Camp NaNoWriMo (July 2020)

Recently I ordered some fairly pricy much talked about Soji Shimada and Seishi Yokomizo books that I want to go over in this blog, and I also went and bought couple of cheap novels from my local shop to compare those more hailed books with. It's been a while since I read Finnish crime fiction now that I think about it... Buuut I decided just stop reading anything right now for the start of - and maybe all of - July and write something of my own instead. This is my 100th post on this blog, by the way, so I thought that it's better to start writing about NaNoWriMo's writing event from now on every time it comes up.

I've been a member of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month site and event for writers) since February of 2016 so it's somehow already been over four years. That was also around the same time I started writing this blog of mine. Before that though I spent three years planning a certain story. It was about a generic inner circle case starring two families in an old hotel in the middle of nowhere that consisted of a wine cellar. I kept writing with hand in my notebooks about what the story would be about, and ended up writing those ideas down and expanding them on computer during NaNoWriMo in November of 2016, which was when I managed to finish the novel. The story had two parts to it both roughly 30 000 words or so in length.

For people who don't know, NaNoWriMo is this personal writing challenge for yourself. The NaNoWriMo site is a free platform to join with its own community and it's purpose is to basically pep you to write and finish a novel of 50 000 words or more every year during November in one month's time (about 30 days). There are a lot of writing tips and motivational speeches from professional writers on the site that are usually sent to your e-mail if you register to the site. However there's more than just the official November writing months; every year in April and July the site also offers you to write during this online event called Camp NaNoWriMo which is basically a lite version of NaNoWrimo.

As you all know, writing a single novel-length story may take years upon years (Looking at you, George R. R. Martin), so it does sound absurd for majority of people to be able to create a best-seller in 30 day's time every November (though don't get me wrong - that certainly has happened). That's where Camp NaNoWriMo comes into play for many people as they gather together in online camps (and sometimes in real life as well) to every April and July write and plan the base for the novel they'll actually be writing in November.

While I was writing that first novel of mine I kind of understood how all these other writers manage to pull through book after book. You see, I felt something emotionally when I was creating it. It was like pouring cold water on my face. Looking back, the ideas were very basic and I just couldn't create a story with an interesting plot or entertaining characters. However I understood something more about how we humans work as I finished the novel... And that is, that we evolve and progress towards a certain goal. We can pull anything off as long as we work hard at it and don't be afraid of doing things or getting disappointed or wasting our time. I bought a digital piano in 2017 that I haven't been playing in a long time (even though I want to, it's not my priority at the moment), but playing that piano reminded me something about being an artist - if we try something such as playing through notes, and manage to pull it off however badly, the next day we will be able to actually do it much better! Our brains get adjusted to challenges. It's the same with driving a car or riding a bike. Or swimming. Writing is no different. As long as we keep doing it to the end, we will get to our goals. After you finish writing a story, you can definitely write something better, more entertaining, complex, coherent, grander... you name it.

But there's always a problem or two, of course. And that is the fact that you get rusty if you stop writing stories (and writing give or take 50 000 words every now and then ain't easy let me tell you), but also another problem is collecting data to actually evolve as a writer. I used to go to a writing class for about a year in 2016. That class had many aspiring writers in it, but I noticed something quite off there - many of them had been writing a single story for many, many years, about a decade even, and they never were quite happy with how their story always turned out. And they didn't know why. I of course also read their stories, and while they didn't have notable writing errors or anything, my gosh... the plots were generic and mediocre at best. They were very mechanic and felt hella manufactured. Like that one Spookie book I never got around to write about. I understood that while I wasn't as proficient in orthography / spelling as them, I was far more familiar with reading other people's stories than they were. I even went and explained some concepts to them, such as what a protagonist or deuteragonist were.

That is where the idea to write on this blog came to me. I love mystery and detective fiction the most and personally want to write those types of stories, but only a naive writer would think that they're able to write anything truly interesting or entertaining without reading other people's works first. And I don't mean just the most hailed, most interesting works, but also the more boring and crappier ones. What kinds of characters and tropes stand out? How to pace different kinds of stories? What doesn't work and what works to effectively present a scene or a moment? How to write about bunch of information or to present a completely new fictional setting so that the reader both understands and gets interested in it? What inspires you to create something new? Collecting data takes time and it takes effort but it also proves that you're serious about creating something new.


So, now is the time to truly get serious and get down to business. This is my 100th post on this blog, so I believe I've collected enough data to actually try this now for real. This is all about getting oneself to understand the level we're at right now after reading quite a few different series. It's 1st of July, 2020 and we're starting up on Camp NaNoWriMo. I tried this back in April's Camp, but it didn't work out as well back then due to personal issues. This time I'll be writing and finishing that story I was going to write back in April. First challenge is for me to get back in track on what the story was about (a murder mystery of course), and remind myself on the side characters, and then start expanding it from there.

I hope many others will also take up on this challenge. To see what level of experience you're at right now is the key - the beginning of it all. Here's a relaxing 'Zen'-type track I've been playing for the past six hours for you to listen so you can get started with your next writing project.

The Gentleman Thief of Victorian era England & The Indian Rebellion of 1857

Things develop in the course of work. I woke up one night when The Great Train Robbery was almost completed, and thought that what the book's really about is repression, and that's what the whole Victorian period means. And the idea of criminals going against society made them the least repressed. That's what the book is about, and this came totally after the fact. At the time, I was just writing a story.
- Michael Crichton on The Great Train Robbery (1975)

On the busy streets of London during the Victorian era of Britain (1837-1901), the poor and the rich walked next to each other. The immense amount of lower class people living in terrible conditions and upper class of men and women living in great conditions was what mainly split the country into fifty-fifty halves of people from two different social classes, but around that time also the amount of middle-class families appearing started to get more frequent as England became the world's richest country; be it because of oil, metal manufacturing or early stages of rapid technological development. A whopping 10% of all work for women was about housework such as working as maids in massive manors or in hotels for tourists. The mindset of that era was still such that females, regardless of their position at work, are supposedly dumber and weaker than men. Women did not have exactly disastrous living spaces and many of them were raised in caring homes where they would sometimes stay living even as adults, due to the massive sizes of the manors owned by the upper class families. However women were still thought as possessions after marriage, and never something that men would claim would have been interesting to talk to. The problem the parents of females faced was that even if their daughters were well-educated, it was technically all for naught as there was a very heavy stigma at place towards ladies doing any other work than being the "rulers of the house."

You see, if the daughters from rich families were to start working, they would lose status. There were many jobs available for women from knitting to being a nurse or an accountant (even if women were commonly not thought to be smart or useful), however any accepted work for women was believed to be for the lower class. Women were boring. Men and dogs were men's best friends. Because of this very common mindset the educated women had a very monotonous style and were raised on learning the attitude of how ladies should act, which they did instead of yet starting to fight against the stigma that had been in place for centuries. Because of the pressure of being forced to do nothing, the girls of the rich houses that were not allowed to do menial things were said to go crazy, bending in agony, even losing their sense of sight, hearing, smell, and so on. All things considered, it was absolutely necessary for women to get married during the Victorian era, however, if they were married then the money they made would according to the law belong to the husbands, even though women's rights had been improved a bit.

However there was a group of women that broke the stigma, did things that ladies were never expected to do or acted in ways that ladies would never have been expected to act. In other words they acted in ways that made men feel that they were interesting and alive, and just entertaining to be around with. Those were the prostitutes of the Victorian era. It is known that prostitutes used to be everywhere in England back then and they dressed up in any way imaginable so that it would be hard to tell superficially what they were about. Rather than simply being only seen in pubs, streets, bordels and so on, the so-called high-grade women who sold themselves would act as keepers of beautiful hotels, visit theaters all the time or practice horse riding. There were multiple ways to lure rich people to paying for their services from physical acts to psychological manipulation of making the men need the women, they are after all, much more interesting that the ladies men were used to. However girls as young as twelve and even younger were forced to act in mature ways and were known to sell themselves and live with adult boyfriends that worked as thieves. Some of these men thieves even got by only with what the young girls were making via prostitution or re-selling stolen clothes and such. 

After year 1930, as the Liverpool-Manchester railway, the first really notable train railway in the world, was built, the amount of people enjoying the adventures on the rails exploded in popularity. You see, before trains were created, the average traveling time using horse omnibuses and other popular ways to move from place to place was very long. Long-distance traveling with good vehicles moved at around 10 km/h. Average speed for trains was about 70 km/h. The more train stations were being built, the better they looked with very stylistic curvy glass windows and nice atmosphere. Railways were being built at such rapid rates that barely anyone could keep up, however they, along with detailed depictions of crimes, public executions and obviously the interest of the ravaging Jack the Ripper in 1888, were constantly the talk of day and things that you could read about. Train stations due to being such a huge thing, a dream method for people to travel elsewhere, meant much also religiously in the Victorian era as many started to think of these stations as sort of addictive chapels of sort. The higher class people spent years on business trips and the visitors to London grew exponentially, with about 10% increase in population each year. Middle of the Victorian era was also really the start of when we started to actually make ID's of people so that they could be identified.

The pre-Victorian era had of course already split people into different social classes and the gambling and cheating nature of the men and spending nature of women as well as masses using certain styles of clothing were at their peak along with the crime rates in the 1860's. It was so bad that there had to be many guards and officers at any give point in time at train stations and on the streets since children would steal from elderly, women would steal clothes from children, many clever tricks were built to keep stealing wallets from unsuspecting people, and a rather enormous amount of small groups of different levels of criminals existed in the society; some downright loathing the ones who use violence and mug bypassers. The amount of street gangs peaked in 1862-1863 so much so that in 1863 England had the most amount of people being hanged since 1838 because of new street laws being put into place in order to try to tone down the amount of ruthless crimes being done against people, especially cases happened during evenings. The human right problems according to the law were pretty complex during this era as well because, as mentioned already, everything the women that were in marriage would gain by working, would belong to their husbands, and women were still not allowed to own property, also, in that logic the law mentioned that the husbands have to take burden of the crimes of their wives - such as printing fraudulent money. Women used men in many different ways to their own benefit and also worked alone or together with them in order to rob people by being distractions, and so on. However in the 1850's you couldn't get death sentences anymore for even the biggest robberies; they were saved for murderers. I believe the reason for that was partly the knowledge of people getting framed for crimes they did not commit.

Poster of the film adaptation.
Directed by Crichton himself.

Michael Crichton's historical crime novel The Great Train Robbery (1975) takes us back to this magical era as a small group of people planned and acted to do one of the more influential crimes in history. The novel tells a fictionalized version of a real life story that happened in 1855 as a gentleman thief known by names such as "Edward Pierce" and "Mr. Smith" masterminded a robbery that began to be known as "The Crime of the Century" and "The Most Sensational Modern Deed."

As Edward Pierce, a rich, professional gentleman thief, learns of the placements of four different keys that go on two different safes, he, along with Robert Agar, a professional picklocker, Barlow, a thug with a large scar on his face, Miss Miriam, a mysterious woman, and the small-sized man Clean Willy, known to as the best snakesman in England, decide to plan almost a year to steal a 12 000 pound gold shipments that are meant to be sent as payment for British soldiers. In current day's economy, the gold would be over 100 000 pounds in worth.

The story takes us through the time when Edward Pierce first learns during a party that the trains traveling from London to Crimean Fort carry two different safes that carry over 10 000 pounds worth of gold. The safes were made by the most famous safe creator company in the world at that time, and each of those safes consist of two "impossible-to-pick" locks. It doesn't take long for Pierce to learnt that the four keys are in three different places; two hanging on the necks of high-ranked employees and two keys in a safe at a train station guarded by policemen and guards. All four of those keys needed to be waxed and replicated. The first part of the story focuses on getting the keys and setting up the Victorian England to the reader, as it is important to explain why they simply needed the keys as there were no explosives at that point in time. "The key is the heart of the whole job."

The second part of the story focuses on the theft itself, taking place on a running train full of twists and turns as Pierce does stunts that most gentleman thieves in fictional series do, such as smuggling people, showing his smarts and traveling on the roof of a moving train with no safety measurements in order to go pick a lock of a closed door from the outside. The presentation of Edward Pierce is really like what you'd expect from a genius gentleman thief nowadays.

The third part of the story deals with the after effects of the robbery, how it affected everything and how it went unseen due to much heavier events that affected Britain in various ways. The biggest reason for the lack of press pressure during the court case of Edward Pierce, Agar and others is the Indian Rebellion which was filled with injustice and killing intent and the rebellion happened when the court case of the gold robbery happened, taking most media attention to the rebel's actions instead. Note that because this post talks mostly about historical events surrounding the main event that happened in the book, much like the book itself, I'll be talking about the rebellion which the book also did talk about and I feel that it is worth talking and thinking about, however you can skip it if you are not interested in learning about it. The review continues after the hellish Indian Rebellion overview.
What I write next is what I have understood of the Indian Rebellion. It is quite interesting to think about but might hurt someone with strong religious beliefs, regardless of what they believe in.


The Indian Rebellion

In 1857 England had 34 000 european soldiers and 250 000 Indian sepoy soldiers in India. Europeans that invaded india had by then already put out certain local religious beliefs and acts such as burning the widows of dead men alive and ritual murders. So the Indians were not happy and were already feeling as if they were being insulted.

A certain event happened in which the English started using new rifles, the Enfield rifles, that had cartridges that were covered in heavy grease as they came straight from the factory. The cartridges worked in a way that you had to bite it to get the powder out. The Indians soon realized/claimed that Englishmen were using pig and cow grease on the cartridges and that it was all a secret ploy to contaminate the Indian people and make them break the caste laws.

Even though the English officials worked quickly to make it so that the cartridges would have no grease on them as they come from the factory, and they would make the Indians oil them up with vegetable oil, by then it was already too late.

This caused the Indian Rebellion to happen against the richest country in the world, England. The most famous episode of the Indian Rebellion happened in Cawnpore, a city of 150 000 people. In Cawnpore 1000 English people, including 300 women and children, had to be under fire for 18 days. The style of living there "insulted all human rights" but soon after the Rebellion had started, the people tried to live as normally as they could. The soldiers drank and ate, the children played around the cannons, and even one marriage was said to have been held in the midst of constant 24/7 rifle and cannon shooting between the English and the Indian.

However as the days stretched on, the food started running out. Men got only one meal a day and soon they had to eat their horses. Women had to get rid of their underwears for the cannon firing, and water was only found outside of the camp. Whoever went to get it, was instantly shot down. The day temperatures reached 60 celsius and many died from the sun.

In the 12th of June 1857 the other building of the two camps went up in flames. All the medicine was lost. But the Englishmen did not give up.

In the 25th of June 1857 the sepoy soldiers announced ceasefire which the English agreed to. The English people were to go to boats that would take them to Allahab, a city 150 kilometers away.

The evacuation started in June 27th, 1857 at morning. The English moved onto 40 different river boats as they were surrounded by sepoy soldiers. When the last English people were on the boats, the Indian boat men instantly hopped off the boats and the sepoy soldiers started firing at the boats that were moving on low waters. The river filled with dead bodies as the Indian horsemen rode on the low waters and killed all the men with their scabbards.

All the English women and children were kept in a clay building where they were kept in deadly heat until in July 15th 1857 professional Indian butchers entered the building and gutted them and cut them all to pieces as they were alive.


That's the condensed version of the "Indian Rebellion" of 1857. 
Of course this led to the Brits wanting revenge and even New York Times was agitated as the news were demanding that the corpses of all the rebels will have to be hanged on the trees and buildings of Cawnpore. The British soldiers shot Indians out of cannons, mutilated them and pillaged entire towns, killing many more civilians than the Indians had as they put down all the rebels, however, we have to understand that the Victorian era was very strong on religious beliefs, thinking the Indians were devils for doing what they did for their reasons, while the Indians couldn't understand the British. There was nothing else left other than a hellish spiral of hatred and fear.

Back to the review now.
Crimes done by very handsome, clever, courageous and calculating male criminals that seem rich, dress well and act in appreciating manner towards everyone, especially ladies, is a fairly known character type in modern fiction. Kaito Kid known from Magic Kaito and Detective Conan series is one of these jewel stealing gentleman thieves, as is the famous Lupin III from an anime series of the same name, and the most notoriously known fictional gentleman thief Arsene Lupin by Maurice Leblanc of course counts as one of those types as well. Edward Pierce seems to be one of the original big-shot gentleman thieves, even though Britain was known to have many thieves who dressed well and did scams, mugging, creating false money, you name it. Actually the main reason for posting this review now is that it's Kaito Kid's birthday, which is June 21st.

M.C.'s The Great Train Robbery focuses on the events that took place a year prior, during and after The Great Gold Robbery which took place in 15th of May 1855 was a rather grand piece of news for how it was pulled off and done, even if the media attention few years later during the court case had diminished.

Now for my thoughts it was quite an inspirational piece of work, almost everything about it from the way the robbery was presented to chapter formats and the writing style was what I could also be using for a historical-type series, thus I could consider this book inspirational and I actually felt interested to learn more, knowing that it's based on a real story amped my interest towards paying attention to what was being said, which is why I'm so interested in writing about the Victorian era in this post. The story flows very well despite being rather non-linear, for example it begins with explaining what the culprits said after they were caught, and doesn't feel like there's too much information although it does info-dump all the time for important reasons, to get the reader to understand what happened and is about to happen in the story, such as understanding methods of why there had to be alarms on coffins because people were afraid of being put under the mud post-death as there was heavy fear towards being announced dead as they were alive, the world was just that different back in the day and it would be very hard to understand and immerse to the story if the author did not stop once in a while to explain the situation.