On Monday evening, I handed my wonderful editor my Christmas novella.  (I’ve seen a preliminary cover but haven’t gotten the go-ahead to share it yet–trust me, as soon as I can show everyone, I will be plastering it everywhere!)

This was the first thing that I’d written completely on contract.  I had a lot of worries about this particular novella.  It’s written as a prequel to my publishing debut, PROOF BY SEDUCTION, and there were just not a huge number of happily married characters from that book who I could work into a prequel.

In fact, there was only one character who was happily married–and that was my hero’s man of business, William White.  Mr. White was an interesting side character in the book.  He doesn’t get much time on-screen, but I always imagined him going back to his wife in the evenings and snickering at my hero, saying, “That man has money and power but HOLY MOTHER OF PEARL does he ever need to get laid.”  Even though William White is unflinchingly polite, as any servant must be, there is always that undercurrent of amusement in all of his dealings with his employer.

And so when my editor asked me to write a prequel, I began to wonder about William White.  Who was this man?  How did he get to be so self-assured?  Why did the extremely proper and stringent Marquess of Blakely hire a man just into his thirties to help run his massive estates?  And what kind of woman would be a good match for such a man?

My heroine just kind of appeared full-fledged, Athena-style.  She’s the one who told me that the hero of my novella was not, in fact, Mr. William White.  He was William Q. White–and I can’t wait until you find out what the “Q” stands for.

*snicker*

So, one of the things I’m doing at the last minute is trying to place my novella heroine on a Regency-era map.  I know that she her father owns a circulating library.  When I started my novella, I figured out the basics of how circulating libraries worked and then left some of the details–like, how much money could a circulating library expect to make in a day?–as a question-mark to be filled in later.

Of course, now it’s later and I’m looking for details.  In any event, I also figured I should find out whether there were a great many of them (answer: yes, by then) and where they were situated.  The answer is: most of them are in very nice parts of town.  The problem is that my hero needs to be somewhat local to the library, and my hero is not going to be living on Harley Street or its environs.

Then I found this lovely list.  I looked up all those addresses.  Most of them wouldn’t do.  But there’s one that’s right off Chancery Lane (where my hero works) and Chancery Lane is adjacent to several areas of London that fall into the “fairly dodgy” spectrum.  Perfect!

But it gets better.  Last time I was in London, I visited Chancery Lane because the book I was writing then had a few scenes set on Chancery Lane.  In fact, it so happened that right after we turned off of it, I saw a tiny bookstore that said they’d been in business since 1830.  1830!  Perfect.  I dragged Mr. Milan inside.  When I first saw the location of  314 High Holborn on the incredibly detailed Horwood map of London, I nearly died.  It was exactly where I remembered that little shop.  Oh, Serendipity!  I know what that shop looks like inside.  I know how narrow the rooms are.  I know there’s a teeny tiny rickety staircase in the back, where even I had to duck my head not to hit it on the way down to the basement of books.

It turns out, it was my abysmal sense of direction rather than any actual serendipity.  I pulled up my pictures from the trip (yes, I took pictures!) and discovered that the little shop I went into was actually 16 Fleet Street.  The wrong end of Chancery Lane.  Drat!