Purchas continues.

[poliphilo]

The novel- Purchas- has been running a week.

I started off with a single idea. I wanted to explore the life of an Immortal. I decided that my hero(ine) would be a child who swallows the elixir of life by accident.

And that's all I knew when I started to write.

I set myself the task of posting it in daily installments on LJ. The first week's worth are on display now at purchas. I'm afraid the format dictates that one has to read from the bottom up. Sorry about that. It's rather jerky, but there you go....

The novel is part fantasy, part history. The year is 1482 and all the details are, so far as I can make them (thank you, thank you, Google!) historically accurate.

I know what happens next. Just about. At present I have two or three installments in hand. What happens further on is very, very cloudy. But I trust my characters. They will tell me how their story is meant to go. I have the feeling that the entire saga already exists, in some form, somewhere, and that it's being unveiled to me bit by bit.

I don't know how long I'll keep it up. I envisage the present novel running for 60,000+ words and after that there'll still be 500 years to go. But whether I write the sequels is hardly up to me. If Purchas wants to tell me about her post-medieval adventures she will, and if she doesn't she won't. But I've let her know that I'm very, very eager to learn about her meetings with Cagliostro and the Count de St Germain in Paris in the 1770s...

Comments

[silversmoke.livejournal.com]

If you're interested -- I believe that several of the styles have the option to show the friends page with the least recent entry first (I know, for instance, that "Smooth Sailing" does). If you have the Purchas journal friend itself, you can allow new readers to read from the beginning, while the rest of us can still read it as it comes along.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'll have to experiment. It would be good to have a copy on line which ran in the proper sequence.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

If you click on a <lj user="purchas" link, you go straight the journal. If you click on "calendar" at the top, and then click on the first entry, you can read that, click "next" and read the second, and so on.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Oh, gosh, what a mess I made of the first post. Let me try again.

Click on this link: purchas. Then select "calendar view." Click the first date, January 3. From there you can just keep clicking "next day" and read things in sequence.

The first day you skip will probably break the spell.