in which i pull out all of my hair

[ontology]

Oh for heaven's sake. I am trying to write the Novel and have stuck on the most ridiculous of details, which has rather unleashed a lot of pent-up frustration. Why did I have to set my novel in 1912-1913? Ten years earlier and I'd have more information than I could ever hope to use, but apparently nobody cares about the Edwardians. And if they do, it's all about the hedonistic upper class and the aristocracy, or, because sordid is always fun to be shocked about, the most abject poverty of the London slums, all twenty people to a tenement and children losing their limbs in factories. I am quite sure that the middle class wasn't all pretending to be wealthy, because that's not how people work. Every time I try to find information on the homes people would have lived in, normal everyday ordinary people, in London, I get all of this nonsense about either manor houses or squalid tenements. NOT HELPFUL. I got a book out from the library, Domestic Life in England, and it devoted at least a chapter to the Victorians, with lots of very pertinent information -- but anything about the Edwardians was scant, mixed up with details from later years, solely about rationing and bomb scares (and zeppelins? is it callous that my first thought was OMG THERE WERE ZEPPELINS OVER LONDON THAT IS SO COOL?), or to the '20s, lots more fun, with the hair shingling and the make-up and the very short skirts. GAH. I want to know about houseguests, particularly in apartments, and if they come up to the door of the flat they want and knock there, or if they ring something down below, as one often does nowadays, and who answers the door, and I am Googling ridiculous things like "history of the doorbell" and "doorbells in edwardian england" and not getting anything remotely helpful.

I wonder how eccentric it is that the Noxes haven't got any servants, but they don't really need them, and would one still have servants if one lived in a flat, anyway? Am I completely wrong in thinking that a family of four would live in a flat? But London was huge and urban even then and it seems as though an actual by-itself house would be hideously expensive whether or not it was even very nice, and nobody would have one. Uh, kind of like Boston.

It's all of the weird little details that are tripping me up, like, how exactly does Mr Caruthers get himself to the Noxes for dinner and who lets him in and where does he go afterwards and are there doorbells involved at all? How large would a decent flat be, with how many rooms? What are the floors made of? What sorts of dances do people attend? Are there places where there's always some music thing going on and anyone can show up to dance if they have the desire? Which ones are respectable and which aren't? (Like today people go clubbing, or to bars or pubs, and all sorts of things.) If a man is trying to conceal Evidence of Vampire Attack, what sort of neck-covering things are at his disposal? Where does one park one's motorbike? 

Every few paragraphs I run into a new problem, and the more I read, the more it seems I don't know, especially since everyone is much more interested in talking about the aristocracy or the Victorians or the slums or the War, except that they'd actually rather talk about the Second World War, so seeing the domestic information one wants getting passed up for a war which is mostly passed up for a different war is enormously frustrating. Hasn't somebody written books specifically for historical fiction writers? "Everything You'd Never Think To Ask About The 1910s", say. How to use the toilet and what to feed your cat and what sorts of sweets one might have on hand. How to get to and from work. How to let your hosts know you've arrived for dinner after they've bleeding invited you. (How to greet a woman you've been secretly in love with for several years when you recently saved her from a mysteriously burning room with vampires in, she's been unconscious for the last several days, and you have probably done nothing but pace around your office and clean up vampire damage and fend off the government, and now you are at her house for dinner but it is 1912 and embracing is scandalous and you are deliberately repressed anyway for what you think are extremely good reasons. Okay, maybe that one I have to figure out myself...)

At this point, the vampire stuff and the underground city stuff and the scientific application of magic is the easiest part.

Comments

[spockodile.livejournal.com]

I still vote for guessing at the minor details now and double-checking them later on. Hopefully the value of the story is not dependant upon whether a person knocks, rings, buzzes, throws pebbles at upper windows, or screams obscenities from atop a step-ladder.

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

I have been with a lot of things, but the things are starting to make a pile that's a little hard to step over. Kind of like the ice cream bowls in my bedroom... D:

[take-a-sadsong.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry you're having so much difficulty! Writing it out on your blog is a good idea because you'll be able to better pin-point problem areas and maybe even work them out logically that way.

Also, I love your new layout!

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

Yes, I feel sorry for subjecting you lot to so much bizarre novel ranting, but it is for Posterity! :p And for some reason, ranting when nobody is reading or listening just doesn't help in the same way.

Why thankee! It's one of Alyssa's; I changed the colours and images around. :D

[tempestsarekind.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear. This is exactly how I feel, except about Victorian America. If I'd set my chapter (one chapter, that's it! one! And I can't manage to write it!) during the Civil War, I would be drowning in info. But I need information--details--about snugly middle-class people in small towns, in, say, the 1880s, and all I keep turning up are books on the Gilded Age society set.

So, you have my sympathies. I do wonder whether some of the social stuff would have been slow to change, though. Judicious borrowing might be a solution. And I think perhaps even Londoners--at least in the Victorian period--would have *wanted* a house of their own, according to Judith Flanders (Inside the Victorian Home, Norton, 2004).

*checks Google Books, because I am not at home with my copy of this book*

Aha. "To house the numbers of newly urbanized people was a challenge without precedent, and it was met in an unprecedented way. As Continental cities (and New York) grew, apartment blocks sprang up; communal living became the norm. Apart from Edinburgh, this was rejected in an unconscious yet unanimous way in the British Isles. Instead, a frenzy of house-building began. One-third of the houses in Britain today were built before the First World War, and most of these are Victorian. In a period of less than seventy-five years, over six million houses were built, and the majority still stand and function as homes still. Despite the speed with which this massive work went on, despite the often substandard building practices, the twenty-first-century cities of Britain are covered with terraced housing built by the Victorians" (20).

So maybe terraced housing rather than a flat?

[tempestsarekind.livejournal.com]

Me again. Still Victorian, but Flanders also suggests that only about 10 percent of the population owned these homes outright, and everyone else rented--weekly for poorer people, seven-year leases for more prosperous middle-class folks. So I guess the question is whether there was a large move to make these houses into flats during the Edwardian period?

And now I am going to stop babbling all over your pretty journal. :)

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

Precisely! Someday, when I have my own library (she says boldly), I will make a special section for writers of historical fiction, and collect all sorts of books with useful trivialities. Of course, my original solution was swearing never to write historical fiction... ha ha ha. :/

Ooh, I'll have to look into terraced housing -- especially as I'd probably be able to get some more concrete visual stuff. Whenever I Google for flats/apartments, I seem to get tenements and things. And they're all in New York, for some reason. I've been trying not to get attached or overly descriptive about any part of my characters' home, because I never really know if I'm getting it right.

[tempestsarekind.livejournal.com]

I think I'd once decided that I wasn't going to write historical fiction, either! Instead I was going to write fantasy novels in which I could use whatever bits of history I liked to make up my own places (like the time I based a palace on a book I was reading on the Romanov palaces--except for the kitchen, which was from Hampton Court). Best-laid plans...

There is a pretty strong association of flats with New York, I suppose. When I went to visit some friends there recently, we went on a tour of a tenement building in the garment district in which they'd re-done several flats to depict housing at various points in the neighborhood's history. It was really interesting, and heartbreaking--but I don't know if there's much out there for learning about housing for other social classes.

I usually try to find lots of paintings and photographs as well (though for some reason I always forget about Google!). I'm not a very visual writer, so it helps me to have an image I can work from and even describe bits of if I need to. Biographies can be helpful in that resepct, or houses that are now museums.

[tsunamisama.livejournal.com]

Check Google Scholar too. Many of the issues you're talking about are esoterica of history and sociology, and likely to show up in theses and scholarly journals and such that you can get through interlibrary loan.

[the-stook3.livejournal.com]

perhaps you need to browse the dailys

http://www.google.co.uk/webhp?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hl=en&tab=iw#hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=newspaper+archives+london&meta=&fp=4c7cdc1edf4ca7c6

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I hadn't even thought of that! I think I could get lost in these old newspaper articles... in a delightful way, of course. :D

[shadowempress.livejournal.com]

A few things:

1. This is an alternate history of sorts, so inaccuracies are acceptable provided you can come up with a logical chain of events that would have brought it about.

2. The best way to find information about the Edwardian's is not to look for books about them, but to find books by them. Read through the book's by L.M Montgomery would actually help you a lot if you read them and ignored the story.

3. If you want specific information about something, find someone who loves it. They probably know stuff you don't. I learn huge amounts about the history of air corps by asking Dad.

4. I love your new layout!

[aohdwyn.livejournal.com]

this is why I can't do historical novels, or novels set in any reality other than the one I live in. I drive myself crazy with questions like this.

I think, if they're really going to be middle class, the Noxes have got to at least have a housekeeper. Look at fiction even from the last century -- the upper-middle-class almost always have housekeepers. If there's a garden on their property, they'd also have a gardener. They might also have a maid-of-all-work in to do the heavy cleaning.

RE bite-hiding time-appropriate neckwear: cravats. If it were set in Elizabethan times, I'd say those ridiculous ruffs -- OMG, just had a vision of reworking of fashion history, what if all of history's rather ridiculous neckwear was actually designed to hide vampire bites? Those high starched collars, neckties, cravats, chokers, ropes of pearls, the list goes on ...

My best advice to you is to read contemporary fiction published during the time period you're interested in. Not all of it can be about duchesses and their love affairs with factory workers. Can you look up books according to when they were published, or copyrighted? That'd be the way to go, I think. Also, it'd be fun!

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

I totally swore to myself, probably when I was thirteen or fourteen, that I would NEVER, EVER write historical fiction (despite this being the majority of what I read as a young lass). Research is harrrrd. And I can spot inaccuracies and anachronisms in other people's books a mile away. Without my glasses on, even.

But but but A HOUSEKEEPER EQUALS ANOTHER CHARACTER TO KEEP TRACK OF. :p If they lived in a flat or something like it, where on earth would they keep a non-family member, the closet? Or would this be a housekeeper who comes in every afternoon? I suppose especially living in America as I do the idea of servants outside of, like, a castle is fundamentally incomprehensible to me, despite having grown up inside British fiction of the forties and fifties. :p

OMG, just had a vision of reworking of fashion history, what if all of history's rather ridiculous neckwear was actually designed to hide vampire bites? Those high starched collars, neckties, cravats, chokers, ropes of pearls, the list goes on ...

ROFL WHY DO I NOT SEE THIS AS TOTALLY RIDICULOUS. :DDDD I mean, what other explanation would there even be for those ridiculous ruffs, anyway?

That'd be the way to go, I think. Also, it'd be fun!

Ahahaha, yes! "Go away, I am busy working. I AM READING THIS DELIGHTFUL NOVEL AND IT IS FOR RESEARCH. SO THERE." I haven't run across enough novels with my narrow time/place specifications yet -- much of my instinctual knowledge of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century comes from L.M. Montgomery, and she's a) rural b) Canada. M.M. Kaye had some really gorgeous memoirs about growing up before WWI, too, and while the pre-WWI stuff was mostly in India, there's probably a lot of stuff I could glean from those now that I'm looking for things. And Eva Ibbotson's A Company of Swans is 1912...

[tempestsarekind.livejournal.com]

I mean, what other explanation would there even be for those ridiculous ruffs, anyway?

Well--to protect the clothing from contact with the skin, at first. The outer layers of 16th and 17th-century clothing weren't really washable, but linen smocks were. So initially the ruff was just a frill on the collar of a smock. And then, it became a detachable display of wealth, basically--because it meant that you had a servant who could spend all that time setting your ruff in place. (They were flat bands, not pre-sewn into loops, so they had to be set in place with hot irons. Which is why the really big ruffs don't come in until starching becomes prevalent.) /pedant

But hiding vampire bites works too. :)