The Age of Napoleon (Book #5)

The challenge I've found in taking on a subject as an adult that I never studied in school is that I tend to learn it lopsidedly--e.g. learning all about the British side of the Napoleonic Wars, but little about the French perspective on the same events (not to mention the Prussians, Austrians, Russians, etc.). Really, I'd like to know more about French history in general, especially 18th and 19th century. But it's tough, because I keep getting hold of books that assume a greater degree of knowledge than I have, and I flounder through them without context or a big picture view.

The Age of Napoleon (Alistair Horne, 2004) added some clarity to my picture of French life under Napoleon, largely focusing on art and culture. It's a quick, readable book, something of a survey but not an oversimplification. I'm sure I'll be making good use of the reference list.

I'll take liberty AND equality, thankyouverymuch

I tend to think of liberty and equality of opportunity as growing side by side and supporting each other, because IMO that's how it's worked in America, at least most of the time. So I get a bit puzzled sometimes as I study early 19th century France and Britain. France was, at least by the standards of the time, admirably egalitarian. You see many cases of men born into poverty and obscurity who rise to prestige on their own merits. But they were ruled by a control freak censor of a dictator. Britain, OTOH, was a highly stratified society largely ruled by a hereditary aristocracy--but was in almost all ways more free and open.

I'm usually pretty good at putting on the mentality of the past, but I guess as a 21st century American I have trouble understanding why the French didn't seize their freedom and the British their equality, because I'd find life without either equally unbearable. (Not, of course, that I'm claiming 2007 America is a perfectly free and equal society. But you don't want me to go into a political rant. Really, you don't.)

Rough Crossings (Book #4)

Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Simon Schama, 2006) was a slow and often depressing read, but I'm glad I stuck with it and managed to finish. It's the story of black loyalists, mostly escaped slaves, who took part in the British war effort as soldiers, servants, spies, etc. They were promised freedom and land after the war, but the government proved less than eager to honor their promises as the black loyalists were transported first to Nova Scotia along with the bulk of the white loyalists and then to Sierra Leone.

Don't read this book if you want to cherish the warm, fuzzy view of the American Revolution you learned in elementary school. I spent a good chunk of my reading time gnashing my teeth over just how nasty and selfish people are capable of being. Neither Britain nor America comes out of this book smelling like roses, but Britain occupies the moral high ground--though they broke enough promises that the moral high ground is more like an ant hill than Mount Rainier.

On the positive side, we meet idealists like Granville Sharp and John Clarkson who actually believed in Britain's supposed ideals and tried to force their countrymen to put principle ahead of profit and political power. And while many of their efforts were in vain, I think they and others like them did speed the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and help spur the growth of the American abolitionist movement. Thank God for idealists, in the 18th century or any other.

More on fictionalizing real people

Another challenge I'm facing as I plot out my alternate history is just how much I can change such details of real people's lives as whom they married and when they died. This is a non-magical alternate history, so it's not like George III is going to be eaten by a dragon or Napoleon is going to be bewitched into marrying a sorceress. So I'm trying to work within natural causes--e.g. if I know a person had a severe illness or injury (or even fought in a battle or traveled to a place where he could've reasonably contracted malaria, cholera, or whatever) and survived, I can justify killing him off. Or, conversely, if someone died of something people had a reasonable chance of surviving, I can make him or her live. (For example, and this is NOT part of my story, what if Stonewall Jackson had survived the amputation of his arm after Chancellorsville? Lots of people survived amputations, or there wouldn't have been any point in subjecting anyone to them, and I bet the Civil War would've played out entirely differently had he lived, since with all due respect to Lee I think Jackson was the most gifted general the Confederacy had.)

Anyway. My specific plotting dilemma is whether I can marry real people to different people than they wed in real life, and, if so, whether I have to find another real person for them to marry, or if I can marry them off to a suitable invented person. In two cases, I think it's probable that my alternate reality would've led them to marry different people, and that marrying them off to their real-world spouses would be too contrived. But I can't see either of them staying single. So do I invent spouses for them? Or do I find other real people of roughly the right age and rank? Either feels a bit presumptuous, somehow. Though, really, I don't suppose it's any more so than killing people early or changing the outcome of battles. Maybe it's just because love and marriage are a bit more intimate than whether one survives an illness or whether the reinforcements make it to the battlefield on time.

I'm lucky I escaped that Starbucks alive...

I'm a member of two critique groups, one online that operates weekly year-round, not even breaking for Christmas, and an in-person one that meets Monday nights at a local Starbucks and does break for holidays and the like. What with our various Christmas/Hannukah/New Year's travels, tonight was the first night we'd met in over a month.

I couldn't remember exactly what scene I'd taken the last time we met, though I knew it was from somewhere in The Inconvenient Bride's extended ball scene. (TIB is a fairly classic marriage of convenience story set at Regency house party, so there naturally HAS to be a ball.) So I guessed.

Turns out I skipped about 20 pages. The 20 pages wherein my hero and heroine are caught in a compromising situation and forced to become engaged. (Told you it was a classic Regency story.) My critique partners did NOT appreciate being deprived of smooches and high drama.

Time to email them what they missed....

Writing real people

My alternate history series is starting to take shape in my mind. I'm picturing scenes, getting a sense of how my characters will interact, etc. I love this part of the process because it's when creativity goes into warp speed, and my body is folding laundry or buying groceries, but my mind is 200 years and almost 5,000 miles away.

None of my previous books have featured real historical figures as anything more than names tossed in to show readers I've done my homework. The Sergeant's Lady refers to Wellington and to Robert Craufurd (one of Wellington's subordinate generals, commander of the Light Division), but neither gets any screentime. And that works fine when your protagonists are a sergeant and a captain's widow. But half the fun of an alternate history is taking real people and putting them in the altered circumstances.

So I'm developing a few of my own characters, including my main protagonist and his love interest, and researching certain key real people, at least one of whom is nearly as important as the protagonist. And it's WEIRD having so much about a major character be determined before I've written a single word. He's in his 30's when my world noticeably diverges from the real world, so he's got a huge chunk of backstory that's right there in the historical record. His personality is largely set--I can justify certain changes based on how I think he'd respond to my scenario, but I've got to work with the material reality gave me. I feel like I owe it to the real man to try to imagine what he would've done, and not to just make him do whatever is convenient for the story or make him a mouthpiece for my worldview.

I don't mind the restrictions, especially because it IS alternate history. But I don't think I could write the sort of fictionalized biographies Philippa Gregory, etc. specialize in. I'd feel too boxed in by reality.

Venetia (Book #3)

In general I like Georgette Heyer's books rather than love them, heresy as that is for a Regency writer. I did, however, love Venetia (1958). It's a story of an innocent virginal miss who tames an older, debauched rake--not normally a favorite plot of mine. But she put some unusual twists in the tale, and she convinced me that the hero and heroine belonged together and would never be quite as happy with anyone else. And that's what romance is all about, Charlie Brown.

That said, while I'm glad Harlequin has put Heyer's works back in print through their HQN imprint, I wish they'd done a better job with typesetting. I guess the issue is that Heyer's works are longer than modern romances, but the publisher wants to keep them the same length/size as a typical single title romance, ~350 pages. The font size isn't especially small, but the margins are too narrow. In particular, the inside margin is so tight that when you hold the book in a normal, relaxed fashion, you can't read it properly. I had to maul the book's spine, such that it looks more like an old favorite I've read a dozen times or a book from the library's paperback swap collection than a book I got new as a Christmas present and read once.