For the past several months I’ve been up to my eyes in research—okay, maybe only up to my neck. The point is that I’ve been doing a lot of research. And I love it.
One of the most fun things about writing fiction is that you get to make things happen any way you want. But sometimes it’s overwhelming to have the sky as the limit, which is why I enjoy writing historical romance.
With historicals, I’m still in control (as much as any writer ever is) of the characters and the plot, but the setting and the world my characters inhabit are constrained by history. So, for example, while my regency romance can have a heroine who talks back to a duke, she won’t be texting her comments to her adversary and she won’t be meeting him at Starbucks wearing a vinyl mini-skirt. The historical aspects of the setting provide the boundaries and guidelines that—at least for me—make the writing easier.
Today I’ve been writing about a heroine who (under a pseudonym, of course) creates puzzles to be published in the London newspapers. So, what kind of puzzles does she create? Well, they aren’t crossword puzzles, because this most popular type of newspaper puzzle wasn’t even published until 1913. A journalist named Arthur Wynne in Liverpool, England is credited with the first sighting. And even though the “magic square” math puzzles that preceded our modern-day Sudoku have been around for more than 4,000 years, the modern-day versions of the puzzles we love to hate weren’t published in newspapers until 2004.
The puzzles that the regency set worked on included literary puzzles (like Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Enigma” which contains descriptions and clues for eleven literary figures in its lines), cryptograms, riddles, ciphers, rebuses (like the valentine shown above) as well as mathematical codes, logic problems, Chinese puzzles, and our old friend, magic squares—just to name a few.
I love doing research!