Well you know me, I’m a sucker for Tudor fiction. The best part is, I know I’m not alone! So for all you Tudor fiction fans out there, I’ve got an interview with Brandy Purdy I know you are going to enjoy!

I’m a complete Tudor fiction nut, so I was pleasantly surprised to stumble up on the various books you’ve written. Is there a favorite work you’ve completed so far?

Thank you very much. Every book I write is different, each one has its unique personality and problems, rather like children. Each one is special to me in its own way for different reasons. For instance, my first novel The Confession of Piers Gaveston, I often say is the book that saved my sanity, it helped me through a very difficult time after my mother’s death, it was the first book I ever wrote and no one really took me seriously or thought I would amount to anything, so even though it gets the least attention of my books I have a particular loyalty to my Gaveston. And my curiosity about Lady Rochford’s motives in accusing her husband George Boleyn and his sister Anne of incest and the effects of guilt on a person who does something like that, led me to write The Boleyn Wife (published as The Tudor Wife by Emily Purdy in the UK) and also helped me through a difficult time in my life. But sometimes it goes the other way around, the book I am writing now, about Amy Robsart, was a book I always wanted to write ever since I first read about the mystery surrounding her death in a book of unsolved mysteries I got from the library when I was a little girl. I was so excited when my publisher approved the project and when Chris Skidmore’s book Death and The Virgin came out which contained evidence long lost. It felt like the perfect time to write this book. But as I was writing it a relationship that meant the world to me, and I had such great hopes for, ended and left me completely devastated, eerily mirroring the chapters I had already written several months previously about the relationship between Robert and Amy Dudley, so the book that I thought was going to be my favorite will always symbolize a very painful loss and betrayal to me.

You mention on your website that you write “historical fiction from a unique perspective.” Tell us a little bit more about that.

I love the challenge of taking a historical figure who is largely silent in the historical record, someone whose voice and personality and perhaps even their appearance have been lost in the mists of history and trying to give them a voice as I have done with Piers Gaveston, Lady Rochford, and in my work in progress Amy Robsart. I am a very emotional person and writer, so with me, its not all about facts and figures and the intricacies of politics but rather the head and heart of the subject. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, or a little of both, but I always try to tell a good story that will inspire a reader not already well versed in the subject to want to learn more. When I first discovered historical fiction, the books I enjoyed always lead me to the biography and non-fiction sections of the library to learn the facts behind the fiction, and I hope my books do that for others as well. I believe historical fiction often embroiders on the framework of bare fact and knowing those facts often leads me to appreciate a novelist’s creativity even more.

What’s next for you?

My current work in progress, which if all goes well, I will finish this month and meet my deadline, is a novel about the love triangle between Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth I, and his wife, Amy Robsart Dudley who died under mysterious circumstances.

Where can we learn more about you?

I have a website and two blogs, my main one where I review books I read and post updates about my writing career and another one about real people in historical fiction and I am on Facebook as Brandy Purdy – Emily Purdy.

Books by Brandy Purdy:

• The Tudor Throne
• The Boleyn Wife
• The Confession of Piers Gaveston
• Vengeance Is Mine: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard, and Lady Rochford–the woman who helped destroy them both.

More on writing historical fiction:

• The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction: Researching and Writing Historical Fiction
• How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries: The Art and Adventure of Sleuthing Through the Past
• Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England

I read Vanora Bennett‘s book, Portrait of an Unknown Woman and immediately started looking up her other books. You know how when you discover a new author, you just want to go back and read everything they have written? It was like that with her. She has a wonderful writing style, and gives some valuable advice for other writers out there.

Enjoy this interview.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from and how long have you been writing?

I’m a Londoner, though I spent the whole of my early adult life living somewhere else – university at Oxford, studying French and Russian, then working as a journalist for Reuters in Paris for a couple of years, southern Africa for a couple more, a bit of south-east Asia, and most of the 1990s in post-Communist Russia and around. I ended up working in Russia for the Los Angeles Times, which was a brilliant introduction to America! and loved my colleagues there. But eventually it came to feel like time to go home. So, one way or another, I’ve always been writing. When I came home, I wrote editorials for The Times of London. And I wrote two non-fiction books about Russia, which gave me my first lessons in how to organise a big piece of writing (it’s all in the thinking beforehand, really). But I always wanted to try my hand at writing a novel, but didn’t, because I was nervous, because it seemed so different from non-fiction, and I didn’t like feeling like a beginner, and … well, all kinds of excuses. Eventually, what pushed me into trying was getting a new job I didn’t like. I complained so much my kind husband hit on the answer – you’ve talked about it for years, but perhaps this is the time to write that novel? And then he went and booked me a week at a hotel in Bloomsbury (like Virginia Woolf), and said, come back in a week, with four chapters. And I did!

I loved your book, Portrait of an Unknown Woman. How did you first come up with the idea for the book?

A fluke. Back in my Russia days, when I was fascinated by all the tough types who were muscling their way into becoming the new rich of Russia, I came home to London for a weekend and went to an exhibition of drawings by the 16th-century German artist Hans Holbein. They were of the new rich of 16th-century England under the Tudors – another anything-goes, get-rich-quick period. The faces looked quite like the scary Russians I kept seeing in Moscow, driving BMWs. So I bought the catalogue. And there, somewhere in a footnote, there was a brief reference to an obscure but ingenious theory about why an extra person had been painted into a second version of one of the pictures. There was a whole elaborate conspiracy theory attached that fascinated me. It stayed in a corner of my mind for years. Eventually I realised I’d read enough about it, half-accidentally, that I’d become a bit of an expert. I hadn’t exactly intentionally prepared myself for it – but by the time I came to write, I found I was ready.

I find that when I stumble across a book I really enjoy, I immediately look up the rest of the books the author has written. I’m doing this now with your works. Do you find that happens as well? Do new readers find you and then absorb your earlier works?

I certainly do that with books I enjoy – I go and hunt the rest of them out. I’m often flattered to find that people write to me saying they’ve enjoyed one and are going to read the others. I can only hope they enjoy them as much!

In your opinion, what’s the best thing about writing?

I love the architectural side of it. What comes to my mind naturally is snapshots – a person at this particular moment, doing a particular thing. But with a book you have to join up the dots – work out how they got from one snapshot to the next, and why they’d have changed as a result of the thing that happened yesterday to start doing the thing they do today. There’s so much thinking – so much ordering of each of the individual building blocks of the story, so they work together properly and make a structure that won’t fall down at the first

breath. In Portrait of an Unknown Woman, for instance, the Holbein of the early paintings is intelligent but pretty much unlettered. By the end, he is quite educated and sophisticated in his thinking. Plus which, the conspiracy theory that I was making the plot turn on required him to be able to make puns, in French, when he was a German speaker. It worried me for ages – how did that all happen? So I read a lot about his middle period, when he was painting a double portrait of the French ambassadors to London. And I realised that could have been a very big and fast learning curve for him – where he’d have heard a lot of very sophisticated talk, both about politics and religion, and that most likely all the conversation would have been in French. So I came to think of, and describe that as, Holbein’s equivalent of a university period – when he “clevered up” and learned to think, allowing him to paint the later portrait that, at least in my book, provides all the answers.

Please share some of your writing goals.

Mostly I’d like to get better at the planning stage of the story I talked about above – learn to make that a natural part of my thinking from the first. I’d also like to learn to write very briefly – my books have a tendency to get too fat! I read about my writing heroine, Beryl Bainbridge, that she would write 12 pages, then, painstakingly, whittle it down to one paragraph. In my dreams, at least, I’d like to be able to write with that haiku-like brevity. Not sure it will happen, of course. But we can hope!

Is there a specific time of day you like to write?

Well, I have young children, so school hours are when I get most opportunity. But before I had them I was a night owl and did lots of work late at night. I love working at night – when everyone’s quiet and you feel you’ve been given a gift of extra time. So perhaps one day I will go back to having the energy for that.

What’s the most interesting book you’ve ever read?

Oh, so many! One of my favourites is Dickens’ Bleak House. It has everything – comedy, satire, lawyer jokes, a romantic story, a spontaneous combustion (yes, really!), and brilliant descriptions of London.

When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

Hm. It was something I think I always knew. I certainly remember being 11 or 12 and being taught about the Brontes at school, and taking careful note of the fact that they were all scribbling away at early novels and inventing imaginary lands for themselves from their earliest childhood, and thinking, well, better hurry up, then! But I must say I also thought it was cloud-cuckoo territory – something I’d never be able to do, because I’d have to earn my living, have a proper job, etc. I remember being quite unbelievably surprised when my agent and publisher first said, “but you can earn your living from writing – you really can.” Now I’m just crossing fingers that goes on.

Favorite authors?

Lots of Russian authors (well, that’s my past) – especially Bulgakov’s magical Master and Margarita, an extraordinary, funny, dark about the Devil coming to Soviet Moscow. I loved Anna Karenina and War and Peace. I love the Brontes. Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre. I like John Irving a lot. As I write, I see these are all huge fat books, not at all the slim volumes I’ve just been saying I’d like to write. So: Beryl Bainbridge’s novel about the Titanic, Every Man for Himself. Hilary Mantel’s novel about a spiritualist working on the edge of London, Beyond Black. Ronan Bennett’s novel, Havoc in the Third Year. And Alexander Pushkin’s long short story, The Queen of Spades.

Book you’re currently reading.

I’m reading an odd one at the moment: Andrei Bely’s novel about a plot by peasant spiritualists in pre-revolutionary Russia, The Silver Dove. The sect it describes have lured away a young gentleman from his life. He’s fallen wildly in love with the “pock-marked peasant woman” who will be his downfall (in Russian, this sounds much better, “ryabaya baba”). It will end badly for him, I know (from sneaking a look further on). I’m fascinated by the description of the peasant sect, which fits in with the novel I’m currently researching, about Rasputin and life in Russia just before the Revolution of 1917.

Any type of writing ritual you have?

Coffee! At the coop I have a desk in, coffee is included in the price of the rent. And they are equipped with fabulously sophisticated coffee-making machines. It’s become part of my daily ritual to make myself the most foamy, bouncy cappuccino the world has ever seen, every morning, before I start. I’ve never been so hyper as since I started working here, either.

Do you believe in writer’s block? If so, how did you get past it? If not, why not?

I do. It’s happened to me, in a way. I think it’s your subconscious telling you you’ve taken a wrong turning. I think the answer is to take a big step back and ask yourself lots of hard questions about what that wrong turning might be. I don’t think there are any easy answers.

What’s the measure of a successful writer?

There are external measures – sales, prizes, whatever. But I think the important thing is to be writing what you want, and not what you’ve been pressured into. I think there’s a happiness that comes on to the page when that happens that readers feel and appreciate.

Advice for other writers?

Don’t be afraid – don’t make excuses – they’re probably all very real reasons why writing today is quite impossible, but they also don’t matter. Just start. It’s much easier to go on once you’ve got something on the page. And keep thinking. Most of writing is in your head.

Where can we learn more about you?

I have a website – www.vanorabennett.com.

Additional Writing Resources:

• Freelance Writers Needed
• How to Write Your Own Ebook in 7 Days
• Freelance Writing Jobs

Also:

• Free ebook on work at home success strategies

Robin Maxwell’s O’Juliet has been getting some great reviews and comments around the Internet. I loved the book and told you all about it in a review here a while back. (We also have an interview with Robin – have you seen it yet?)

Well guess what? I’ve got a copy to give away to one lucky reader!

To enter, just leave a comment on this post by Tuesday, March 2nd. I’ll choose a winner at random and announce the lucky guy or girl the next day. Good luck!

I know a lot of you wanted to win The Queen’s Governess from Karen Harper in our recent giveaway. I can’t blame you! It’s a great book and for historical fiction fans, it’s a treat reading a story from Kat Ashley’s perspective. But we could only have one winner. That person is our 55th commenter, Victoria!

Congrats to her! If you’d still like to get the book, it is available on Amazon.

Not only is Kathy Lynn Emerson incredibly prolific, she’s one of the most versatile writer’s I’ve ever met. I suspect any writer would be happy to have her career. What a great example she is of a working writer!

I have read and enjoyed several of her historical novels. Enjoy this interview!

You’re an incredibly versatile writer, with two historical and one contemporary mystery series (not to mention nonfiction works) under your belt. How do you decide which genre you will write next? What inspires you to tell these particular stories?

I earn my living and pay my health insurance by writing so, although I wouldn’t write something I find personally distasteful just for the money, I do take into account where I might sell what I write. If I have three or four different ideas for books in mind, and one could be marketed only to a small press for a tiny advance, then I can’t afford to focus on that one right now. That would become what I call my “back burner” project while I spend the bulk of my writing time on something that will actually pay the bills. I’m fortunate in that I enjoy writing more than one type of book. I become completely absorbed in whatever kind of story I’m telling. If asked, I don’t think I could choose a favorite. Fictionalized historical biographies, especially those set in the Tudor era, are very popular right now. That’s wonderful for me because that was the first sort of book I ever tried to write. At that time (1976), no one was interested in publishing them and I moved on to other genres. Now things have come full circle. I have the opportunity to write about some of my favorite historical figures—projects that would have been on that back burner a decade ago—AND make a living.

What could be better? So I’m currently writing the series for Pocket Books, under the pseudonym Kate Emerson, with THE PLEASURE PALACE already out and sSecrets of the Tudor Court: Between Two Queens coming out in January 2010. In between those books, I’m still writing the Liss MacCrimmon Scottish American Heritage Mysteries, under the pseudonym Kaitlyn Dunnett (A Wee Christmas Homicide (Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries) was released on September 29, 2009—my 40th published book), and I’m filling a file folder with notes for future stories in my ten-book mystery series set in the Elizabethan era, which is written under my own name. I’ll get back to those when I can. The most recent publication there was a short story in ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE.

Share some of your writing goals. What’s next for you?

One goal is to write historical fiction that is as accurate as I can possibly make it. The Tudor novels are giving me the opportunity to do that. Each one tells the story of a different real woman at the Tudor court . . . but not one most people have ever heard of. I find such women much more interesting than any of Henry VIII’s wives, or even Elizabeth I herself. BETWEEN TWO QUEENS, which will be published in January 2010, is the story of Anne Bassett, maid of honor to four of Henry VIII’s queens and lady in waiting to Queen Mary. Much of her life story is recorded in letters that were confiscated when her mother and stepfather were arrested for treason in 1540 and I don’t change anything that is known about her. But there are intriguing gaps in our knowledge. For those periods of her life, I create fictional events that seem to me to explain the remainder of what we do know. Currently I’m working on the third book in this series, BY ROYAL DECREE, which is the story of Elizabeth Brooke, Marchioness of Northampton, and covers the period from 1543 to 1558. When that is finished, I’ll be writing another book in the Liss MacCrimmon mystery series.

What’s the most interesting book you’ve ever read?

Okay, this is a HARD question. I’m not sure it’s the most interesting EVER, but one that is certainly a unique reading experience is Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel.

Favorite authors?

Again, this is hard to pin down. Favorites change and I’m constantly discovering new writers. Dorothy Dunnett is always on the list, however. So is Judith Merkle Riley. I enjoy Elizabeth Peters’s mysteries and Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books as well as his bigger fantasy novels in the Furies series.

Book you’re currently reading?

I just finished Aaron Elkins’s Skull Duggery (Berkley Prime Crime Mysteries), a mystery novel, and I’m reading (for pleasure and research) a biography of Elizabeth I that has its focus on her relationships to other women. It is Tracy Borman’s ELIZABETH’S WOMEN and I’m reading the U.K. edition, but I imagine it will be out in the U.S. before too much longer.

Any type of writing ritual you have?

It is more a habit than a ritual. I get up, have toast and coffee while watching a bit of the TODAY show, top off the coffee mug, and head into my office for whatever awaits me. Today it was answering these questions. Most mornings it is the next section of the work in progress.

Do you believe in writer’s block? If so, how did you get past it? If not, why not?

I believe in it, but I’ve never experienced it. I am usually working on two very different projects in different stages of completion. Currently one is a Tudor historical and one is a contemporary mystery. When I reach a point where project one has hit a snag or I feel progress is slowing down, I switch to project two. I find, when I am able to take a break from one project and work on something else, especially if project two is totally unrelated to project one, that I go back to the first book refreshed and full of enthusiasm and that whatever problem I was having with project one has resolved itself. By that time I’m usually also ready to take a break from project two.

In your opinion, what’s the measure of a successful writer?

The ability to write books that someone else wants to read.

Advice for other writers?

Don’t give up.

Where can we learn more about you?

I have a separate website for each of the names I write under. The main one is http://www.KathyLynnEmerson.com. For my historicals it is http://www.KateEmersonHistoricals.com. And for my contemporary mysteries it is http://www.KaitlynDunnett.com

Anything else you’d like to add?

For those interested in the real women of the sixteenth century, I have a Who’s Who of Tudor Women at http://www.KateEmersonHistoricals.com.

More resources on publishing and novel writing:

• Write a novel in 60 days
• Take your book from manuscript to the masses with self-publishing and print-on-demand from CreateSpace.
• Write an ebook in 7 days
• Real Writing Jobs

You know the mark of a great writer? It’s when you read something they have created, and it stays with you. You remember the characters, and not just the story, but the detail of their lives. That’s the kind of writer that Diane Haeger is. I read her book The Secret Bride, and fell in love with the detail. The story has remained with me, and she was able to highlight one of the most interesting women in history.

Diane is one of the those writers who is so talented, she’s able to tell a great story in a variety of genres. Her advice for other writers is excellent, and I know you’re going to enjoy this interview.

I loved The Secret Bride: In The Court of Henry VIII. You did a great job with it. The story of Henry VIII’s sister Mary isn’t written about too often, but it is equally as fascinating as the rest of the Tudor happenings. What drew you to this story?

Thank you very much for the kind words. I actually loved that story, and the idea that Mary was the one woman to go up against Henry VIII and keep her head. Not an easy feat! Also, Henry’s younger sister had a certain moxie that I think translates well into today’s times. They were incredibly close as siblings, but she did put that to the test in a rather dramatic way, as did his best friend, which I loved. And her love affair with Charles Brandon was certainly something fun to write about as well.

You’ve got quite a selection of different genres in your writing repertoire. What draws you to each one? How do you decide which story you will tackle next?

True! I really have been all over the map; Renaissance England and France, Georgian England, current day Scotland, Italy, India and even the Civil War! I certainly never intended to do that but it has been quite a journey.

I suppose what always draws me first is the love story. I have always found that truth is better than fiction in that regard, and there are so many incredible stories throughout the pages of history that it is great fun to find those and then to share them with an audience. I suppose that is the initial draw. But there is most definitely an element after finding a great story of determining what readers will be open to reading, and some stories can be either too dark or set in a country that does not statistically sell well, and then sadly those stories remain on my desk. Sometimes, like with my novel The Secret Wife of King George IV, they can sit there for years before they find a place, but it was definitely worth waiting for since, I am proud to say that book became my first hard cover novel. So patience, in the writing world can be a virtue.

Is there a specific time of day you like to write?

I have two teenagers, and all of their situations, groups, clubs etc… so my life is extremely full, therefore that I write in the mornings, generally from 6am until noon. But I do editing and research after that. Whenever there isn’t a football game or a dance show, I’m usually in my office.

What’s the most interesting book you’ve ever read?

Hmm great question. By book, if you mean a novel, well it’s no secret that one of my favorite books of all time is Karleen Koen’s Through a Glass Darkly: A Novel. From every perspective for me, that was a brilliant story, absolutely flawlessly written. But my idol was always Irving Stone, who I was blessed enough to meet before his death during the process of writing my first novel. The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo is the sort of pinnacle of research and bringing back to life of an historical figure and his times to which we historical novelists can only aspire. In my research and care of my subjects, I try always to keep his level of detail in mind when I work.

When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

That was very early. I wrote my first novel long-hand when I was sixteen. It was awful, more a stream-of-consciousness, looking back, but it was the process that I developed a love for even back then, telling a story of other people’s lives from beginning, middle to the end. It took me another decade to believe I could actually write professionally and to go for it.

Favorite authors?

Irving Stone, Karleen Koen, of course, Philippa Gregory is brilliant, Robin Maxwell, Joan Wolf, and others outside the genre like Barbara Delinsky, Katherine Lynn Davis, Eileen Gouge especially.

Book you’re currently reading?

There seems always a new Philippa Gregory novel to tempt me. Right now I’m half way through The Boleyn Inheritance and also two Renaissance manuscripts I’ve been asked to give a quote to. Very good writing in both.

Any type of writing ritual you have?

Write every day, no matter what. Otherwise I lose the flow of the story. Write at least five pages a day. They don’t have to be great in the rough draft form, but as another author once wrote, “the purpose of the rough draft is not to get it right but just to get it written”, and I couldn’t agree more. That has helped me so much I can’t tell you. I have remembered it for 20 years and cut out the quote!

And I do listen to a lot of Renaissance music to get me in the right frame of mind.

Do you believe in writer’s block? If so, how did you get past it? If not, why not?

For me, writer’s block happened mainly when I thought too much about the process, if that makes sense, or if I concentrated too much on the big blank page on my yellow legal tablet. For sure, that can be daunting, horrible some days. Over time though, I learned to take it literally a sentence at a time. There is a certain communion with the pen and paper for most writers, and I am one of them. I totally cannot write on the computer. If I am not feeling it initially, I write a word, sentence… sometimes I scratch it out, but there is something there, something to change, something to add to, a beginning. That usually works.

In your opinion, what’s the measure of a successful writer?

Another great question! My first reaction would probably be the measure of a successful writer is artfully telling stories which publishers want to buy, which they actively will promote, and doing that regularly—being part of the publishing game, I guess, and staying there. But as I think about it, the greater measure of success I think for a writer is to be able to tell the stories that you want to tell, telling them honestly and fully, improving your craft every time you do it, learning from each book, and feeling that you are sharing something people really want to read and react to, something that will touch them. Hearing that I have touched a reader is the greatest feeling there is, seriously. It does keep me going with those blank yellow pages!

Advice for other writers?

Cliché maybe, but I would say enthusiastically never give up if you believe you have a story to tell. My favorite quote is from Thomas Edison : “Many of life’s failures were people who did not realize how close they

were to success when they gave up.” That has most definitely been something I can relate to. My career has been long, difficult challenging and most definitely a winding road dotted with failure, frustration and, ultimately, success.

If I had any idea 18 years ago, where my first novel, Courtesan, would take me, or where it would not, I don’t know if I would have had the strength to keep going. Thank goodness for one day at a time.

Where can we learn more about you?

I would love anyone to visit me at my website www.dianehaeger.com and feel free to email me. As I said earlier, hearing that someone has been touched by my stories is the very best thing in the world.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Thank you for asking me to do this. It has been a delight.

More resources on publishing and novel writing:

• Write a novel in 60 days
• Take your book from manuscript to the masses with self-publishing and print-on-demand from CreateSpace.
• Write an ebook in 7 days
• Real Writing Jobs

Are you as anxious to read Michelle Moran’s new book, Cleopatra’s Daughter: A Novel, as I am?

I adore historical fiction, and I know I will love this book. (I already know it.) Release date is September 15, 2009, but we are giving away a copy here! Just leave a comment on this post by Monday, September 14th. I’ll choose a winner at random and announce the lucky guy or girl the next day.

To give you some flavor for the book, we have an interview with Michelle Moran. She was also kind enough to write a guest post for Working Writers on the life and libraries of ancient times. Here is the fabulous book trailer for Cleopatra’s Daughter: A Novel: