cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

I was thinking through a scene recently, toward the end of my current WIP, between the four major female characters. The scene will touch on their various plotlines and character arcs and where they the end of the book finds each woman. All four are ongoing characters in the series, but two are real, two fictional. Because it's a series, no one's plotline is neatly resolved in one book, and I don't think of my characters having nice, neat happily-every-after endings in any case. Yet in thinking about this scene, it occurred to me that already the two fictional characters have decidedly happier trajectories than the two real historical characters. Which reminded me of why, much as I love to write about real historical characters and events, I prefer to have fictional central characters. I can create my own characters with their own personalities and story arcs. And part of that is that many fascinating real life historical figures not only did not have happily-ever-after liv...

This will be a short post because I'm juggling multiple deadlines, but I wanted to share one of the "eureka" moments I experienced during my research on Marie Antoinette. Last spring I read more than a dozen biographies of her and was surprised that very few historians or academics mention the fact that the young Austrian archduchess Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna Hapsburg von Lothringen underwent a comprehensive physical makeover to make her appearance more attractive to the French. Negotiations to wed Antonia to Louis-Auguste, the dauphin of France and grandson of King Louis XV, began in 1766 when she was only ten years old. The talks dragged on for years, not atypical for a dynastic alliance. By 1768, Antonia's mother, the Empress of Austria Maria Theresa, still had no firm commitment from Louis XV. Something had to be done to hasten the process, as Austria (with Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia eager to chew off pieces of the empire)...