Blog

It suddenly makes sense to me to keep a research diary here on my blog. I'm usually burnt out on my daily writing by 11:30 in the morning, and if I've made my thousand words, then I quit for the day. And yet I haven't been keeping track of the research I do every day. Of course, I do a lot before I start writing, but I find there's always something else I need to learn while I'm in the midst of it.

I'm currently writing Book 7 about the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 Petrograd (St. Petersburg)....

My daughter might decide not to have children. In her mid-thirties she has a successful career as the Chief Advocacy Officer for a thriving criminal justice organization, she has a fabulous group of friends with whom she travels the world, and she has a dog. Domestic bliss isn't currently a priority.

I'm okay with that. Her father and I had had a difficult (and that’s an understatement) marriage, and while motherhood has been the most meaningful experience of my life, I understand why she...

Snowflakes swirled outside the window of the silk shop. Louisa checked her watch: almost closing time. She’d been working every afternoon for two weeks now and still no sign of the thieves. She closed the magazine she’d been reading, got up, and meandered among the bolts of silk stacked on tables in the center of the cavernous room, losing herself in the piles of cloth — the bright jewel tones, the brocades, the gold-threaded flower patterns. Running her fingers over a turquoise silk, she...

From the Drawing Room to the Streets

The 1910s are a fascinating period in women’s history. For upper class women, the Gilded Age was getting rusty, and many women gleefully discarded the societal rules which had previously governed every aspect of their lives. For lower class women, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 galvanzied action to unionize and organize. Remember how horrified we were by the fall of the Twin Towers? Witnesses to this horror must have felt much the same way....

I love research. I can’t resist going down an Internet rabbit hole to find contemporaneous accounts of a particular event — like NYC Mayor Gaynor’s funeral in 1913. How crazy is it that there was an attempted assassination on his life in 1910, and then he died three years later from the bullet, which was lodged in his throat. Here’s a picture of him immediately after he was shot!

And few things are as delightful as reading books from the past, such as Washington Irving’s 1832 A Tour on the...

Divine Inspiration, Rare and Awesome

If I waited for inspiration, I would never write anything. I think most working writers feel that way. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy my daily writing, but the will to sit and write does not come from an outside source. It probably comes from the desire as a child to be heard as well as the pleasure of spending lots of time in other worlds.

And yet, every once in a while, the universe drops me a line and tells me to keep going.

The first book of my...

On the day I wrote this blog I was in Jacksonville, Florida, the city where I grew up. I am here because I was invited to go to my old high school, Robert E. Lee, and speak to students who have been reading my novel, Picara. I had just finished breakfast and I picked up a copy of the Florida Times Union. As I glanced over it on the elevator on the way up to my room, my heart lurched. One of the teasers on the front page of Section C said that Harry Crews had died. My literary father was gone....

These are a few of the books that my friends and I read when we were teenagers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We also read a lot of science fiction and fantasy as teenagers still do. My favorite SF book was Dune by Frank Herbert. And like the old fart that I am, I have zero use for the film adaptations.

The title of Go Ask Alice (1971) comes from the song by Jefferson Airplane, “Don’t you want somebody to love?” The book, written in the form of a diary, is about a teenage girl who ingests...

I stood among the crowd of a couple thousand protestors in front of the Old Florida Capitol, a charming historic building with a gray-ish dome and striped awnings — the effect marred by the huge phallic structure right behind it. Looking around, I saw a lot of young women and men, but the majority of the people were my age or older. These boomers were perfectly at home, waving their “no kings” signs, smiling and singing or just stopping to chat with each other. They were in their element....

A Writer’s Thread

I’m often reading for research, so I don’t get as much time to enjoy historical novels as I would like. However, there’s one author whose books I always make time for: Madeline Martin. I know whenever I pick up a book by Martin, I will be entertained, educated, and emotionally engaged. One reason I’m drawn to her books is the passion her characters possess for the act of reading itself.

I first became aware of Martin a few years ago when I interviewed her for the Historical...

The moment I uncovered the identity of silent film star Theda Bara’s secret lover, I leapt off my couch and danced around the room. Early in my research process, I had watched a biographical documentary on Bara’s life, The Woman with the Hungry Eyes. The documentarian mentioned that Bara had referred to a time in her life when she was “in that twilight called love” during a brief sojourn in Paris. But she never revealed who her lover was.

The one reference to this mystery man was a mention of...

Do you remember the song, "Polk Salad Annie" by Tony Joe White? It was a big hit when I was a kid in Florida. We loved the line about the gator getting your granny. "Chomp! Chomp! Chomp!"

Last summer my daughter and I were kayaking in a spring-fed river in North Florida. We had paddled into one of the small inlets in search of a spring when my daughter stopped and pointed to something. I thought she was pointing to the origin of the spring and I turned my kayak around -- only to realize I was...