Unusual Historicals

This week, the Unusual Historicals blog is featuring The Golden Lynx as part of its regular series of interviews with authors who write about less-familiar places and times. By the time you read this, the site should include an excerpt from chapter 1. On Sunday, December 29, the same site will post a Q&A with me about Lynx and the series of which it constitutes book 1.

For this, I owe a big thank you to Lisa J. Yarde, who walked me through the process of submitting my files, and to her fellow members of Unusual Historicals, a group that includes fifteen other writers. Of those fifteen, special mention goes to Kathryn Kopple, a Facebook friend whose posting of her own interview alerted me to the site’s existence.

The variety of subjects explored by these authors is impressive: eighth-century Norway, the Frankish kingdom, Ptolemaic Egypt, medieval Spain, Moorish Spain, the ancient Hittites, Troy, Rome and its Teutonic neighbors, ancient Ireland, the medieval West, fourteenth-century Scotland, and seventeenth-century Italy, as well as the American West and England in various periods. It’s encouraging to see such a range, especially in a publishing climate that seems to favor the tried-and-true.

So please, check out the excerpt from The Golden Lynx. Read my questions and answers. If you are not already following me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Goodreads, and elsewhere, click on the links to change that. Sign up to keep updated on this blog, too. I post every Friday, and I love receiving comments or just knowing that someone has taken the time to read what I write.

But don’t stop there. Click around the Unusual Historicals site, which has been running since 2006. Read the excerpts and the interviews, the posts on historical information (medieval games, Islamic gardens) and on writing. You may find some new authors whose books speak to you and encounter new elements of the human experience in distant times and places that you never considered worthy of your attention until now.

Isn’t that, in the end, what reading historical fiction is all about?

Note that you can find other interviews with me, each one emphasizing different points, conducted by Nicky Ticky, L.M. David, Diane V. Mulligan, and Liza Perrat of Triskele Books. The last includes a review.

And Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, and a wonderful new year to all my readers. May 2014 bring you whatever your heart desires.