Workshop Description:
When you cruise the shelves at the bookstore, or the online listings, it’s easy to find stories of daring-do and hot clinches set in the Scottish Highlands, Regency or Victorian London or a country house within these periods, and occasionally take a trip back to the Medieval or Age of the Viking. But what about the history that is nearer to home for many of us – you know, American history! Or that of the other continent where undesirables were dumped over two hundred years ago: Australia!
Once upon a time, historical American romantic adventures were on equal footing with their European cousins. Then they seemed to vanish, fall by the wayside as the bodice rippers gave way to a different style of storyline, westerns being the lone exception. And they rank at the lowest rungs in relation to sales. When it comes to Australia, as a setting it, too, didn’t gain a foothold in the same way the European historical worlds did.
And yet, editors and readers are looking for something different. They get burned out on their favorite periods occasionally. A solid diet of one setting can begin to lose its spark.
Spark is what grabs a reader’s interest. Spark is what American and Australian history can supply for your storytelling, too.
Oddly enough, what you can bring to American, be it the north or south continent, or Australian settings are the same people used in the tales set in Scotland, in Ireland, in Britain, or elsewhere in Europe. You know, immigrants. They aren’t all poor and downtrodden, though many are. What all immigrants are is daring, bold, hopeful. Adventurous. Passionate. All wonderful traits for characters. Setting them down on a fresh new stage brings all that to the forefront. Plus, a bit of fear. At least for the first ones to arrive. But being daring, bold, hopeful, adventurous and passionate are traits they hand down to their descendants, who may be your characters in later stories. Can you say “Spinoff”? Or “continuing Series”!
So, bring that Highland laddie, that Irish rogue, the Regency dandy, the Plantagenet or Tudor lord, the roving Viking warrior to one of the New Worlds (the continents of North and South America and Australia all qualify). Force a convicted man or woman, or an indentured one, or a slave onto a ship bound for…well, historically, likely death, but while people around our main characters might greet Death, our heroes and heroines will only have a slight brush with it. Match your hero with a heroine he might never have met in the Old World. It’s still a man’s world in these historical periods, though feisty women no doubt abound as well. They had to survive the challenges, you know. The scenery these characters stride is a bit different, sometimes the language is, but these Europeans from earlier centuries are related to the immigrants that settled large new lands. You can convert them into whatever your story and the time period demand.
How do you decide where best to set this remade couple down? What neck of the woods or coast or plain or desert or jungle (the southern swamps in the US and South America and the crocodile infested parts of Australia), what period? That’s what we’ll do in a quickly moving 4-weeks. Consider the landscapes available from the earliest settlements to the Roarin’ Twenties and see how well American or Australian History works as a setting…a fairly untouched setting these days…to revitalize your storytelling or create a niche of your own. There’s plenty to harvest with these spacious skies, majestic purple mountains, waving fields of grain, or blisteringly unhospitable deserts…not to mention a cast that can be of Spanish, French, English, Dutch blood, or from one of the many Native American and Australian tribes.
BIO: Beth Daniels was a devoted Anglophile until she moved West from her home state of Ohio. Spending 22 years bouncing from Southern California to Nevada to Arizona or Nevada to Arizona to California and back to Nevada as she trailed in first one than another husband’s job footsteps changed her mind about where to set her historical characters. She’s had over 30 romances published, most as Beth Henderson, seven of which are historical romantic adventures set in the Old West but as Nied Darnell she dapples in Weird West Steampunk as well. Oddly enough, she holds a BA in American History with a minor in British Modern History, as well as an MA in English Composition and Rhetoric.