Origins!

Dawn Vogel is one of those authors and editors working in the publishing trenches that most people don’t know about but should. Here, she tells me how she incorporates real world history that is stranger than fiction into her writing. — The stories I included in my collection, Denizens of Distant Realms, are all secondary world fantasy stories. They didn’t all start out that way, however. The first version I wrote of “Dry Spell” was a historical fantasy story, set in Colonial Virginia. In doing some research related to Roanoke (one of my favorite unsolved mysteries of history), I found an article that talked about extreme drought in the Virginia Tidewater in the late 1500s and the early 1600s. The earlier drought, which lasted three years, might have been a reason behind the disappearance of the Roanoke colonists. (article: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/04/980428075409.htm) I also researched the presence of Romani slaves in the...

Elizabeth Guizzetti has been a friend and peer for years. Today, she tells me about her love of language, how it shifts over the decades, and how she keeps slang of the past alive in her vampire books today. Thank you for having me today, Jennifer. I’m so excited to talk about one of my favorite types of research. As an author, I love all historical research, but one of my passions is idiomatic phrasing and slang. As everyone is aware, slang changes generationally and within generations. Sometimes a word slides through several groups and is dropped within a year. Idioms tend to last longer but still follow fads and expose a period’s morality and generational fears. For an author, idioms can make handy shortcuts to depict the inner thoughts and even a character’s personality. One of the biggest pitfalls that an author can run into while using idioms and...