Slang is so much fun! When used correctly in historical fiction it can add to the feel of the time period. But slang is also slippery. A phrase that “sounds” historical can be a lot more recent that you think. So, unless you like getting tetchy notes from readers, it pays to check your slang. A word as simple as “okay,” for instance, can take you down the rabbit hole of etymological research and confusion. Okay sounds so… modern, right? Well, it depends how you spell it. According to Oxford Dictionary online , the first use of this word (spelled OK) appeared in the 1830s, perhaps originating as an abbreviation of orl korrek t—“a jokey misspelling of 'all correct' which was current in the US in the 1830s.” So, if your fictional setting is firmly planted in late 19th century U.S. (as mine is), OK is okay! But—guess what!— okay is not! It didn’t appear until 1929, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary . Another useful tool for chasing down the time frame of period s...

Armistice Day. November 11th. A date I’ve known all my life and commemorated annually with a red poppy in the buttonhole as long as I lived in England; commemorated—without really understanding its meaning until I started to write about the 1920s. I’ve learned a lot about the first world war in the 20 years since. Though I decided not to make its horrors the focus of my series, I soon realized that two subjects that attracted me to the period were inextricably linked to the war. First, the country could not afford the extravagances of fashion, so women’s clothes became much simpler and more comfortable; and second, the huge loss of life in the trenches helped open an unprecedented range of careers to women. The more I learned, the more careful I had to be to pick and choose what information I used in my mysteries, especially as they’re basically lighthearted. We’ve all read (or started to read) novels where the author has attempted to cram in every scrap of extensive research. Noth...

  N ella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife , 49 . Edited by Richard Broad and Suzie Fleming. Profile Books. 2006. I became intrigued by Nella Last when I saw "Housewife, 49," a 2008 British televison drama based on the book, Nella Last's War . Nella Last, a forty-nine-year old housewife who felt stifled by her marriage, gradually empowers herself through her work for the Women's Voluntary Service, a British wartime volunteer organization, and through keeping a diary for the " Mass Observation " project. The book is an edited collection of her diary entries for this project during World War II.  Mass Observation was a social research program created by Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson in 1937 in an effort to help British people gain a greater understanding of themselves in everyday life. They recruited volunteers to "observe" their daily lives through the keeping of diaries which were submitted weekly to MO headquarters...