With your kind encouragement, Gentle Reader, I present to you the occasional series . . .
Weird things from a writer’s search history!
A sampling of things I’ve done and researched the Finishing School series.
Tasks . . .
- Made an outline (failure)
- Made a mind map (success!)
- Drawn a massive dirigible schematic plan (Which made me get my Brambly Hedge books out of storage, great house plans in there)
- Clipped printed and sketched characters
- Noted additional world facts and thoughts
- Formulated more complete series arc
Researched
- Oil Paintings from 1814, any with blue dresses in them?
- Deadly plants that grow in England
- Events in 1852 London
- London Protocol (Treaty of 1852)
- Fashion in 1852
- Queen Victoria’s children and pregnancies
- Wicker Hassocks
- Evolution of Exams in Schools
- History of Wedgewood Pottery
- Internal schematics of early steamers
- Etymology of the slang term peepers.
- Serving tea & tea services
- Introduction of military elements into lady’s dresses in the 1850s (used English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century)
- Portraits in 1852
Opening of the season in London (family return just after Christmas, being associating in March, larger events begin in May) thank you What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew- A meal for mid March. (Things a Lady Would Like to Know March 16: Vermicelli Soup, Leg of Mutton and Current Jelly Sauce, Potatoes and Broccoli, Bakewell pudding)
- Ways to tie a narrow cravat
- Etymology of the word whizz
- Expense and toxicity of oil paints before 1900
- When did England officially abolish slavery? 1833
- How to spell turbot
- Location of British coalfields in the 19th century
- History of drinking straws
- Names of the parts of a piccolo
BOOK DE JOUR!
Curtsies & Conspiracies: Finishing School Book 2
PICK YOUR VENDOR!
Does one need four fully grown foxgloves for decorating a dinner table for six guests? Or is it six foxgloves to kill four fully grown guests?
Sophronia’s first year at Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality has certainly been rousing! For one thing, finishing school is training her to be a spy–won’t Mumsy be surprised? Furthermore, Sophronia got mixed up in an intrigue over a stolen device and had a cheese pie thrown at her in a most horrid display of poor manners.
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Quote of the Day:
“A book is to me like a hat or coat – a very uncomfortable thing until the newness has been worn off.”
~ Charles B. Fairbanks