There’s nothing like researching life in the past to make you appreciate life in the present. I am so glad I’m living in an era (and location) of indoor plumbing, with easily accessible clean water for washing and drinking. And washing machines.

Just reading about laundry day before washing machines makes me want to lie down (on my clean sheets) and take a nap. Hours and hours of fetching water, then boiling it, scrubbing the clothes, rinsing with still more water, and hanging up to dry, then ironing everything. The rich who could hire people to do all that might have been able to stay clean, but for everyone else, it was an ordeal that they didn’t go through too often. They might change the sheets on their beds a few times a year. Some people just wore clothes until they fell apart without ever washing them because they didn’t have access to water or the facilities to do laundry. Yikes!

We won’t even get into the issue of privies, chamber pots, and cess pits. Ew.

As a woman, I’m even more fortunate to be living today because women had so few rights or opportunities a couple of hundred years ago. A “respectable” woman couldn’t do much to earn a living. A woman who did work was paid drastically less than a man (okay, that hasn’t entirely changed). A married woman was considered the property of her husband, as were her children, so even if he was horribly abusive, she really had no recourse. Her only option was to leave her children with him if she left (or, like in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, run away with the kid and hide out, pretending to be a widow).

Transportation was a real issue (something that really comes up in what I’m working on). Before railroads, long-distance travel was slow and uncomfortable. The only options were foot, horseback, or coach, maybe boat, depending on location, but boats didn’t have engines, so even that wasn’t easy. No wonder few people ever went far from where they were born, and you had to be a real adventurer to do much travel at all.

When I’m reading these reference books, I find myself feeling gratitude for so many little things as I go through my day — clean water from a tap, light at the flip of a switch, hot water for tea by turning on an electric kettle, a refrigerator keeping my food fresh, a washing machine and dryer for clean clothes and sheets, a car to allow me to travel easily beyond my neighborhood. We romanticize the past in fiction, but the truth is that life wasn’t easy. I think we enjoy reading about the past or about worlds that resemble our past because it’s so different, but we tend to shy away from the things that were so different because they’re rather disgusting. I’m certainly not going to be delving into how seldom anyone did laundry. On the other hand, things like the transportation and communication issues give us plot opportunities that don’t exist in today’s world. There are so many things that can be solved with a cell phone call but that become real problems if it takes a week to send a letter, and that’s the fastest way to communicate.

And then there are the clothes — so pretty to imagine, but I wouldn’t want to wear them every day. That’s what fiction is for, dipping your toe into another life for a little while.

As I continue research for a book, I’ve come across something that may require me to deal with something new for a book: dialect. I’ve had Sam the gargoyle’s hint of a Brooklyn accent and the occasional “y’all” for some of my southern characters, but I may have to take it further than that with this story.

In the time period I’m emulating — and in the world I’m building — it’s before there was easy long-distance travel, so most people never went more than a hundred miles from home in their lifetime. That meant that regional dialects were quite pronounced and distinct. The exception might be people whose work required a lot of travel (merchants, sailors, military, etc.) and the upper crust. The elite sent their sons to boarding schools, where they met people from other regions and they visited London and went to each other’s homes for house parties. They ended up having their own dialect that was distinct from the regional dialects where they lived. Otherwise, different parts of the country had different ways of talking that could sometimes almost be other languages. These regional differences have blurred over time as people have become more mobile and as there’s mass media, where there’s a “standard” way to speak.

In the story I’m developing, the heroine comes from a remote region that’s not visited by many outsiders. In a sense, they’re the “hillbillies” of this world, though more sophisticated and educated than that. At the beginning of the story, the heroine has barely interacted with anyone outside her family, let alone from outside her region. It would make sense that she would speak a different dialect than the upper-crust people from the empire’s capital city.

That means I need to figure out what her dialect is and how to depict it. Dialect in text can be really annoying and distracting to read, and it would be even worse if it’s a made-up dialect that doesn’t map directly to anything readers will be familiar with. I, personally, hate it when a book is so heavy on dialect that I have to read it out loud to try to sound out the words and figure out what they’re saying. I think the heroine will adapt pretty quickly once she realizes that the people around her talk a different way, so it will mostly be a factor early in the book to show that she’s different from the other characters and then later maybe when she gets excited and forgets herself. I just need to figure out a few speech patterns and wording changes that will indicate her home “tongue.” I think I’m going to try to avoid anything that will require funny phonetic spellings.

Meanwhile, I’m seeing more and more of the “movie” in my head (and in my sleep). Unfortunately, so far it’s all set-up stuff, so I’m not getting a lot of hint at what the plot will be, just how the characters get into the position for the plot to kick in and affect them.

I finished my proofreading! In the future, I really need to avoid doing two books back-to-back like that. I need to do other kind of work in between, not just for my brain but for my voice. I proofread by reading out loud — the best way to make sure you’re reading what’s there rather than what you think should be there, as well as a great way to spot awkward phrasing, repeated words, etc. Reading entire novels out loud for weeks at a stretch when I’m used to not talking much on a normal day really seems to have strained me because my throat’s a bit sore (though some of that may be due to high mountain cedar levels). I may have to give myself vocal rest this weekend (and remember not to talk to myself out loud).

I let myself sleep late and have a lazy morning today because wrapping up a book should be celebrated, and then this afternoon I have to dive into planning my next projects.

One thing I have to figure out is what my heroine wants. That’s such a basic part of fiction, but I realized once I got started thinking about it that although I have what felt like a fleshed-out character, I have no idea what she might want, aside from the story goal (which I’m also not entirely clear on). The one thing I can think of feels like it’s overused and a bit of a cliche, but being different and doing the opposite thing means the story has no drive. People wanting something bigger or more than where they are is such a standard thing (“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”) but content people make terrible protagonists, unless something absolutely forces them out of their contentment. I don’t want to blow up her world, and I don’t want to make her hate having to do the thing she has to do, which means I have to make her something less than content. This is going to take some thought.

Meanwhile this is a “secondary world” story, so it’s not based in our world, and that’s rather liberating. I’m somewhat basing it on a particular period of our history (clothing, technology level, society), but I can change things I don’t like. For instance, I can have lovely late 18th century-inspired dresses but skip the powdered wigs on men and women. In my world, they don’t do wigs. I can also have less sexism, so girls can do things they wouldn’t have been allowed to do in our world’s history. I just have to decide how much their world follows ours — we moved into the Directoire style that morphed into Empire, with the kinds of dresses you see in Jane Austen movies, in part because of the French Revolution and looking back at Greece as a model democratic society, so women tried to dress like they were Greek statues. In a world without a Greece or a France, would the same kind of transition have happened? Or would it have happened for a different reason — some fashion leader is seen outside in her nightgown, and soon everyone’s dressing that way? Or maybe there were still statues in flowing robes for another reason, and people start emulating that style. That style change was so drastic that it makes a lovely visual shorthand to separate those who are on the leading edge of fashion from those who are more provincial, like the latest season of Poldark, in which the women who’d been to London dressed very differently from those who’d stayed in Cornwall, and once a Cornwall woman had been to London, she returned home wearing very different clothes. Cornwall was still in Georgian style, with a tight bodice and full skirt, while London was in Regency style, with the column silhouette and high waist.

And, no, thinking of setting a book in a world that emulates this era is not merely an excuse to watch a bunch of Jane Austen movies. Really. (Though it may have been influenced by the fact that my PBS station is rerunning the Pride and Prejudice miniseries.)

I’m working on copyedits for Enchanted, Inc. book 9 right now. This is the phase when I look at the manuscript that the copyeditor has marked up and insert the changes into my copy of the manuscript, deciding which ones to accept or reject. The copyeditor is essentially a professional nitpicker, not only spotting things like grammar, spelling, punctuation, missing words, misused words, typos, and the like, but also keeping track of continuity — she was wearing a hat in the previous scene, but now there’s no mention of a hat. Is she still wearing the hat or did she take it off? Where did she put the hat when she took it off? Does she put it back on when she goes outside again?

I have a wonderful copyeditor, but I still struggle with this phase of a project because it takes me right back to my school days. It feels just like when you’ve had a paper or essay graded and the teacher hands it back to you, covered in red marks. It isn’t actually like that at all because a copyeditor isn’t judging you (except maybe inside). You’re not being graded. It’s a partnership to make the book better. The editor is helping you. It’s more like giving your paper to a friend to read over it for you and make suggestions before you hand it in to the teacher to be graded. Your friend’s marks don’t count as part of your score. They just help you improve your work before it is judged or graded. I’ll have to remember that analogy the next time I get copyedits and spend a day procrastinating furiously because I dread looking at my manuscript and seeing marks all over it.

I suspect I’ll still cringe when the copyeditor calls out an obvious mistake. I swear, words go missing between the time I review the manuscript before handing it in and the time the copyeditor sees it. Most of my edits, though, have to do with compound words and keeping straight which are written as two words, which are smashed together to make one word, and which are hyphenated. That all depends on which style guide you’re using. I learned Associated Press style in journalism school, but publishing tends to use the Chicago Manual of Style, and they sometimes do them in different ways. In a lot of cases, there are several “correct” ways to do it, but you go with what’s in the style guide you’re using for the sake of consistency.

And I swear, they change the rules between books because I try to internalize them on each copyedit and do what the editor said the last time, and it still ends up getting changed.

The other thing a copyedit will make glaringly obvious is which are your “pet” words for that book. You’ll think you’ve caught those words you overuse and you’ll be sure you cut them all out, and then you’ll get a note from the editor saying, “You used this word 60 times in the book. You should probably cut most of these uses.”

The really annoying thing is that in spite of this kind of edit and proofreading after making the edits, you’ll still end up with at least one error in the finished book.