Thursday Thirteen: Traveling the World

By Jennifer Mueller

Ha! I'll make my list today fit the Unusual historical theme.

Thirteen unusual places I have set a story.

1. Kenya: SAMBURU HILLS

When Celeste Reed steps off the boat in the fledgling colony of Kenya, East Africa she finds out the man that she was to marry doesn't even care to get to know her let alone listen to a word she says. Life is miserable and then he has the nerve to die leaving her to run an estate without any money. It seems he spent all he had to impress the colony and she was just part of the package. Africa is unforgiving to the weak, but it can be the people that you least expect that make it. And then there's Edward.

2. Cuba: HAVANA HOLIDAY

Five stories, four days, three nights, two times the fun, and one heck of a good time. Dahlia, Eve, Nora, Alice, and Marianne; when five women who work together
in depression era Boston save up for a trip of a lifetime to decadent Havana, anything can happen. With seductive Latin men and rich vacationers at every turn who wouldn't enjoy dancing till dawn, the parties, the nightclubs, the beach, the gambling, and there’s always more than one side to a story.

3. Argentina: A short story in WOMEN OF THEIR TIME anthology

4. Byzantium/Turkey: FAR FROM HOME

She's a highly placed lady in waiting and he's a lowly soldier guarding her as she sneaks out of the palace during the Byzantine empire. Each thinks the other wouldn't be interested but things change as the months drag on including the danger she's in.

THE DANCER'S SECRET

When a dancer in World War I Constantinople holds the key to a British spy's assignment, he can only trust his instincts. She's not telling how getting her out alive will save the lives of thousands of men and with a traitor to catch, instinct is all he has as his network falls apart around him.

5. Ancient Rome: A LITTLE ROMAN SCANDAL

She was a puzzle to Claudius, a challenge and the ultimate mystery. She came to his party, then abruptly left without chaperon, escort, or imparting much knowledge about herself. The one fact sticking out is that Livia is running. Still, he is attracted, and needs to find out why the beauty is running and from whom. Livia wants to leave the city, but because of her father's position, she cannot. He allows her little or no freedom, and is determined to sell her into marriage to a man twice her age or more. Livia would like to marry for love, but she knows that is improbable until she meets Claudius. Not knowing who he is, she accepts his help. Battered and bleeding, she goes to Claudius, and hides in his home from her abusive father and his manipulative schemes. In ancient Rome it was the fathers and then the husbands job to protect the women in his care. Can Livia Pollia be kept safe by Claudius, and away from the father who traps her? Can the scandal they promote help her while bringing her abuser to pay for the crimes against her mother?

6. China: Two short stories in WOMEN OF THEIR TIME anthology

7. Malta: I IMAGINE WALKING, part of ODYSSEY AND OTHER STORIES

A decade after World War II ended and her husband returned with plans that didn't include her, Danielle Maxwell hopes a several month business trip to Malta will be just what her marriage needs to get back on track. When her husband has more interest in drinking and fishing with an old friend that has settled on the island can Danielle find a way to rebuild her life with or without her husband?

8. Ancient Egypt: EGYPTIAN NIGHTS

A horrible death, an even bigger mistake by the gods of Ancient Egypt. A modern woman is trapped in a life not her own. But even in death beginnings can happen.

9. India: A short story in WOMEN OF THEIR TIME anthology

10. Majorca: ALL MY DREAMS (okay this one isn't historical but it is unusual)

When all of Loryn's family was taken from her she just ran. Fixing up a house in Majorca sounds like a dream to most but it was only hiding from life. When a movie producer decides her house is perfect for a location, life comes charging in and he drags her into the world once more. But does he bring too much of life to make it work?

11. Portugal: ANCIENT WALLS (another non historical, but unusual)

Maya Montgomery just wants a vacation with her son, that's it, but with her ex giving her trouble to the point of needing a restraining order, even relaxing involves a fight. At least until everyone in the hotel is kept inside with days of rain. After the way her ex has been all it will take is someone being nice to her and Carson is nothing but nice. Nice to look at, nice to talk to, nice to go to bed with. For once in her life, things are looking up, until her son is kidnapped and the note orders her to find a hidden treasure. Treasure not everyone is even convinced exists and her son's life depends on it. So much for a peaceful vacation.

12. Ancient Greece: THE MOUNTAINTOP

In ancient Greece men marry for money and land while finding their pleasure elsewhere. When Orestes saves a captured woman from slave traders just what is she supposed to do when she doesn't feel like sharing? Especially when she's literally ready to fight him over the matter.

13. Japan: AN UNUSUAL DANNA

When a Geisha in turn of the century Japan starts receiving gifts from an anonymous benefactor she can only guess at who it is that is helping her. Its not making the woman who owns her her house happy either she stands to loose a lot of money if her geisha leaves. Is love the answer to all her problems?

For more details on any of these titles, please visit my website.

Jennifer Mueller

Out Now!!!!
Writer's Block, a recommended read at Romance at Heart Publications
Far from Home at Aphrodite's Apples

Dutch Treat

Growing up in New York state, only miles from Sleepy Hollow (yes, that Sleepy Hollow) I had early exposure to Dutch history and folklore. Maybe numerous retellings of Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (though I can't bring myself to see the Johnny Depp version; I know he's brilliant, but I can't bear anyone tampering with Ichabod Crane.)planted the seed and later the Valerie Sherwood novels I gobbled in college watered it. However it started, I'm noticing Dutch references in my own stories more often than not.

An urban legend about the ghost of a Dutch settler spooks the heroine of my first historical, My Outcast Heart. The hero of "Never Too Late" has a Dutch name, the heroine of my time travel WIP is proud of her Dutch heritage and one of the core families in the saga I'm co-writing with a partner is Dutch. In a novel I'm shopping around now, Jonnet and Simon fall in love while in the Dutch exile of the English Civil War. So, what's the appeal? Beyond the wooden shoes, cheese and tulips?

The Netherlands, or The Low Countries, depending on the period, enjoys a golden age during my favorite periods to set my romances. Duking it out with England and Spain for mastery of the seas, and the booming trade of the Renaissance, Dutch merchants and explorers traveled across the oceans to the Caribbean, and the New World. Tons of story potential both on the respectable side, and during the golden age of piracy that followed.

When a college friend tracked me down across campus to physically put a Valerie Sherwood novel in my hand and tell me I had to read it, the history and legends I'd absorbed in childhood took on a new dimension as I read her tales of love and adventure, in the bustling city of Amsterdam and the wilds of New Amsterdam colony with the wealth of the patroons contrasted with the new land. I knew I had to know more and more. In fact, I gleaned so much that I was able to ace a colonial history exam with an essay question about Dutch contributions to colonial society. Trust me, we can thank Dutch ingenuity in ice travel for keeping colonial trade going during the colonial winters.

Dutch women, historically, often had more rights and freedoms than their English sisters. They had an easier time if they wanted or needed to fend for themselves economically, even instigate divorce. Now wouldn't that be an interesting twist?

Ingenuity flourishes throughout Dutch history, with farmers, artists, artisans, scholars and nobles abounding. With the current market expanding to include a wider variety of settings, and the Fox network about to debut their New Amsterdam drama series, maybe readers will be interested in discovering a few Dutch treats of their own.

Paris After the Liberation

As a writer of historical fiction, it's often difficult to settle on a specific time and date for a book's setting. For my last book of Warring Hearts, my WWII trilogy, I decided to set my story after the liberation of Paris. This of course led me to research. I checked out several books but relied on Paris - After the Liberation - 1944 to 1949 by Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper for understanding the 'feel' and 'attitudes' of the Parisians. The quotes in this article are from this book.

My story is a historical romance fiction, so of course, the main storyline is about Richard Hart and Claire O'Neill's relationship. Yet, it's important for the writer to transport the reader 'back in time', to give the reader a sense of place. Paris in the spring of 1945 isn't the same Paris I visited this spring. So, how does a writer sprinkle in the historical atmosphere without giving the reader a history lesson? Observations from my character's POV is one way to set the mood.

What would an American in Paris witness during this time?

Foreigners returning received a slightly different impression, not one of external dilapidation, but of an internal decay while the exterior remained untouched. Isaiah Berlin wrote to a friend: "Paris seemed terrifying to me--cold and abnormally clean and empty and more beautiful than I have ever seen a city to be...but empty and hollow and dead, like an exquisite corpse; the metaphor is vile and commonplace, but I can think of nothing else." And Susan Mary Patten, the wife of an American diplomat, wrote that "it was like looking at a Canova death mask."

This is a paragraph from my WIP, from Claire's POV:

Tension formed tiny crinkles around his mouth, his eyes shaded by his sunglasses. Claire grasped his hand, needing to feel him. Hollow, this is how she viewed Paris. Cold, clean and empty. It's as if the Nazis ripped the very soul from the city and left a clean and beautiful vacant movie set.

Rationing remained in effect. A city of contrast, the black market thrived, and if a person had the money, they could live rather well.

"The Ritz," noted the British Ambassador, "looked exactly as it did prewar with Mrs. Corrigan sitting in one corner of it."

There champagne flowed freely and residents dined well. For everyone else, daily life for the lower classes contrasted sharply. They'd come to expect electrical outages, no telephone services, shortages of paper, soap, food and coal. Candles were in constant need, fake coffee called gazeux was served in cafes, shops were empty or closed down. There were no goods to sell. Parisians wore wooden soled shoes (no rubber available) that made a funny clamping sound on the streets, the women wore short dresses and outrageous hats. An early spring followed the harsh winter that year, and yet, faces remained bitter and closed down.

From my WIP: Claire observed the strollers taking in the spring day. The harsh winter brought in a early spring. The wisteria and lilacs bloomed, the chestnut trees blossomed. The air held a faint sweet scent. The women paraded in outrageous hats, made of bits of wire, bird nests, feather, every found object imaginable. Their only creative form of expression since rationing forced them into drab, short dresses, mended and patched.

There are many ways to sprinkle in the history and mood of the period in which you are writing. It's what I admire in great writers of fiction. It doesn't have to be a historical book, either. The Kite Runner transported me to Afghanistan, and gave me insight into their culture. I developed a better understanding of the country.

This is what I hope to do when I sit down to write a historical fiction. Give the reader not only a sense of place, but an understanding of the culture.

Happy Reading!
Vicki

P.S: The photo is my mom and dad at a nightclub during the war! I know it doesn't have anything to do with Paris, but their picture represents the style of the time. *g*
http://www.vickigaia.com/

Historicals: What Got You Started?

It's a given that everyone who reads historicals has at least a passing interest in history, whether they were given a Regency by a friend or relative and told "read this it's good," or they picked up a novel in the grocery store because it had a bright cover featuring a guy in a kilt or a Viking, or whatever. So my question is what got you the writer started and what is it about your favorite era that made you want to write a book set in that time?

For me it was a book on Medieval history in the 6th grade. I took it home the first day of school and read the whole thing. I graduated to my mother's Georgette Heyer novels and from there my dad being stationed to Crete sparked the interest in ancient history. I got interested in genealogy and the further back I went the more I wanted to recreate what it must have been like to live during ancient times, hence my ebook Caesar's Love.

So, how did you all get hooked on your favorite eras?

Oh yeah, and do you have any favorite historical figures that you'd love to base a character on but haven't yet? Rather partial to Catherine the Great myself.

Close to Home

Among the stories I worked on in the past few months are two which I set in areas where I live or used to live: the fictional town of Kirchwalden in CASTLE OF THE WOLF, my May release, is based on a small Black Forest town called Waldkirch, where I spent the happiest five years of my childhood, while the Villa under the Linden Trees in my podcast novella "Betrayal" is modelled after a house near Frankfurt which has fascinated me for many years. I found it very exciting to do research on these two settings and to discover new things about familiar places.

In 1863 Eugen Lucius, Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Meister and Ludwig August Müller founded a chemical factory near the town of Höchst and, thus, not far from Frankfurt on the Main, an important center of trade. The factory became famous for its production of colours, the first of which was the reddish violet fuchsin, and as a result the new factory "Meister, Lucius & Co." became known as the "Red Factory" among the people living in the vicinity. Up to the early 20th century, those colours did not only produce lovely dyes for cloths, but also affected the men who were working in the factory: even after a few days off, the workers would still colour their bed linen, and in winter you could tell from the colour of footsteps in the snow in which department of the factory the man who had walked there worked.

"Meister, Lucius & Co." flourished and soon new products were added and the numbers of workers in creased. This expansion was also due to clever promotion: the director of sales even managed that the French Empress Eugenie visited the opera in Lyons (famous for its silk dyers!) wearing a dress dyed in a splendid Höchster green, which remained just as splendidly green even in gaslight (this used to be a big problem in the 19th century: in gaslight most green dyes looked blue).

As their business grew so did the wealth of the families of the owners. In 1902 Herbert von Meister, one of the sons of Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Meister, bought a small estate on the other side of the river Main, right across from the factory. There he had a small, but lovely villa built for his family, the Villa unter den Linden (or, in English, the Villa under the Linden Trees).

Four years later the family could move into the new house, and the old building were torn down in order to make way for a park, stables and an orangery. Just beyond the entrance gates to the park stands the coachman's house ....


... and a little further down the drive an ice house hides in a small hill:


Not far from the ice house once stood a doll house, probably built for von Meister's daughter Elisabeth. I remember peering through small, dirty windows into this doll house during some sort of communal summer picnic in the park when I was three or four years old. The inside was covered all in cobwebs, but you could still see how beautiful it once must have been.

This image of the dollhouse stayed with me through the years, and when we finally moved back into the area, the old Villa under the Linden Trees seemed to call to me. Herbert von Meister, his wife and his daughter are all long dead now; the doll house is long gone and has been replaced by a wooden play hut, and today the villa houses a centre for the treatment of drug addicts. The once private park and gardens have long been opened to the public, and so I was able to traipse through the old gates, past the coachman's house and down the drive and could imagine ... imagine ... how it splendid the villa must have once been, and I decided to use it as a setting for a story. However, I took some license with its history: in my story it has been built 100 years earlier, and the fabric merchant Heinrich von Meister has married a gypsy girl...

The Biltmore Estate

• Four acres of floor space
• 250 rooms
• 34 family and guest rooms
• 60 servants' rooms
• 43 bathrooms
• 65 fireplaces
• Three kitchens
• One 100,000-acre forest
• One 250-acre wooded park
• Five pleasure gardens
• 30 miles of macadamized roadways
• 23,000 books
• Horse and dairy farms
• Elevators
• Refrigerators
• One 700,000 gallon indoor swimming pool (with underwater lighting)
• One bowling alley
• One gymnasium
• One state-of-the-art laundry complex
• Three museum's worth of art dating to medieval times
• And Napoleon Bonaparte's ivory chess set.

Cost upon its opening?

Nobody knows: George Washington Vanderbilt didn't keep any records. The ultra-modern Biltmore Estate opened its doors to guests on Christmas Eve, 1895, after only six years of construction. The youngest member of the railroad magnate family, 33-year-old George had no problem spending the $100 million (nearly two billion dollars at today's rate) of his father's money.

Even though I have no characters with access to that kind of money, I've been able to use bits and pieces from what I've learned about the platinum lifestyles of the Gilded Age. Biltmore's preservation and education programs are some of the best I've encountered, and the self-guided audio tour (each visitor is given a personal MP3 player) is packed with more information than I can retain. I've visited twice. The first time I bought the book, and the second time I took notes. And I'm ready to go again!

I love getting a strong sense of place in books, every bit as much as I love good stories and well-drawn characters. I think it's why I love the gothic novel: I get to explore houses and grounds I could never fully explore otherwise.

What are the most interesting settings in your books? What about books you've read? How do tours and personal visits affect your writing?