I began the Akitada series in the mid-eighties. Progress was extremely slow. I was still teaching full-time and would be for another fifteen years. Besides, I had never written fiction before, let alone a mystery, let alone one set in eleventh-century Japan. But Robert Van Gulik had done the same… Read More »The Series Protagonist by I. J. Parker
It’s so easy to get from one place to another in this century, isn’t it? We have the motor car to take us almost anywhere by road, we can use trains (if they run on time) to take us to cities not only here in Britain, but over most developed… Read More »Do we really miss the old Victorian days? by Loretta Proctor
First, find a patron; the bigger, the better. A powerful patron might reward you with a handsome gift, possibly money, maybe even room and board in a country manor during the plague season. He or she — women, like Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, were also important patrons of… Read More »How to get published in Elizabethan England by Anna Castle
Get any group of historical novelists together and you’ll hear discussions of research. We read and read and read about the era we plan to write about. We try to sort out the real from the assumed, the misinformed, and the unconcerned writings that have gone before. (Shakespeare, for example,… Read More »What Do Readers of Historicals Want? by Peg Herring
I first got the idea to write a novel about Pocahontas years ago, while I was working in a bookstore where I found a biography about the famous Native American “princess.” Curious, and thinking this would be a familiar and unchallenging story, I started reading the biography on my lunch… Read More »Pocahontas and the origins of Tidewater by Libbie Hawker