For a few years now I have had the grand idea for a flashy novel of high Victorian fiction that occurs in a twisty world of magic and gaslights. This is not remotely original, but I want to write it anyway, because I am really not that great a novelist, you see.

I don’t believe that just because a genre may employ lots of tropes and conventions that they must every one of them be defied for the resulting work to be original and fun. And I sort of really like Dracula by Bram Stoker, the original incarnation, and there is part of me that likes Vanity Fair and even Tess of the D’Ubervilles, so I guess there really never was any hope for me. I began to bang out a plot outline in a long, long summary of the book. This was essentially because I was more enthusiastic about the idea than I was about actually writing the thing, which I planned to write in florid, overwrought 19th-century prose, you see.

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