Random Alpennia Post

[hrj]

Having given myself a pass on the usual Tuesday and Wednesday posts, I thought I'd catch up on Alpennia for Random Day. (I'm feeling well enough to go in to work, although this is often followed by getting slammed again with sinus stuff in another day or so, plus bonus coughing for weeks to come.)

I keep having to emphasize that the next book (after Mother of Souls) really truly will be Floodtide. The thing is, I already have Floodtide all plotted out. So I don't want to talk about any details on the principle that I don't like to talk about details in advance of writing them. (I'm still worried about that derailing my story process.) So the large-picture topics tend to happen further down the line.

When I started brainstorming about the antagonists for Mistress of Shadows (roughly speaking: a circle of rogue sorcerers in Paris, dabbling in both domestic and international politics) I knew that I wanted to include a female viewpoint character among those antagonists. And I followed one of my emergent principles in asking, "How will this character stand outside the circles of power in a way that will both motivate her actions and give her a certain freedom from expectations. How will her position in life and society be both a strength and a vulnerability?" (Other than being a woman in patriarchal society, which is pretty much a given starting point.)

Overlaid on this, I've pledged myself to always asking the question, "where are the non-white characters in this setting? in this story?" I feel somewhat conflicted about this (which I'll go into in more detail when I start seriously promoting Mother of Souls) because I'm not writing my non-white characters as a insider, and there are a whole host of issues around that. But then again, I'm not really writing any of my characters as a cultural insider. This is part and parcel of being a 21st century American writing European-based historical fiction, even aside from the religious issues. But the hazards around writing characters like Margerit Sovitre are diluted by the much larger number of well-off white middle class historic characters in Regency-era fiction. When I write a character like Serafina Talarico, I may well be writing the only Ethiopian-Italian bisexual magical-Regency-era character in existence. (Note: research this topic, because I need to be able to point readers to other similar characters/stories especially ones written by authors with more character-intersection.)

And yet...when I start asking the question, "who are the characters who are outsiders in their own cultures who might become significant characters in the Alpennia series?" the answers that I get when I make sure to consider non-white characters always seem to take the story in unexpected and intriguing directions.

When I first started brainstorming the question of my female antagonist for Mistress of Shadows, I knew she had to be both integrated into French society and in some way an outsider. France (unlike Alpennia) had a lot of international connections at this time, so there's something of a wealth of possibilities. But one angle that snuck into my imagination almost randomly was Napoleon's political and military interests in Egypt and the consequent Egyptomania in France. What if my character were Egyptian in origin and came to France (or was brought to France) in the wake of the French presence there? It would fit my timeline. But who would she be? In what context would she end up in Paris? What would her relationship with the other antagonists be? How would they have discovered her specific mystical talents (which I'd already started exploring) and under what circumstances would they have induced her to make common cause with them?

If there's one thing I've discovered in doing background research, it's that you can grow an interesting character out of almost any historic background, but it's sometimes harder to fit an existing character into a particular background. And I didn't know much about early 19th century Egypto-French interactions other than the certainty that such a thing existed. So I headed to Google and started looking for historic sources. Sometimes you hit the jackpot. Among the several promising titles that turned up, was the following:

Coller, Ian. 2011. Arab France: Islam and the Making of Modern Europe, 1798-1831. University of California Press, Berkeley.

It's an in-depth historical and cultural study of a group of Egyptian--well, "refugees" isn't quite the right word, but we'll use it for now--who had hitched their political star closely enough to Napoleon that when the French presence withdrew from Egypt, they not only felt they had a more promising future in France, but felt that the French government owed them something for their support in Egypt (and successfully convinced them of it). This is all vastly over-simplified. This is the fascinating story of the next few decades of shifting political and social interactions (including the consequences of the Bourbon restoration), and the ways in which this heterogenous group that organized under the label of "Egyptian" retained and then discarded something of a coherent identity, as well as they various ways in which they integrated into French society while remaining "other".

And within that complex story, I've found the solid bones for who my antagonist is, what her back-story and motivations are, and the tensions and fractures in her life that will guide her eventual choices. I was going to go a bit more into the historic details, but I think I'm out of time for now. (P.S., I'm not being coy about the character's name -- I'm still working on that part.)

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Now that's a compliment! I confess that my own inadequate reading schedule is a handicap when trying to list similar characters. But the main thing I want to be able to do is say, "If you want to read about characters like this who were written by authors who have more in common with the characters, here are some books to try."