@nallorlives - Factual fiction is, to me, real people, happenings, and events, mixed with fantastical or fictional methods or ways that these real happenings and events occurred. It's not like "fanfiction" where fans write fictional things about real people or characters, but just fill in the gaps in stories to come to the conclusion.

Example is in my current story, a man who fought in WWII was stationed and returned to a UK town between missions several times where he saw glimpses of one beautiful, exotic girl. He then reunited with her in Bastogne where she was now a nurse (fiction part) (the most difficult and deadly part of the war apart from Normandy) and thought her dead after remnants of her coworker were found at the bombed hospital. After that, he suffered alcoholism through the end of the war and for 10 or so years afterward until he got married a second time. (fact) The reunion was where he saw her again (fiction), they married (this was the second marriage), and he got sober for good and they really did have a happily ever after. It's a reasonable yet fantastical way they fell in love, were separated, but were rejoined.

I'll give it away here, but in my next story, my antihero meets his future true love when she tends to him through his drunken stupors as a spectral being, and that was why he sought alcohol and drugs more--to be closer to her. She warns him of impending doom and pleads with him to stop or they'll never meet. He gets sober and goes to rehab, makes something of his life, and let's that previous life live on in the past. So when they do meet randomly (fact), he falls in love with her and can't remember how he fell in love; she is drawn to him when she sees him in real life again but wonders why she recognizes him, and realizes it was when she was in a coma that she was with him (fiction).

I'm sure most romance novels are made with this sort of factual fiction in play, but never with famous people involved. lol