Blog Post for September 8, 2023
It has been the most work I’ve had to spend on a project in years!
For the next chapter of Murder’s Row, I tracked the main protagonist’s, or Jack’s, movements throughout the story so far and to a new location relevant to the story (which you can find out more when Chapter 2 — Part 1 comes out).
What I did was use Oldmapsonline.org to find a map of London circa 1830 (a few years outdated, but that would still work fine), and by using the “Compare” feature of the website, I was able to toggle the map’s opacity with what has historically taken its place in modern-day London, then find that approximate location on Google Earth. Once I did that, I plotted “placemarks” to the Google Earth map on those approximate locations, places like the beginnings and endings of streets, etc., until I plotted the entire journey of Jack Gilligan and Robert Finnley from the “Docklands to the East” as I depicted in the first chapter of my story up till they reach the imaginary façade of the inn owned by William ‘Archie’ Scott, Jr. (You can see on the collage above this journey as its placemarks are colored light blue.)
I then was able to use these placemarks to get a precise latitude/longitude location, from which I put in order of which came first on their walk, then by using a distance calculator for latitude/longitude locations, I was able to get an approximate distance for each leg of Jack and Finnley’s walk. I also did this with the next leg of his journey, which I detail in Chapter 2 (so definitely remember to go check it out if it has already come out).
From here, (I know, there are a lot of steps in here;) I multiplied the distance they both walked with the average walking speed for humans, and voila, I finally had the time it should’ve taken for Jack to get from the Docklands to the East to the imaginary location of where William ‘Archie’ Scott Jr.’s inn is, which I recently decided to start calling the Wullavear Inn.
A similar mathematical operation I did for the next leg of Jack’s journey, which takes place in a stagecoach (or something like it), but instead of multiplying the distance by the normal human walking speed, I multiplied the distance by the average speed of a horse-drawn carriage appropriate for that time period, which according to Wikipedia is about 10mph. (You can see on the collage above the route taken by the horse-drawn carriage as the placemarks for its journey are colored red.)
That said, the reason for doing all of this work to begin with is with the intent of finding out how long Jack’s walk with Finnley takes place, and after that, how long the journey Jack takes in the future installment of the story via the horse-drawn carriage. This I could finally use to tell what time it is in the story at each interval something important takes place in the story, with a starting time coming from Chapter 1 of the story again, where I specified that “it is approaching noon” in London when Jack first arrives there. This I decided to simply estimate as being approximately 12:00 pm on the day that he arrives to the Docklands to the East (in London).
The “Docklands to the East” is actually supposed to be St. Katherine Dock, but because I was unsure of where passenger ships docked up in London historically during that time when I initially wrote Chapter 1, I just decided to be as vague as possible for it to still work with the story. Similarly, I had to find a practical location to put the Wullavear Inn for it to match what I wrote in Chapter 1 that it was “located on the north side of the city’s Center” while also being in line with the fact that one of the building’s edges “is adjacent to another street which intersects the street it lines” and for which shares a continuous façade with the other buildings along the same side of the street. (Are you getting confused, because I sure might be! But all jokes aside, if you are getting confused, why not read Chapter 1 of Murder’s Row right now so you don’t have to be. No hate truly if you haven’t already ;) )
That concludes this week’s blog update. I hope you, the reader, anticipate as much as I do when I am able to release my next installment of Murder’s Row (that being Chapter 2 — Part 1), but for right now, I am still hashing out some of the specifics of it (but still making progress). Thanks anyways if you have read this far into my blog.
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