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Most of what follows is more for my benefit than yours...
I’ve been unusually quiet, I know, so sorry if I’ve missed anything and failed to comment on important stuff, I’m finding it hard to keep up here, lately – if anyone’s posted fic or anything else I should know about, perhaps you could let me know cause I might well have missed it.
I’ve been hard at work on the BOOK; done a ton of research and been getting to grips with the characters, learning their back-story – like Leese, who’s from a ‘deeply Anglicized family of Asian origins; public school, very middle class. She actually started life in a sitcom I wrote for the BBC a few years back though she was a lawyer then; now she’s a gothy PhD student; a former student of Angel’s - My characters are very adaptable. (o:
The other lodger, Claudia has been through a serious breakdown, been heavily into drugs, lived on the streets; Angel took her home one night, no questions asked and now she runs the house, makes sure there’s coal in the cellar and that everyone gets fed. I’m not sure about her background but she’s highly educated. I don’t think she has any family. I’m still working on Claudia.
I’ve mainly been setting the cosily domestic environment of the main character and occasional 1st person narrator, Angel – with his slippers and his specs and his cats. I now know his home, and the small nest egg he lives on, came from dead grandparents he never met.
The house is a big, Victorian villa by the river (on the Embankment, near the suspension bridge, if anyone here knows Bedford – I’m setting this in my old home town, the place where I grew up, but not definitively; I don’t think I’m giving the location a name). It has no garden; the space where the garden was is now a vast, elaborate conservatory that the grandparents erected when they came back from India. The house is a place of former glories, fading now – the conservatory has a few broken panes patched with plastic. I’ve been having fun with the interior décor and whathaveyou of this place since most of the action will take place inside or nearby.
The one I still don’t know all that well is the murder victim, Jess. What her connection is to Angel and how she came to be living there, still needs to be worked out.
The story is diverging from the original idea which focussed mainly on the supernatural side. It’s getting much more grounded in the mundane, the everyday – the characters as individuals and how they work together, with the supernatural goings-on becoming more background – Which is probably as it should be for Angel, who’s been living with this stuff all his life, and is running away from the intensity of it all. That’s still the crux of the story – why is it happening, how can we stop it? – but it’s less the focus; the focus is now on the people, not the thing. And ghosts are people too, of course. (o:
Anyway, it’s coming along and I’m pretty happy with the way it’s progressing. I’m aiming to start the actual writing for NaNo.
As for the rest…
Reading (and re-reading): The Secret History; The Subterraneans; The Blue Angel; The #1 Ladies Detective Agency.
Watching: Oz and James’ Big
Stopped watching: Journeyman, Life, Dirty Sexy Money.
Listening: - to a ton of Radio Four and
finally got to see ‘A Cock and Bull Story’ which I loved and Mark hated.
The fannish life has been taking a backseat lately, but I haven’t forgotten the fics.
I’ve done a ton of notes for the Rainbows sequel; I have every chapter all properly planned and sorted (how unlike me!) right through to the end, now - which is a genuine relief. (o: Hopefully, I can go on with that tonight because life gets sadly busy from tomorrow.
How about you, O Serene and Worshipful Flist? Pull up a chair, kick your slingbacks off, have a jammy dodger and tell me all about it…