i've been downhearted baby ever since the day we met

I spent all day working on the book. I took a break around two p.m. to get a couple of things from Whole Foods and pick up a prescription, then got back to the grind for a few hours before calling my parents while making dinner. We spent an hour catching up rather bleakly; I'll be glad when the election is over. Then I ate my delicious potato-leek soup and portioned up the rest to freeze, before getting back to the book and working on it until now.

My major task for today was to make a comprehensive outline of the book. This was necessary for a couple of reasons: 1) I have to write a synopsis for the contest I'm entering, and most agents also require synopses, so that's the final step after I finish the manuscript itself; and 2) it was useful to distill the 400 pages of manuscript into a 13-page outline so that I could see whether the plotlines hang together and whether the individuals' internal monologues are consistent throughout the book.

It turns out I'm pretty happy with it; the additions that I've made over the last couple of weeks have helped to make Malcolm's motivations clearer at the beginning, and I know what I need to add/extend/change at the end to make the final emotional climax more satisfying. I think this can be accomplished with one new scene + added details in a couple of other scenes, and I've earmarked where those details need to go, so adding them in should be fairly easy.

But because my brain was already a little fried from the outlining exercise, I spent the evening wrapping up the research on the few remaining historical details (like when Princes Street in Edinburgh was constructed, what kinds of shoes men wear with their kilts, whether mahogany furniture was popular in the 1800s, etc.) I also spent some quality time with my name books -- I realized that Fiona wasn't popular until after 1840, and I had never given a full name to Ferguson, so I set out to remedy both of those issues. Ferguson is now William Avenel Ferguson Stafford, earl of Rothwell (although he doesn't use the title and only goes by Ferguson because he hates his English father, the duke of Harwich), and his sister (formerly Fiona) is now Elinor "Ellie" Claiborne, marchioness of Folkestone.

Names are weird; I was trying to come up with a ridiculous name for a v. minor character, went to the Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, and stumbled upon Godfrey. I thought, 'perfect!', and for some reason thought that 'Godfrey Huggins' sounded like a great name. I did due diligence, Googled it, and discovered that Godfrey Huggins was 1st Viscount Malvern, and the governor of Southern Rhodesia. I'd read up on Rhodesia a few months ago, so I guess the name embedded itself in my mind even if I never in a million years would have remembered it of my own accord. It's a good thing I Googled it, though, or else the five other people in the world who know that he was the governor of Southern Rhodesia would have been most upset.

Okay, I really need to go to bed. For those of you who have emailed me and I haven't gotten back to you -- I'll catch up with you v. soon! I want to be done with the book in two weeks, and at that point I'll likely reemerge into society for a few weeks.