Tasha Alexander | Reality Bites...or What Was It Really Like in Victorian England?

Being a historical novelist has its perks and pitfalls. The perks? Being able to work in pajamas is probably my favorite. I love the travel that comes with the job--whether it’s when I’m on the road meeting readers or embarking on a research trip. I love being to stay up till four in the morning writing and getting to sleep late (mornings have never been good for me; I’m much more coherent in the middle of the night). And I love the reading my work requires--poring over diaries and letters written by Victorian woman, studying the history of the time.

It’s this perk that leads to a pitfall--a pitfall that is one of the hardest things to deal with when writing historical fiction. Often, when you study history, you find that the actual truth does not always match with modern ideas of what the past was like. We like to think we know the Victorians--how they were prudes who never let any female out of the house without a chaperone and admonished their daughters to lie back and think of England.

None of which is quite true. According to Michael Mason’s fantastic book, The Making of Victorian Sexuality, in the middle of the 19th century a third to half of English brides were pregnant at their weddings. Not what you expected, right? I was surprised. Just as I was surprised to read about how the servants mapped out the bedrooms assigned to guests at country house parties--the arrangements were organized so it would be easy for gentlemen to slip into their mistress’ rooms. The staff planned accordingly when delivering morning tea.

While working on Tears of Pearl, I started off with the prejudices and assumptions most westerners have about Ottoman culture. I set the book in Constantinople because I was fascinated with its exoticness. The last thing I expected to learn was of the significant roles played by Ottoman women in the government--the sultan’s harem was not, in fact, a debauched playground. Instead it was full of well-educated, intelligent women, most of whom were fluent in multiple languages. This was a society where upward mobility was possible, even for girls. One of the sultans brought into the harem a girl whose beauty struck him as she carried a bundle of laundry across a city square. She came to the palace, learned everything she could, and became the sultan’s favorite. When her own son inherited the throne, she was titled Valide Sultan--sultan’s mother--more powerful than many government ministers.

Want to know more about the ups and downs of being a historical author then click here.

Tasha Alexander | Dare to Dream

When I first started writing, I hardly dared to dream. I banged away on a semi-decrepit laptop in my attic apartment in New Haven, Connecticut (yes, really, an attic...servants’ quarters, actually; I kept looking with no success for the butler...), working on my debut novel, And Only to Deceive, with only the briefest someday-maybe-if-I’m-good-and-lucky-this-will-get-published thoughts.

I’d chosen the location for the novel carefully—wanted to use settings familiar to me. Places I’d actually been. I studied abroad in college, living in London, and that seemed an easy starting point. Two trips to Paris had cemented the city in my soul, and a recent visit to Greece had wholly seduced me. I was confident I could capture the essentials of each location.

But what next?

I’d joked for a long time that my writing career was a thinly veiled attempt to justify my travel plans, but I’d never really let myself believe that someday, just maybe, I could be an author and jet about the world on research trips. I kept those thoughts far from my brain, focusing instead on writing. It’s the best thing an aspiring author can do—nothing is more important than crafting the best books possible—while all the while pushing the bounds of what you can accomplish.

And you know? A really funny thing happened. All of a sudden (well, okay, not quite; a few years and a few books later), I found myself sitting on a ferry cruising up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea, watching the colors of Istanbul bounce from the shores of both Europe and Asia toward me. Somehow, through lots of hard work and more than a little magic, I’d made it: two weeks in Turkey, researching the next book in my series. The characters I created in that attic apartment are still with me. They’ve grown and deepened and developed a fondness for Turkish food, and I’ve no doubt I’ll drag them along for many more adventures.

I’m home now, more than a little worse for wear (I blame the two hour cab line in a snow storm at O’Hare for that), fairly confident that I’m never going to entirely regain my voice, but happier than I could have ever imagined. Dreams have a way of catching up with you—and I can’t wait to see what happens now that I’m no longer bent on keeping them at bay.

Tasha Alexander

A Poisoned Season - Available Now

A Fatal Waltz - Coming May, 2008

www.tashaalexander.com/