my heart is a glorious machine;

Of all the things I thought research might accomplish, forcing me to write a sequel to the ever-present Novel that isn't even half-finished yet was not really something that crossed my mind.

Ah well, I'm a young writer yet. Eventually I'll learn there are Things To Watch Out For.

So: I've been reading as much about the Edwardians and the Great War as I can manage to find in the house -- I'll start to go spare if I can't pay off my library fines before much longer -- and the deeper I go, the more the blasted sequel talks to me. Okay, so "in the house" means "my siblings' history books" and "the internet", because for some reason I don't seem to have anything much on the First World War myself. Or the Edwardian era. A brief glance through the Book Closet brings me... uh... well, Barbara Hambly's duo of awesome and political-situation-foreshadowing Edwardian vampire novels (starring James Asher, motorbiking philologist ex-spy professor! and Lydia, his doctor wife of much win), and... Nicholas and Alexandra, okay, and the Emily of New Moon trilogy (Emily's diary entries are always dated 19--, which leads me to a bit of private fanon in which Emily's Quest ends just before the war begins, and there's all this stuff about Dean Priest in, like, Cairo or Japan or somewhere doing espionage, I don't know), and Peter Pan, a couple of my Ibbotsons -- A Countess Below Stairs is, rather plot-pointedly, right after both the Great War and the Russian Revolution, and A Company of Swans is London and the Amazon in, oh hey, 1912! -- um, is that it? Seriously? Argh.

Novels are excellent for research, too, especially novels written either during the era, or afterwards by people who were alive then -- one reason I love Eva Ibbotson's historicals so much: she has this really fresh perspective on the World Wars and writes about them so naturally, because she was there, and she sees them from both an English and an Austrian perspective, which is also neat -- because that gives you a better idea of how and what people were thinking and reacting to everything around them, instead of being told by a history book what was on everyone's minds. History books are well-meaning, and immensely live-in-able and helpful in most areas, but understanding how people thought and felt and reacted... you need to be in there. I'd like to write a historical novel that feels more like Eva Ibbotson's, in which she's just writing about what happened in her childhood, knowledge that comes naturally to her, so she's not shoehorning in Historical Perspectives or This Event or painstakingly describing everything you might not be quite familiar with (hint: people pick up on stuff fast, writers). I want to understand what it was like to wear those clothes and eat that food and read those newspapers. And then I can put in the vampires...

Anyway, I'm just reading a pretty basic World Wars history book -- I don't want to say textbook, cos the curriculumn my mother used for me and is now teaching my siblings with doesn't tend to hurl textbooks at you unless it's maths and there's nothing else for it. It's a book about history, and it's got a lot of pictures and things, but it's really well-done and readable and interesting. I mean, readable until something hits you straight in the stomach and you kind of have to put the book down for a while. Today I read about the Christmas Truce of 1914, and I kept thinking, blimey, these men didn't even want to be killing each other. Ugh. Screw this war.

Which is probably what Mr Caruthers would be saying, honestly, only with some rather choicer words learnt on the streets of London... Which brings me back to the bleeding sequel for a novel that's only three-quarters plotted and doesn't even have a real name yet, but here I am, thinking about Briony growing up in the war and bobbing her hair, and Camilla as a battlefield nurse, and how Mr Caruthers would be a staunch conscientious objector, but as the war got more and more desperate and the government got more and more pushy, he'd get dragged into espionage or something, given his Special Areas of Knowledge, and some other Exciting Novelly Stuff I should talk about soon. (I bet if I were a professional novelist I'd have a Do Not Talk About Your Blasted Novel So Much On Your LiveJournal Clause, because there are noooo secrets here, are there? Only I need someone to bounce all of this off. Actually, there is one secret. Just a little one. And I don't want to tell you about it because it's just a little weird brainquirk that is much, much more powerful in inference and in context.) And how Evangeline's Special Skills might get her pulled into the War, and how much things would be different with the addition of vampires and magic...

I was just trying to understand the political situation before the war, you know? Curses.

As I continue work on the Evangeline story, I realise how much I still need and want to learn about the era I'm writing in. It bothers me, for example, that all characters, major and minor, are automatically white in my head, because I don't have any real concept of racial diversity in 1912 England, but there has to have been a fair amount, because this is the British Empire that the sun never sets on, and inter-global travel is just becoming a real possibility with trains and steamships and everything. And if people from the further reaches of the Empire come to London, what roles do they play in society? I also don't really know what it would be like, really, to walk down a main street -- there are vendors, right? What sort of food and wares are they selling? What's the motorcar-to-horse-drawn-carriage ratio? What does everything smell like? What sort of music did people really listen to? (Props for finding popular songs that do not make me want to stab my eyes and ears out; I paged through a book of popular not-folk-songs from the early twentieth century and the lyric quality was atrocious. Clichés breeding like horny rabbits, nauseatingly sentimental concepts, incredibly lame wordplay... awful.) I've found a source for researching food, finally -- my grandmother gave me a cookbook of Yorkshire food, with historical notes and pictures and things, and the author has got a whole series of similar books, one of which is on London. Hurrah! Camilla does a lot of cooking, and the evening meal really is the heart of the Nox family day, and yet I'm still very unsure as to how experimental people got with food back then, how much the cultural exchange affected what people ate -- curries are popular in England now, but were they a hundred years ago? -- how much food cost, how likely desserts or snacks would be, what people ate for cold lunches and things.

As for the I-should-have-known-this-all-along Tam-Lin elements, Evangeline and Mr Caruthers fit pretty strongly into the Janet/Tam-Lin roles. Which reminds me, one of the reasons Tam-Lin is so awesome -- and why, I suspect, it attracts so much exploration in fiction -- is because Janet is one of the earliest kickass heroines of (Western?) fantasy. Janet saves her man. I love it. Also, I remind myself, just because you're exploring it here, doesn't mean you've used up all of your Tam-Lin credits and can't ever write another riff or adaptation -- Robin McKinley did two Beauty and the Beasts, remember? And Beauty and the Beast crops up again in Sunshine, in both obvious and subtle ways. And they're all awesome books. (Only... I am not Robin McKinley. She is way cooler than me, although she may be one of the few people I write faster than.) The vampire woman who coerces young Mr Caruthers into Some Vampire Nonsense is the Faerie Queen, I think, except I also think she's dead(...er) by the time Our Story begins. Maybe all of the vampires operate as the Faerie Queen, because there really are no vampire leaders, although there are probably a few especially powerful or charismatic vampires who are looked up to by the tribes at large.

The tithe... I think I'm getting closer and closer to understanding this bit. The woman on the library steps... I said that I realised she wasn't a warning but a ritual? I'm beginning to understand that she's only the first. I think people start turning up vampirely dead all over London, and this is primarily what Evangeline is recruited to stop -- probably because she was so good at accidentally destroying a whole room of vampires the time they tried to lay siege on the library (still trying to work out why any of that happened). It's something to do with the Industrial Revolution, or the war that maybe only they know is coming (also need so badly to read about the cultural climate that lead to the Great War), and they're trying to stop it happening? Stop it encroaching on their way of, erm, unlife? And Mr Caruthers, for one reason or another or perhaps a whole host of them, is the required -- wow, I was about to say Final Sacrifice, but, um. (Rowsdower Rowsdower Rowsa-rowsa-rowsdower!) And I've always liked the concept at the end of the ballad, where the Faerie Queen turns Tam-Lin into various things and Janet has to keep hold of him, and remember that he is the man she loves, and not to be decieved by the Faerie Queen's illusions, and I'm interested to see what I could do with that in this story, with Mr Caruthers (becoming various versions of himself, past, future, and purely speculative?).

Note: the element in which Janet is pregnant by Tam-Lin is not at all present in this story. In case you were wondering. :/ Also, I'm intrigued by the last line of the ballad, where the Faerie Queen says that if she'd known that all of this would have happened, she would have turned Tam-Lin into a tree -- in my 'verse, trees are sort of the antithesis of evil magic, which is why wooden stakes kill vampires. Trees equal life.