Passage of time

I just came across my chronology for the Winter season of Mirabilis:

• Tuesday January 1st 1901 - the duel
• Friday January 11th 1901 - Jack's trip to Selsey
• Sunday January 13th 1901 - setting off from Paris on the Orient Express

The book by al-Mas'udi that Jack is supposed to fetch in Istanbul is going up for auction at noon on Friday January 18th 1901. (He would normally get there with time to spare, but obviously there have to be complications.)

Episodes 24-32 (I still think in episodes, even now the DFC is defunct) all take place over the space of a few hours on January 18th. Which means that if the DFC had continued, we would have been rounding off the Winter part of the story in August (our time) but Jack and Estelle would still be less than three weeks into the Mirabilis year!

After "episode" 32 there's going to be a jump, picking up the story several months later. By this time fantasy is getting to be a familiar part of everyday life, as you can start to see in the correspondence at the Royal Mythological Society.

Amazing to think that at one point we were seriously talking about running Mirabilis over 52 weekly episodes in realtime, ie so that time passed in the story and the real world at the same rate. It was a nice idea but, with only 5 pages a week, it would never have worked unless we'd tried some variant of the two clocks system in Othello.