Bloopers

In historical fiction, you can't take anything for granted. Not even, as it turns out, the making of a bed! Longtime readers know that whenever I make a mistake in one of my novels, I come clean here in my blooper file. Well, we're only two months out from the...

Here's one for the blooper file. As I understand it, the chocolate we know it today was not invented until 1847. Until then, chocolate was known and enjoyed as a drink. So why, then, do edible chocolates appear at the end of the 18th century in both America's First...

In my author's note for The Women of Chateau Lafayette I wrote that at the New York Historical Society, in a box of Beatrice Chanler's papers, I found unaddressed love letters tucked into a Valentine folder with a note that identified them as being from Maxime...

I hope I never reach a point in my career where I will feel perfectly confident dispensing literary commandments like Moses with stone tablets. But since I was raised Catholic, I thought I’d take a humbler stab at The Gospel of Historical Fiction according to...

The Nile is a river in Egypt that empties into the Mediterranean. Its source, though hotly debated in ancient times and incorrectly theorized by King Juba II to be in ancient Mauretania, is actually (mostly) in Ethiopia. The river flows north. Consequently, when...