Troy Buzby, Author

I get it. Writers have heroes. We think we have competition. At the end of the day, we’re all trying to find the right way to write our novels.

My wife is amazed at how authors, any author, can come up with stories. Some of us are full of them. She’ll tell you she doesn’t have any. I might conjure up an entire world and story in my head in an afternoon. How do I do it?

Your character discovers something that seems divine, miraculous, world-changing. Their first instinct reveals everything about who they are—do they hoard it, share it, study it, or try to control access? The Strand Series starts by wrestling with this question. Ephriam Biggs discovers power beyond contemporary understanding. Others soon come into contact. Their immediate response strips away all pretense and shows their true nature.

Your colonial character discovers a rifle that never needs reloading, lights that never burn out, radios that ignore the curvature of the earth. What does he think he’s found? This is the premise I’m exploring in my colonial fiction; technology so advanced it looks like magic to people who’ve only seen electricity in lightning bolts. Honestly, it’s my way of thinking about AI and what happens when incomprehensible technology drops into a society that isn’t ready for it.

Today marks 250 years since someone fired the shot heard ‘round the world at Lexington Green. But what if that shot had never been fired? I’ve been thinking about this question while writing my alternative history fiction, not because I love counterfactual history (though I do), but because understanding what didn’t happen helps me write what might have happened instead.

The best historical fiction puts characters in situations where every choice is wrong. I’ve been wrestling with this challenge in my alternative history fiction, not because I enjoy torturing my characters (okay, maybe a little), but because that’s what the colonial frontier demands. When survival is uncertain and communities are small, clean moral choices become impossible luxuries.

Your 1760s character just said “awesome” and you’ve lost your reader. Creating authentic historical characters is harder than it looks, especially when you’re trying to make them feel real without sounding like time travelers. I’ve been wrestling with this challenge while writing about colonial Pennsylvania, and here’s how I actually learned to bring these people to life.

Here’s a question that keeps me up at night as I write about this period: What if Pontiac’s Rebellion had never happened? I know alternate history sounds like parlor games for history nerds, but this particular “what if” reveals just how precarious the real history was and how close we came to a completely different America. For writers, it shows how small character decisions can alter the course of everything.

On October 7, 1763, King George III drew a line on a map that would help spark the American Revolution. No colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. To the British, this looked like sensible policy after an expensive war. To the colonists who had just finished fighting to secure those western lands, it looked like betrayal of the worst kind.

In 1760s America, being on the run meant more than dodging sheriffs. There were no phones to trace your calls. No credit cards tracked your purchases. No cameras recorded your movements. Just you, your survival skills and whatever luck you could muster. But don’t think that made escape easy. The colonial world was small, interconnected, and deeply suspicious of strangers.

Some Americans might remember the French and Indian War from high school history class. Fewer still could tell you much about the Revolutionary War beyond 1776. Ask them about Pontiac’s Rebellion. You’ll get blank stares. Blink. Blink. That’s a shame, because this “forgotten war” of 1763-1766 changed everything about how Britain managed its American colonies and set the stage for the Revolution that followed.

Forget Daniel Boone and his coonskin cap. The real Pennsylvania frontier in 1763 wasn’t a romantic adventure. It was a powder keg waiting to explode. Three different peoples lived in constant tension with competing claims to the same land. I’ve been digging into this period for my alt-history fiction. The more I learn, the more I realize how little the popular image matches the brutal reality.