First of all, let me apologize for the rather later and rather short post – I spent most of the day preparing a job application (or rather, I spent most of the day tearing my hair out over what to put into the cover letter for the aforementioned job application), and I feel as if my brain has been sucked dry.
In the night from Saturday to Sunday, the whole of the USA turned back their clocks, and the Historical Romance Network took the opportunity to celebrate our genre on social media with the hashtag #FallBackInTime: like last year, people posted selfies with historical romances. Elena, for example, took a picture of herself with one of her favorites from Mary Jo Putney.
Others ::cough:: me ::cough:: took pictures of their softies reading historical romances. Dragon, Corduroy Wes, and Vampire Teddy did a great job of modeling for me:
And soon, #FallBackinTime was joined by #WhyIReadHistoricalRomance and #WhyIWriteHistoricalRomance — quite fittingly as Sunday also marked the start of this year’s National Novel Writing Month when oodles of people worldwide sit down and begin writing a brandnew story. So it was indeed a good day to think about why we love our genre so much.
For me, it’s the history & the research. I cannot get enough of historical tidbits, historical gossip, the details of life in the past. And the research books! I love (love, love, love!!) obtaining new research material! 🙂
Fall Back in Time is also a good opportunity to add a few more historicals to your TBR. I picked up Royally Ever After, a bundle of two of Loretta Chase’s shorts, which were originally published in different novella collections. I particularly adored “Lord Lovedon’s Duel”, which has got a typical quirky Loretta-Chase heroine and features a most unusual device.
And now over to you: Why do you read (or write) historical romance? And what was the last historical you read?
Wishing you the best with the application, and thanks for posting my selfie!
So many reasons I read and write historical romance. Although I can enjoy a well-written contemporary romance, I’m more drawn to different settings and subgenres, including paranormal and historical. I grew up reading Georgette Heyer and traditional Regencies and then followed favorite authors like Mary Jo Putney into the sexier historicals.
Thank you, Elena!
With Heyer, I needed several starts: I always ended up with books I didn’t like, until I finally stumbled across one I thoroughly enjoyed – Regeny Buck, I think – and that was the beginning of my love for Heyer. 🙂
I missed #FallBackInTime this year –no chance to take a photo! But I love both reading and writing historical fiction. I love your image at the top of your post, Sandy –it says a lot! “Safe & reliable form of time travel”, yes, indeed! I have always been fascinated by the way people lived in the past, from a very early age. There’s a fundamental natural attraction there –it’s not just the influence of early childhood reading, despite my post about that some time back. Like you, I love the research as well as the story-telling. Pair that fascination with a love of romance, and voila!
I fell in love with history at quite a young age too – I guess it helped that I grew up in a town that was overlooked by not one, but two castles (both in ruins, though).
When I posted the b&w version of that first picture on Twitter last year, I was tickled pink when one of my friends commented how much she loved old photographs of London. “Uhm… it’s not a photograph,” I said. “It’s more, like, ‘Made by Sandy.'” 🙂