Cattle, Horses, and a Cowhand

Highlighting Ana Morgan’s research about cowhands and their universe. I had lots of first-hand experience to draw on, when I started writing Stormy Hawkins. I knew homesteading. I’d been chased out of a pasture by the neighbor’s Jersey bull. (It had nasty horns and knew exactly how to use them.) I lived near the fictional […]

American Heiresses/ English Dukes

This week Donna MacMeans shares her research with us. One of the things I love about writing is how everything you’ve done, every place you visit, inspires stories. The stories might not be immediate, but they percolate in the brain until they fit with the perfect storyline. That’s the way it worked for me with […]

A Viscount, Irish History, and Plumbing

Alina K. Field joins us this week Thank you for having me as your guest today, Caroline! I love historical romance that draws on the current events of the story world. (Your most recent novel, The Reluctant Bride, does that beautifully!) So when I came up with the idea for a series about the children […]

The Fate of Prisoners

Research about Fortune’s Foe from Michele Stegman Ever since I visited El Castillo, the fort in St. Augustine, Florida, and saw the small space where 20 English captives were held in 1740, I wondered what happened to those men. Apparently, no one made any effort to rescue or help them during that awful war between the […]

Five Tips and Real Life

Recently John Le Carré gave CBS’s Sixty Minutes five tips for novel writers. You can find them here. One was easy: “Keep a travel journal.” Some were lessons I learned the hard way: “Make the verb to the work,” and “Start your story as late as possible. One is giving me fits. “Start writing at […]

Paris Then and Now

Sofie Darling comes to us today with some facts about Paris and The Medici Fountain. Following the assassination of her husband Louis XIII of France in 1610, Marie de’ Medici removed herself and her son, the new king of France, from the intrigues of the French court to a safe place where she could rule […]

Eight Centuries / Eight Love Stories

If you were lucky enough to attend the Bluestocking Belle’s Cover Reveal party on Saturday, you’ve had a preview of our 2017 anthology, Never Too Late.  We present eight timeless love stories across eight centuries, with eight unique takes on a single trope (a compromising situation that isn’t), an older heroine, a wise man, and […]

The Global Tourist in New Zealand

Jude Knight introduces us to Victorian Tourists to New Zealand. The nineteenth century, says the book I’m currently reading, was the European century; the century in which Europe dominated the world. The nineteenth century was a European one also in the sense that other continents took Europe as their yardstick. Europe’s hold over them was […]

Here Again—Gone Again

When I slid into June exhausted from launching The Reluctant Wife—which let me just say is a very good tale of love, loss, journeys, and reconciliation. Sigh… Where was I? Oh yes. Launching. It is exhausting work to get the word out about a new book, and I had guest visits to a few dozen […]

Bringing the Oregon Trail to Life

  Tina Susedik with details about the Oregon Trail The Trail to Love is my first historical romance and part of The Soul Mate Tree Collective. The story is set on the Oregon Trail. As I wrote the book, I research many words to find out if they were used in 1854 and was surprised […]