Category: Writing
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From California Gold to Roman Gods: Writing Inspiration from My Summer Travels
One of the biggest occupational hazards of being a writer is finding story inspiration everywhere. It could be a snippet of an overheard conversation, the gait of someone walking past you, the kind of smile a person gives another. But travel for a historical fiction author is a whole other kind of inspiration. I didn’t…
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Inventing the Intrigue: How I Reimagined My Tudor Ancestor as a Heroine and Spy
The protagonist of my upcoming Tudor suspense series, Anne Winston, is my thirteenth great-grandmother. Finding her in my family tree inspired me to create a story about her as a gentlewoman spy in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Anne’s family and upbringing Born Anne de Burgh (attention, fellow Austenites!) around 1525, she was the…
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Update!
It’s been a minute since I’ve sent an update. It’s been a busy year! A move halfway across the country and starting a new chapter in my life… but now it’s time to get back into the swing of things! I have been busily working on a draft of the second book in my Tudor…
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For a quart of ale is a dish for a king: Beer in Elizabethan England
One of my favorite research subjects when writing historical fiction is food and drink. Incorporating it into a story helps draw the reader into the daily lives of characters in a way that’s familiar. But world building also requires putting the reader into a different time, so introducing the unfamiliar alongside the recognizable helps ground…
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Bringing the Elizabethan Whitehall Palace to Life
Architectural research is a fun aspect of writing historical fiction. The best is when you’re able to walk the streets and corridors that your characters would have walked, burrowing into that sense of place. Unfortunately, especially for those of who write stories set hundreds of years ago, sometimes the buildings have been significantly changed—or have…
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Lower Manhattan, 1910: Immigrants Build the City and the Story
The island of Manhattan in the mid-19th through early 20th century was a microcosm of the larger immigrant history of the U.S. Everyone both mixed and didn’t mix. The waves of new languages, cultures, and customs rubbed alongside the many generations that continued to move uptown as the decades progressed. Irish immigration My story takes…
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The Devil’s Mile: New York City’s Most Notorious Street, 1910
Take a stroll down Bowery today and you’ll find a range of shops, museums, hotels, and other largely forgettable places. But the Bowery of a hundred years ago was a completely different place. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but the Bowery took that to a whole other level. Both the Bowery…
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The Mysterious Death of Elsie Helair, New York City, 1917
All good mysteries must have a crime. One of the key elements in writing a mystery is getting the crime right—and making it interesting. Often, truth is stranger than fiction. In reading about murders in New York City newspapers in the 1910s (it’s true; writers really do google the wildest things!), I came across an…
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Isabella Goodwin: First female detective of the NYPD
I have been interested in the immigrant history of New York City for as long as I can remember. My own family history is tied to it (more on that in a future post). But it took time to find the story I wanted to tell. Finding the inspiration BBC History Extra, one of my…
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A Quick Update!
It’s been a while since I’ve been here. My last blog post was January of this year (so much for my goal of six blog posts this year!) Two cross-country moves and personal upheaval in the past year and a half meant writing took a back seat. Then in May of this year, my brother…
