Making a splash

I want to change history.

Of course I do. The last "novel" was set nebulously in the vicinity of 2001. This one is in 2018, which is a lot easier to research; unless there is good reason to go otherwise I can use current information for rail lines and so forth.

So I got lucky with some early numbers. The medieval street fair I went to in Rhineland/Palatinate is still ongoing as of 2018, and it happens the same weekend that Oktoberfest opens in München. Unfortunately that means by the time I get to Verona, the Arena has closed their last performance for the season (it was an Italian pop singer, if you want to know).

But Venice. So there was the Regata Storica on Sept 2nd. That's a bunch of races preceded by a parade of historical boats. Then there's a big film festival. And then there's the Acqua alta of 2018; the biggest and nastiest flood tide since 1966. But it didn't happen, historically, until Oct 29.

I mentioned wasting some time trying to figure out when you got a good snow cover along the route of the rail connection from München to Verona. Well, I found a video taken in Brenner Pass in early September of 2018 that showed snow, so that's good enough for me. Because the point isn't getting it exact, it is getting it within the ballpark of what is reasonable and expected for that place, that season, etc.

The precise timing of the acqua alta is up to the vagaries of (large-scale) weather and tides. There is no strong hydrologic reason why it couldn't happen in September. In fact, my protagonist arrives in Venice on or just after the Full Moon. So as in the Brenner Pass example above I'd be entirely justified to have puddles in the Piazza San Marco.

What I can't do -- at least, not lightly -- is move the historically significant October event. Not unless it was really, really key to the plot of the story.

There's a last point here. It strains coincidence when your characters just happen to arrive in Rio in time for Carnaval and at Houston just in time for a launch. The real travel experience is that the great exhibit was last week and you can't wait long enough for the duck season to start and you are always somehow in the wrong town at the wrong time. But this story takes place in a not completely realistic universe. My protagonist will happen on more than her fair share of interesting things, from a film festival to a riot.

And, yeah, at the climax the Olympias will row in, despite being a full ten years too late.

But all is not lost. The very much real-world medicane "Xenephon" swept into Athens the very weekend my protagonist will be concluding her adventure. I hadn't planned anything to do with a storm. But I'm sure not going to turn one down...