Joyce Elson Moore's Blog, page 4

Regency Romance by Jacqueline Seewald

I find Regency romances fascinating. I've read many hundreds of novels in the genre. In this regard, I am like many other devoted readers. Regency romance has endured for a long time and I believe will continue to be popular. However, Regency romance fans are very particular about historical references. They want them to be completely accurate. To this effect, I did extensive research, reading and collecting numerous histories of this era as well as biographies of people who lived in those...

Newsletter Help

With the release date of The Tapestry Shop coming ever closer, I've had to jockey my time between writing, and getting the word out about my book. My readers may find today's blog helpful, as most of us have something we'd like to share, from time to time, with either friends, family, a social group, or perhaps members of your church or book club or P.T.A. For authors, marketing has become a fact of life, like it or not, and we all must look for ways to let our readers know about our newest s...

Is it Magical Realism or Fantasy?

Magical Realism is a term first used by a German art critic, and over time, it evolved into a literary term. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) is usually the writer most referenced when discussing Magical Realism, but other authors have employed his techniques, and now there are several whose work is held up as an example of the style of writing.

Sometimes, as authors, we use the term to describe a genre, but the elements of Magical Realism can be found in several genres. ...

Do Authors Need a Fan Page?

At the RWA National conference, I sat in on an informative workshop about building your career with Facebook and Twitter. The speakers were Sheri Brooks, Cissy Hartley, and Jayne Ann Krentz. Here are some key points they made, and a few hints that might be helpful for other writers who, like me, are scrambling to keep up with how we can best use our time to market our books.

I don't Twitter (not yet, anyway) so most of my notes were about utilizing Facebook as a tool to make friends in the rea...

Publisher information at RWA

In a departure from my usual blog postings, I'm going to offer a quick replay of what I learned in various Publisher Spotlight sessions at the recent RWA conference in Orlando this past week. In spite of the change of venue, necessary because of the floods in Nashville, the conference went off smoothly. For my workshop on Researching for Historicals, the room had been prepared and all was in readiness. That, combined with my capable moderator, Megan Kelly , herself an author with a later...

If You Love History. . .

One of the highlights of my recent London visit was to Westminster Abbey, the church in which many historical figures were married, crowned, and buried. The abbey is a virtual history of England, and to visit there was like walking into the past.
London Skyline from the ThamesYour ticket allows entry to almost every part of the abbey and grounds. Some of the more memorable sights in the abbey were the St. Edward Shrine, Henry VIII's Lady Chapel, and the coronation chair used by Edward I in...

Medusa Heads and a Sinking Palace

Justinian, the 6th century Byzantine emperor, built a system of cisterns beneath the city of Constantinople, now Istanbul in Turkey. One of these cisterns, dubbed the "sinking palace" by locals, can be seen by visitors, and is unusual because the cistern itself resembles an abandoned palace. It is one of several hundred cisterns which lie beneath a thriving metropolis of trams and city streets.
The 336 Roman columns supporting the massive structure are what give the cistern the look of a...

Chained Library at Hereford

Documents dating from the 8th century draw researchers to this old library in the UK. The cathedral stands on a site where worshippers have joined together for twelve-hundred years. Today, the library of the Hereford Cathedral is known for its medieval books and the precious Mappa Mundi, a medieval map that gives visitors an insight as to how medieval scholars saw the world.

The library is perhaps best known for its unique security system. Chaining books was a widespread practice during the Mi...

Medieval Manuscripts in a Swiss Library

This is the second of several blogs about old libraries that are worth seeing.
The Abbey Library of St. Gall in eastern Switzerland holds over 140,000 manuscripts, including some original parchments dating from the 9th century.
The library has been in existence since 719, and was named after St. Gall, an Irish hermit whose hermitage was on this same spot. After his death, a small church was erected on the site. The church later developed into the Abbey of St. Gall, which came to be an importan...

Libraries Worth Traveling to See

Tucked away, in hidden corners of the world, are some old libraries, with soaring ceilings and paintings to match the Sistine Chapel. These treasures are all over the globe, including in the U.S., and I'll be blogging about several in the weeks to come.
The library in Strahov Monastery in Prague holds documents going back centuries. Their most prized possession is a 9th century document, heavily ornamented, but that is not the only treasure there. The shelves are filled with priceless old man...