Happy Release Day!!
Writing good historical fiction can be a real challenge! Nicole Loughan tells us how she went about writing Divine Hotel.
Keeping It Real
by Nicole Loughan
Diana Gabaldon is doing it, Dan Brown is doing it, now I’m
doing it too.
I finally dipped my toes into writing historical fiction and
the water is fine. Deriving inspiration from our collective history is
exciting. I think it helps people automatically connect to the material,
regardless of content, but it doesn’t hurt for the content to be good as well.
When authors write about the familiar, even with books like Abraham Lincoln
Vampire Hunter, it creates a picture in our mind whether we want it to or not.
We know Abraham Lincoln and with a catchy title like that it gives us just
enough information to want to know more.
But writing about real history is tricky. For me, I was
writing about a history which was not my own, and which was very familiar and dear
to the people who lived it. Also, since I did not reach very far back in time
many of the people who lived it are still around. I relied on research and old
photos to form a picture of what it might have been like to live in
Philadelphia in the 1960s and I tried to tread carefully on dearly held
memories. One example, in my book I write about an old department store. When I
told people I had written about this store, there were definite opinions on
what the characters did there and what the store looked like, I had gotten some
of the details wrong and made changes to correct it.
In my previous books, The Saints Mystery Series, I wrote
complete fiction based in the Bayous of Louisiana. All of the events were
completely fabricated, and it was completely clear that the situations were
made up. I did still have to be careful about the culture. The books focused on
two Cajun families and I wanted to be careful about showing Cajun culture
without trampling on people’s heritage.
Overall, I found writing about history and historical
fiction exciting and challenging. I spent several weeks researching Philadelphia
in the 1960s, no easy feat as much of the historical nuance is not recorded.
You need to hear it from the people who were there. For example, that store I
talked about in Philadelphia is known by people from Philadelphia as
Wannamaker, but if you search the internet it will tell you that store was
called Strawbridges. People still call the building Wannamaker’s today even
though it’s a Macy’s. That’s the sort of detail you just can’t find in an
internet search.
I have so much more respect for writers who make the choice
to explore history with fiction, it’s very hard to navigate the waters of the
real world with a fictional captain.
You can find Nicole’s latest book Divine
Hotel for sale on Amazon for an introductory $2.99 special. Her Saint’s
Mystery Series are also available on Amazon starting with To
Murder a Saint.
Divine Hotel
Divine Series, Book 1
Nicole Loughan
Genre: Time Travel/ Mystery
Publisher: Can’t Put it Down
Books
Date of Publication: 03/28/2016
Cover Artist: Genevieve LaVO
Book Description:
Time is running out for
Philadelphia’s Divine Hotel…One woman is tasked with saving two children who
lived at the once majestic hotel but she soon learns that there is more to
their history and the hotel than she ever thought possible. To save them she’s
going to have to re-set the clock for everybody at the hotel and the only way
to do that is to go all the way back to 1964. Righting the wrongs of the past
will be no easy feat, because there are those willing to fight to keep their
sins buried in history.
About the Author
You may know Nicole as the
syndicated humor columnist, “The Starter Mom,” or from her Best-Selling Saints
Mystery Novels. Because of the series’ popularity, Amazon chose it for their
Stipend Program to be turned into an audiobook at their expense.
An award-winning journalist and
author, she was recognized by Writer's Digest as a top fiction writer in 2015 and
won honorable mention in genre fiction from the Writer's Digest annual
self-publishing competition for her Saints Mystery Series.
Nicole writes for two daily
newspapers in the greater Philadelphia area and as a columnist for Happenings
Media. Prior to working as a writer, Nicole was an Agency Social Worker for the
Philadelphia Department of Human Services, where she first learned about the
subject of her latest novel, Divine Hotel.
Nicole grew up on a rural farm in
Southern Michigan, but she was always a city girl at heart. She still has a
penchant for straight-from-the-dairy cheese, but otherwise prefers to spend her
days in New York and Philadelphia and her adopted hometown in Bucks County. The
mother of two, she is a soprano in The Bucks County Woman’s Chorus and an
amateur pianist.
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