Blog Post for August 26, 2023

Last update for this week, which will be a short one.

However, there are three new changes that I wanted to address in this post:

First, I added a very specific detail to the general location of the hotel that Jack is staying at during his visit to London.

The original quote where Jack is first introduced to the hotel, which I have decided to start calling the Wullavear Inn (though this is subject to change like just about everything in my story so far), goes as follows:

They walk some more until they reach the front of a building which is located on the north side of the city’s Center. The building is approximately 19–21 feet in width and is four stories high. In the front of the building, there is a line of iron fencing along the entirety of the front yard of the building but there is a section of the fencing which formed a gate-like entrance that remained open. Some feet behind the edges of the gate, there are two men dressed in security uniforms which Jack learned later was meant to stop anyone who looked like they didn’t belong from getting into the building.

For this specific change, I added the sentence: “The façade of the building is also contiguous with the other buildings’ façades that line the same street, and the building is adjacent to another street which intersects the street it lines” to the end of the paragraph. I was meaning to add this detail to my story originally, but for whatever reason, I forgot to include it.

I also stated in the first chapter how the Inn was located “on the north side of the city’s Center,” but I originally had found a physical location on old maps of London which I have mentioned previously come from Oldmapsonline.org, but I decided not to include the specific street names because the building I had chosen to be the Wullavear Inn didn’t look like the kind of building that you’d expect to house a luxury hotel in. I have found another location from said map, but at this point, I have begun contemplating just making up a fictitious location in between two locations which you could find on a map (if you were that obsessed with my story’s lore and whatnot. Wikipedia writers, I’m looking at you).

But regardless, I’m really passionate about making my story as believable as possible since it is meant to take place in a real city during a real time period. So anytime the main protagonist, Macklemore “Jack” Gilligan, and any other side characters in the story do something in the story, it should be based on real locations and/or relatable ideas to have come out of that time period.

The conversations Jack has with Finnley both about the increasing vagrant population in the city and the “crisis in our adolescence” as Finnley referred to it would have been prevalent ideas that were rooted in actual historical trends that unfolded during that time period in Great Britain. Just to give you an example, what were coined “Ragged Schools” became very popular beginning in the mid 1800s (1844 to be precise), and which originated in Scotland, then migrated south into England.

Briefly, the idea behind Ragged Schools was to take in children who experienced troubled lives with their respective guardians, many even who lived out on the streets or even without permanent guardians (I know, sad right?), to give them an vocational education and to teach them about the Bible. This comes from the fact that an increase in migration to urban areas like London, spurred on by advances in farming and manufacturing practices, led to a natural increase in population (what we now call urbanization).

I found a newspaper article from July of 1875 which states about the “Ragged School movement,”

The happy influence which had been wrought amid the densely populated and poverty-stricken purlieus of London since the dawn of the great Ragged School movement, thirty years ago, was simply incalculable.¹

The quote I got from researching these kinds of things earlier on many months ago that got me inspired to write about something that touched on all of these topics, even if gently.

My second update to the first chapter of my story is to explain that when I mention Bath Street in my first chapter, it should be Browns Lane instead. I got mixed up with the proper location in my initial quest to look for a location for the Wullavear Inn as I have already stated.

Lastly, I will now make a personal time limit for edits done to future installments of my story. As such, after 5 days of a new installment to my story going public, I will no longer be able to make changes to the constituency of the story. This comes, as you might be able to understand, after I made myself a goal to publish a new update by this Saturday (a.k.a., today), which has had me working late into the hours of the evening (writing this very post nevertheless), which I hear is just like how college is even though I never got that far in attending a higher education so I wouldn’t really know — But you get the point!

This should make making the story as consistent as possible more desirable for myself so as to not cause me to have to work myself this hard in the future.

Anyways, I thank anyone who is currently reading this far into my post, but I will need some time away from this project to re-adjust my life priorities when it comes to this whole project. I hope I can confidently say when the next chapter of this story will be able to come out, but until then, bye for now!

Sincerely your guy,

NLennel

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Thanks as always!

¹Tower Hamlets Independent and East End Local Advertiser, 17 July 1875, p. 3.