Online writing community

Looking to join an online writing community?

At www.wattpad.com you can both discover stories of others as well as share your own writing. Get feedback from other writers and find out from them how to make your stories more engaging. You must register for membership to this free site, but once logged in, you can access and share writing in a variety of genres, including, of course, historical fiction, poetry, nonfiction, action and many others.  At the community tab, you can participate in a blog and/or join a specialty club, which includes Improve Your Writing, Multimedia Design and Industry Insider. There is also a Café Club that allows members to connect socially.

I use wattpad as a sounding board to see what others are writing. Many of the stories I find there are written by young, undiscovered writers. Because I write for children and young adults, I find it a good place to get a good sense of what young people say they want to read in the genre of historical fiction.

Create strong passwords!

If you use your computer to research, write, publish and promote your historical fiction, you have probably created a lot of accounts for which you need a password.

Tech experts tell us it is a good idea to change our passwords from time to time. You do that, right? How safe is your password? Microsoft offers tips for creating strong passwords at http://www.microsoft.com/security/online-privacy/passwords-create.aspx. The site recommends that you create strong passwords based on four variables: length, complexity, variation and variety.  At the site is a password checker tool that rates the strength (or not) of your passwords.

Where to find primary documents for historical research

The Wilson Center Digital Archive recently published a new set of 73 collections of declassified historical documents. Sets include Chinese Foreign Policy, Berlin Wall, Intelligence Operations in the Cold War, and Cuban Missile Crisis documents. Writers of historical fiction looking to strengthen their settings by adding event details might find these documents useful.

Finding Focus for Your Historical Fiction

Today’s Technology tip:  How might authors of historical fiction determine a focus for their stories? You’ll want to read as much of the genre as you can in order to discover the answer to this question. This website for cataloguing authors and their works of historical fiction lists recent historical fiction bestsellers and can be searched by timeline: www.histfiction.net  Not sure about the quality of the historical fiction you are reading?  View the “Evaluating Historical Fiction” guidelines I give my college students at http://softchalkconnect.com/lesson/serve/JWuhxMV2YtoKqN/html.

Anne R. Allen's Blog: Three Keys to Writing Memorable Fiction

Anne R. Allen's Blog: Three Keys to Writing Memorable Fiction offers great advice to any writer, but especially to writers of historicals.

Attract readers and book clubs

Today’s Technology tip: Start your own online book club featuring your book, and invite your friends (and their friends) to participate in the discussion.  One site specifically for book conversations is Book Club It. http://www.bookclubit.com/.

·         Got images?  Consider setting up a sharing site of your historical images, maps, drawings (be sure they are copyright free or you  own the copyright) to showcase your story in a visual way. If you do this before your book is published, you can include the URL on the cover.

In celebration of Patriot's Day

Yesterday was Patriot’s Day in the U. S., so as I was browsing sites about the American Revolution, I stumbled across the Museum of the American Revolution site, a project under grants from The Lehrman Institute and The Hertog Foundation. One of the features at the site is an interactive timeline that allows viewers to explore important objects in American history. For example, at 1776 on the Timeline, I was able to view American currency and firearms of the period. A writer of historical fiction might find this site useful when describing objects used in an era. At the collection link on the site, viewers can observe art, manuscripts and printed works assembled by the Museum over the past century.

Search engines to maximize your research results

Technology tip: Although Google is a great search engine to use for your research, different search engines often return different results.  Why not use a meta search engine (a search engine that queries other search engines and then combines the results) to maximize your search results? Here are a few of my favorites:

http://Dogpile.com

http://mamma.com

http://ixquick.com

Discover the history in your neighborhood

Want to find historic places in your neighborhood—or in some other specific geographical location? The site Historic Places: All Historic Places in North America lets the user browse and locate historic places in a favorite location. Simply type in a location in the search box and the interactive map shows pins of historic buildings, objects structures and sites in the area. Click for more information about each of the pins. This site would be great for tourists, but it is also a great site for writers of historical fiction who need a general overview of the history in a particular region.   The site contains about 100,000 North American historic places listed in its database.

How accurate do you need to be?

As a writer of historical fiction for children and young adults, I was mortified to find one of my books shelved as nonfiction--biography in my local library. Historical fiction, I tell my readers, is a blend of fact and fiction. The writer has to balance telling an engaging story with telling the truth according to the historical record.  Guest blogger Anne Cleeland explores this conundrum in an article found at http://bit.ly/XCbPcd.

A Writers' Resource Site

Jane McBride Choate, a writer for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Bulletin, alerted me to the site GalleyCat: The First Word on the Book Publishing Industry. It offers a link to Writer Resources that is particularly useful to writers who self publish, as well as those who publish mainstream. This week, the link has an article on “How to Write a Long Novel” and an info graphic on “How to Write a Scene in Eleven Steps.”  You can comment on what you read or share the articles on social media sites, making this site interactive for those of us in the writing/publishing community.

This afternoon I went on a field trip to the Smithsonian’s Museum of National History—a virtual field trip, that is. The 22-minute video tour of the site is introduced by author David Baldacci and divided into four sections:

1.       Welcome; Lewis and Clark Compass

2.       Star Spangled Banner

3.       David Drake Pottery

4.       Lincoln’s Pocket Watch

The field trip is designed for K-12 students and their teachers who want to explore historic objects and connect them with American history. Anyone can take the free field trip and download the supplementary materials and activities at the site, however.

As a writer of historical fiction, I often use objects (such as a compass, a flag, a pot, a watch) as symbols for something going on in my plot. Exploring the objects on the virtual field trip reminds me that I should do more of that in my narrative text.

Free Online Historical Dictionary

Today I discovered a free online historical dictionary at History Today. According to the website, “The dictionary is a compendium of facts, figures, mini biographies and definitions of historical terms.  It covers people, places, key events and epochs. “

To access information, simply type a term into the search box. I typed in “Battle of
Gettysburg,” and got a 100-word article of basic information about that event. Although the site is not very useful for in depth research, it might be good for finding quick information about minor events that occur in the time period about which you are writing. You can also browse the site by period, location and themes. This site is a companion to the magazine History Today.

What can we learn from reenactors?

Technology tip:  Living historian and reenactor groups, like good historical novelists, try to be as honest as they can in portraying their characters, and we can learn much from them.  They have studied everything about the period of history they portray, right down to the material from which their buttons are made.

The web page of a group devoted to the Middle Ages can be found at http://www.sca.org/

The Civil War Reenactors home page is

http://www.cwreenactors.com/index.php

Reenactor.net at http://www.reenactor.net/

is a site that includes reenactor groups from ancient times to the present.

Avoid anachronisms in dialogue

A couple of weeks ago, someone on one of my historical fiction listservs asked if anyone out there knew when the term “smelling himself” as in “full of oneself” came about. The writer was afraid of an anachronism in a piece of dialogue she was creating for a historical novel. Someone on the listserv suggested that she try putting the phrase into Google’s N gram viewer.

According to the website, when you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years. You can find plenty of examples at the sites info link.

This free tool strikes me as useful for writers who want to be sure their idiomatic expressions used in dialogue are authentic to the period about which they are writing. Or perhaps you are wondering what year a certain object came into use. I tried an experiment with “seatbelt” and found that the term came into use in print (at least in the books Google searched) about 1960. You can run your own experiment at the site.

Researching for authentic historical details

Authentic details help to develop historical characters in the minds of readers. Sometimes, for example, my historical characters need to have dialogue about what is happening in their world. At other times, they may need to be reading a book or listening to music.  

I have a pretty good nondigital source for finding cultural details in history, called The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events, by Bernard Grun, based on Werner Stein’s Kulturfahrplan. The source begins with the year 5000 BC and progresses to 1978. In table form, it gives snippets of important people and events in the categories of History and Politics; Literature and Theater; Religion, Philosophy and Learning; Visual Arts; Music; Science and Technology; and Daily Life. So, if I have a character living in 1863 who loves to read and listen to music, I can very quickly determine what the literature and musical trends of that year would have been.

But wait!  This blog is about writing historical fiction in the digital age.  Here is a link to the U.S. Library of Congress site called This Day in History that gives information about events and people of the past according to exact date.  There are even links for “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” Of course, this source is limited to recorded history from the Library of Congress, but here you will find links to the primary resources (images and documents) associated with U. S. history.  For example, on this day in 1778, the Treaty of Alliance between the U. S. and France was signed in Paris.

Create a pdf file of your writing!

Today I experimented on the free site simplebooklet.com. I am thinking of writing a few historical picture books to share with my little grandsons, and I was looking for an interactive website that would allow me to do that. I signed up for the free Simple Booklet account, using Firefox as my browser (IE won’t work with this site). Then I was prompted to upload a pdf file, so I uploaded the first few pages of Writing Historical Fiction: Digital Age Advice, including the preface. You can also add text, images, audio files, videos, and links to each page of your booklet, and I will certainly try that for my grandsons.

It took a few minutes for the pdf to convert to the ebooklet, but when it was finished, I was prompted to click on a button that created a custom URL so that I can share my publication. Here is the link http://simplebooklet.com/writinghistoricalfiction

My PDF has been turned into a web optimized flip booklet that I can now email, share, and post the introductory pages of Writing Historical Fiction across the web. Of course, the free account means that my ebooklet will contain ads, but for a small fee, I can have the ads removed. Now, to get busy on that historical story for my grandsons.

Track your book's sales!

Whether your book is self published or traditionally published, it’s easy to track your Amazon sales on the website NovelRank. First, go to your book’s listing on Amazon and copy the link. Next paste the link in the box at NovelRank. The site then gives you your book’s sales rank for Amazon.com, .co.uk, .ca, and .de. You can check a box to add to add France, Japan, Italy (.it), China (.cn), and Spain (.es). Once you have added your book to the site, Amazon begins tracking sales. The site notes that historical data prior to listing your book to the NovelRank site is not available from Amazon, only NovelRank tracking data going forward. Once tracking begins, you will be able to see sales made per month. The free site also includes a FAQ link and a blog.

Writing historical fiction for young readers?

Do you write historical fiction for youngsters? Want to share your writing with young readers online? Or maybe you just want to read the work of others online. Wattpad is a site that allows you to browse the work of newbie and published writers. It contains work in all genres, including historical fiction, with a special appeal to young readers (teens). For the published writer, Wattpad might be a place to increase sales if you post a chapter and then include a link to the title in an e-store. Then a reader could go to the link and purchase your book.

The site is free, but you must create an account to use it. I was able to create an account via Facebook. I plan to use this site as a reader in order to discover what young people are reading and writing in the genre of historical fiction. I think an exploration of the material on Wattpad will inform me as I create my own historical stories for young readers.

New Year's Resolution

Did you promise yourself that you would get more writing done in 2013?  Me too. One of my favorite apps that help me to stay on top of tasks is iDoneThis. IDoneThis is an iPad and iPhone app and website that asks the question every night at about 8 pm: What did you get done today? Then a notepad appears on which you can list your daily accomplishments that you can later access when you want to keep track of them over a longer period of time. This year, I am going to use the app to keep track of how much time I actually spent on writing related tasks.  Then, at the end of the year, I will assess how well (or not) I kept my New Year’s resolution for 2013.