Historical settings

I try not to meet my favorite authors anymore. :(

- I met Douglas Adams on a Florida vacation - he is missed.
- I met Isaac Asimov at a publisher's party in honor of Nick Hornby, author of "About a Boy", "High Fidelity", and I think "The Commitments". I didn't meet Hornby because I was stuck in a hotel room with a 1 week old and a 3 year old. Spouse was supposed to relieve me so I could go downstairs and join the party. It never happened. I met Asimov because his room was next to mine, and I literally bumped into him while walking up and down the hallway with a toddler in a stroller and a baby at my breast. Asimov is missed.
- I spent an evening chatting in a bar with Robert Lynn Asprin. He is missed.
- I met Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob. I hung out with his younger daughter all day at a convention. He was hospitalized right after.
- I've sat in George R.R. Martin's kitchen a couple of times and have eaten a few meals in restaurants with him. The company I founded licensed some of his intellectual property, and we negotiated face to face. As far as I can tell, his writing productivity fell off a cliff shortly after. Also, I don't think his wife likes me :( She left one dinner early with no explanation.
- I met Roger Zelazny in the same bar I met Robert Asprin. They spent and hour or so telling "I can one up that" fibs to each other. It turned out that Zelazny once lived in a house on the same street as mine. He is missed.
- I attended a gust lecture with Erma Bombeck. She is missed.
- My father was the first editor to recommend publishing Lois McMaster Bujold. He read slush piles as a side gig while he was in the Air Force. She was the gem of the bunch, and he stayed in touch with her until he died. She's been my all time favorite author for several years. She bumped Jane Austen down a notch. Anyway, her health took a down turn, and her productivity has suffered. I'm sad for her, but damnit I want more books!

I have attended a lot of Authors Conventions for the fun of it. My spouse's best friend from high school was an executive buyer and reviewer for Borders - that resulted in meeting some authors because we had a "mutual acquaintance". One of my college professors knew Steven King well and had him give a talk to our class. I didn't think King's work would interest me, but I have since read all 58 of his novels under the King name and his pseudonym, Bachman. Personally, with the exception of the movie, "Christine" which didn't do the book justice, I like the movie versions of his books better than the text versions.

Gosh - I've met so many others, but my mind is drawing a blank right now. I have dinner simmering in a crockpot, and my nse/stomach is telling me to get off the computer.

[edit]

[Oh! one more] I had a brief but wonderful email correspondence with Sir Terence Pratchett . Piers Anthony indirectly put me in touch with Pratchett by forwarding an email. Pratchett replied to me directly cutting Anthony out of the conversation :p

[another edit]
I also know my academic colleagues with books in the same field as mine. We meet regularly at technical conferences. We have the same editors. We each have a "signature look" so we can find each other easily in crowds. One wears a ten gallon hat. Another wears a cravat. Tim O'Reilly attends most of the conferences his company sponsors. He doesn't need a prop because he is so tall that he is always visible in a crowd. One other fellow nerd I make a note to hang out with is readily identifiable by the woman on his arm. She is an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10. Ethnically, she is half German Ubermensch and half Native American. I recommend the combination.

[yet another edit]
There was the parade of "fetish" authors through my parents home when I was a kid. Back then, smut was published in cheap paperback or even staple bound volumes sold primarily at news stands and some drug stores (I have no idea why drug stores). Anyway, the publishes paid 6 cents per word back in the early 80s, and that was the best around when it came to freelance work for hire. My father wrote a dozen or more stories that were in anthologies with other authors. The publisher had a list of very specific fetishes and commissioned stories to hit the "sweet spot". I've only read a few of my father's smutty works, but one was about naked women who ride horses bare back and have sex with men improbably while on horseback. Basically, the men rode standing in the stirrups, and the women rode the men while supported on their trusty steed's back. That seemed like a laser focussed fetish to me, but they apparently sold well.

Impressive list. Eric is literally a card carrying Communist but doesn't try to jam his politics down your throat either in person or in his writing.

Before my time writing but I understand thta erotica could pay pretty well and a lot of people used it to pay the bills. In a world of Literotica, it is a lot harder to make it pay. Once I get enough of a back log and polish on my stories, I am considering trying my luck on Amazon.
 
I try not to meet my favorite authors anymore. :(

- I met Douglas Adams on a Florida vacation - he is missed.
- I met Isaac Asimov at a publisher's party in honor of Nick Hornby, author of "About a Boy", "High Fidelity", and I think "The Commitments". I didn't meet Hornby because I was stuck in a hotel room with a 1 week old and a 3 year old. Spouse was supposed to relieve me so I could go downstairs and join the party. It never happened. I met Asimov because his room was next to mine, and I literally bumped into him while walking up and down the hallway with a toddler in a stroller and a baby at my breast. Asimov is missed.
- I spent an evening chatting in a bar with Robert Lynn Asprin. He is missed.
- I met Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob. I hung out with his younger daughter all day at a convention. He was hospitalized right after.

Honestly, feel free to visit Piers Anthony again some time...

Tongue mostly in cheek. I wouldn't actually wish the guy dead, but hoo boy do I wish he'd retired somewhere around 1989 before he published the book that retroactively ruined his Xanth stuff for me.
 
Writing historical fiction IS hard. One of the stories I'm most proud of is The Brave, an action-packed, ultra-violent lesbian western that I researched as exhaustively as I knew how, and yet it still mostly takes place in the only civilized saloon in the Old West that didn't force people to check their guns at the door. Oops.

Still, I'd love to play with historical settings again. One of my first ideas for an erotic story was about a burlesque dancer/Vargas girl in late 1950s Miami and the star-struck bellhop tasked to take care of her every need. Anyone can see where that's going, of course, and that's certainly part of the problem. But I also suck at research (again, the only civilized saloon that didn't check guns), and I can't seem to learn enough about how things (like hotel management, amenities, that specific level/brand of celebrity my female lead is working on) worked and looked back then to transport the reader to that era.

It's a shame too, because burlesque dancers back then...yowza. God bless them all.
 
Writing historical fiction IS hard.
Yes, even for history majors. And the rest of us have maybe seen too much historical fiction that plays with facts. No, Western migrants didn't "circle the wagons" against Indian attacks. And ancient Scots didn't wear kilts. Some readers respond badly when their favored myths are omitted or overturned.

My LIT entry in historical fiction, The Botanists, is about real people, scientific stars of their era (a century and more ago), whose professional lives are well documented... but not their personal stories. So I got to make up all that -- and it was hard. Took many months to get it fairly right.

We can drench almost any historical narrative with hot sex. Use real people and places. Find what's known about them. Then fill in the blank spots. Abe Lincoln *could* have been a vampire-killer, sure. But what about his gig as a male prostitute?
 
I always shy away from writing historical, because I worry I won't be accurate. Love reading it though
 
I always shy away from writing historical, because I worry I won't be accurate. Love reading it though
I just set mine in Dark Ages Britain, a period of time with virtually no written records, and had one of my characters write it all down. It's easy, when you make it all up!
 
Take an opposite example: What if the Ottoman Turks were not defeated at the Battle of Vienna in n 1683? All of Europe, half of Asia, half of Africa, and in all probability, the entire Western Hemisphere becomes culturally Ottoman. It would be necessary to be castrated to advance to high ranks in the military (the practice somehow prevented military coups - some Chinese Dynasties had the same practice). Vast numbers of powerful men might openly keep harems, and half of all men are castrated at birth because there would be no wives available to them anyway. It might be like the "Handmaidens Tale" for real. The world is 1000 years more technologically advanced in 2019...

Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt is premised on the Black Death completely wiping out European civilization, so that the world is dominated by Asian cultures.
 
I always shy away from writing historical, because I worry I won't be accurate. Love reading it though
As eb suggested, pick a blank-page setting. I'm slowly cooking a piece in California ca. 1550 CE with an English-born sailor in Cabrillo's flotilla marooned there to make his way through native cultures i.e. women. I can be sketchy with tribal details and can invent much else. Every people calls themselves "The People" so I needn't fret about accurate naming.

How I Became An Evil Queen and Make Me Scream! are vaguely historical but not firmly fixed, so details can be finessed. Other prospective tales will be in 'known' pre-modern Europe -- but blank pages are still available. I'll invent pillow talk of Rodrigo Borgia aka Pope Alexander VI and his daughter Lucrezia.
 
The only reason I've so far flirted with my love for Ancient Greece on mere occasion here is because I'd become so absorbed in it that I'd be obsessively consumed by the theme.

Somewhat related: I've been sketching out a possible story that takes place on an Indian reservation, in the recent past. I don't usually deal with elements such as the ones impacting that community. The main character is a young man who's part of a generation increasingly out of touch with his cultural heritage and assimilated into the American way of life. That is, until a young woman comes along that gives him a fresh perspective. I don't plan to get deeper into this topic than I have to in order to provide an interesting context for the development of their personal relationship. I'm just using the little bit of perspective I've absorbed as an outsider, along with some research (including, of course, the fact that he wouldn't typically use the phrase "Indian reservation"). I also don't feel it's my place to dig into it substantially, anyway. Should I be concerned about this at all? Obviously no one knows my background here as an author but I also want to be culturally sensitive.
 
The next series I post to Lit. is on the Barbary Coast pirate era. I haven't found too much erotica writing about that. "The Shores of Tripoli," coming in September.
 
I've been sketching out a possible story that takes place on an Indian reservation, in the recent past. ... I also don't feel it's my place to dig into it substantially, anyway. Should I be concerned about this at all? Obviously no one knows my background here as an author but I also want to be culturally sensitive.
Rezes, rancherias, and their members vary widely. You might pick a nation, tribe, band, and place, to anchor your tale. Read contemporary accounts to avoid cultural embarrassment. Native American newsletters will help.
 
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