Is it real? Is it fiction?

Megan of Pom­pano Beach wrote me and asked, “Do you incor­po­rate real events into your writing?”

The answer is, yes and no. The about to be pub­lished Sophia’s War is full of things that real­ly hap­pened dur­ing the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, but the main char­ac­ter, Sophia Calder­wood, is fic­tion­al. Yet, I tell the sto­ry as if she had a great deal to do with what hap­pened. Hard Gold and Iron Thun­der were writ­ten much the same way. True Con­fes­sions of Char­lotte Doyle is a com­plete fic­tion, but I sure tried to get my facts about ships and sail­ing right. The Pop­py books are tales about ani­mals, but they are full of things that hap­pened in my own fam­i­ly life—not that you would know it. Seer of Shad­ows, a ghost sto­ry, uses what I knew from my days as an ama­teur pho­tog­ra­ph­er. But the emo­tions and rela­tion­ships I depict in my books are most often based on things out of my own expe­ri­ence, lived or observed. The facts—particularly for the his­tor­i­cal fiction—comes from research. I sus­pect all fic­tion is cre­at­ed this way. No mat­ter how fan­tas­tic the tale, there is some real con­nec­tion to the writer.