I had a eureka moment this afternoon, and have finally come up with the last major plot element for my first Edwardian set story (I think my little sojourn back to my eighties adolesence helped quite a bit). The story's had a bit of a prolonged gestation (see other blog posts), but after mucking up 'Midnight Angels' I really wanted to get everything square from beginning to end before starting writing.

I read a lot of historical fiction and I think the best doesn't just scatter period references about, but uses them to generate plot and character - which I'm going to have a goat, though maybe not successfully. There are a couple of deliberate photographic anachronisms, for example, the main character's camera is essentially a simple form of Rolleiflex, about twenty years ahead of when the Rollie was produced, but technically it could have been built in 1908 in the form I propose; as it's part of the reason why he's so successful he didn't want to reveal the secret, so we didn't get Rolleiflexes until the Twenties - that's verisimilitude taken care of, and I'm sticking to it :)

I suppose the hardest thing to believe is that there were paparazzi in the period, but it's absolutely true - and they were even more rapacious and unscrupled than today's snappers.