History lecture CD (greatly paraphrased): “And then the conspirators acted, converging in three waves, but the revolution faltered and a woman killed a conspirator in the street by throwing a pot and then a lot of people died, and an oppressive government agency was instituted which made a lot of people miserable and also dead. All this happened about the same time as this other horrible mass murder was going on.”
Me, listening in car: “YES!”
Me, looking around empty car guiltily: “I mean, yes, that’s good for my plot. Not, yes, huzzah that a lot of people died horribly. Just, um, a good convergence for that new plot I’ve been kicking around and hoped would work out with appropriate historical timing. And it does. Which is cool. I mean, cool for the story, not cool for the dead people. You know. Who wants donuts?”
Authors are weird.
Yea, verily, yea, it doth happen that way.
One of my research moments involved seeing a way to fit the Holocaust into the backstory of my vampire and zombie alternate history. It’s such a serious and horrendous part of real history that I thought it likely that particular piece of backstory would never see the printed page.
I asked myself quite sternly, “Is nothing sacred?”