Happy New Year, dear readers,
As the New Year starts, it’s time for me to get back to my writing. Instead of trying to write the next great American novel, this year I have decided to write a historical tale—maybe Veggies Through the Centuries. Well--it’s just a working title.
My specific interest is in renaissance England, but I’m no history scholar, so I need to find out more about the period before I begin to write. To learn more about daily life during that time, I checked out: https://sites.google.com/a/mycsla.org/renaissance-quest/renaissance-stuff/daily-life-in-the-renaissance. While that helped, I needed more. To give my characters appropriate historic names, I turned to two sites for help. One is:http://www.peiraeuspubliclibrary.com/names/renaissancenames/RenaissanceEnglishNames.html. The other is: http://www.namegenerator.biz/medieval-name-generator.php. These were very helpful for names for my main characters, but I might still need help filling in all of the supporting cast for my tale. For that, I found stock characters at: https://prezi.com/sm8hmasowpb7/elizabethan-theatre/
Of course, they didn’t speak English the same way back then, so I need to do a bit of research there, too. I found some great words and phrases I could sprinkle into my dialogue, without making it hard for modern readers to understand what my characters are saying, at: http://www.renfaire.com/Language/vocab.html. While I was there, I became interested in the origin of the English language and how it associates with other countries and languages, and found more at: http://www.vox.com/2015/3/3/8053521/25-maps-that-explain-english
Of course I still need to have info about some of the clothing they might have worn during the renaissance, and found some good information at: www.tudordressing.com. And of course I need to know about appropriate weapons http://www.sixwives.info/tudor-weapons.htm and more about their armies at: http://slippydog.co.uk/tudor/army/army.htm
Once I have decided on the clothing, characters, and weapons needed, I must get myself into the proper mood to write in that period. What better way to do this than to learn about their food? For that I found: http://cookit.e2bn.org/historycookbook/1406-bread.html and another delicious site: http://tudorhistory.org/topics/food/recipes.html
As I settle in to write, I am thinking of getting Scrivener, a writing program that might help me to organize my book, at: http://www.Scrivener.com. Helpful hints for newbies using the program can be found athttp://www.GwenHernandez.com. And for editing, I have a new secret weapon called http://www.Draftmap.comwhich helps me catch a lot of errors that my eyes overlook when I’m proofreading.
I hope your new year gets off to a good start, and that all your writing resolutions come true.
Betty Wryte-Goode