Ok, my first blog. My intention is that these are at least monthly as part of my strategy to write this novel by setting goals and deadlines, but if you find it useful or interesting too then this is also good.
This is my progress to date:
I’ve completed the log of my Kenyan quest to find a remote farmhouse on the slopes of Mt. Elgon on the Kenyan Ugandan border. The journey is seen through the lens of a somewhat distant personality from the past, my grandmother, and her life. I see much of this log as back-story to weave into the book. The story is also my journey – the people I met, the ‘then and now’ environment, the smells and sheer fun of the detective work.
The detective work has continued: (1) The search could have been narrowed down if I had known that the owners of KK in 1962 were the Kerrs, that farm had become a dairy and that this dairy had since burnt down including the trees. (2) The letters make more sense. Of course she does write in shorthand because her father knew the context – as do I now I have been there – eg I now know that 1820/1 is a land registry number. (3) I also heard from Orie Rogo Manduli, who texted the history of her farm and provided another piece in the jigsaw. She also has promised to get me the title history of other farms.
Unfortunately much of the new information is back-to-front and received after I needed to know it. I knew this was a much used device to create suspense and storyline in ‘who dunnit’ fiction, but I now know it is the everyday experience of detectives.
Background reading goes on apace. I’m reading. The current books are Karen Blixen’s Letters From Africa 1914 – 1931, CS Nicholls Red Strangers and Julian Huxley Africa View.
Going forward:
I want to shift the distant lens to include the close up lens of today and coincidentally a friend sent me an article on John Quincy Adams by James Traubmarch. In the article Traubmarch considers the relevance of Adams today and his different moral stance based on Plato and Aristotle, and a fixed cosmos — compared to our philosophical outlook today underpinned by Darwin and Freud. After spending five years researching Adams for his book, Traubmarch concludes that Adams wasn’t like us at all. We don’t want to know what Cicero stood for to help us decide what we should stand for. We want to know what Cicero was like and what shaped him.
This set me thinking. The difference between a British Edwardian woman and a modern woman isn’t just the solar topee and clothing. It isn’t that one of them doesn’t say ‘okay’. It’s that they think differently to us today. Even such basic things as the perception of distance and the size of the world are different. If you wanted to get to Mombasa by sea in 1924, it took three weeks, via the Suez Canal or longer round the Cape. Astronauts to the Space Station orbiting the earth take 10 hours to get there (and hours to actually dock) and the Space Station takes 92.69 minutes to orbit the earth.