Lost Cords

I've another guest post up on the Five Rivers blog, this one about the inspiration behind my upcoming A Tangled Weave. I haven't told the entire story in that post, though. Wanted to make myself look a bit more professional there, doncha know. The full truth is much less flattering.

French nobles, late 17th
century

I have always kept notebooks, but for some reason I have never really kept one in the fashion of Dwight Garner, to say nothing of this sort of book. I am coming to deeply regret this, if for no other reason than that I am finding myself increasingly unable to justify certain choices I've made in my writing.

That is to say, when I'm asked where the idea came from, I'm too often unable to be specific. Sometimes this failure is more awkward than others. The title of an alternate-history novel I'm (occasionally) working on, for example, comes from something I wrote when working on Dixie's Land (about which more anon). What I didn't write down was the source of the quote. And now I can't even remember which notebook I wrote in.

More French nobles

So when Lorina, my publisher, asked me for a short essay on the origins of A Tangled Weave, I was once again stumped. The moment of inspiration was pretty much as electrifying as I describe it in that guest post. The problem was, I couldn't remember what I'd been reading when inspiration struck. And because my approach to world-building for that novel was, shall we say, not as detailed as it has been for other novels, my notes contained nothing of use to me.

Normally I'd just go downstairs to the stacks and thumb through my books until I found the relevant source. But... four or five years ago we underwent a massive downsizing, in an ultimately successful attempt to reduce the size of our library in preparation for a large-scale renovation project. At the time I was sure I was finished with all of my books about seventeenth-century Europe. So I had nothing to research with.

French dandy (holy cow)

This left me with the fallback resource a lot of writers are reluctant to admit to: Google. I'm more than happy to admit to using Google and Wikipedia as preliminary research sources (will probably have more to say about this later, as well), but these work better for general topics. Searching for something like "prohibition Indian cotton France" brings up lots of results—more than ten million, in fact—but not the result I wanted. (Okay, to be accurate, the result I wanted wasn't in the first half-dozen pages of results, which was as far as I was prepared to trawl.)

French peasants, gendarme

To make a long story short, I eventually found a reference to the book that had inspired me, but I didn't find it by searching on anything fabric-related. I found it by searching for books on "everyday things," which my memory eventually told me was possibly part of the subtitle of the book that had proved so useful in giving me background to the world of Lise's wealthy aunt in A Poisoned Prayer.

Having found the reference and written my piece for the Five Rivers blog, I am now committed to being much more careful about noting not just book titles but even page numbers in my researches for new projects.

Let's see how long this resolution lasts.

Images are taken from The History of Costume by Braun & Schneider (in the public domain).