A Writer's Melting Pot by Victoria Chatham

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Beginning a new book is always an exciting project for me. There are places to research, houses to build, characters to create and plots to devise, all or some of which may eventually find their way onto my pages. 

I start with my characters, getting to know them as I build their backstories, their life histories with all their strengths and weaknesses, failures and successes. Whether I am writing historical or contemporary Western romance, my character questionnaire follows the same pattern. The characters have to reflect their era, so I'm careful about naming them, and if I'm writing a Regency romance, then I have to make sure my characters' titles are correct.

Next, I work on my settings, the stage on which my characters perform. My Regencies have a mix of city and rural settings because the peerage split their time between London, for when Parliament was in session, and their country estates when it adjourned. The busiest time, known as the Season, was between Easter and when the House adjourned in July. By then, most people were keen to get out of town because of the smell.

Country estates are lovely to create, and many of my imaginary ones come from illustrations in books like Country Houses From the Air or The English Country House and the very useful Georgian and Regency Houses Explained. I have floor plans for country houses and smaller but no less impressive townhouses. From there, I can create my settings with a measure of accuracy and viability. What might be included on any of these estates as far as farms and crops are concerned, are all gleaned from internet searches for letters and records of the big houses, some of them going back hundreds of years, and depend on what part of the country (being England, Scotland, or Wales) the estate is. Building styles change somewhat from county to county depending on what materials are available or how wealthy the lord of the manor might be.

Weather, with all the light and shade that comes with it, plays a part in my settings, too. For information

on a particular year, I start with a visit to https://premium.weatherweb.net/weather-in-history, and to pin-point a timeline for where my characters are, I consult https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=1818&country=9. The weather can affect so many aspects of my character’s mood. If it’s warm and sunny, then likely she is too. If it’s raining, all sorts of events can transpire from that. Think Marianne Dashwood getting soaked in the rain in Sense and Sensibility. Rain heralded my hero’s arrival in Folkestone in my book His Dark Enchantress. It fit his mood and the seriousness of the situation in which his wife, my heroine, had been abducted.

Plants and flowers play a part, too, and for this, I use a Reader’s Digest book of English flora, plus Culpeper’s Complete Herbal. It pays to know what plants grow in which part of the country because someone will surely call you out if have a daffodil growing where it never would or a lark singing in central London as this is a bird that likes open countryside.

How I dress my characters also comes into play, and for this, I use an Illustrated Encyclopedia of Costume, Fashion in Jane Austen’s London and just because, The History of Underclothes. When I go home to the UK for a visit, I'll go to museums. One of my favourites is the Costume Museum in Bath. YouTube can be particularly useful, especially clips like Undressing Mr. Darcy. I guess I’m a bit of a nerd because I do enjoy research, and if I come across a particularly interesting snippet, it makes my day. Whether I can use it or not in a book becomes another matter altogether.

I'm fortunate to live in Alberta, Canada. Touring the Rockies, visiting small towns and their museums, and going to rodeos have all helped with my Western settings. It's said a picture is worth a thousand words, and I have many photographs of mountains and rivers, open prairie and dusty badlands. I've interviewed cowboys and stock contractors and once spent a day on a working ranch where the owner was quite shocked to hear that I had never seen a moose. "There was one down in the muskeg this morning," he said. So off we went in a well-worn pick-up truck to find the moose. After driving around for an hour, there was no sign of said moose, so we looked at some of his stock and went back to the ranch house for coffee.

Most authors are people watchers, but in addition to watching, I like talking to them, too. You never know what might come up in conversation. Someone might throw away a line that you know you just have to fit into your dialogue somewhere, as in Legacy of Love, where one cowboy asks, "Are you being straight with me?" and the answer is "straighter than a yard of pump water." Writing is a joy and a challenge, sometimes a frustration, but never, ever, boring as all the elements that make a story come together in the melting pot of this author's mind. Oh, and the new book? Look out for Loving Georgia Caldwell coming this fall.

Victoria Chatham

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