Japan benefit reading

Most of interest to those on the BC Lower Mainland, so I can't myself attend, but just in case anyone reading this blog has the chance, here's the info:

*Japan Earthquake Benefit *

***Friends Across the Pacific: An Evening of Readings & Performances**

Join us in supporting relief efforts in Japan. The BC Japan Earthquake Fund and the Asian Canadian Studies Society invites you to an evening of poetry, fiction, and performance, with some of Vancouver's finest writers:

Daphne Marlatt, Joanne Arnott, Proma Tagore, Roy Miki, Lydia Kwa, Hiromi Goto, Fred Wah, and more!

Thursday, March 31, 2011, 8pm. Doors open at 7:30pm

VIVO Media Arts Centre, 1965 Main Street, Vancouver

By donation. All donations will go to the Canadian Red Cross through the BC-Japan Earthquake Relief Fund.

** All welcome. Must be 19 years of age or older to purchase alcohol. ID required.**

The BC Japan Earthquake Relief Fund (BC-JERF) is a coalition of volunteers; we are individuals, community groups and businesses concerned for the well-being of the people in Japan in the wake of the recent earthquake, tsunami, and unfolding nuclear threats. Our purpose is to vet and act as an organizational hub for BC communities' fundraising efforts and to facilitate the delivery of this financial aid to the affected people in Japan. Funds raised through BC-JERF-endorsed campaigns and events will be donated in full to reputable charities operating on the ground in Japan, such as the Japanese Red Cross.

Community Partners: VIVO Media Arts Centre, Powell Street Festival Society and Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

For more information contact: Julia Aoki, Communications Coordinator at julia@bc-jerf.ca

books, book-talk, and race

Terri, I'm sorry, this will probably give you another book to read--but it's a very fast read!

So, I recently finished Half World, by Hiromi Goto, a sorta-local author (lives on the mainland), book trailer for which can be seen here. The back-cover copy reads:

MELANIE TAMAKI IS AN OUTSIDER
As the unpopular and impoverished only child of a loving but neglectful mother, she is just barely coping with school and life. But everything changes on the day she returns home to find her mother is missing, lured back to Half World by a vile creature calling himself Mr. Glueskin. Soon Melanie embarks on an epic and darkly fantastical journey to Half World to save her mother. What she does not yet realize is that the state of the universe itself is at stake....
Award winning author Hiromi Goto's novel is an adventurous, genre-bending fantasy of shape-shifting characters, tortured half-lives, and redemption.

Wow. This book moves at a dead run. There are two prologues, one distant past and one recent past. The first is a pared-down legend-backstory, but the second is grab-reader-by-throat.
Then the story proper begins, as Melanie's mother goes missing, and she gets a phone call (on a disconnected phone) from the deeply-creepy Mr. Glueskin telling her what she has to do if she ever wants to see her mother again. Because the reader has already encountered Mr. Glueskin in the second prologue, this is even creepier than Melanie knows.
Melanie makes a believable young heroine, sometimes frustrated and overwhelmed, sometimes hasty and resentful, but always picking herself up and 'doing what's nearest'. She has no special powers, only determination and a loving heart--a refreshing change from the YA heroines who are billed as kickass tough girls but are passive and helpless when the crunch comes. (And hoorah, she is a chubby kid and does not become magically thin-and-pretty by the end of the story.)
The horrors she faces in Half World aren't cheap blood-splatter special effects, but subtler and weirder. I thought there was an influence both of the Japanese ghost scrolls and of the Buddhist hells, and maybe also Stephen King's Overlook Hotel, which is to say, pretty damn creepy.
So yeah, if you haven't read this book already, you should go and read it.

You can guess, thus, that when I heard Hiromi Goto was delivering the keynote talk at a conference at the university where I work, I knew I'd have to be there. Even if not for myself, for the others on the book-chat forum who'd read her work.
The conference info is here. Curious, If True: The Fantastic in Literature.
I would have liked to attend the whole thing, but I was booked already to leave Friday for a medieval event in Bremerton where I'd be taking a new apprentice--not something one can reschedule easily. And Hiromi's talk was the highlight.

After some to-ing and fro-ing to find out about registration, which turned out to be on the other side of campus, but which I didn't really need to deal with anyways because I wasn't speaking, just listening, but let me be useful in walking one of the real attendees over to find the secret hidden building he needed, I was in place with coffee and snacks and a copy of Half World in good time. Here's my notes, filled in and cleaned up. Anything incoherent or wonky is due to my errors of transcription and memory.

The title of her talk was: "Escape Procedures May Not Have Been Designed To Your Specifications: Some Thoughts on Race and Representation in the Literature of the Fantastic"

Hiromi Goto is a small compact woman with fairly short grey hair and a face either smiling or seeming about to smile. She is very present, almost concentrated, in the space she occupies (I'm not sure if that's a clear explanation). She spoke from written notes, at first with her eyes on them, gradually more confidently and with less referring. She began by acknowledging that this was the territory of the Coast Salish peoples, and thanking them in Japanese for allowing her there.
The spark for her talk was the not-too-long-ago kerfuffle over the filming and whitewashing of the Earthsea books. Having read the books in her youth, Hiromi's first reaction to the fuss was 'wait, Ged's not white?' Then she was embarrassed: at a time when she was reading avidly and hungrily for characters like her, (enough that she was thrilled and touched by the Chinese character in A Cricket in Times Square, only later recognising him as stereotypical), how could she have missed that Ged was not another white character?
In part because she applied the author's race to the characters. In part because of the author's conscious decision to provide the physical clues gradually, to get the (possibly-resistant white) reader into Ged's skin before noticing that said skin was brown. And in part because the clues about the culture of the islands of Gont (bronze-smithing, goat-herding, witch-women, women's magic being 'rubbish and humbug', dragons) were not sufficient to mark it as a non-European culture for her.
A distinct race (like the Karg?) will be set against a 'normative' race. Readers within a culture that has a dominant race will assume that the unspecified is the dominant. The attempt to envision and write for a 'universal reader' erases difference and homogenizes, which ends up being exclusive rather than inclusive.

Pause to describe the concept of umwelt (German, the surrounding world), the perception of the world related to oneself, through constructions of one's body, education, desires, past. The understanding of the world can be very different even by organisms that are quite similar. A meadow will be understood differently by a fieldmouse, a hawk, and a farmer, and different again by a second farmer. No one umwelt is correct or dominant, each is true for the one within it. Neither is that understanding fixed. One's self alters within different contexts, one isn't a neutral subject. She compared this shifting and altering to the altering of perceptions in optical illusions where foreground becomes background.
Goto's family came to Canada when she was three. She remembers English being incomprehensible babble to her ear, and remembers text moving from incomprehensible to meaningful as she learned to read. As she read, she didn't at first notice the absence of 'people like her', only as she encountered the few that existed in fiction did she become aware of the lack.

Representing diverse races and cultures requires complexities, and the necessities of narrative prune away complexity. Thought must be put into the complexities of race: what effect does it have? The markers of race include colour, hair, language, cultural practices and religion. Not all of these will have space in the narrative, but there is more to representing diversity than providing different skin colours.
LeGuin diversified sf/f, but race is more than skin colour. Goto considers Always Coming Home to be the more effective treatment of race. She uses the term Terra Racialliblendedis to refer to the setting where everyone is mixed or non-white but there are no differences in culture or custom, even in food, and cites The Hunger Games as an example. Given the near-future setting, it's implausible that racial and regional differences could have been subsumed so completely into class differences.
Race is inextricable from political discourse: multiculturalism, immigration, economics etc. Racial narratives can be deadly; she gives the example of the black man seen as criminal. Brown bodies in literature have been locked in the attic or the kitchen, or banished to jungles and forests for exotic background.
Sf/f provides room to imagine different worlds and futures, but setting the brown body in a supposedly post-racial world and flattening the differences inherent in race and culture presents its own problems. Fantastic literature can push at the boundaries of comfort, but is read by the reader within her own social context / umwelt. The reading of the fantastical other is the reading of one's imagined self.

We cannot escape our context, even reading for escape, but we can dismantle, small step by small step, and move toward a place where escape is no longer desired.

After her talk, there was some time for questions. A couple of questions asked on how to represent other cultures respectfully, and what would affect your decision on whether to use one culture rather than another. She suggested (to a question that came perilous close to whining about touchiness) that peoples need space / chance of their own representation, that it may be appropriative to make use of a culture that hasn't had experience of its own (representational) space yet.
The concept that struck with me was 'narrative prunes away complexity' and since I'd recently read a Quill & Quire review of Half World, where the reviewer regretted that the story spent so little time on Melanie's life before the crisis, and wanted more time spent on the world and how it worked, I asked whether much had been pruned from Half World.
Answer being yes - that an earlier draft had been probably 400 pages, and the last was less than 200 (not sure if that's mss or printed - the pbk is 233 p.). The present opening scene of ch.1 was originally ch. 15 or 16. Much was pruned out by the pressures not only of narrative but of market considerations and the intended audience.

Then I had to run away back to work, and was unable to stay for the readings and panel discussions. But I did get a copy of Half World signed, and found out where I can buy her other books (the university bookstore - have not found them at the local indies.).

readers' rights: my pledge

I've been stewing over this for about a week, trying not to get all ranty. Then I read Janni Lee Simner's call to action, and had (yay!) permission to rant.
(A good link roundup on YA Highway here , including a link to Zoe Marriott's fine post on the insecurity that makes writers vulnerable)

As I've said, repeatedly and recently, I was a reader before I was a writer. I'm still a reader. If some wicked fate forced me to choose, I'd weep and wail and hammer the walls... then choose reading.
Something you learn, hanging out with readers, whether in person or online, is that tastes differ. The book one person thrusts into your hands promising that it will Change Your Life is the book someone else gets three pages into and gives up on. The protagonist who is one reader's ideal lover is another's pretentious git who needs smacking hard.
The internet has made it a lot easier to have entertaining, spirited (yet usually civil) discussions about books with people whose perspectives are quite different from mine, and to read reviews of books I might never have known about, reviewed by people who are insightful, funny, and sometimes snarky.
Which means I am not thrilled by the chilling effect of recent tweets and posts suggesting that Negative Reviews Will Be Held Against You (Caps of Portentiousness, found in all the best fantasy novels). At present I find it doubtful that I'll be asked to blurb someone else's books, but I sincerely hope that any blurbing I do would be based on what I thought of the actual book, not whether the author reviewed mine.

Anyway, presently I have no influence, to raise or to crush. I hope I would never want to crush someone for being passionately engaged with books, or for bringing the snark. So here's the little that I can do against the chill:

My Pledge of Readers' Rights
If my books are sold and published, and people I've never met read them, I hereby admit the following rights to any and all such readers:

1) The right to not like my book, and to think it is crap.
2) The right to stop reading and to judge my whole book on howeverlittle you read.
3) The right to completely miss my point.
4) The right to dislike any of my characters, even based on a partial or inaccurate reading.
5) The right to dislike my prose style and to quibble with my word choices.
6) The right to find fault with my plotting, worldbuilding, or other big-picture aspects.
7) The right to share these opinions in person, twitter, blog post or other social media as they appear.
8) Other rights that seem good and reasonable and occur to me later.

I do not grant to the reader the right to make me change something already published.

I have the responsibility to act like an adult.
That is, the responsibility to listen to criticism with attention, using my own critical faculties to find what's useful and what's not (just as I would with a workshop critique).
That is, the responsibility to not hold grudges or look for ways to do down someone who doesn't like my writing however they express it.
I was tempted to weasel here, to say something about tone, about even-handedness, but given that writers generically want nothing but praise, in bucketloads, even-handedness is way too difficult to quantify. As a reader, you have a perfect right to think that anything I've written is a load of crap and to say so, in those words or similar.

I retain the right to bitch in private to my friends about how you completely missed my point, dear god do these people have no reading skills at all?

To which I set my hand and seal, this fourth day of March 2011, when I should be finishing my revisions and not blathering online.

snow and sociability

A lost work by Jane Austen? No, the last week-and-a-bit here.
Mark has been away in Arizona, at the semi-disastrous Estrella War, and I've been here, cleaning and tidying the house (to my specs, which may not be universally accepted) followed by spreading my stuff around on the excavated horizontal surfaces. Sometimes I danced around the house singing 'Mine, mine, mine.'
I watched--while rowing--How to Train Your Dragon, which I enjoyed greatly. Mostly I've been watching videocassettes with subtitles, because the rowing machine is kind of noisy, and I'm usually rowing early in the morning, when I don't want to turn the sound up to bellowing level. Previously I've watched Comet, Butterfly and Sword; Lady Hermit; Legend of Zu; Zu Warriors; The Crimson Charm; Magnificent Swordsman (gave up on that one). How to Train Your Dragon made for a change of pace and genre.
That was not the sociable part though. The sociable part was last weekend, when I had visitors, yes. Thursday, our friends Paul and Shona came for dinner, even with the warning that I was only making tuna casserole (comfort food). Friday, Stephen was in town to attend a concert and spent the night here. Saturday and Sunday, my friends Lynne and Tony came over from Seattle, and we had dinner at the Won Ton Noodle House (yes, that's its real name) and lunch the next day at the Penny Farthing, and talked a lot, about writing and reading and work and collecting and stuff. I got to talk about my writing! and believe that the other people were interested and not just being polite! The food was terrific too--I'm astonished I've gone so long not knowing how good the Won Ton Noodle House was. I must make up for lost time.
I know I'm very lucky in having online friends to whom I can go on about writing & about my books. But there's still something special about being able to talk to someone face to face--and it is lovely for the ego to talk about my own characters and stories more than about the craft of writing. Though I suppose doing it regularly would result in unsightly bloating of the ego.

Yes, it has SNOWED in Victoria and the Island generally, between 5 and 20 cm on Wednesday. When I got up, 6ish, there was only a little, but it came down hard, and by the time I set out to work I'd had to shovel the front walk and sidewalk twice. I did the neighbours on each side as well, because it's always a toss-up whether someone in Victoria even owns a snowshovel.
So gorgeous, though. Until later in the day there was no wind, so the tree branches were all laid in with white, the grey and black underlying it like shadows. Except for ruts in the road and the shoveled walks, the snow was smooth as if it had been sanded down. Every now and then a powdering would fall from the trees or roof-edges, and spread itself out, vanishing. Only later did clumps fall and leave their ghost-tracks.
I made a half-hearted attempt to bicycle, but that didn't work at all. The slush built up between tire and fender, and the ruts in the road sent me slithering sideways. So I walked to the bus stop and waited nearly half an hour, during which time about 5 buses should have gone by, but didn't (2 went by in the opposite direction) and all the people who were waiting when I arrived gave up and went home. I might have been able to walk most of the way to work in that time, but given how many sidewalks weren't shoveled, it might have been difficult.
Wednesday was the day Mark got back, so on his return from the desert he was greeted by snow.
The cat is confused by the whole business. Last night she was so whiny about wanting to go outside, then refusing it when the door opened onto a world of white, that I tossed her out into the snow, where she remained, bleating and unmoving, until making a sudden astounding leap back through the door, without touching the snow in between.
Cat-butt-print shown below:

in the continuing series

Of things I said I'd blog about later: Notes from Mary Robinette Kowal's talk on Readings, given at the World Fantasy Convention 2010.

Usually, it seems, this talk has a much longer time-slot, so she was rushing and hitting the high points, with an invitation to join her in the bar afterwards for a more detailed discussion. Unfortunately I wasn't able to follow the mass that went on to do that, so this is only what was said in the time allotted. Also, only what would fit on the back of my namecard, since somehow I did not have a notebook with me (this is really unusual - I don't know how I wound up walking around without a notebook. Next I will not have a book to read, and then you can take me away raving.)

So, the high points, or what I wrote down of them.
Be loud: this means not yelling but projecting. You don't want to wreck your voice, so use what you learnt in choir or drama class, sit or stand up straight and give your lungs room to fill. Keep your head up and aim for the back row (My mum used to call this 'the deaf old lady in the back row.)
Slow down. You want to run at about 150 words per minute (this is the recommended rate for recording audiobooks). She pointed out she was being a poor example, because she was rattling along talking fast to cram as much of the content in as possible. Practice reading your selection aloud, and clock yourself to make sure you're not speeding up.
Tell the story. Practice, read it aloud beforehand and get familiar with it. As much as possible, tell it without reference to the page, and look at your audience. Make eye contact and watch their reactions.

Choosing which piece to read:
It should be self-contained, without requiring a lot of explanation beforehand or during, and have some sort of closure to tie it off.
It should have a small cast, so that you don't have many character voices or presentations to keep distinct.
It should suit your voice.
It should lend itself to being read aloud, with onomatopoeia and strong rhythm to the sentences. (think Just-so Stories).

The narrator is a character, whether named as one or not, and has to be distinct from the other characters. The narrator is the gateway, and the narrator's attitude determines the audience's interaction with the character. Decide how to play the narrator.
Note the key words in each sentence, give them weight.
If the selection is first person, narrator shouldn't be too different (gender, age) from you, or audience will be distracted & maybe confused.

To distinguish characters, use:
Pitch--learn your pitch by humming high to low
Placement--voice is different when it resonates in back or front of mouth, chest, sinus, movement of soft palate
Pacing--give characters different speeds of speaking (remember to keep own speed down)
Accent--if you are using one, make sure it's accurate, better to use rhythm, pacing & inflections
Attitude--if you speak with a smile, or as if you're angry, the same words sound different

She talked briefly about microphones, but I didn't make notes on that, only mentally resolved to avoid the damn things. If I can teach an Ithra class without a mike, I ought to be able to read aloud without one--I doubt the audience would be any bigger, and probably smaller.

Hmm, that's kind of skimpy compared to how it looked in rough notes. So, my review, then?
Well, it's always worth while watching Mary Robinette Kowal. I would probably attend a panel on, um, ichthyology if she was the speaker, because she's just that lively and engaging. Also she would give all the fish different voices and gestures.

Anyway, with that in recent memory, I paid close attention to Robert Lloyd Parry's performance of M. R. James's ghost stories in November (a run of three-name names - is it significant?) as mentioned here.
He was playing the narrator - Montague Rhodes James, a Cambridge don, and in the second story, the main character was also an academic, and the introductory part of the story was banter at a college dinner, so the characters had similar accents and to some extent similar delivery.
He dealt with this by using posture and body language - it was clear that one character was seated and looking up, and the other standing, looking down & interrupting the first one's meal. The seated character (our MC) he gave a slightly querulous, nasal tone, and when the bluff old soldier appeared, he got a lower in-the-chest voice and a slower speech.
The first story had a historical setting, with characters of different classes, and he kept with James's somewhat caricatured country bumpkin form for the servant, lengthening his vowels and speaking slowly. The squire had a more peremptory pace, and the vicar slower but higher and quieter.
What impressed me was how willing he was to employ movement--even though he mostly stayed seated--and to convey fear (by breathing and pitch mostly) which I think I would be very self-conscious about doing.
And of course I was massively impressed that he was doing it all by memory, with no reference to a text. Tell the story indeed.

I am a hamster

Only less cute. Just the puffy-faced, snuffling, huddled-amidst-crumpled-paper features, the paper being kleenex rather than the crumpled paper balls that iconically signify the trials of literary creation. (tangent: what will be used to signify false starts now that paper is so rarely required for them?)
Yes, I still have the horrid cold. At least today is sunny and clear, unlike the streaming rain of yesterday. Also, last night, after I got up to clean up the cat puke, I dreamt I was on a double-decker bus with Neil Gaiman.
So things balance out, I suppose.

I meant to do a post about things I don't like reading in fantasy: monocultural worlds. But I will use the horrid cold as an excuse to postpone that, and instead refer you to Zoe's excellent post on building multicultural worlds here.
And to the works of the late (and much-missed) Jo Clayton, most especially her three Wild Magic books.
And to the works of Martha Wells, especially City of Bones and Wheel of the Infinite. There's also a moment in The Wizard Hunters where someone from a culture that has no representational art (only pattern making) encounters a trompe l'oeil painting and is fascinated by the idea of painting that looks like real things, which made me-the-reader bounce happily.
And obviously to N. K. Jemisin and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and its sequel The Broken Kingdoms.
And to Alaya Dawn Johnson's books Racing the Dark and The Burning City. Which I want to post a proper review of, when my head contains more braincells than mucus. Short form--Racing the Dark does have some first-novel markers (I don't hate adverbs, but I do notice them) but damn! the world building and the non-generic settings and the heart-wrenching turns of the story and the characters and ... oooh.
And, natch, a pointer to Terri-Lynne DeFino and her first novel Finder, set in a big sprawly fantasy world that (yay!) is not Northern Europe with jumbled place-names.
There are more, but they must wait until the proper thoughtful analytic post. Suggestions welcome....

mostly medieval, otherwise history

Last Saturday was the University's Medieval Seminar, run by Continuing Studies. This year the topic was especially interesting (to me) Medieval Lives.
The talks were as follows:
Program:
9:00 am Welcome and Opening Remarks
9:10 am Introduction, Dr. Marcus Milwright
9:30 am Everyday Life in Scotland during the Viking Age, Dr. Erin McGuire
10:10 am break
10:45 am Abelard and Heloise: Lovers in a Dangerous Time, Dr. Iain Higgins
11:30 am lunch and film presentation
12:45 pm Medieval Map Project presentation
1:00 pm Byzantine Lives Under Siege, Dr. Evanthia Baboula
1:45 pm The Caliph al-Muqtadir (908-32) and the Fall of the Abbasid Empire, Dr.
Hugh Kennedy
2:45 pm break
3:15 pm Christine de Pizan, the first Man of Letters, Dr. Helene Cazes
3:45 pm Closing Remarks

So overall, pretty cool. Erin kept her audience on their toes by starting with questions to them, and asking them to come up with possible explanations for unexpected grave finds and so on. The Christine de Pizan talk ran out of time before it ran out of interest, which is better than the alternative, but frustrating still.

Above, in a pic not taken by me (I'll check and get the credit right later) you can see the site and the setup, during the talks, while things are quiet. Between lectures, we're 'on', and chatting with the attendees while they get their coffee and biscotti. But during the talks, we may attend them or do other things. In the photo I was losing at checkers to a 7 yr old, while his sister walked the labyrinth. (I evened the score later at 9 man's morris.) The lady on the right is warping a tablet-weaving loom, the lady in dark blue is embroidering, and the lady in light blue is playing a harp
Also, yes, I chose this picture to show off the labyrinth and painted floor and backdrops that I painted my own self. Because I think they are pretty cool, actually.

What I should have been doing was getting further ahead with calligraphing the contract indentures for my apprentice-to-be, Deirdre, whom I'll be taking at the end of the month. Writing out two copies of a longish contract, to be cut apart in a sawtooth pattern (the indenting that makes it indentures, in case you wondered) isn't done in one hour or even two. (I'm hoping to get it finished this weekend.)
But I flatter myself that I was still doing something useful, in keeping the kids amused. We also had a non-rules-based foot ball game with the leather-stuffed ball, down past the catering tables and through the empty part of the hallway.


On Wednesday Mark left for the Estrella event in Arizona, with the van, so I am non-vehicular for a couple of weeks, and forced to get my own dinners. I took today as vacation so I could get started on straightening up & tidying the house--after us getting everything medieval out for the display, and then everything needed for a week's medieval camping, the house was in some disarray. (Shall I admit it? I hadn't finished boxing up the Christmas decorations.)
Today was thus spent moving things around and establishing my laptop and immediate-research books on the kitchen table, next to the woodstove; clearing off surfaces; dusting; sweeping; stacking books; and coming down with a streaming headcold that I finally have to admit was not just a response to the dust kicked up by previous activities.
Bugger.

Writing-related, Cost of Silver: I'd reduced the 20-year span of happiness between major threats to 5 years, and am now reducing it by another year or so, by sending Griffin off to war. The Bishops' Wars, in Scotland, so as to include gritty uncomfortable historical detail and increase wordcount.
Originally, after being turned down by apprentice-girl Alice, Griffin was to find comfort and eventual love with Nan Moray (older than him OMG!!!). In revision, he's going to be a sullen overdramatic young idiot and respond to being turned down by going to 'list for a soldier. So a few thousand words of enduring hardships, seeing nasty things happen, engaging in some himself, staying alive, and coming back sadder & wiser and all, then finding comfort and love with Nan. Must figure out which historical figures he'll encounter.

Do I sound a titch cynical? this is because I've been reading Rebels and Traitors, by Lindsey Davis, a novel set in (shoehorned into?) an exhaustively detailed history of Civil War England and the fall of Charles I.
I should say first that it's well written and often engaging, and Davis knows the times and events surpassingly well. Too well, perhaps, and as someone who loves the details herself, I think I can identify when someone has given in to including something because it is just that cool, regardless of whether it assists the story or characterisation.
This would be a pretty good, fast-moving, eventful novel, if you stripped out the irrelevant detail. This would be a fascinating, detailed 'narrative non-fiction' history if you stripped out the invented characters and plot. But as it is, you have both, for 742 pages, and you may be constantly shifting mental gears between fiction and non-fiction--not to mention keeping track of rather a lot of invented characters and rather a lot of historical ones who have walk-ons to be name-checked but don't affect the plot.
On p.14, I encountered this sentence: 'To set the moment in context, that year of 1634 would see the notorious witchcraft trials at Loudon, the first meeting of the Academie francaise, the opening of the Covent Garden piazza in London, and the charter for the Oxford University Press.'
In case you're wondering, none of those have so far appeared in the actual narrative. Then the exposition continues for a page and 2/3ds, bringing us up to date with events in the Americas, continental Europe, and Wales.
I'm not sure I can pull this off, myself.