Revolutions are Hard

Yesterday, I took a look at the synopsis I wrote for what I had then planned as a trilogy of Rebel books, and wow, I went pretty far astray on my plans. I did stick to the planned plot for the first half of book two, but then went on a totally different tangent and ended up in a different place. Meanwhile, I didn't even get to the stuff that I'd planned to get to that needs to happen. Book three may end up being the second half of my planned book 2, which means I might have a four-book trilogy. But then I've heard that it's better to have series with odd numbers of books, so I may need to go to five. I guess I'll have to see how this book shapes up.

Basically, what it comes down to is that it's very hard to have a revolution -- something more than just an uprising. Creating a new country takes more than just the armed revolt. You have to have something in place to run the new country and make it work. And you have to get a lot of people on board, at all levels of society. That's one of the things that was fairly unique about the real American revolution. It involved participation from the landed elites down to ordinary people, all working together. The ordinary people might have had an uprising but probably wouldn't have been able to put together a national government. The elites had the government and the Declaration of Independence but wouldn't have been able to win the revolution without the ordinary people. That kind of cooperation among classes was unlikely in British society at that time.

Now I need to move that kind of thing into the Gilded Age, which had its own kind of class consciousness, even in the real history. There were massive divides between rich and poor then, with the rich people being really, really rich and the poor people being extremely poor. There was social movement possible, though, with some of those very rich people having come from next to nothing. They had a little trouble breaking into the upper crust, in spite of their wealth. So, how bad would it have been if the British class structure were still in place and the upper class had a physical difference -- magic -- that separated them from the rank and file? And that's where the idea for these books came from.

So, to complete this series, I need to progress things to the point that they're able to have a successful revolution and put together a government that might actually work. The fun thing about alternate history is that I can fix some of the things that went "wrong" with our history.

I have more brainstorming and plotting to do today before I attempt to go deal with children's choir. I may go to adult choir rehearsal to listen, but singing is still out of the question.