Love is worth the risk
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 […]
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 […]
I’m back at my desk, rested and energetic. If you read my newsletter that went out yesterday, you will have read that I feel like my writing picked up speed this summer until it is almost back to normal. Since I got back I did a final edit on Well Done, Harry for the Winter […]
The word from my editor about Duke in Name Only? “What an absolutely delightful story! … so vivid and the characters so real and three-dimensional.” That is lovely to hear, but I’m a bit terrified by, “There are very minimal edits.” I rely on a strong pair of professional eyes to keep me out of […]
Highlighting the facts behind historical fiction with Cerise Deland who also writes as Jo Ann Powers. Decades ago I became fascinated by the American women who volunteered to go abroad to nurse American soldiers in France during World War One. At the time, we lived in Washington D.C. and I was very familiar with the holdings […]
Highlighting the facts behind the fiction with Jude Knight on mourning in the Regency Era. In the novella I am currently writing, my duchess is coming to terms with being a widow and, at the same time, losing her job. So I’ve been checking up on mourning customs. As in so many things, we look […]
Highlighting the Facts behind Historical Romance with Jude Knight Like any big city, London has always had slum areas. In the early nineteenth century, they were noxious and dangerous. I’ve been studying them for the last two novels in my Regency series, The Return of the Mountain King. In 1800, over a million people lived […]