{"id":1061,"date":"2009-01-25T15:35:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-25T23:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2009\/01\/25\/first-draft\/"},"modified":"2009-01-25T15:35:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-25T23:35:00","slug":"first-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2009\/01\/25\/first-draft\/","title":{"rendered":"First Draft"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m starting the first draft a new novel today. CKL<\/span> asked me if it was going to be a Victorian. It’s not. So I said, “No!” in a horrified tone of voice. I was really surprised that he should ask me such a question.<\/p>\n

Then I remembered that I just finished reading What Jane Austen Ate and What Charles Dickens Knew<\/span> by Daniel Pool, and that I’m currently reading Daily Life in Victorian England <\/span>by Sally Mitchell. He’s seen me with those books. He was even in the room yesterday<\/span> when I started building my rural Victorian village in the Sims.<\/p>\n

I’ve been talking about the Victorians a lot lately, too. I find the differences in our lives mind-boggling. For example, A typical laborer might need to spend more than 1% of his weekly income if someone sent him a letter. Food was more than 60% of that same laborer’s weekly budget… if his family lived on oatmeal, bread-and-butter, potatoes, and ate meat only on Sunday. Housing was expected to be less than 10% of income.<\/p>\n

By comparison, I pay nothing to receive more stuff in the mail than I know what to do with. I eat meat almost every day, but I’m still offended if my food budget (not including restaurants) exceeds 10% of my income. And I feel like I’m getting away with something because our housing is only 20% of our monthly budget.<\/p>\n

Those are just the easy differences. I have difficulty imagining what it would be like to live without electricity, plumbing, or communications. And that’s nothing when I try to imagine getting married and no longer having ownership rights to anything that used to be mine, including my body.<\/p>\n

So I guess it wasn’t entirely unreasonable for CKL<\/span> to ask me if I was writing a Victorian novel. But I’m just playing around with the Victorians. They’re interesting and their world is alien to me.<\/p>\n

My new novel is much less interesting. It’s about a high school girl in a family of werewolves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m starting the first draft a new novel today. CKL asked me if it was going to be a Victorian. It’s not. So I said, “No!” in a horrified tone of voice. I was really surprised that he should ask…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[92,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deeann","category-writing"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}