This is a guest blog by historical fiction author Lindsey Fera. People often ask me what got me into writing historical fiction and eventually, reenactment. The answer to each is the same: I always felt I was born in the wrong time. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always said I was born in the wrong year, decade, century. Perhaps this stems from where I grew up and spent 25 years of my life: Topsfield, Massachusetts. Nestled north of Boston amidst rolling, glacial hills, the Ipswich River, and more stone walls than I can count, Topsfield is not only a desirous town to live and raise a fam ..read more

Author Rebecca D’Harlingue talks with her character Anneke van Brug from The Map Colorist. Rebecca: Hello, Anneke, I feel that I know you quite well, but there are a few questions that readers have asked me, and I thought it would be helpful to get your take on them. Anneke: I will answer the best I can, but are you not my creator? Can you not thus divine everything about me? Rebecca: Perhaps, but you may know that many authors feel that their characters come to have a life of their own, and that we just write down what our characters tell us to. I’m not sure I would quite say that. Never ..read more

Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger writes historical fiction with strong women characters. What was the inspiration for The Diplomat’s Wife? The Diplomat’s Wife series follows Kitty Larsson, the daughter of a (fictional) U.S. Senator at the dawn of WW2. With her sights set on becoming the first female Foreign Service Officer, she arrives in Vienna as a secretary to the head of the consulate. She also falls in love with an Austrian lawyer, heading for a top diplomat’s job. And then the Anschluss happens, and Kitty discovers the man she thought was of one mind with her, might not be at all. And the frie ..read more

The Casket Maker’s Other Wife–my first novel and ongoing WIP–was inspired by my great-great-grandparents’ polygamous marriage. I descend from the second wife who emigrated to America from Switzerland after she’d joined the Mormon faith in 1869. At the time, the LDS church encouraged the practice of polygamy. For my great-great-grandmother, I think it was an answer to her prayers. Pregnant and abandoned by her first husband, she had few options. It was a different story for the first wife who would share not only her husband but the meager resources available for his first family. There’s no wr ..read more

Perchance I am an unlikely novelist. In school, I was never particularly interested in writing although I was always an avid reader. The idea for writing my first book came in 2001, when I was helping my middle son with his second-grade genealogy report. I did some preliminary, but very minimal, research, and then set it aside. My life changed dramatically in 2016 with all my children graduated from high school and moving from our hometown of eighteen years. One day in 2017, I was bored and realized I desperately needed something new in my life, a project and a goal. I decided maybe I should r ..read more

I was interested to read Anne Beggs’s interview last week with her fictional character Lady Aine of Dahlquin, and particularly the point Anne Beggs makes about how it’s her characters that dictate their stories to her – rather than she freely makes them up. I feel the same about my swashbuckling kick-ass Tudor heroine, 20 year-old Mary Fox. To me Mary has become a real person, and the more time I spend in her company, the more I get to understand her. I first met her as a 17 year-old in The Broken Sword, when she escaped from her abusive stepfather and an arranged marriage. In her next adventu ..read more

I purchase a lot of books and download a lot of freebees by new-to-me-authors. If I enjoy reading one of those books, I do three things. First, I check the author’s website to see what other books they’ve written. Because if I like one of the books they’ve written, chances are I’ll like and want to read their other books. Secondly, I read their website bio, hoping to get more information on why and how they created their characters and stories. Since most author website bios are usually pretty thin, the third thing I do is search out author interviews. Because when I’m curious about someone, I ..read more

Welcome to May and to an interview with our Lantern of the Month, Kathryn Pritchett. Kathryn lives a few miles away from me in the Oakland Hills, where she enjoys playing with her six grandchildren, knitting outlandish outerwear, and puttering in her (mostly) deer-resistant garden. Kathryn and I met about seven years ago at a Historical Novel Society meeting in Northern California and developed our friendship with long chats while driving to other meetings. In 2019, we both helped create Paper Lantern Writers. On a recent sunny spring afternoon in the Oakland Hills, I got to know Kathryn a lit ..read more

As a fiction writer, who writes about people of my imagination, not true people with biographies I could research, you would think I would know everything about them, because I made them up. Not true. The voices in my head demand I get their stories right. They correct me if I misquote them, only revealing things when they are ready, not when I want it. I’m just taking dictation, and I’m okay with that. A character interview sounded like fun, so I jumped at the opportunity. From my Dahlquin series, in thirteenth century Ireland, we are talking with Lady Aine of Dahlquin, the wife of Lord Huber ..read more

May brings sunshine, springtime, flowers, and time to read in the sun. I love gardening, and my yard is full of green sprouts and flower buds. In about two weeks, it will be stunning. That’s the best time to take a minute to read and bask in beauty. Luckily, there’s a wide assortment of new historical fiction this month. Here are my picks. BEST COVER Goddess of the River by Vaishnavi Patel (May 21) “A powerful reimagining of the story of Ganga, goddess of the river, and her doomed mortal son, from Vaishnavi Patel, author of the instant New York Times bestseller Kaikeyi.” ~ book description Th ..read more