I'm having a bit of a crisis of confidence WRT the whole concept of my alternative history. Which sucks, because I love my characters and my story and I need to restore my own suspension of disbelief.

You see, originally I was going to change one thing, and one thing only. Everything different in my timeline had to flow from that single initial change, not necessarily as the most obvious or likely result, but as a possible outcome. This struck me as being intellectually rigorous and elegant, and in general the Only Proper Way to write alternative history, at least of the non-magical sort.

Problem is, my desire for elegant intellectual rigor is clashing with my desire for a cracking good story. So I want to let in a few other changes that'll make the story work better, only I'm afraid that all the truly intelligent readers are going to point, stare, snicker, and generally sneer at me for sloppy worldbuilding.

I've lost track of the times DH and I have had discussions like this lately:

Me: I'm stuck because I can't make X work!
Him: Easy. Just have a traitor at the highest levels of government who feeds the decision-makers false information. Your protagonist tracking this guy down and killing him would make a nice subplot in Book 2 or 3.
Me: But...but...that's not a possible outcome of my initial change in the timeline! That Change wouldn't lead anyone to commit treason.
Him: You're writing FICTION.

I guess what I'm breaking down over is Cause vs. Result. You could approach an alternative history from either direction--e.g. if I were doing the Civil War, a Cause-based story would be, "What if Stonewall Jackson wasn't shot at Chancellorsville?" A Result-based story would be, "How might the CSA have won the Civil War?" Since IMHO there were multiple reasons why the South lost (and in 20-20 hindsight, the odds were hugely stacked against them from the start), you'd probably have to change more than one event to get there. And that's my problem. I thought of my Result before I thought of my Cause, and my Cause has turned out a bit too flimsy to bear the full weight of, um, causing the desired Result.

Is that OK, do y'all think? Can I change what I need to in order to get the cracking good story that allows me to do the most with my beloved characters (and I am CRAZY about these characters--I'd HATE to feel like the story is so broken I can't write about them anymore)? Or is that too sloppy a route to produce a good alternative history?

Susan. Tell the story. It's an AU, yes? The whole purpose of an AU is to give a writer the room to tell the story s/he wants to tell, unhampered by inconvenient history.

It sounds to me like you've tied yourself up so tightly and repeatedly trying to "do justice" to the characters you fell in love with and the period you've researched so deeply that you're losing sight of your story.

Everything can be sacrificed--or at least take a step back--to tell the story, to move it forward, to maintain momentum and tension and suspense. When you get bogged down in the precise shade of a uniform jacket or the intricate forms of social politesse, you're losing sight of your story.

The whole point of research is to immerse and familiarize yourself with background and details. Honestly? Mostly, your readers don't care. They just want to read a good story about characters they can relate to and care about. Can you give them that? I think so. Then it's enough that *you* know all those precise details. Now trust your own awareness of period and get on with telling the story. If there are plot points or details or other factors that can't be handwaved by the fact that this is alternate history, you can fix them after you've finished the story.

I know you want to be perfect. Nobody can be. Not even you. And dithering about details like this is just another form of procrastination, you know. I have SO been there, believe it or not.

Admires Beverly's spicy brains. (Or: what she said.)

Me: But...but...that's not a possible outcome of my initial change in the timeline! That Change wouldn't lead anyone to commit treason.

But it might lead to certain people living or dying out of order. Rather than turning someone a traitor, someone who may have died in the original timeline (say in a ferocious battle that now never happens) they now live, grow older and end up in a position of power...

Lord, when I was writing my Italian Ren Spander AU fic, I don't know how many times I tied myself up in a knot on things like "But Cesare was still a Cardinal that year!" or "Leonardo was nowhere near Rome then!" And I had to repeatedly bop myself with "You're writing an alternate universe with vampires, Leonardo da Vinci can change his travel plans."

The whole purpose of an AU is to give a writer the room to tell the story s/he wants to tell, unhampered by inconvenient history.

Thanks, Beverly! I think I'll print that out and stick it to my computer, because I'd been about breaking my brain trying to make the entire story I want to tell spring from a single changed incident.

I probably spend too much time worrying about the Reader Who Knows More Than Me. It's crazy because, frankly, that's a small fraction of the population. But OTOH, the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know. While I have a good general knowledge of European and world history 1789-1815, I'm really only an expert on certain elements of it. I'm constantly learning more, but you can't be an expert on everything.

But yeah, you're totally right. I need to write the story and do whatever I need to make it work. Because it's supposed to be fun for me to write and for the reader to read, first of all. The rest is gravy. And while I don't think DH's "traitor in high places" is really where I want to go anyway (I've got other plans for an OTT spy/conspiracy plot, and I don't want to go to that well too often), CaBil is right that I need to check the casualty lists of certain battles that never happened in my reality. Because there may be hidden wells of competence on one side and incompetence on the other that I haven't fully tapped...

And I had to repeatedly bop myself with "You're writing an alternate universe with vampires, Leonardo da Vinci can change his travel plans."

Glad it's not just me! Of course, my AU is just our world if a few events had turned out differently, so I don't have vampires or dragons or anything. OTOH, I do believe in at least partial free will and quite a bit of randomness in the system IRL, so there's no reason not to let my fictional world reflect that...

Never mind that certain people's reputations were made or destroyed in battles, so even if they didn't live or die, the trajectory of their careers could be changed or their rise to the ranks was arrested because their superiors didn't die on schedule...

Heh, Susan did I ever mention the project I am doing with TokyoPop here? The initial concept was based off Antiques Roadshow spot on Davy Crockett's first wedding license which was filed for but never acted upon because the woman got cold feet. If he got married then, would he have gone West... ?

How something like that turned into a steampunk 1830s American with steam drays the size of small ships carving paths through Appalachia is a process I am still not sure I can break down...

There's a show called Connections that shows on PBS--or used to--that would track various technological developments back through history and show the linchpins necessary for that development to occur. So much of development is random that a few tiny rearrangements can open whole new worlds.