MORE RESEARCH NEEDED

Start of the Day: 169,258
End of the Day: 171,422
Written: 2,164

Finished the chapter and have pretty much finished the Demi-Monde part of Book 3. Of course it now needs to be knocked into shape, slimmed down and polished but in essence it's finished.

Now I need to turn to the action taking place in the Real World and for that I need to take time out to read up on plagues! This will take ten days or so, so in the interim I'm just going to be reading through what I've written and critiquing it.

The amount of research I've needed to do for the Dem-Monde series came as something as a surprise.

The original idea for the Demi-Monde came after the first book of mine - Dark Charismatic - that John Jarrold handled on my behalf went the rounds of publishers. Dark Charismatic is my re-imagining of the Jekyll and Hyde story seen largely from the POV of Jekyll's wife, Margaret. Set in the year 1877 it portrays Jekyll as a much more ambitious character, his evil going far beyond a little localised murder and mischief. I thought it was pretty good but as no publishers were terribly interested (there's a lot of sex in it which might account for their nervousness) I suppose it wasn't. Anyway one of the rejections I received said something along the lines that the Victorian London I'd conjured wasn't authentic.

Now this, I've got to tell you, was a real downer. I'd spent months researching London of that era and thought I was well equipped to convey the attitudes, the morality and the speech patterns of the day. The problem was, I liked writing about this era, I like steampunk, so what was i to do?

The answer was to create my own Victorian world and that's how the Demi-Monde came into being. Being virtual reality it's by definition faux-Victorian and that gave me the lattitude to twist things around a bit.

And it seems to have worked out fine.