Dec. 4th, 2014

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I first met and got to know Lucy Kemnitzer ([livejournal.com profile] ritaxis) on the late lamented Usenet group rec.arts.sf.composition and we've not only kept in touch via our blogs but have intersected in person on a number of occasions, since we both live in the greater SF Bay Area. There's a special bond you make with another writer when you get to watch each other's stories grow from idea-seeds through research and initial drafts to final products. Like my own Alpennia, Lucy is grounding her current project in the invented past of a place that is and yet is not the Europe of our world. A lot of her methods are quite familiar, although I haven't had the opportunity of making a research trip in recent years!

I'm delighted that Lucy agreed to be my inaugural guest-blogger here in the Rose Garden. I have a couple more guests lined up at the moment and hope to make this a regular weekly feature if there is enough interest. (Please contact me if you'd like to discuss doing a guest blog or a blog exchange.)

* * *

Last summer I spent nearly seven weeks in a European city (Central or Eastern depending on who's talking) doing hours of research almost every day. I took notes and photographs, walked miles, peering at architectural details, the leaves of plants, the layout of streets. Serendipity was on my side, because the large complex of national museums there was doing an ambitious multifaceted project on the history, culture, economics, and everyday life of the last century of the Austrian Empire and everything to do with World War One.

In addition, I've read a stack of books and articles, perused websites, and interviewed people , including a series of discussions about trench warfare and the history of automatic weapons. I have a nature encyclopedia of the area, and I have taken the pains to translate sections of it. I learned to identify trees that do not grow in California.

This was in service of a novel which is not set in Europe—Central or Eastern, however you may construe it—nor during World War One, nor having anything to do with the Austrian Empire. The novel is a secondary world fantasy, which takes place in locations sprinkled around an impoverished backwater region with historical pretensions to empire and a tremendous linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity and uneven penetration of modernity (modernity being in this case about equivalent to modernity of our own Europe of a hundred years ago and a bit more). The region consists of affiliated small duchies and principalities badly governed by a tangle of conflicting law systems, with varieties of feudalism pertaining in some places while simultaneously there's a bicameral parliament elected by popular (but constrained) vote. Magic runs through the story: the protagonist has an ongoing relationship with a wild sow who is an elemental spirit, and his scientist sister has visions and talks to trees.

I could go on. But clearly, I'm not writing about the Austrian Empire here. So why all the research—and why, in particular, this research?

I'll answer the second question first. I researched this corner of the world because I had access to it. I was in that city for family reasons and I took advantage of it to inform my secondary world building with what I could learn there. Also, when I was first thinking about this story I wanted to set it in a milieu that was not Tolkienesque: not, to be frank, set in a disguised England. I was already beginning to learn about this corner of the world, and I decided to let Serendipity work for me there.

I had already written most of the book before I took my great research vacation, and I had already visited the city as well. I had ideas about how history would go, and what technology would pertain. I wanted to know as much as I could about how these things had gone down in the real world. In this way, I can compare and contrast elements of my story with elements of the real world. Sometimes it's a simple reality check: would a city at this level of development likely have a streetcar system? Yes, it would. Would it be available for my working-class characters to ride? Yes, at least certain lines would. Would the Duke of the tiny obscure place ride an automobile or a sledge? Auto in the summer, sledge in the winter, depending on the state of the road.

But the very core conceit of the story hinges on a historical question I asked because I didn't want to set it in the Middle Ages. "When was the latest that armies used drummers on the battlefield?" I was thinking perhaps the Franco-Prussian War or something. Imagine my surprise to learn the answer—World War Two. Then I started nosing around and I kept discovering that the actual history was full of things that enriched the story and moved the plot along. Every time I read about the evolution of the ideas around language and ethnicity in the Slavic-(but not only Slavic-)speaking regions, I found that I understood my story more. Even though my novel is not "about" language or ethnicity, and especially even though it is not "about" Slavs or Germans or Hungarians or Romani...

It's not exactly that the real world provides strict templates or laws about history and the relationships among peoples. It's more along the lines of pattern drafting for clothing. To draw a new armscye, it behooves one to understand the curves and measurements of existing ones, and to know especially well the way the armscye is put together of a garment that has something in common with the garment one is designing.

* * *
Lucy Kemnitzer blogs at http://lucykemnitzer.wordpress.com/
and can be followed on Twitter as @lucykemnitzer

You can pre-order her lesbian sci-fi novella A&A Salvage from Less Than Three Press (release date is December 10, 2014).

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