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Book Review: Traitor’s Knot
England 1650: Parliament has executed King Charles I, and the English Civil War is over. Meanwhile, ordinary English men and women must get back to life, living with the consequences of loyalties and principles tested, stretched, strained, and sometimes broken. The winning side, as it often does, holds the only culturally acceptable moral high ground, and everyone else must bow to the pressure of the new political landscape or suffer the consequences. Memories are long, and grudges hold fast. Royalist officer James Hart escapes the war with his body intact, settling into an uneasy life as an ostler (keeper of the stables) at a small inn in Warwick. But this…
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ARCHIVE: On Inspiration and How Kassia Came to Be
Inspiration is a funny thing. It’s often at its best when we aren’t looking for it, and when it comes calling, we’d better be prepared for the earth-shattering results when it’s taken seriously. Like so many other authors, I never dreamed of being one; though in all honesty, the signs were always there if only I’d been paying attention. As a child, I was a consummate daydreamer. My happy place was most often found wandering my grandparents’ farm in rural Nebraska, dreaming up intricate stories in my head. Writing in school came easily to me. When I was in college, the professor of my required creative writing class continually called…
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Thoughts on Writing The King’s Daughter
Becoming an author wasn’t anything I’d ever imagined doing throughout most of my life. In fact, the very idea of it, when it came, found me like a deer caught in the headlights. The more common tale for the authors I know is that they had dreamed of writing books ever since they were children. That wasn’t the case for me. If the idea had been suggested any earlier in my life, I would have found the notion utterly laughable. It wasn’t until a New York Times best-selling author nudged me that I caught on. The resulting experiment led to the inspiration for my first book. Let me explain. I…
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ARCHIVE: Elizabeth’s Side of the Story, a guest post by Samantha Wilcoxson
I am often asked why I choose to write about the women in my books. In the case of Elizabeth Woodville, protagonist of Once a Queen, I felt the need to tell her side of the story. You see, in the first book in my Plantagenet Embers series, Elizabeth comes across just as harsh and scheming as many expect her to be. It is difficult to shine in comparison to her daughter, Elizabeth of York. After finishing the trilogy, I felt like it was time to return to the beginning and give voice to a few secondary characters, including Margaret Beaufort, Elizabeth Woodville, and Reginald Pole. In Plantagenet Princess, Tudor…
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ARCHIVE: Why I write Historical fiction set in the Middle Ages, a guest post by Elizabeth Chadwick
There are two reasons that I write historical fiction set in the Middle Ages. One goes back to Childhood and the other to my teenage years. If neither had happened I might still have been a writer, but who knows what my chosen subject would have been. To begin at the beginning I need to tell you how I came to be a writer in the first place. I told myself stories throughout my childhood, but they were verbal – I never wrote anything down, and I didn’t tell them to other people; they were just for me. My earliest memory of telling stories goes back to being three years…
