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It’s Michaelmas Term at Saint Clare: #AdAstraWriMo begins at midnight.
Once again, the gates of Saint Clare School for Girls creak open.
The crest still gleams with its public motto: Ad Astra, To the Stars, but those who know the place remember the stitched-in version, the one learned by heart and not by rote:
Per Disciplinam et Lacrimas, Ad Astra – Through discipline and tears, to the stars.
Tomorrow, November, the eleventh month begins and, with it, writers globally again attempt the 50 000-word challenge. This year, I’m returning to Saint Clare not to start something new, but to bring everything home: the stories, the notes, the fragments that have accumulated since the first tale was written back in 1999.
At last, my new Scrivener project now holds the entire school – the dormitories, the prefects’ room, the staff meetings that go on far too long, and, most importantly, the archives. Throughout the month of November I’ll be migrating, revising, and writing new pages for Inez of the Upper IV (Summer Term 1955) – and, in another wing of the imagination, finishing the Honour and Ned series, their stories set some twenty years earlier.
It’s not exactly NaNoWriMo, and not quite rebellion either.
Think of it as a special Michaelmas term: attendance required, results to be determined.
Fifty thousand words will (hopefully) follow – some new, some rediscovered, all part of the same ledger.
The Old Girls return and the inkpots are full once more.
The term begins tomorrow. I’ll be in my study, writing, counting words, and organizing, and in the school’s library, procrastinating via exhaustive research.
If you want to follow along: everything will be filed under#AdAstraWriMo.
T
Introduction
But Inez is watching. And she remembers.
This tale follows 
– Sit where you are seen, not where you are heard.
Even with getting to hand out with Rex and Adalia, my biggest September news is <cue trumpets>: after being abruptly shuttered five years ago, 
(This part of the text comes from the end of 
He sat at his desk while sh slept. He could not silence her — Honour was not a woman who could be silenced, or remain chastened for long without planning rebellion. She was too beautiful not to be noticed, even had she been inclined to play the wallflower — and her debut season had already proved she was anything but.
Ned’s jaw tightened. To the others, she was a charming bride showing off her sparkle. To him, she was a bright flame catching against dry kindling. He saw the peril of innocence mistaken for invitation, the danger of brilliance wielded without care. He sensed gossip already clinging to her like sickly perfume, a risk that could be stored, repeated, used. He admired her wit – how could he not? – yet threaded through the gaiety he heard something else: the false brightness of a society pretending it was not on the verge of war.
The Charrington Papers, of which the present collection forms a small but telling part [see also