Tag Archives: writing historical fiction

The story behind For Want of a Shilling

15 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Historical Fiction, writing historical fiction, Writing Process

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Author Paul Feenstra returns with a story about inspiration for his latest novel, For Want of a Shilling. Over to you, Paul.

After a rather nasty injury that saw me sofa bound for seven months, my doctor informed me it was time to get out and regain strength to my surgically repaired Achilles tendon. I needed no urging and immediately set out, albeit gingerly, and decided to walk around the bays in New Zealand’s beautiful capital city, Wellington.

What caught my attention was a driveway that wound up a hill; an ominous metal bar prevented vehicle access. Further discouraging the curious was a number of signs clearly alerting trespassers that the Commandant would be displeased, and threatened action taken by the New Zealand Defence Force for those who disobeyed his stern warning.

This isn’t the USA, I thought, this is New Zealand, what could they possibly do to me?

I saw this as an invitation and without hesitation hobbled up the driveway, although I half expected black-clad soldiers in body-armour to come rappelling down thick coils of rope from assault helicopters to blindfold and whisk me away. I wondered how I would ever find out if my lotto ticket was a winner, if I was imprisoned to rot in some undisclosed dank cell.

The sealed driveway curved up a hill with low growing coastal bush on either side until I reached the summit, and there, much to my astonishment, I found a series of old fortified military style bunkers on a flat expanse of land and a young couple having a romantic picnic on the grass beside one of the buildings. I felt some relief and no longer looked over my shoulder in fear of being arrested. In politeness, I left the miffed couple alone.

The cluster of graffiti covered buildings and fortifications looked old, certainly older than other bunkers I had seen around Wellington. During WWII, New Zealand built coastal defences in preparation for a Japanese invasion, but these buildings were vastly different.

Soon as I arrived home I began to investigate the fortifications and learned they were constructed in 1885, in fear of a Russian invasion.

“A Russian invasion, surely not!”

I’d never heard of such a preposterous claim, why on earth would the Russians want to invade New Zealand? – Apparently, they did.

After further research, I discovered the plans. Written in 1864, Russia had every intention of invading Australia and New Zealand. These resource-rich colonies had exactly what Russia needed.

The Crimean war in the 1850’s saw Russia’s navy tied up and useless in the Baltic. It was old and decrepit. The brother of Russia’s Tsar wanted to reform the navy but problems at home with the serfs meant that workers were on strike and factories weren’t producing. Where would Russia obtain the resources they needed?

In 1870, the Tsar’s brother and son departed for America to begin an extensive fact-finding mission. Certainly they wanted to learn about new technology, tactics and shipbuilding where they could incorporate into their own navy’s transformation and modernization. What caught their eye was the exploits of the Confederate ship, CSS Alabama.

In its short two years of service, the CSS Alabama had an extraordinary record of success. It burned 65 union vessels, and not one passenger or crew member on those ships was ever harmed. For the Russians, this represented a wonderful opportunity, and I had an idea for a novel.

Imagine if the Russians, by using the tactics of the CSS Alabama, launched a new and powerful warship, and then sent her into the South Pacific.

There was more to learn. In January 1873, New Zealand’s, Southern Cross Newspaper printed a story that detailed how a Russian warship entered Auckland’s main harbour, captured a British warship, kidnapped the mayor, held him for ransom and then looted the city’s coffers of all its money. On leaving Auckland, the Russian ship also captured a merchant vessel laden with New Zealand gold headed for Australia. The newspaper article also listed a few other extravagant claims.

A few days later, the Southern Cross printed another story admitting the first story was, in fact, a hoax. But was it?

I discovered more which made me think.

This newfound knowledge became the basis for an exciting new historical fiction novel titled ‘For Want of a Shilling’.

For Want of a Shilling by Paul Feenstra – In January 1873, New Zealand, is a sparsely populated coastal community on Wellington’s south coast, the peaceful lives of Owhiro Bay residents are shattered with the discovery of two brutal and senseless murders.

What begins as a local murder investigation turns into a plot of global proportions. From the political agenda of England’s Prime Minister, the Machiavellian son of Russia’s Tsar, to the famed exploits of America’s confederate ship Alabama. Intricately researched, the author uses many recorded historical events and people to weave a story of intrigue, conspiracy and greed.

FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION follow A WRITER OF HISTORY (using the widget on the left sidebar)

M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel, TIME AND REGRET was published by Lake Union. Mary’s other novels, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads or on her website www.mktod.com.

From English teacher to author

06 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by in Author Entrepreneur, second career authors, writing historical fiction, Writing Process

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Deb Peterson has been a Facebook friend for quite some time and has been on the blog before as Delaney Green (more about that in a moment). She is the author of the Jem books, about a girl with Second Sight who grows up in the years between the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence. Today she shares her path to becoming an author.

You asked why I write under a pseudonym.

I write under a pseudonym because, first, my given name is rather common, and I wanted it to be easier for readers to Google me. Second, I wanted a division between my public and private life, especially on social media, so I could keep writerly stuff on my writer sites and personal stuff on my personal site. Last—and how’s this for hubris?—I assumed I’d be so well known one day that crazy fans would seek me out, and I didn’t want to have to move to a secluded house in the country away from my current neighbors and a neighborhood I enjoy, especially after spending 20 years rehabbing my house until it’s just the way I like it.

What sort of career did you have before becoming a writer?

I’ve had a lot of jobs—newspaper reporter, copy editor, professional actress, Broadway theater concessions manager, adjunct professor, farm laborer—but my career for 25 years was high school English teacher. That job was a privilege. It was a marathon. I didn’t much care for all the grading I had to do (one year of work at home for every year I spent at school, and I’m not even kidding—I did the math), but you do what you have to do so kids learn. Teaching was excellent training for what I do now:

  • You have to be disciplined enough to do your work consistently and well, because you face people every single day who need you to be there for them with your A game.
  • As a teacher, you have to know where you’re going and plan, just as you do with a novel.
  • You have to figure out multiple ways to get a student from point A to point B, as a writer must do with both plot and character development.
  • Teachers have to be able to explain why they’re doing what they’re doing in the classroom to parents, principals, peers, and students—again, an aid to crafting plot.
  • A teacher experiences humans in triumph and in crisis, another aid to character development.
  • On top of that, I taught literature: Dante’s Inferno, The Iliad and The Odyssey, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, Shakespeare—it was a 25-year deep dive into classic literature. Invaluable.

Was there a triggering event that prompted you to begin writing?

Before I knew how to read and write, I was drawing pictures, and every picture had a story. As soon as I learned to read, I read every book on the shelf. I never thought a regular person like me could/would be allowed to write an actual story, but I wrote and illustrated one anyway in grade four. I had a poem published in a national magazine in grade seven. I wrote a ton in high school and started a creative writing magazine. I didn’t really have a triggering event. I have always invented stories. But I will say that I simply could not write when I was a single mom teaching full time, rehabbing our house, and directing the theater program at my school. I had to sleep in my spare time!

Do you now write full time or part time?

Normally, I get up every morning and write for four or five hours, so that’s only 30-ish hours a week—not really full time. I also coach writers at a local college about eight hours a week. And I still sub in the local schools once in a while because I still need a kid fix now and again. Right now, I have been waiting five months for my editor in London to finish editing my latest novel in the Jem series (Jem, a Foreigner in Philadelphia), so I have been working on a mystery novel, a novel about trolls, and on short stories. I’m delighted to report that I just had two stories accepted for publication, one by Black Dandy (New Zealand) and one by New Myths.com. A third story made the long list in an inaugural competition sponsored by The Woolf of Switzerland—I’ll hear about that one in early February.

What parts of the writing career do you enjoy the most/the least?

In the last two years before I retired, I got up two hours before work to write—but I always had to quit and get ready for school. Now, it’s an immense joy to be able to get up and go straight to my desk with a cup of coffee and work without having to stop. Honestly, I don’t dislike anything: I love the research, I love crafting a story, and I love editing. I feel so blessed to be able to do what I do.

What parts of your former career do you miss/not miss?

I miss the kids. As I said, I still sub now and again because kids are refreshing—and I fall right back into “I truly see and appreciate you” mode when I’m with them. Kids know if you really care about them or not. I do care. I always will.

I do not miss the incredible amounts of time I spent grading papers. I do not miss interacting with difficult parents who apparently birthed little gods and goddesses rather than human children. I do not miss being demonized in the press and the resultant political crippling of my profession.

Do you have any regrets?

I regret not getting up at 4 a.m. years earlier.

What advice would you offer other second career writers?

My advice is simple: START. Just start. Don’t spend weeks or months looking for the perfect pen, perfect office chair, perfect time of day, perfect routine, perfect time of life. Don’t say, “I’ll start tomorrow” because you may not get tomorrow. If you want to write, write NOW. I wonder what I might have produced if I had developed those hundreds of story ideas I had over the years that I jotted down on bits of paper I subsequently lost. Or the stories I made up for my son on the fly at bedtime; one year, I made up a 24-chapter story about an elf whose adventures led up to Christmas Day. Oh, how I wish I’d written down that story! What other marvelous stories never got written, and never will get written, because I didn’t put them down on paper? Please, dear reader, pick up one of your slips of paper and WRITE THAT STORY TODAY.

Many thanks, Deb. Wish I had the exposure to classics that you’ve had – although I doubt I could have handled a group of high school students! Wishing you success with your next Jem novel.

FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION follow A WRITER OF HISTORY (using the widget on the left sidebar)

M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel, TIME AND REGRET was published by Lake Union. Mary’s other novels, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads or on her website www.mktod.com.

Interview with Stephanie Dray, co-author of American’s First Daughter

28 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Connecting Readers & Writers, Historical Fiction, Inside Historical Fiction, writing historical fiction

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A few weeks ago, I read America’s First Daughter written by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie. The novel was so excellent, I should use the word devoured! It’s difficult enough for one author to create a story let alone two, so I decided to find out more. Here’s Stephanie letting us in on her writing world and how she works with Laura.

Can you tell us a little of your journey from newbie author to bestselling author?

Gosh, it was a long journey. I started out as a fantasy writer who didn’t realize she wanted to write historical fiction. I have some manuscripts that are truly terrible, and will be hidden under the bed forever. But I eventually started getting little stories published in professional publications, then, under a pen name, I started writing genre fiction for traditional publishers. And my first historical was LILY OF THE NILE about the little known daughter of Cleopatra and Marc Antony who went on to be one of the greatest client queens in the Roman empire. That became a trilogy, and a passion. After seven years in the ancient world, however, I was ready to move on. And it was America’s First Daughter that gave me the chance to do that. I was both surprised, and delighted by the public response to it, and that it hit the NYT Bestseller list, now with hundreds of thousands of books sold. But I really take nothing for granted. In this business, you’re only ever as good as your last book.

What took you from lawyer/teacher to writing historical fiction? And how did your earlier career help your writing career?

The lawyer joke that I often make is that I decided if I was going to lie for a living I’d rather write fiction. It always makes me laugh, but it’s a bit too flip, really, both with its attitude towards lawyers and fiction writing, because both seek out greater truths even if it’s a circuitous path there. I think my earlier career helped me learn to research, and it definitely gave me an appreciation for how history and precedent shapes the present world, an understanding I try to bring to all my work.

With the H-Team and Laura Kamoie you seem to have become an expert at writing fiction collaboratively. Can you tell us why you chose that path? And secondly, can you give us some insights on how the process works so that the reader has a seamless reading experience?

I didn’t set out to be the Queen of Collaboration; I think it’s just that I’m a very social creature and writing can be a very solitary profession. I do it because my craft improves by learning from others and I’ve been blessed to have some extremely talented writer friends. Even so, my writing relationship with Laura is special.

Now, we’re good friends, which helps enormously. But we also think alike when it comes to story structure. With regard to America’s First Daughter, we had a completely unified vision of how the story should unfold from day one, and that served us well. Especially on the rare occasion that we came up against editorial pushback from critique partners or others. We very rarely disagreed and when we did, we always fashioned a third solution that was better than what either of us originally intended.

We found ourselves in more disagreement regarding My Dear Hamilton, but that was only because our original idea, which we thought was so clever, didn’t work at all. And so, under extreme deadline pressures, we had to very quickly navigate a new path. But in the end, the respect we have for one another always gets us through the process and makes a stronger book. Laura and I edit each other’s words freely. We use track changes, of course, so that if there’s a dispute about something we can see what’s changed and we can talk about it. But there’s really no ego surrounding the sanctity of our words. They’re Patsy’s words or Eliza’s words and we just try to make them the best they can be.

You’ve written several novels set in ancient Egypt and with America’s First Daughter and the upcoming My Dear Hamilton, you are now focused on American history. What prompted the switch?

There are two reasons, really. The first is that, as a Government major and former lawyer, I have always wanted to write about the Founding Fathers and even when I look back to my creative writing in college I see that I was writing historical fiction about figures in government. Fortunately, America’s First Daughter gave me a chance to write about a Founding Father from the eyes of his daughter Patsy, a little known woman who had a great deal of influence over our country’s conception of itself.

The second reason for the switch is that I like to be read, and the commercial niche for ancient history–especially stories about ancient women who don’t wield swords–is a smaller one than for American history at this particular juncture. Readers have a lot of people clamoring for their attention these days; I will always try to give them what they want. In the end, it’s a fortuitous switch because as it happens, America and ancient Rome have a lot in common. The clothes are different. The climate is different. But the ideas, tensions, and struggles are very similar. And of course, I’m fascinated by Republics. Their rise, their fall, their triumphs and failures. That’s the stuff of drama!

American’s First Daughter is wonderfully written and a compelling story. How did you go about the research process?

Oh, thank you for your kind remarks about the novel. It truly was a passion project. The research, I confess, was arduous, but made much easier by the national archives, where 18k letters of Jefferson have been cataloged, digitized and transcribed. From his letters, we moved to the letters of the family, which are kept on Monticello.org. These are amazing resources for all Americans and it made it much easier for us to imagine the inner thoughts of our characters–because they wrote some of them down.

Patsy Jefferson lives a long life. How did you decide what and what not to include?

That was really tough. There were a number of times that I wished things would stop happening to her. We ended up stripping a lot of the politics out of the book simply because Patsy was removed from a lot of it. Her father got to be the president because she was busy keeping his plantation going, but that meant she wasn’t directly involved with many of the more famous, or infamous, political doings of the day. Not so Eliza Hamilton, I should add, who was right in the thick of it with her husband at the time. Our basic rule was that if something didn’t directly shape or influence the character arc we wanted for Patsy then it would have to go.

You say that you write about women who live in the shadows of men and that your novels explore “the moral dilemmas, difficult choices, and heartbreaking sacrifices that shaped these women’s lives.” How do you choose which women to write about?

In some ways I almost feel as if they choose me. Cleopatra Selene certainly did. I was actually trying to write a story about her brother, but I kept hearing her voice in my head. The same thing happened to me with Cartimandua from A Year of Ravens. I was supposed to write about someone else, but I couldn’t fall asleep at night because this ancient lady wouldn’t shut up. I know that sounds pretty woo woo, and I’m not one of those people who think the dead literally speak to them. But there’s an exercise in empathy that happens while writing and the mind latches onto what it latches onto. Psychological alchemy, I guess.

I will say though, that there’s no way that Patsy Jefferson chose me. In fact, both Laura and I were acutely aware that she would not have wanted her story told which made her a truly challenging woman to write about!

What do you think are the critical ingredients of historical fiction? And why do you think readers enjoy the genre?

Oh goodie! An invitation to ride my hobby horse. I apply a very emphatically broad definition to the genre. If it’s set in the past–let’s say more than thirty years–it’s some sort of historical fiction. Whether or not it will be enjoyable or good is a much different question that depends on any variety of factors, but I take a very hard line against folks who get all sniffy about what does, or does not, belong in our genre based on their own particular preferences. I think we all need to be welcoming more readers, with their varied tastes, into the fold. For me personally, what I enjoy about historical fiction is learning something new; generally what I read prompts me to do a little research of my own or ask questions I would never have asked. I enjoy slipping into a different world than my own, without all the modern baggage we carry, to try and wrap my mind around human problems–which I don’t believe ever really change.

America’s First Daughter by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie – In a compelling, richly researched novel that draws from thousands of letters and original sources, bestselling authors Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie tell the fascinating, untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph—a woman who kept the secrets of our most enigmatic founding father and shaped an American legacy.

My Dear Hamilton by Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie – From the New York Times bestselling authors of America’s First Daughter comes the epic story of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton—a revolutionary woman who, like her new nation, struggled to define herself in the wake of war, betrayal, and tragedy. Haunting, moving, and beautifully written, Dray and Kamoie used thousands of letters and original sources to tell Eliza’s story as it’s never been told before—not just as the wronged wife at the center of a political sex scandal—but also as a founding mother who shaped an American legacy in her own right. Coming April 2018.

Many thanks, Stephanie. I’m delighted to have you on the blog. I’m sure readers will find your experience as a co-author and writer of historical fiction very interesting.

FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION follow A WRITER OF HISTORY (either through WordPress or by using the widget on the left sidebar)

M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel, TIME AND REGRET was published by Lake Union. Mary’s other novels, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads or on her website www.mktod.com.