My experience at the Imperial War Museum (formerly Bedlam) was a strange combination of eerie recognition and the validation an author feels when she got something just right. In walking around the grounds, I had known something about the layout thanks to Google Earth. But my imagination had embroidered facts with story details—gardens, roses, benches,…
In 19th-century London, the word Bedlam was enough to produce a shudder in rich and poor alike. The insane were incarcerated there, as well as women who enjoyed sex too much and people whose political views were troublesome and needed to be discredited. In the 1700s, it was a popular destination for those who wanted…
I have my laptop, charged and ready to go. I have the month of November, decks cleared and waiting. I have my account at nanowrimo.org and a cluster of oddly shaped word associations scribbled in my notebook that I’m calling an outline. Can you hear the engines revving? That’s me, getting ready to write the…
I’ve been challenged by the students in Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program. The task? The first mention of the word look in our most recent books, along with the paragraph before and after. From Magnificent Devices: She hoped. Her blue hat was not the best accessory for her raiding rig, but…
Last month, I traveled to London to do some background research for the Magnificent Devices books. Internet resources and Google Earth offer a lot to the writer, but nothing beats actually walking the streets your character might have walked–even if they’re concrete and well drained as opposed to 1889, when they were cobblestone and ……