Structure, smashed

Dead reckoning is a method of navigation, dependent on latitude and sun. The night sky is not consulted. Set your course straight and sail the line.

My ms Dead Reckoning is about power: who does what to whom, who gets to tell the story of it.

Draft after draft, it has failed as a novel. Or rather, I have failed it.

The protagonist is a girl who is mistaken for a boy in early eighteenth-century Bristol. For convenience and later self-preservation, she maintains the disguise, not that it fools everyone. Several people want to own her and use her, including two thieving pedophiles, a disgraced spy, a spymaster, a shipwrecked Englishman and self-styled fishing admiral.

An encounter with an old tormentor sparks violence, complicity and a sickening fall.

So what’s the best way to tell it?

This time, in pieces. Not multiple first person, but shards of third-person, scraps of testimony.

I want the story at your feet like splintered wood and dropped glass.

Shag linear. Shag dead reckoning.

No chart. Umm ...