Figured it was time I did a face reveal

This is me

This is me and whoever wanna volunteer

For the fic writer ask, what draws you to historical AUs? Are they difficult to write?

Part of it is definitely that I’m a historian (did my undergrad in it and it was a major part of my MA thesis) and also a history nerd. I spend a lot of my time reading big books on different topics, and chasing up references to interesting sources. I have a folder dedicated to historical newspaper extracts on specific topics. So in one sense that definitely makes them easier to write, because they’re usually an AU set in a period that I’ve done a lot of work (formally or otherwise) on.

Often they just emerge out of my obsessions. Probably every western AU I’ve written can be traced back to things I was reading and thinking about in 2018 (and on a recurring basis since 2008 and 2012, it’s a topic I’ve spent a lot of time on), and any WWI fic has its roots in my *love* for historical medicine and the advances made in those four years. Wraiths of Wandering basically exists because I looked at Susan Kay’s epilogue and a host of different kid fics and my brain just went “the nextgen is absolutely of an age to fight in WWI” and combined that with historical surgery to have a wild time. The Irish Revolution Trilogy is a combination of a pile of things that I’ve studied throughout my education and research I’ve done in my own time and the huge cultural phenomenon that time period is. The Time Travel fics are a little unique but they also wouldn’t exist if not for my abiding love for and fascination with Noël Browne — and if it did exist it would be different on such a basic level that I don’t know what it would be like.

I honestly find historical AUs easier than modern AUs. You can do things in a historical AU that you can’t in a different setting. There’s a level of bureaucracy and control now that there wasn’t then. Everything is quantified and traced and full of protocol, not to mention the practicalities of modern law. In a historical AU you can write someone sustaining a gunshot wound — fatal or otherwise — and never have them go near a hospital. You can write them getting treated in a hotel room or on a kitchen table and they’re both equally accurate, whereas if you do that in a modern setting you have to have a way of justifying it so you’re not as free to explore the emotions of the situation. The emotion in a fic is key to me and I find it so much easier to explore emotion in a historical setting with a different set of rules to play by.

Another reason I love writing historical AUs is that they’re a really great way to fathom out the things I’ve been reading. So often we treat history as something static, names and dates and figures and stats and a clear course of action, but it’s not like that at all. It’s so messy, and when we treat it as not messy we lose sight of the fact that these people were people. They lived and loved and fucked things up and took risks and made stupid decisions, but we treat them as if they can be broken down to something simple and lose the bigger picture. Writing historical AUs is a great way to treat the past as having once been real, and to put life back into the narrative, and also to find the emotions at the heart of it because of course people in the past were emotion-driven but we forget that too and we shouldn’t.

They’re also loads of fun and it’s so much fun to think “if it was Ireland in the 1920s then Philippe and Raoul are probably members of the landlord class but wouldn’t it be wild if actually Philippe was a member of the IRA because he wanted a better country for his brother to grow up in” or “in West Texas in the 1870s Erik is not going to be holed up in some opera house but he is going to be a known and feared outlaw and probably excuses his face as a war injury and Doc Holliday probably fixed up his teeth sometime around 1873 when he was still a dentist and not a man with a thousand myths around him”. They’re so much fun and you don’t have the logistics of “there are a whole pile of laws around digging for dinosaur bones on federal land” or “someone’s going to hear the shots and call the emergency services.”

They’re just such an opportunity to do things and explore things and they don’t feel so constricted. At least how I feel.

Plus the past was 10 times more queer than we give it credit for and it’s only right to put the queerness back into it. There were gay men and lesbians involved in the Irish revolution and the American West was a melting pot of people who didn’t fit in the conventional society of the day, and we would do well to remember these things and write about them.