Recovery.

I missed last Monday by virtue of underestimating the amount of preparation I’d need to do for us to be ready to leave at 05:30 on the Tuesday morning.

You didn’t miss me, did you?

Thought not.

A Bit About Research.

Surprisingly little of what I could find was as useful as I had thought it might be. Without going into anywhere near enough detail to make this political one way or the other, I trawled what I could find on social media and then across the internet in general to get a flavor of the reactions to Dr. Ford’s allegations, particularly in the responses to her personally.

Victim Blaming.

I found nothing tangibly useful, but the process led me into attitudes toward victims in general. One thing that surprised me was how, according to a 2010 survey in London, women are less forgiving than men, more likely to blame the victim of a rape.

She was dressed provocatively.

She has a bad reputation.

She should have known better.

A Bit Of A Spoiler?

The reason I’ve been grappling with this is that, as you’ve probably guessed, The Old Man involves at least one victim. At the end of the day, the story revolves mostly around the issue of class. In at least one instance, however, it involves responses to a victim. These responses, the predicament, and the accusation leveled are demonstrably unjust but, just like in real life, the facts of the case are obscure, not only to the characters themselves but to the reader also.

So the responses need to be tempered and varied, but also have authentic counterparts in real life.

Progress Report.

We headed out bright and early last Tuesday morning, spent the whole day travelling, had four days to spend with family and then, yesterday, another whole day on the road coming home. During those four days I did make some progress.

What used to be Chapter One got bumped up to Chapter Two by the introduction of a new initial chapter, then while on vacation, working my way through it I noticed this chapter needed to be split into two also, resulting in everything following it needed to be renumbered.

Right now I’ve made it through to the closing part of the chapter – now Chapter Three – so I’d guess another thirty minutes or so of dedicated effort and I’ll be on to the next chapter. Since they’ve all been broken up there are now thirty-nine rather than fifteen chapters, although the last one has yet to be written. Each one is obviously smaller and shouldn’t take as long to revise.

Plans.

Once that’s done, I want to do a second read-through and a second revision. At this point I’m mostly happy with the plot, the changes I have in mind aren’t major rewrites, and I don’t anticipate any major rework after this revision, so I’m planning on the third iteration being beta-reader-ready.

Meantime, I still have a lot of work to do around the place. There’s the roof to fit on the rabbit barn, some rework to be done on the grading and then fitting the siding before moving the rabbits down there. Then there’s work to do preparing for chickens and sheep in the New Year, and the pantry to make into somewhat less of an enormous booby-trap.

It can all be done, I intend to do it.

Have a great week and hopefully, for a change, the next post won’t start with an excuse…

Categories: Research, Revision, The Old Man, Work Update