Since my blog has really morphed in a blog-novel, I thought I would make it easy to find out how this started and to link to the first chapter so that if you want to start at the beginning you don’t have to dig through the monthly archives to find Chapter 1. Click here to go straight to the first chapter.

I haven’t been as regular at writing these chapters as I would like to be, mainly due to the life-altering event of buying a house this summer. Hopefully after we’ve moved I’ll settle into a better pattern. Please feel free to leave comments and suggestions. It’s nice to know people are reading.

This is what I posted when I originally started:

Dear Readers,

I hope to shortly start posting daily excerpts of a novel (well hopefully daily – that may be overly ambitious but we’ll see). I was inspired to embark on this adventure by Alexander McCall Smith’s fabulous serialized novels, 44 Scotland Street and Espresso Tales. I haven’t gotten to read the third, Love over Scotland, yet. He was challenged by a newspaper to write a novel about Edinburgh in daily segments, just like writers like Dickens used to do. The books are fun, light-hearted but never meaningless and they follow the inhabitants of 44 Scotland Street.

After finishing my novel that I had mulled over for almost six years, I spent the last several months wondering if I would ever get a new idea and new characters. I could hardly imagine coming up with new characters after knowing my last ones for so long. But, after just recently finishing Espresso Tales, I thought that it would be so fun to try out this form of novel-writing and almost immediately I had my characters – six of them! All I needed was a four unit condo complex in downtown Edmonds. So I went on Redfin, my favourite real estate website and what do you know? There it was: a unit for sale at 515 Walnut Street, a four unit building. I was thrilled!

I haven’t prepped as much as I probably should, but in a way, I am viewing this as a writing exercise to help me develop the habit of writing daily. I have scoped out the condo building (ignoring the no trespassing signs for once in my life!) and spent some time figuring out what my six new characters look like. I hope you’ll find the excerpts interesting enough to follow along, comment and even suggest things if you want to. Smith says in his introduction to 44 Scotland Street, that he was greatly encouraged by one lady who wrote to him regularly with her thoughts on how the story was progressing. You should see the first post in a few days.