"Writing is a lot like sex. At first you do it because you like it. Then you find yourself doing it for a few close friends and people you like. But if you're any good at all...you end up doing it for money. "
--Author Unknown
It's been a few weeks since I've updated the DoD blog, largely due to this obscure thing called the 'Christmas break', for those who were fortunate enough to have one. This entry will give an update on what posts are forthcoming, and some more general thoughts on the style of writing in DoD.
As always, I have a number of posts in the pipeline. I've recently compressed this down to twelve, which is too many to list all of them in detail here. There's a further one about Julia Gordon and life in Nicaragua, a couple of posts about the lives of slaves and debt-slaves, one showing the life of lower-class Americans through the diary and letters of a man from Appalachia, one about alternate architecture in Hartford and Columbia, one about philosophies and ideologies in Europe (mostly *socialism), one about the ethnic ancestry and cultural values of Americans, one about the life of that ex-Australian immigrant William Macarthur as he tours the United States, two political posts about the history of 1890s USA and New England, one post on post-war Italy, and one post (likely to split into several) on the *Boer Wars. As always, these will get finished as and when I get time and as and when I get inspiration. I suspect the next two finished will be about the life of Julia Gordon and one about the life of slaves mostly set in Kansas, but this may change.
As the above list of upcoming posts shows, there's also been something of a change in the subject matter of DoD posts. Until now it had been mostly on the political-military side, which I expect to return to, but I felt that it needed some balance. So there's been the last 6 posts on other areas of life, and there are more forthcoming. At least the above ones, and maybe others which I have vague ideas floating around for. I will probably intersperse some of the political posts, however, and the post on Italy is also nearing completion.
More generally, I'm also changing and refining the techniques which I use for writing DoD posts. As a glance through the timeline indicates, I've used a variety of techniques to get information across, but there's two main styles, which I tend to mix and match according to what I think is the best way to relay information about the theme for any given post.
The first source is "eyewitness accounts" - a few minutes or occasionally more extended moments in the life of someone living during the ever-moving 'present day' of the DoD timeline. All of these eyewitness accounts are shown through the perspective of a particular individual. This means that information is filtered, since they can't comment on things that they don't know about, and their view of a situation may be quite different from the other participants. For instance, when I showed the meeting between President Corbin, Brutus Clay and General Mahan which led to the Third Mexican War (post #75 - Nightfall), you saw Corbin's view of the situation. That meeting would have been seen quite differently through Mahan's point of view (viz, that he had quite severe concerns over Brutus Clay railroading the president, and that war with Mexico was a good thing but only if carried out in a way which ensured that Britain would not intervene).
Similarly, eyewitnesses can be mistaken, assuming things about other characters' motives which are incorrect, they can misremember previous historical facts, report as 'truth' what is only widely accepted urban legends, and they can overlook details of an interaction. But the use of a viewpoint character, at least the way I like to write them, means that they don't automatically think facts about themselves which they just take for granted. To take a recent example, the post about Julia Gordon in Nicaragua (post #96 - By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them) included snapshots about her pertinent impressions of the other characters, but she didn't need to think about herself in the same way. She doesn't feel the need to elaborate on her reasons why she doesn't want to marry, why she preferred Nicaragua to Georgia (although she does describe some of that to Harry Walker in a conversation, where I think it's reasonable to do so), and how she wants to live her life. Instead, I try to show some of it through her interactions with other characters, or if it's not relevant or practical to show it just remains in the backstory. If I had written the post from Harry Walker's perspective (which was something I considered), then
you would have had his snapshot impression about Julia but much of his own life wouldn't have been mentioned in any significant way.
The second main style is "historians' accounts" of various historical events or historical trends. These have some advantages in that they allow me to show sweeping trends, long-term developments, snippets of the 'modern world' (about 1945-1955 in DoD terms), some foreshadowing, and just general 'sense of the world' in a way which is harder to get through eyewitness accounts. They can also show some information, especially figures, which contemporary people may not know or care about. However, there's any number of limitations on these sources too. Historians may be sloppy researchers, which happens occasionally. Some information just doesn't make it into the history books. Historians will, naturally, tend to write about the areas that interest them, and it may mean that some important aspects of life are left unmentioned. They also have biases, particularly nationalistic biases, and they may also have their own pet theories which they continue to promote regardless or even in spite of the evidence. I try to give some indication of their nationalistic biases through the countries where they are published, or in the way they harp on about particular subjects. How they display their pet theories can be more difficult. For instance, there are disputing interpretations about how and why the system of debt-slavery and other form of indenture arose as the United States expanded southward. There's the 'Yucatan Thesis' of Michelle Davies (later Michelle Kelvin), and the quotations from her books emphasise the Yucatan as the inspiration for the development of these formats. The main competing interpretation states that it was a product of U.S. experiences in Nicaragua and northern Mexico, and that the Yucatan was just a rather unusual example.
The third style I use, less frequently than the others, is what in historical parlance are 'primary sources' - letters, newspaper articles and diary entries and so on written in the same ever-moving 'present day' of the DoD TL. These tend to have the same biases as eyewitness accounts, and have the added one that there may be some deliberate deception involved (letters and newspaper articles), reliance on hearsay (newpaper articles) or deliberate decision to leave out some embarassing or less salient details (all of the above, but particularly diary entries).
The fourth style is what I think of as miscellaneous, which is to say that these are either simple one-offs or just different tidbits. This includes bylines of where books are being published in the later world, literary notes about old books, the transcript of a 1949 debate, entries from the *CIA world factbook, and so on. These each have their purpose, partly to give more glimpses of the 'present day' of the DoD timeline. The main limitation of these is that extremely limited information is presented - I don't want to make things like this too broad or thus reveal everything about the status of the 'modern world'.
With all of these styles, there's two things that are consistent: information is always limited, and the narrator is unreliable. I think that having an unreliable narrator is more realistic, since no-one really has perfect information anyway. The limitation of information, as well as being a necessary result of writing things through individual perspective, also means that I can keep a few surprises in store for later. I think things would get boring if everything was revealed at once. However, this is also because I don't know everything about what will happen in the rest of the timeline. I have a fair idea, but some things are still unresolved, and others I may want to change. (In a couple of cases, especially the history of South Africa and Japan, I've already made some substantial changes). So not revealing things, especially by choosing various styles or sources which avoid commenting on certain subjects, means I don't need to say something which I may want to change later. Retcons are always possible, but I don't want to have to go rewriting huge chunks of the existing timeline, and it also makes it much harder for people to keep track of what has been happening. For instance, there has been no mention of what Canada is like, or even if it exists, during the 'modern day' world of the 1950s. All references to Canada have been left ambiguous for this reason, and the 'census data' from Canada is reported from the New England Historical Archives. I do have a clear idea of what I expect to happen to Canada, but since this may easily change if I have to affect other aspects of U.S. or New England history, I don't want to be too specific about Canada as well.
Cheers,
Kaiser Wilhelm III
