One of the blogs I follow is Hearts Through History, which features some marvelous posts on history in general, as well as historical romance in particular. A recent post by Merry Farmer caught my eye, about historical body image. The concept of skinny, as she notes, is purely a 20th century notion, but most heroines Read More
Category: Writing History
Inspiration, Italian Style
So I spent the last two weeks in Italy. It was one of those trip-of-a-lifetime sorts of vacations, where we packed in just about every major tourist site, and quite a few minor ones. My husband is a classicist, so there was a heavy emphasis on Roman ruins–Colosseum, Forum, Villa Adriana, Pompeii, Herculaneum, etc.–but we Read More
Writing Contests
This post is sort of an update of a piece I wrote last year over on New Kids on the Writers Block, when I was in a contest frenzy. I’ve been in contest mode this spring as well, serving as a category coordinator and a backup judge for the Cleveland Rocks Romance Contest, and as a Read More
Going to the Dogs
Sneaky Pete & his well-ordered bone collection We recently added a puppy to our household. Sneaky Pete is a standard poodle of indeterminate age. He might be nine months, he might be 18 months; he was a rescue, so who knows? He and our other dog, Larry, also a poodle but getting on in years, Read More
Note to self. . .
. . . do not introduce a new blog and then vanish for three months. Have you ever had one of those periods in your life when it was all you could do to keep yourself employed and you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered? And anything else–house cleaning, regular showering, writing–was simply more Read More
Writing History: Books
The other day I was reading a historical romance set in the Victorian era, and one of the characters was reading The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot. After I checked to make sure the book had actually been published by the time the book was set (because I do that sort of thing), Read More