With 9 days to go until NaNoWriMo, I've started preparations for this year's project, codenamed (and possibly titled, though the chances of it surviving until the final version are unlikely at best) "Wander." The premise is one that I used for my first published short story, a historical-fantasy mashup that spans a couple of millennia. I've tabled this one for more than five years, because I felt I needed to grow a bit as a writer before I could do it justice. The novel's scope and slightly more literary bent than my usual SF/fantasy modus operandi is one challenge that I think I'm now ready to face; the other is having to mesh the story of my pseudo-historical protagonist with actual events and locales.
One of the things I like the most about SF/fantasy is that the milieu is entirely your own creation; you can draw inspiration from wherever it suits you, and needed have to worry about how things correspond to the real world - except, of course, thematically or by analogy. It can be a daunting level of freedom for writers who are used to the familiar confines of fiction set in the "real" world (which inevitable evokes only enough real world verisimilitude as the story itself needs), but on the other side of the coin, that freedom can also be something of a crutch. Being forced to mesh things together with real world timelines, places, events, and people makes for a unique challenge for a speculative fiction writer like me, and the nature of the task requires that some pre-writing research and notetaking be done.
Among the various topics my research has me reading through: the Sengoku Era in Japan; the historical city of Alexandria; European warfare in the Middle Ages; and a question the answer for which continues to elude me - what is the difference between the terms Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew?
Also, some flights of pure fancy that I made over ten years ago also appear to have important milieu-based ramifications on my present line of research. In the short story, I gave the protagonist the last name "Temani," which at the time I only knew meant "from the south." My recent research has uncovered that being from "Teman," one of the larger and more characteristic cities of the country of Edom, would strongly predisposition a Jewish character as being one of the Temanim, or Yemenite Jews, a specific subset of Jewish people with a colorful and unique history. A history which includes an aversion to naming their children after the biblical Ezra, which comes awfully close to the given name of my protagonist, at least as I had named him in the short story. Whether that means I'll be giving him a different name, or whether that contradiction is a story-worthy complication remains to be seen, but I'll be working out the particulars as I continue my background research and start developing plot outlines.
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