New for History Addicts and Historical Romance Writers – The History Portal

One of the official duties I carried out at RomantiCon last weekend was to sit on the Historical Romance panel on the Sunday.  That’s me in the pic to the left, second from the left, sitting next to the lady in the kirtle, listening to the lady expound on the pitfuls of writing historical romances, and what an idiot you are if you ever step into that particular minefield.

That makes me a four-time loser, I think, plus an assorted time-travelling idiot a few times over.  I can’t seem to leave the genre alone despite the fact that New York just plain isn’t interested these days, and sales are so far down in the basement an historical romance writer simply can’t make money at it, not even writing erotic historical romances alone.  Sad fact.

But we persist in sliding out an historical title here and there — I’m slipping out two of them in the next year via Cerridwen Press (Diana by the Moon and Heart of Vengeance)– because the bug, once it bites, bites deep.  For readers and writers both.

Anyway, someone must have noticed my addiction because along with Kathleen Coddington (she’s the one in the kirtle), Solange Ayre (she’s the one talking) and Ruby Storm (and she writes the most amazing BDSM titles for EC when she’s not drifting around the annals of history), I was asked to present the history panel.

But we were given the Black-Hole-Of-Calcutta timeslot.  Thirty-five minutes only, the last panel before a 30 minute break before the most anticipated event of the convention:  The Bookfair.  Every other author in the joint would be off getting pretty before finding lunch and arranging their booksigning tables, so we knew they wouldn’t be at our panel.  And all the readers wouldn’t be there, because they’d be jostling for prime line-up positions in the queue for the bookfair, or trying to get lunch before getting a good spot in the line-up for the bookfair.  (And we didn’t blame them one little bit.  We were trying to figure out how we could cut out early and get our own spots.  This was the EC Bookfair of the year, for cri-yi-yi!!!)

And we had two 35-minute-only panels before us, that we just knew would run over time, and crowd us out.

So we knew going in we were going to be hammered, squeezed and squashed into a tiny little spot in the space-time continuum that would flash past in a blink of an eye.  And yep, when we got there, Meaghan Conrad, our coordinator, asked us to chop it down to 25 minutes.  Yet this was historical romance we were supposed to deliver a panel on.  Give. Us. A. Break.  :)

About the only profession that doesn’t generate more paper, research and general flapping of gums might be the legal profession, but I wouldn’t bet my royalty cheques on it.  Well, I spent a year in law school, and I’ve spent years researching for historical romances, so maybe I would bet on it.  The law books are heavier, but there’s not as many of ‘em.  I spend dozens of hours researching a new historical era for a novel.  If you’ve ever wondered why an historical author tends to stick with the eras and periods they’ve always written in, that’s why.  It takes hundreds of hours of research to learn the culture and customs and language and be familiar enough with it to be able to make a scene come to life without stopping at every sentence to look something up.  Plus it takes dozens of hours just to find those resources in the first place.

We were supposed to explain all that in twenty-five minutes, plus answer questions?  Just spelling out the URLs was going to take fifteen of ‘em.

So we got smart.

Between the four of us, we pooled all our original articles, on-line resources that we use, favourite book titles…everything that we use to research and write our historical novels.  And we built a history portal for us and for you.  At the panel, we explained all the above, and gave out a swish four-colour handout with a link to the portal (thanks to Ruby Storm!), and then paused to answer any specific questions the readers had in the time we had left over…and their questions fillled up the time we had left.

History Panel Handout

That portal is now available to you.  We’re leaving it up in perpetuity, and will continue to tweak it. In fact, as soon as we get our sh…er…act together, we’ll list our historical titles under our profiles, so that you get direct links to those.  And as RomantiCon will repeat in 2010, there’s a possibility that the panel will live on.  Whether all four of us will be on it is debatable, but we’ll let the next panelists know of this portal, and offer them the opportunity to add their resources to the page, too.  For now, explore the rich list of information and links that are there.

~ Click Here to Jump to the History Portal ~

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