Fiction Update

I wrote more fiction. I did not write better fiction.

After this story is drafted, I will have a lot of extra work to do fact-checking the details. When I write, sometimes I do research on the fly. There are a lot of things in this story that are real, and thus I am responsible for getting them right (or at least plausibly close).

So for instance, most of the black characters' names are 1) drawn from my memory of names given to imported Africans in history, 2) taken from the Biblical Names chapter of a name book I have (because slave names were often taken from the Bible), or 3) taken from the African Names section of the same book, because my main character is willing to let people keep their original names (or try to; there's a language-fail scene in the story).

What I couldn't do was search for things like seasonal lists of when certain foods ripen in Georgia or what, what farm chores are typical in which months, details for the Quaker dialect in the antebellum South, etc. Some things like that I'll guess and keep going, but when they're 1) important details that impact the story, or 2) little spread-out details that would be hard to find and fix all of later, it's usually better to check first and then write.

When writing about weird speculative topics, making the background details solid helps sell the readers on the weird stuff. If they catch a factual mistake, it shakes their faith in the story (not to mention the writer). This is all the more true for alternative history, something I don't often write, because most of the people who read it are history buffs themselves and they will catch even tiny mistakes and raise a fuss.