Back to the Drawing Board

 I've been wrestling with Book 4 of the Twins of Bellesfées. 

The macguffin is opium that has been treated with zombi dust to turn all of England into zombis. (Yes, that's how the word was spelled back in 1843). I thought I knew why--a great revenge against Angélique--but I recently found another research source that totally negates my planned plot. Now I have to come up with a justification for someone to want to attack England as well as kill the twins.

I've tried pushing the action forward, hoping a reason would magically or logically reveal itself. I'm nine chapters into twenty, which for me is the point where the plot is revealed and the fight to stop it begins. All my characters are in place, all my devices are ready to be sprung, and here I am stopped cold because the entire premise I was building on has collapsed.

I like these novels to do three things: tell a rollicking good story based on my twins, make a commentary about the society of the time period and its contemporary correlative, and make my twins grow in their respective directions and relationships. To me, a story has to mean something beyond a lot of action and basic conflict.

That three-fold goal, of course, is the reason I spend so much time in research. I have to get the historical facts right if I'm going to play around them. It's not a simple hero's journey, there and back again, and wasn't that a hoot? I want women to identify with my twins, even if the twins are women in France 1843. I want them to stand for something, build something. I want my novels to say something about the reader more than the author.

Lofty ideals, I know.

So back to the drawing board: England, the First Opium War and unequal Treaty of Nanking, Macau, Zheng Yi Sao... I put it all on the back burner to simmer.

The inscrutable Zheng Yi Sao