Do you ever have too much up in the air at the same time?
I’m up to my neck in research for my next historical fantasy series. It takes place during WWI, and it’s been really eye-opening to dive into that history. Did you know that over the course of WWI, fifteen to twenty million people died? That’s roughly 400,000 deaths each month.
To the modern mind, it’s simply unimaginable.
In the meantime, I’ve also finally decided to tackle War and Peace. So many times, when people talk about novels, they say things like, “Oh yeah, it’s a great book. I mean, it’s not War and Peace, but it’s good.” Well, I was tired of hearing about how great War and Peace was. I’m listening to it on audiobook.
The audiobook is sixty hours long… I’m halfway through. It’s going well. There’s a line in Gilmore Girls where Rory Gilmore meets up with her boyfriend, Dean, at the bus stop. She asks if he read it. He says, yeah I read it.
That right there is the most unbelievable scene in the entire series. There’s no way Dean read War and Peace. But I guess that’s a conversation for another time.
I took a break from War and Peace when I hit the halfway mark to read Black Powder War, book three in the Temeraire. It’s a great historical fantasy book series by Naomi Novik about the British Dragon Aviators in the Napoleonic War.
There’s only one problem. War and Peace is also about the Napoleonic War, and I’ll admit there have been a few instances in which I’m getting things mixed up. I mean, as a rational adult, I understand there were not actually dragons in the militaries fighting between Napoleon and the other European powers. But does that mean I can’t imagine Andrei Bolkonsky riding a dragon from time to time?
But then, when combining this mash-up to all of the details about dates and battles and tech innovations from my research on WWI, my mind is in a constant state of near psychedelic hallucinations about some fantastical past.
I suppose there are worse things to be thinking about all day.
Do you ever experience plot/story mashup? Read more than one book at once?
