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Those of us who loved history class…maybe even, like me, snapped up a college degree in history, planned all vacations around museums, castles (ruins and not ruins), ancient sites (Stonehenge, vanished pre-European period native American cultures), ghost towns, tours of historic homes, or volunteered at local historical places, or attended reenactments and Renaissance Faires…well, we can never get enough history in our diet, can we?
Even if you haven’t done these things, you could feel the lure of mystery. And history is if full of unsolved mysteries. They might have found Richard III at long last, but whether or not he was responsible for the disappearance of his two young nephews from the Tower is still hanging ten. H.H. Holmes was caught but Jack the Ripper’s identification is still in contention. And those are just the two best known unsolved mysteries to most of us. There are plenty of others.
But it doesn’t take an actual event – though it could – to write a story set in a historical time period where sleuths are numbered in the main cast members.
The title of this workshop covers many different ways in which a historical setting and a mystery can be presented in sync. Whether you want to change history (as alternative allows you to do in various ways, just jump in your time machine) or insert characters into an earlier era and give them a crime to deal with or a crime in the making if someone is hunting them, or use actual historical personages – or not – in a real historic mystery setting…well, this workshop will touch on them all.
There’s a balance to be preserved no matter which kind of tale you mix mystery and history together in, and it changes slightly with each niche, and with whether the story will be a standalone or part of a series. Why not join me to sort out what you already have and what you may need to gather further research on or simply dream up. We’ll do it all in 4 short weeks.
Presenter’s BIO: Beth Daniels snagged a BA in History and started on an MA before she moved to a different state and found they didn’t have a program that was what she’d been specializing on and switched to a MA in English Composition and Rhetoric with an Emphasis on Creative Writing. At the time she already had more published books than all the professors in the English Department combined, though hers were in genre fiction, which they sneered at. Typical. In any case, she has stirred mystery into all her historical romantic adventures (as Beth Henderson) and made it the main focus in her Covert Cogs Weird West Steampunk tales, her 1920s Dieselpunk stories, and Gaslamp Fantasy inquiry agent shorts (as Nied Darnell), but also writes contemporary urban fantasy mystery comedy series (as J.B. Dane)