UPDATES to LISTS OF WOMEN AT COURT and to WHO'S WHO OF TUDOR WOMEN
8/7/10: I've been updating and adding to both the entries in the WHO'S WHO and the
Lists of Women at Court sections of the website. As I've said before, this is a never-ending process. What can I say? I just keep finding information on more and more interesting women. Almost every time I begin research on some aspect of the work in progress (in this case AT THE KING'S COMMAND, the 4th book in the SECRETS OF THE TUDOR COURT SERIES), I come upon references to Tudor women that intrigue me. I try to find out more about each of them. If I find enough on someone, she becomes a new entry in the WHO'S WHO. Sometimes there is nothing to find, but with more and more new information being shared online every day, it's always possible something will turn up later. That's also why the older entries keep being revised. New (to me, anyway) information turned up, either in books I've bought or borrowed for research, or online in genealogies or other material that has been added since the last time I looked. I get a real thrill out of solving the mystery when I can connect a stray name to a family, a life history, and sometimes even a portrait.
WEBSITE UPDATED WITH COVER AND INFO ON BY ROYAL DECREE
8/4/10: I've just received the final proofs of the cover for BY ROYAL DECREE and they're gorgeous! The earlier version had Bess Brooke wearing a pale pink dress. This one is much more striking. I've also started to add information on the novel to these pages. This is an ongoing process, so please check back from time to time to see what has been added. To go directly to this material, you can click here:
NEW EBOOKS ADDED
7/12/10: More of my ebooks (written as Kathy Lynn Emerson) have just been added at A Writer's Work web store.There are five books for young people (ages 10 and up), four of them previously published (JULIA'S MENDING, THE MYSTERY OF HILLIARD'S CASTLE, THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING BAGPIPES, and, in nonfiction, MAKING HEADLINES: A BIOGRAPHY OF NELLIE BLY) and one (SOMEDAY) that is an ebook original. For grown-ups, there are two titles, the eighth book in the Face Down Mystery series, featuring 16th century gentlewoman, herbalist, and sleuth, Susanna, Lady Appleton, FACE DOWN BELOW THE BANQUETING HOUSE, and the Agatha-award winning nonfiction, HOW TO WRITE KILLER HISTORICAL MYSTERIES: THE ART AND ADVENTURE OF SLEUTHING THROUGH THE PAST. I hope to add more mystery titles before the end of the year.
CHECK OUT WHAT'S NEW AT THE WHO'S WHO
6/26/10: I've just added a section titled "How the Who's Who Came to Be" at my A Who's Who of Tudor Women. You can go directly to it by clicking here.
In other news, I'm still adding to the Who's Who (it has over 900 entries now) and working on the next Kaitlyn Dunnett mystery and doing research for the fourth novel in the Secrets of the Tudor Court series, which will be titled At the King's Pleasure. The protagonist in this one is Lady Anne Stafford, another of the women to whom King Henry VIII was romantically linked. It's unlikely they had an affair, but Anne was part of an interesting love triangle, the other two points being her husband, George Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, and Sir William Compton, one of the king's most trusted courtiers. Some of you will remember Will Compton from The Pleasure Palace. At the King's Pleasure begins with Anne's wedding, which took place at court in 1509 and follows her life through to the execution of her brother, Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, in 1528.
Since I haven't even started to write that one yet, however, let me take a moment to talk about the next book coming to stores, By Royal Decree. The story of Elizabeth Brooke, marchioness of Northampton, it begins late in the reign of Henry VIII, when Henry is looking for a sixth queen, and continues until the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I. During that time, Bess Brooke led a fascinating and controversial life. She fell in love with a married man in a country where there was no divorce unless you were the king. William Parr, brother of Queen Kathryn Parr, secured a separation from his adulterous wife, but he was forbidden to remarry. The only solution was to persuade the king to grant a royal decree permitting them to wed. In the course of their relationship, Bess and Will find themselves married under one sovereign and unmarried under the next. Bess goes from being the mistress of a married man to a position as the highest ranking lady at court and back to being a mere mistress again. More than any of the other books in the series, this is a love story, and one of hope and triumph over tremendous odds. And of course, there's plenty of political intrigue and danger, too.
MISCELLANEOUS NEWS
5/11/10: For those of you interested in A Who's Who of Tudor Women, the online version, I've restructured the text into smaller sections. Some of them were getting really unwieldy to add to! Most are now separated into letters of the alphabet, except for a few letters that just plain have a lot of people in them. Who knew so many women had maiden names that began with B? Anyway, if you bookmarked one of the sections, just go to the index for new links.
In other news, I'm getting ready to go to Mayhem in the Midlands in just two more weeks. I'm presenting a solo program on Historical Mysteries and also participating on two panels. This may be my only foray into the world of fan conventions and writers' conferences this year as I have two new books to write, one as Kaitlyn Dunnett and one as Kate Emerson, and a 45th high school reunion to go to in the fall. And, of course, I keep adding to the Who's Who, which is fun but time consuming.
you can reach them by clicking on the links for the Tudor court and for each of the two books (so far) in the Secrets of the Tudor Court series. Enjoy!
MORE NEAT STUFF AT AWRITERSWORK.COM
3/11/10: I've just added three e-book originals to my listing at the A Writer's Work web store. I'm really excited about all three of them. A Who's Who of Tudor Women is a text-only version of online Who's Who as of the end of February 2010. That's 622 mini-biographies plus a section on titles used in Tudor times. Yes, the information is available already and for free, but for those who want the convenience of having the information at their fingertips, and all in one file, I'm making this version available. A list of additions and corrections made from March 2010 onward will be posted on a Tudor Women Additions List.
Also new is Crimes and Confusions: Five Historical Short Stories, a never-before-published collection of novella length. Included are "The Reiving of Bonville Keep," "The Kenduskeag Killer," "The Tell-Tale Twinkle," "Any Means Short of Murder," and "The Curse of the Figure-Flinger."
And last but not least is the historical novel for young readers, Shalla. Set in Colonial Rhode Island it is based on real events in the year 1643. Click on the link above to go to the A Writer's Work homepage or below to go directly to my page there.
TWO TITLES NOW AVAILABLE AT AWRITERSWORK.COM
2/23/10: "A Writer's Work" is now in business! At this new web store you'll find not only my books (written as Kathy Lynn Emerson) but others by a variety of multi-published authors. Historical? Contemporary? Romance? Mystery? Nonfiction? They're all there for your reading pleasure.The books at this site go directly from writer to reader. We're changing the process. No middleman. We've done the scanning, proofreading and covers ourselves to make our books available, many for the very first time as ebooks, and set up a system whereby we can also offer original ebooks direct to readers. The two Kathy Lynn Emerson titles available for the launch of the site are Murders and Other Confusions, a collection of Lady Appleton short stories originally published by Crippen & Landru, and Fatal as a Fallen Woman, second book the the Diana Spaulding Mystery Quartet, set in 1888, originally published by Pemberley Press. The ebooks come in a variety of formats and can also be easily converted to read on a Kindle. Check it out!
For those of you who aren't into ebooks, I now have a special offer available on the complete Diana Spaulding Quartet in trade paperback editions.
NEW BLOG AT WRITERSPACE
2/8/10: Click on the quill below for a new blog on filling in the gaps in the historical records.
New Interview
1/2/10: Click on the quill below for a new interview with me.
There will also be new material about me at my old faves, The Burton Review and Historically Obsessed.
Housekeeping: The Story Behind THE PLEASURE PALACE
12/11/09: I've been rearranging the website in preparation for the publication of the second book in the Secrets of the Tudor Court series, Between Two Queens. It will be in stores in early January 2010. There are links on the index page to all the locations that have been updated. So far they include my biography page, the bibliography of books I used in writing the first two books in the series, the information on Henry VIII (more pictures have been added there) and the page with pictures of palaces. One change I've made is to move the story behind the writing of The Pleasure Palace from my bio page to this one. It makes up the remainder of this entry. Enjoy!
The idea for The Pleasure Palace goes back a very long way, to the earliest attempts Kate (then called Kathy) ever made at writing historical fiction. Having come to the conclusion that a career teaching seventh grade English was not for her, Kate decided to fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a novelist and sat down to write her first historical. It was awful, heavy on the information dump and full of "telling" instead of "showing." It was 1976 and there were few writer's groups around. The Internet hadn't even been invented yet. The only way to learn how to write was by writing.
So, Kate kept at it. This time she didn't write an entire book, just a synopsis and one chapter for something she called The Princess of Pleasure Palace. The protagonist was Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, and it was quickly rejected by a publisher.
While writing two other novels set in the mid to late sixteenth century, Kate continued to work on versions of one taking place early in the reign of Henry VIII. These incarnations were very different from THE PLEASURE PALACE as it was completed in 2008. The Perils of Pleasure Palace was intended to be historical romance and centered around a fictitious character, a girl from the London streets, who was supposedly brought to court by Will Compton after he seduced her. She subsequently became the mistress of several other courtiers. By the end of the book, they'd all died. She finds a home, if not happiness, as a servant to Mary Boleyn, someone Kate always thought was a much more interesting person than her sister, Queen Anne. This was long before Philippa Gregory wrote The Other Boleyn Girl and even long before Karen Harper wrote about Mary in The Last Boleyn, which was originally published under the title Passion's Reign. Needless to say, this early version of The Pleasure Palace, which stood at 72,000 words in 1978, did not sell, either. Kate was still learning her trade. After two rejections, she revised it, ending up with a 96,000 word manuscript which was rejected ten times.
Kate Emerson, however, never gives up on an idea she likes. Even though she went on to be published in other genres, she never quite forgot the idea of setting a novel in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1994, she gave it another try, this time her focus on the French prisoners of war at Henry's court and the women who loved them. This version, titled My Lady's Ransom, involved a fictional English gentlewoman with a fictitious servant of the duc de Longueville, only this servant was to turn out to be a French nobleman in disguise, working to thwart an evil uncle who tried to steal his inheritance. Kate wrote an outline and a chapter and tried to market it as historical romance but had no luck selling this incarnation either.
Flash forward to 2007, when suddenly all things Tudor are popular and historicals don't have to fit into a subgenre like historical romance or historical mystery in order to sell. THE PLEASURE PALACE that resulted is Kate's thirty-ninth published book (she's written under three other names over the years, in just about every genre going) and is a far better story than any she dreamed up for earlier versions. But there are bits and pieces of older versions here and there and Pleasure Palace (Greenwich) itself still plays a key role in the plot.
BLOGS AND INTERVIEWS
10/8/09: I seem to be popular all of a sudden. People keep asking me to blog and do intereviews. This is kind of neat. It also means I can write short essays (okay, okay . . . I can BLOG!!!) about whatever strikes me as interesting at the moment. I don't think I'd want to commit to doing that on a regular basis. I'd never get any novels written if I was trying to put out a daily or even a weekly blog. But once in a while, especially for a previously untapped audience, one that really seems interested in what I have to say, the process can be fun. And, let's face it, being asked is always flattering. Most writers, myself included, need all the ego-boosts we can get.
If you haven't explored the rest of this website, I hope you'll do that now, but if you're ready to move on, here are some of the places where you can find me blogging or being interviewed. Keep in mind that I may be listed under one of my other names, so be sure to look for all three of me: Kaitlyn Dunnett, Kate Emerson, and Kathy Lynn Emerson.
I'm already posted, talking about my "Who's Who of Tudor Women," at The Burton Review. And I've done an interview about my historicals for Historically Obsessed, another historical blog. You can find that at Historically Obsessed.
Later this month there will be a blog from me ("Who Am I Today?") at http://www.writerspace.com/wsblogs. It is scheduled to be posted on October 14th. I've also just done an interview for http://workingwritersandbloggers.com. Looking a bit farther ahead, I'm working on an article for the March issue of The Medieval Chronicle, which was a print newsletter back in the day and is now starting up again as an e-newsletter. You can check it out at www.TheMedievalChronicle.com. I think I'll be writing about letter writing in the early sixteenth century, but don't hold me to that.
I'm going to try to update this news page on a regular basis, but don't hold me to that, either. There isn't always anything new or newsworthy to share. Mostly I sit and type. This is very boring if you're not the one doing it. Sometimes it's boring when you are!!
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