I just pre-ordered three books. This is a rare thing for me to do, but these upcoming historical novels have, for various reasons, caught my eye and I just can't wait my usual few weeks or months after a book debuts to finally get around to ordering a copy. The first...

From critically acclaimed novelist, Rita Gerlach, comes book 1 in 'The Daughters of the Potomac Series', a timeless tale of love and betrayal, loss and redemption against the backdrop of the American Revolution.  Book 1 in the long awaited 'Daughters of the...

"The past is where we get the raw material we use.... We pick bygone time up by the handfuls and, like clay, see if it feels right and then form it into stories about the past." ~ James Thom, The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction James Alexander Thom is one...

I've spent this month (which is flying by, can it already be the 18th??) doing the background research and developing ideas for two new stories. Now I've chosen one of them to push ahead with. Or one has chosen me. Its protagonists have grabbed hold of my heart, a...

Do you enjoy reading historical fiction? Time-travel? Books set in England/Cornwall? Mysteries? Danger? Adventure? The 18th century? Romance? Lyrical prose that will sweep you away to another time and place and create characters so vivid they live on after the last...

While sorting through my prodigious accumulation of research books in an effort to thin the herd, I was leafing through a book on 18th century gardens (which I decided I could not part with), and ran across a bookmark. It was a halfsheet of paper on which I'd written...

Happy  New Year! I'm kicking off 2012 on the blog by posting the books I read, fiction and nonfiction, over the past year. This is the second year I've kept a record of my reading, and while I didn't read as many books in 2011 as I did in 2010, still it's a pretty...

In ages past the Celtic tribes of Britain spoke of a Time Between Times, those blurred twilight borders between day and night, between seasons, between one year and the next. It's a time when the eyes of the earth are closing for slumber, when the sun retreats and the...

At the end of the trail..... Ah.... That's my sigh of satisfaction, having just written the real final line of the novel in progress. I wrote the last chapter weeks ago of course, only to decide it needed an epilogue to tie up some loose threads and give a better...

This week one of my favorite authors, Susanna Kearsley talked about  Letting Go (The Heroine Addicts blog), saying good-bye to one's characters. Writing that last scene in which they appear. And the wrench of sadness and loss this can bring a writer. Even if the...