Since I write primarily historical fiction, I glean inspiration for stories, scenes, settings, plot points, characters, etc., mostly from history itself. "I can use this" is a constant mental refrain as I scour historical sources, looking for fodder for fiction. For example, my Silver Rush mystery series  is set in the 1880s, with the first five books in Colorado, primarily Leadville, and the three most recent in San Francisco, California. Why did I pick Leadville as the starting point? Well, that also springs from history, in this case, my family's history. When I was in my mid-forties, I learned that my paternal grandmother had been raised in Leadville. I knew nothing about the place, so at the urging of my uncle, I began to dig around into Leadville's beginnings as a silver-mining boomtown, with an eye to setting a novel there. I found many parallels between those heady days of the late 1870s/early 1880s, when folks rushed to this remote Rocky Mountain location, a...

First, thank you to the Blood Red Pencil for hosting me for this stop on my two-week-long virtual tour for Mercury’s Rise , the latest book in my Silver Rush historical mystery series. Truly, I have to thank BRP for more than that, because it was BRP’s Dani Greer who helped me out of a tight spot regarding word usage in Mercury’s Rise . It all began with whiskey. And whisky. I had taken great pains to determine under what circumstances my protagonist Inez Stannert would use which term. After all, Inez runs a high-class saloon in 1880s Leadville, Colorado, so she would certainly know the difference. My conundrum began when the line editor at my publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, noted that some places in the manuscript were “whiskey” and others read “whisky.” Which is correct? she asked. I sent her a long reply (with links!) noting that they weren’t the same. (New York Times weighed in here and The Boozin’ Blog had a discussion here .) But I began to worry that switching between the...