Quinta Normal grounds, they fear that the sunset at 8.18pm will awaken their nemesis.
This may all seem like a lot of research, but it’s just a few clicks on the internet and then you have some bones to hang your story on. If you choose 10th November in Leeds for the modern romance between Kurt and Gwendolyn then you can use the run up to Christmas with the city Christmas lights, the displays in Roundhay Park and all the Christmas shopping events as easy ways to frame their encounters as the story progresses. And if Lord Kurt and Miss Gwendolyn are searching Victorian London, it’s so much easier to know if a London Underground station would be open in a particular area if you can just check the history pages of a website for 1875 rather than worrying about making something up and then contradicting that two chapters later. And surely it’s easier to remember if Kurt the Barbarian and Gwendolyn the Healer are battling ice or heat waves if you have nailed down an equivalent real world date. After all, you don’t want the heat of the summer sun shining on the gilded domes of Tarsh if you’ve described the snow storm two paragraphs and three hours earlier.
My opinion is that a reader wants to know about the characters and the plot. The most important thing is absolutely the story. I believe that it’s easier for a reader to savour your wonderful writing if those minor, background details work together, support the story and help things flow. And if research gets in the way of the story – junk the research!
Spellcheck has been around for decades and I’ve been grumbling about people failing to use it for at least that long. To my limited knowledge, it’s been around since long before AI was being talked about anywhere but science fiction. These days, though, I think that AI is fairly heavily involved, but you still sometimes need a human to check for the tricky there, their, they’re type typos.
I sort of believe in Spellcheck. I feel that it’s important to treat a reader with respect, and that includes giving them a fighting chance of understanding what you’ve written. Spellcheck can help with that, but it’s far from perfect. For example, while I was in the throes of writing ten thousand words in twenty-four hours (would not recommend) my typing was sloppy and I kept typing ‘no’ instead of ‘on.’ This was not helpful to either the writing or my state of mind and it would not have been picked up by spellcheck. You may mean to write something erudite and elegant, but you could easily end up with something like, The inventor of autocorrect has died. The funnel will take place tomato if you’re not careful. It does, however, have its place, particularly when I was writing Digging up the Past and kept spelling archaeological wrong.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I’m trying to get the stories from the White Hart together in a complete edition, all two hundred and sixty thousand words of it. I opened the document and I swear that the word processer creaked. As some of it was published over ten years ago, I’ve gone over parts of this plenty of times and I don’t expect to find many issues, but there are chapters that haven’t been properly checked and some dates from before I learned how to punctuate speech correctly and some could really do with a long look in the cold light of day, so I clicked on the editor in Word, which I’m sure is AI, and sat back.
It took some time to think about the document, which was perfectly reasonable. There was a hint of a nervous breakdown as the programme went through some of the names, but it wasn’t too much of a problem. Then I clicked on the Grammar check.
I have issues with grammar. On the whole, I’d say that I was okayish. I’m not afraid to look things up and I’ve spent some time learning the rules but I’m not confident. I had an appalling education. I was unlucky to go to primary school when they were trying out new ways of teaching young kids, and the way it worked at my primary school, well, it didn’t work very well at all. I had a great time. There were loads of colouring books and fun toys and then, when I got home, I got to spend fun one-on-one time with my parents who carefully taught me the basics of reading, writing and numbers. Until I was around fourteen, my sources of education were my parents, who thought I was being taught at school, tv documentaries, and the Readers Digest. Grammar trailed far behind more colourful information, as I read about dinosaurs, plant identification, and history, and ruthlessly raided my grandfather’s collection of encyclopaedias from around 1912.
When I clicked on the Grammar check, I winced at over a thousand notifications, but I wasn’t surprised and I settled down to work through them. I accepted a lot of the suggestions at first. After all, I thought, this was an official programme and I had spent most of my life getting speech marks wrong. As I went on, however, I became less sure. I started arguing with the dratted programme about commas. This Grammar checker seemed to want to strew commas over my work with a generous hand and I wasn’t sure it was right. Some of the commas made no sense at all. I should have made notes on what I found, because some of what the computer wanted was hilarious. In the end, I reluctantly decided that I would have to revisit the grammar by meticulously checking through the document myself, including all of the commas.
Did you know that there’s a handy function on Word where you can click on ‘Find,’ put in a word or symbol and it will flag all instances. I opened up ‘Find,’ inserted comma in the search box and the computer whirred, grumbled and then told me that there were six thousand, six hundred and change of them in this darned document. I said some very rude words.
I like to think of this as a learning moment. I learned that I couldn’t trust the Grammar checker. It was forcing edits that would have either made no sense, changed the meaning of the sentence or made me look like an idiot. I know now that I need to go back over the document with a fine-toothed comb, with particular attention to commas. Most importantly, I’ve learned never to start such a damn fool project again.
I may or may not be digging out my copy of English Grammar for Dummies for a refresher.
It may be a while before I get Tales from the White Hart, the Complete Edition but it will happen. I’m not letting a Grammar programme beat me. And for now, I’ll keep trundling along and doing my best. If you spot any spelling or grammar mistakes, please let me know. I’d rather get things right. Though there is a risk of me arguing about commas.
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