Frederick the Great discussion post 11

[cahn]

In our last installment, our heroes found that Henri de Catt's memoirs, a major source for current biographers of Frederick the Great, are not to be trusted!!

rheinsberg

Comments

Re: Katte! - The Koser take

[mildred_of_midgard]

Mind you, now my own MT marriage AU is even more AU than I thought

I once read something that I thought was clever, which was that if your story includes a firearm and you're not a gun nut, and you specify the make of the firearm by name, you should call it a "modified [whatever]," so that when you make that inevitable mistake somewhere in your story, gun nuts can nod knowingly and think, "Ah, yes, that's the modification." (Whether it's a plausible modification is another matter, but this has to at least improve your odds.)

I'm starting to feel like if I write Fritz fic, I should call everything an AU no matter how closely I'm trying to adhere to reality, because within a month or two, we'll have turned up something to contradict what I wrote. :P

That is, in fact, how I've read historical fiction for a long time: I tell myself it takes place in an AU, whether the author thinks it does or not, and then when I hit that inevitable error, I nod knowingly to myself about parallel universes. It helps my blood pressure like you would not believe, and allows me to focus on whether it's a *good* story without worrying excessively about whether it's a *accurate* or *plausible* story. I realize this doesn't work for everyone, but it's of great assistance to me.

I mean, both "Pulvis et Umbra" and "Counterpoint for Two Flutes" have already turned out to have errors beyond the intentional creative liberties that were taken at time of writing, so it's only a matter of time before any fic I write becomes obsolete in terms of my current knowledge base. It's actually comforting to see it happening to you too. ;)