A famous writer once said that writers are the only people who can admit they hear voices and no one thinks they’re crazy. The problem for us is when we don’t hear those voices....

Women through history have been more passive than active. True, or false? That’s certainly the conventional wisdom that allowed men to scrub most of our female ancestors from the history books. Yet writers of historical fiction know better. In truth, women have done far more of the heavy lifting in every era than they’re given credit for. They served as wartime spies and saboteurs. They ruled empires. They explored new territories as pioneers. They changed the course of civilization, even as they risked their lives to give birth and protect their children--often from the men who fathered them. The challenge for historical novelists is to honor this truth about women’s agency while simultaneously acknowledging the conventions of each era--including those patriarchal structures and societal mores that have too often kept women from achieving all that they might have.

Almost every day on the Historical Novel Society Facebook page, someone asks, “How do you know when you’ve researched enough?” “What details should I include?” Or finally, “When is it allowable to stray from the facts?” We’re excited to answer these questions in our one-hour panel discussion, getting into the nitty gritty of what we do and how we do it: how we find our facts, how much we rely on the Internet, whether we travel to the places we write about, and how we determine which facts will remain on the cutting floor.

Conventional wisdom says that writers looking for long-term success should write series, however those books will be published. Readers love to settle into a fictional world, whether historical or fantastic. And if you’re doing your job right, they become attached to your characters. They want to know more about them. They want to meet their children, their grandchildren, their aunts and their uncles. All right! You plan a great series and get it off the ground with the four-six books conventional wisdom says you need to find your audience. What then? ...