If the thought of Kevin Costner riding across the prairie buck naked makes you shiver and moan, try to resist wading into a turgid melodrama about political intrigue in the court of Elizabeth I.

I couldn’t write a historical unless something about the period "speaks" to me. I am fascinated by the medieval world, and I chose to use it without a second thought as the milieu of my debut book, She Who Laughs Last. 

I had studied medieval architecture in college, which introduced me to the complexity and contradictions of that time. What we are presented with is a very "male" society – knights, the Crusades, the Church – and very little about the women of the time, with a few notable exceptions such as Eleanor of Aquitaine. So from an intellectual standpoint I enjoy poking around to explore the lives of women of that time.

Although She Who Laughs Last won the 2002 New Historical Voice contest, sponsored by Romantic Times and Dorchester, I’ll confess that as it began to march along page after page it veered off into the realm of a fairy tale, and in the end I found I had created something quite different than I had started out to write, which is the real joy of writing as far as I am concerned. My subconscious had sorted through all the ancient myths and fairy tales I adored as a child and served them up in a medieval stew. And I had a comedy on my hands!

What we love will surface as we write, whether we will it or not. If we try to push it away we may get a "real" historical – not a bad thing – but that’s all. If we leave ourselves open to the process, we get something more personal -- a historical that speaks to others as well as ourselves.

Recommendation #2:  
It’s dangerous – and ultimately futile – to try to write to the market.

If, for instance, vampires are robbing banks in Abilene in 1860 to the delight of every agent and editor on the planet and you choose to write to that market, keep in mind that by the time you write the book, revise, and submit it, banks in Abilene are being cleaned out by fourteenth century Scottish knights taking a time-travel detour on the way to the Holy Land. You’re back to square one and you haven’t written the book you probably wanted to write in the first place.

I probably don’t need to know if Lord Nelson was constipated the day he met his noble end at Trafalgar. And don’t believe everything you read when you set out to do research for your book. Like beauty, historical fact is in the eye of the beholder, and we can never know the "truth" of the matter. 

The history of the Norman Conquest comes down to us through the writings of – guess who? – the victorious Normans. We use historical sources because they are there, but in the end, it is the meaning of the events – beauty, tragedy, farce, whatever – we share with our readers. We want details to be as accurate as possible, insofar as we know them, but we’re writing a novel here, not a dissertation!