Dirty Jobs of the Middle Ages

Dirty Jobs of the Middle Ages

Researching Christmas Traditions?

Writing about Christmas traditions in your historical novel? Check out the info graphic at the Balsam Hill website . The timeline includes historical holiday information about culture, decorations, traditions and figures, from early origins to the early twenty first century. From this info graphic, I learned that my Civil War characters would have depicted Santa as the typical Nast character we know of today, all jolly and fat, er overweight. My characters would not have known about Rudolph, however, because he was not created until 1939.

Google Search Tip

I use Google a lot to help me find information and images on the internet.  When I find a web page via Google that I think might have answers to the research questions I am asking, I key “Control F” to bring up a “Find” page. In the “Find” box, I can type in exactly what I am looking for and Google will take me to the key term on that web page.  That way, I do not have to read through the entire page to find what I am looking for.  It saves some time when I am impatient to get right to the information I seek.

Fast research!

Ever wish you could quickly grasp the historical context of something without doing all that research?  Well, probably not. If you write historical fiction, doing the research is more than half the fun.  But if you need to grasp a historical concept quickly or you are looking to kill a few hours, check out Crash Course.  John Green teaches you the history of the world in 40 YouTube episodes of Crash Course.

Each video is about twelve minutes long, and titles include The Agricultural Revolution, The Silk Road, Rome, The Crusades, and The Atlantic Slave Trade. These videos are designed for history teachers and their adolescent students.  The two that I viewed were lively and engaging, but annoyingly flip. John Green is really, really enthusiastic. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal that I didn’t know (or had forgotten) when I watched The Silk Road video. You have the option of skipping the commercial that begins each video. These videos are entertaining and enlightening, whether you want to learn something new or brush up on the history that you learned in school.

Young people made history too!

Adults sometimes overlook the contributions of young people to our nation’s history. American children have a long tradition of changing things for the better in our nation. Teachers and parents can help young people make connections to their history and to children who lived in the past. History is their story too.

Consider the following historical contributions from young Americans, and share them with your youngsters:

·         John Darragh was fourteen when he acted as a Revolutionary War spy. When he got important information, his mother sewed messages inside large cloth covered buttons that she then sewed onto John’s coat. Once he was behind British lines, he cut off the buttons and sent them straight to George Washington.

·         Sacagawea was a teenager when she helped to guide Lewis and Clark and the Corps of the Discovery on their journey to the Pacific Ocean.

·         Thirteen- year- old Emily Edmonson and fifteen-year-old Mary Edmonson, sisters, were among the 77 enslaved Americans who participated in the single largest known Underground Railroad escape attempt.

·         Teenager Adam Lowry Rankin and his family helped more than 2000 slaves to freedom. One of the fugitives they helped was an inspiration for Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

·         Nine-year-old Johnny Clem joined the Union Army, was a lance corporal by age 11, and later became a major general.

·         As a nineteen-year-old teenager in 1888, Minnie Freeman led her young pupils to safety through one of history’s worst blizzards.  As many as 200 people or more, perished during what became known as the Children’s Blizzard, because so many of the dead were children.

·         Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat---nine months before Rosa Parks took a similar stand!

Young people are fascinated by the courageous stories of people their own age throughout history.  Young people, after all, no less than adults, helped make our nation’s history.

Marilyn Seguin

Author of Young and Courageous: American Girls Who Made History

http://marilynwseguin.com

Create strong passwords!

If you are like me, you may have a hard time keeping track of your passwords to your online accounts.  I try to create a new password for each new account, just to protect them from hackers.  Many folks create one password and use it for multiple accounts, however (you don’t really do that, do you?) because they have a hard time remembering multiple passwords.

Recently, I watched a tutorial on how to create strong passwords at Explainia. In a nutshell, the tutorial advises that a strong password should be at least eight characters and include small letters, capital letters, numbers and punctuation marks.  It might look something like this: miN@5_2k?

According to this month’s AARP Bulletin, among the easiest to guess and steal passwords include: password

 123456

 12345678

qwerty

 abc123

Now, you haven’t really used any of these as passwords, have you?

Has the internet killed reading books?

Because I teach in the English Dept. of a large Midwestern University, I am surrounded by people who love to read books—students and faculty.  Therefore, I am always puzzled when folks lament that no one reads books anymore because information on the internet is both pervasive and ubiquitous.  As a reader of books and a writer of them, the idea of the internet replacing books for reading pleasure gives me pause. You probably feel the same.

Thus, I was interested to read this article from The Atlantic, “The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart.” Of course, the study is a little skewed, as the author of the article acknowledges, but still.  Makes me feel better. How about you?

A tool to create print documents from your blog or website text.

Yes, it seems that the world is going paperless, and that is a good, green thing, but sometimes you just need a print version of a web text.  Why? Maybe you need a promotional piece to take to a book bookstore or library visit.  Or perhaps you need your website bio in print as a speaker introduction to a book talk.

One free tool in the cloud that allows you to instantly convert any web site text to a print version is printfriendly. At this site, you simply type in the URL of the page you want to make print friendly. In my case, I needed a print bio to send to a writers’ directory, so I typed in my website home page www.marilynwseguin.com and this is the print version   I got.  No need to transcribe the text from the website!

There is also a free widget you can embed  into your website or blog if you want visitors to have the ability to print directly from your site.  And just as soon as I can figure out where to place the HTML code, I plan to embed the widget into this blog!

Create a free author's website

Your book is published, but you can’t sit back and rest on your laurels.  In fact, there won’t be any laurels unless you take an active role in connecting your book to readers.  Your publisher may help with this, but there are many tasks you’ll need to do on your own.  If you self published your book, you’ll be promoting all on your own.  Here is a list of suggestions for promoting your book along with some technology tools to help you accomplish them.

·         Create an author’s  website—readers like to know something personal about the authors they read.

Technology tip: The Wix website at http://wix.com  allows you to make a free Flash website using text, graphics, links, music, video and more. The tools are easy to use and the sites look good if you can stand the ads. 

Unfortunately, WIX websites were not viewable on iPads and other mobile devices, but I recently learned that soon the problem will go away when Wix moves to HTML5.

Finding images for your historical fiction

Recently, I was looking for some public domain images in the National Archives that I might be able to include in my book about Marie Peary, daughter of the Arctic explorer.  There, I stumbled across a tool called Pathways Challenge that allows a registered user to create posters or videos of material in the National Archives digital vaults.  The free tool was probably created for educators and their students to teach and learn about primary resources and history, but writers of historical fiction (and nonfiction) will find the tool useful as well. Users can search by title or tag and they can make lists of their online collections.  I found the tool a useful portal for discovering images of the people about whom I am writing .

Tool for creating a clever book trailer

One of my students recently wrote and self published a contemporary novel that he offers for sale on Amazon.  Like most students, he is on a tight budget.  So, when it came time to create an animated book trailer, he used the free web tool xtranormal Movie Maker.  I won’t link to my student’s trailer in this blog post because it contains a few cuss words, but really, the movie is quite clever.  The site allows the user to choose character avatars and settings.  Then the user simply types in the dialogue, and the site converts the package into a movie the user can upload to YouTube. My student chose two characters from his book and created a movie from a piece of dialogue from the book.

Documentaries as research

I must admit that I am a big fan of documentaries, which can be great informers of historical events.  Recently I found a rich source of free documentaries on the web. DocumentaryZ  is a portal for documentaries on a variety of topics, including biography, science, health, military, and history.  At the history link, I found videos about U. S. and World history, including a great documentary on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which yielded some useful information for a post Civil War novel I’m working on. The site has a search bar, but when I entered the term “Lincoln,” I only got the one result.  Nevertheless, the site could be useful for a researcher who prefers a multimedia approach to historical research rather than straight print.

Use Google Alerts for Research

Is there a topic, person or location that you frequently search for when you are writing?  Create a Google alert for the search term.  When your search term appears on the web, Google will send you an alert to your choice of email or RSS feeder. 

Think this isn’t useful to a historical researcher?  Think again.  Most local newspapers carry columns from historical societies.   I entered a regional search term into Google alerts, and I regularly receive emailed links to articles written by local historians.  It is true that Google alerts might be more useful if you were, say, trying to keep up with the news on your favorite athlete or monitoring a developing news story.  But every historical researcher knows that the best info sometimes comes from unlikely sources.  As a historical researcher, cast your nets wide and see what you can haul in!

New Year's Resolutions

Here we are at the end of January, the month of New Year’s resolutions.  Did you make any resolutions about writing for 2012?  Plan to start a new project? Market something you’ve already written? Begin a blog? Update your website?

I use a free daily reminder tool called iDoneThisToday. I may have written about this tool before. I am a big fan.

Every day at 3:30, the site sends me an email asking me what I got done today.  I reply to the email (well, let’s say I reply if I have something to report) and the site records it on a monthly calendar.  In November, I pledged to write something five days a week.  I took December off. This month I resolved to take at least 5000 steps per day (I use a pedometer for this)—writers need to stay healthy to produce their best work, right? At the end of the month, I can look at the calendar to see how much or how little I accomplished toward my resolution.  I think I will pledge to write 1000 words a day in February.  What about you?

Send personal documents to your Kindle Library

I have completed a first draft of a historical manuscript and have let it sit long enough so that I can look it over with a fresh eye.  I could print it out of course, but I am a big fan of the Kindle as a reading device.  I also have a Kindle app on my iPad and iPhone, so I can read my Kindle collection anywhere, anytime. So how to get my Word manuscript to my Kindle device?

Send to Kindle is a free Windows program from Amazon that lets you send a document from your computer to your Kindle Library.  First, you install Send to Kindle on your computer.  Then when you click on a saved document, you have an option to “send to kindle” so that you can read it on your mobile device.  That is what I did with my story draft, and I was able to read through the ms without having to sit at my desk to read it on the computer screen.

Beware Anachronisms

A writer friend of mine recently told me that one of her readers called to tell her she had mistakenly used a word in her historical novel that was not in usage in the particular place and time about which she wrote.  Of course, she was embarrassed.  We all would be.  Her anecdote put me in mind of a warning I included in my book, Writing Historical Fiction: Digital Age Advice.  It appears in chapter 3:


 Be wary of anachronisms.  Anachronisms place people, events and things in the wrong time. Would your character have a wrist watch in 1800?  Was Maine a state in 1820? How many prisoners did General Robert E. Lee take during the incident at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia in 1859? (None. Lee was not yet a General in 1859; he was a Col.  Also, Harper’s Ferry was in Virginia in 1859.  West Virginia broke off and became a state in 1863, taking Harper’s Ferry with it. See how easy it is to make mistakes when doing historical research?)