Today I am over at my home away from home at Historical Fiction eBooks but I thought some of you might be interested in my post about When Truth is Stranger than Fiction.
Here is the introduction:
My Victorian San Francisco Mystery series features Annie Fuller, a widow who runs a boarding house, supplements her income as a clairvoyant, and investigates crimes. She fights hard to maintain her economic independence, and this independent streak gets her in trouble and causes personal and romantic difficulties. This is fiction, but it also is laced with historical fact.
On occasion, the factual elements of my books are harder for readers to swallow than the fictional parts. For example, some reviewers, after reading my first book, Maids of Misfortune, complained that my protagonist, Annie Fuller, is “too modern” in her attitude and behaviors. Yet, some of the most “feminist” statements Annie makes are shameless paraphrases of real speeches by real 19th century women.
Other readers found it far-fetched that I had Annie pretend to be a clairvoyant, Madam Sibyl, in order to be taken seriously when she gave business advice. This is why I decided to start half the chapters in my second book, Uneasy Spirits, with the real advertisements that fortunetellers, clairvoyants, and trance mediums put in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1879 — a number of them specifically offering to give business and stock advice.
Conversely, there have been times when something I thought I had made up turned out to have more ties to fact than even I imagined, creating a kind of synchronicity or happy accident. To continue reading, go here.
M. Louisa
I have read all your books in a week, I generally read history and biographies, but I could not put your books down!