Love is worth the risk
I’m off to visit Texas and a good friend. We will talk and talk, mostly about books, as we’ve been doing for 65 years. (Really) Consequently I won’t be back to put up a Coffee posting next Monday. I’m leaving things in good shape. Honor at Heart, Book Four, Tattered Honor is up for pre-order. I will […]
Elizabeth Donne Joins us today to talk about medieval thegns and scribes, and how they impacted her story The Legend Begins, Book One of Forevers in Fenwick. Although The Legend Begins is a Regency novella, the legend itself supposedly originated in 924AD with a scribe called Alwin. Medieval scribes are commonly imagined as monks, copying […]
For much of the eighteenth Century, Roman Catholics in England faced penalties for not attending Church of England services. They were also restricted from voting, holding public office (including as an officer in the army or a magistrate) or sitting in Parliament. The Papists Act 1778 allowed Catholics to own land, provided they took an […]
Rue Allyn joins us today to share her research into the British army commissariat, and the opportunities for villainy she found there. I’m currently working on a novella for a Bluestocking Belles group project. My novella is scheduled to launch in September of 2026. I had some difficulty coming up with story conflicts, until I […]
Virginie Marconato joins us this week with some amazing facts behind her novel, Seducing the Warrior. A scene in chapter 4 of Seducing the Warrior is directly inspired by a true story. It took place in autumn 1066, just before the conquest of England by the Normans, the kind of story that seems too good […]
Aubrey Wynne joins us this week to talk about The Cato Street Conspiracy and the part it plays in her novel Crimes, Conspiracies, and Courtship. The radical Arthur Thistlewood, who appears in my novel Crimes, Conspiracies, and Courtship, was a real villain. He joined the Spencean Philanthropists in 1811. By 1816, he was considered a […]
Jude Knight joins us this week with some facts behind the fiction in her novel, A Gift to the Heart. One of the iconic television series of my youth was a British espionage television series called The Avengers, staring Patrick McNee—bowler hatted, in a smart business suit, and armed with an umbrella, which he uses […]
Sara Bennett joins us this week with her novella, Lord Ravenhill Comes For Christmas, and the facts behind a perfect Victorian Christmas. I have written a Christmas novella! I have always craved a white Christmas so I wrote one, and dived into the sort of Christmas traditions that became so popular during the Victorian era. […]
The heroine of “Charred Hope” in Love’s Perilous Road lives on a widow’s pension. What does that mean in fact? I assumed her pension would be small and barely enough to live on. I wasn’t wrong. In the Napoleonic era the widow of a British officer was entitled to a pension, and as the widow […]
Carefully. The big lesson of the month is “don’t rush!” I’ve read through the first of the books in the Great Rewrite Project. With the help of Caroline Warfield’s Fellow Travelers I am close to a series title. This week I plan to send the first for cover specs to the artist. Covers will motivate […]