Kathryn Page Camp

  I just re-read the first three books in the Cherry Ames series by Helen Wells. For those of you who don’t know, Cherry Ames was part of th...

  If you read this blog regularly, you know that I’m a stickler for getting the period details right in my historical novels. That includes ...

  This week’s blog post is a reprint from June 20, 2016. It is another one I wrote while working on   Inferno. Getting History Right You...

  This week’s blog post was originally published on August 15, 2016, when I was writing Inferno. Sifting Through the Rubble The Great Ch...

  This week’s blog post was originally published on August 6, 2018, when I was researching as as yet unpublished novel about the Siege of Vi...

  On Saturday I gave a talk at the Hammond Historical Society, which I titled “Living in the Past: The Art of Researching Historical Fiction...

  In 1917, President Wilson declared war against Germany on Good Friday. That’s fine, I guess, except it caused me extra work to get history...

  I am preparing to write a middle-grade historical novel about a German-Lutheran girl living in America during World War I. Germany was the...

When writing historical fiction, the vocabulary is almost as important as the story. Labor Day has always been called that and has been cele...

  Slang and even formal vocabulary change over time. As a writer of historical fiction, my challenge is to stay true to the period without c...

   All historical fiction travels back in time, but matching the story to an exact time can be tricky. The overland routes to the California...

  I’m working on a trilogy that covers the three main ways people traveled to the California gold fields during the middle of the 19 th cen...

  As I’ve mentioned in past posts, some of the people who joined the California gold rush took a route across the Isthmus of Panama. My curr...

  As I’ve mentioned before, diaries, journals, and other personal experience accounts are my favorite research materials. I’ve found a numbe...

When 12-year-old Julia is sent to stay with her cousin Fannie in Chicago, neither girl likes the arrangement. Then the Great Chicago Fire of...

  I enjoy reading historical fiction, but only if it is an accurate portrayal of the times and events. So when I write my own historical nov...

  This week I am reprinting a post I published on the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog on February 5, 2014. I am using it as a lead-in to se...

INTRODUCTORY NOTE: I managed the Indiana Writers’ Consortium blog for six years before IWC closed its doors at the end of 2018. The idea...

Only detectives should write historical novels. I don’t mean the kind of detective with a magnifying glass or a knowledge of fingerprint...

Sometimes I feel sorry for authors who write contemporary stories. Unless they generalize current trends (which some do very well), they...