Researching historicaL fiction details

Looking for a fast way to find out what happened in a particular year in history?  Want to add more authentic time-specific detail to your historical novel?

For example, what novel would your protagonist have been reading in 1888? What was the latest technology in 1666? To what play would your London villain have taken his mistress in 1750?

The Timesearch website allows you to search the web through timelines.  Although it is a bit awkward to use at first, the tool does allow you to search by date, area and theme.  Themes include arts, literature, performing arts, politics, religion, science, technology and war.  Clicking on a theme for a particular year and area doesn’t give a whole lot of information, but is useful for finding tidbits of info that can help flesh out the historical time period about which you write.

Icons on the web tool allow a user to find text as well as images, linking to Google and History World. Interesting tool for researchers and writers of historical fiction.

Literature Map

I happened across an interesting website one day last week called Literature Map: A tourist map of literature.  When you go to the site, you type in the name of a writer, and the site develops a word map of other authors who write books similar to the author whose name you entered into the search box.  The site is useful for finding writers in a particular genre or who write in a particular style that you write. So, for example, if you type in “Hemingway,” you get a word map that includes Salinger, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Eggers and Wilde, among others. All are writers found in the literary canon, in this case.

I typed in my own name just for fun. The site didn’t recognize me.  No surprise there.  But when I clicked “yes” to the prompt “are you sure of the spelling?” the site added me to the database for “suggest a new writer.”  So that’s something.  Site visitors are then asked to vote to include writers in the database.  I’ll be curious to see the literature map the site creates for me as a writer of historical fiction, won’t you?  That is, if I win the election.

Book trailers

One of the biggest challenges to me as a self-published eBook author was to create a book trailer.  I did not have the time to learn Adobe Flash, nor the money to hire a professional.  So I decided to do it myself (you can view may trailer on this blog). I used the free online tool Animoto.  Caveat: the free part gets you a mere 30 seconds, but I felt that was enough time to plug my small nonfiction book.  If I ever self-publish again, I will probably upgrade to Animoto Pro.

Second, since my book is pure text and doesn’t really lend itself to visuals, I chose to use words as images, except for the photo of the cover and of me.  I happen to own copyright to both those images, so I saved some money there.  Then there was the matter of music.  I chose music for which I paid a license fee—about $50 for a 30-second clip. 

Since making that first book trailer, I have discovered there are some free sources or Creative Commons licenses for music you can use in your book trailers:

“14 Awesome Open Source Music Sites for Digital Creatives”

Need a historical map?

Need a map for your historical fiction?  Trying to get a fix on a historical location for your setting? The David Rumsey Map Collection Data Base and blog web site features historic maps for many geographical areas and timelines. 

According to the site, “Popular collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall & case, children's, and manuscript maps.  You can browse map categories: What, Where, Who, When. The collection can be used to study history, genealogy, art, explorations, local and family history.”

The data base includes over 12,000 searchable maps.