Tuesday Ten: Write the West

Here for this week’s Tuesday ten are ten books to help you breathe life into your old west characters and take your reader there:
1. Time Life: The Old West (series). Now, I could have cheated and listed these by title –that would have covered two Tuesday Ten’s! But I am that rare western writer [...]

Victorian Baseball

I am a Red Sox fan. I have been for lo these many years, and have experienced the highs, and far more often the lows, of watching my team. I know a little about the history of the team, and I know for sure that baseball was originally created in Victorian times. [...]

10 ‘modern’ Victorian things

It’s amazing that what we take for granted now was new and fascinating slightly more than 100 years ago. I admit, some might be a stretch, but you can see the connections! The very first link at the bottom is a short blurb about Christmas in Victorian times, and highlights a lot of new inventions [...]

Is It a Boy Or a Girl?

It’s a common question asked at a birth, but when studying pbotos from the nineteenth century, it’s often hard to tell whether a young child is a boy or girl.
In that time period, despite their sex, infants and toddlers all wore dresses.
The reason was simple. Until a child was potty trained, a dress or gown [...]

Tuesday Ten: The Cowboy Code

The American cowboy’s code of ethics was pretty straightforward—but each “rule” was backed up by plain ol’ common sense. Here, for our Tuesday Ten, are ten “laws of the plains” that the cowboy strictly adhered to.
1. It is bad manners to ask a man his name. He may have a reason why he [...]

Another Scandalous Victorian Interview — Catching Up with Kristin-Marie

Why do you write historical?

I’ve always been a storyteller. Even as a child.
In Kindergarten, I’d gather dozens of students about to tell them scary Victorian ghost stories. I’d learned already to use cliff-hanger endings and so the students would come back time and again to hear the rest of the story.
Nowadays, I love to unearth [...]

Another Interview

After doing my very first interview on this blog last month, I was asked to do an interview on Shirley Kiger Connolly’s website.
I had fun talking about my book projects and work habits. Here’s the link:http://shirleykoinonia.tripod.com

Tuesday Ten–Slang sources

I bought several slang dictionaries years back to help me get a feel for period dialogue. I often found that the slang references were from books of the period, which lead me to investigate the original sources. Not only did I find more slang in those sources, but often learned general Victorian phrasing [...]