How hard can it be to create a character with a conscience? It’s not always easy, especially if you’re a guy trying to create a female character. Readers of early drafts of my first novel, A FALSE DAWN, often told me that Louise, my character, seemed selfish and spoiled,...

This woman doesn’t seem to have a care in the world, which is fine. But her luck is about to change, badly. Does she have the character to deal with it? That worried me – alot. At the point in my novel illustrated here, my main character, Louise, is...

It sounds so dramatic to say that history “saved” me. But it’s true. I started working on my novel before I retired, but when I finally found myself without a job, for months I felt so lost. Finishing all the research on Colonial America, in order to write A...

Do you remember how the daughters of Downton Abbey could NOT directly inherit any of their father’s wealth? The English system of inheriting wealth was adopted in the U.S. after this country became independent. In the 1600s and 1700s, however, Frenchwomen living here in French-held territory – mostly in...

When I started writing my novel, I was intimidated by the fact that the main character I had chosen (or who chose me) was a woman. What do I know about women beyond what most guys know? I plunged ahead, and over the many years that I worked on...

Early versions of my first novel, A FALSE DAWN, were not going over well. My main character, Louise, was not always popular with my target readers, who are women. (After all, most fiction is read by women. And I, a guy, chose my main character simply because she spoke...

This very real woman helped inspire me to create the main character in my first novel. Starting in the 1750s, Marie Chouteau founded a dynasty based in St. Louis. To do this, she became an accomplished businesswoman and had to fend off her first husband, who had abandoned her...

The lives of women in Colonial America were not always as bleak and powerless as many of us imagine. When I was writing my first novel, which features a woman living in the 1740s, one of my first questions to myself was, “What could a woman of that era...

Do you know one way they got rid of unwanted babies in times past? Churches and hospitals had “foundling wheels” set up on their outside walls. A mother could lay her child in a small crib, then turn the foundling wheel to place the child safely inside the building....