The book is nearly ready...the lovely folks at Arcade Publications have edited, chopped, laid out, illustrated and proofed it to within an inch of its left and it's about to go to print. Expecting a launch in early December, at an appropriately Victorian (in every sense) sort of venue. Edward Oxford is now tweeting @Edward_oxford. he seems to enjoy retweeting his book, his letters and the odd pronouncement of Queen Victoria. He always did have a soft spot for her.

Queen Victoria's journals came online a few weeks ago (thanks to Shooting Victoria for the heads-up.) The entry in which the Queen writes about seeing Oxford try to shoot her, and her complete lack of fear - it didn't even occur to her when the gun went off that it was meant for her - is here.

I suppose one shouldn't promote the competition. But I've just received my copy of Paul Thomas Murphy's Shooting Victoria, which looks at all the people who shot at, wrote rude letters to and whacked her Majesty over the head, and it looks great. A huge enterprise to do them all and Murphy's book is more concerned with the Queen herself and the wider picture - he said to me in an email that he leaves Oxford at the gates of Bedlam and so he does, so the fascinating second half of his life isn't in that book - but I admire his scholarship and I'm really excited about reading the story of all the "assassins" without having to do the archival legwork! In other developments, the manuscript is rolling along - I am reviewing Arcade's changes and we are getting serious about images and design and publication dates - and although there are plenty of distractions, the book itself - A Walking Shadow is starting to look like a reality.

just a little update...the manuscript is with Arcade and we are in the early stages of editing...the book will be out later this year. I am now working on a PhD on Oxford, which is quite a different process to a book! fewer pictures for one thing. Part of the PhD will be a creative piece based on Oxford's life, so I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how fiction and history can work together, not against each other.

not really finished...the moment of handing a manuscript in to the publisher is always weird. there's a mix of worry that they won't like it, huge relief at having finished it, doubt about how it could have been done better (one more draft?), and a niggling awareness that it's not really actually "done"; there is a lot more to do, little technical things and edit reviews and image permissions...until the book is in one's hand it's not done, and not even then because then one must - wants to - promote it so people actually read it. last night I saw my first book on the shelf of a bookshop and I was like, oh, there you are. Two years ago that was "done" too...

...writing a book does not of course leave a lot of time for blogging...but it is coming together pretty nicely.

Arcade's little books are not overlong. The manuscript is 30,000 words, including breakouts and quotes from all those funny 19thC documents and letters I've read along the way. Some are so delicious they are going in despite not being strictly necessary. And the quotes from journals by passengers aboard the ship Oxford took to Australia, though from different voyages, are priceless: all kinds of dramas, fights, deaths, vomiting and ways to combat months of seaborne boredom.

I have a self-imposed deadline of late next week to get the ms in...there will be small additions, like references, but if I don't do it by then, it will be February.

Right now I am exactly the age Oxford was when he was released from prison. I cannot imagine starting life with nothing now. The more I find out about how well he acquitted himself, the more I like him...and the more I cannot quite reconcile him with the utter fool he was at 18. Though of course many of us were utter fools at 18.

The joy and pain of archives: you can spend a day turning old pieces of parchment, squinting at smudged copperplate handwriting, and get nothing.
you can walk into a library, pick a volume of church gazettes almost at random from a daunting 25-year span to be examined, and hit a new reference to your subject on the first page you open it to.
No matter how armed with dates and names, you can flounder in a sea of not very precise filing by some clerk 142 years ago.
and the most frustrating and rewarding: you can be constantly distracted by the flicker of little historical diamonds: stories of nobodies calling out from scraps of papers. For instance: In 1868, Jane Boyd, a "sorrowing widow" from Co. Antrim, Ireland, took the liberty, as she said, of writing to the Victorian Police Commissioner to ask, had he heard of her son John Boyd, last heard of in the Victoria Police, but silent these past years. "I am distressed between hope and despair," she wrote.
And that's the end of it. no report, no record of a reply to Mrs Boyd. Just a woman in Ireland casting out a line to a missing son, suspended.