This month Quizzing Glass chats with Heather Redmond, mystery author
QC: What most interests you about the people of the Georgian/Regency era?
It was a very dramatic era, with war, industrialization, royal drama, mad poets, scientific advances, and so much more! Those years seem to be an endless well for creatives.
QC: When did you first get hooked (and what hooked you) on the Regency era?
Signet Regency romances back in the 1990s. I loved the covers as well as the stories.
QC: What is your favorite thing about the Regency – what do you like to write about?
I am currently writing about (fictional) crime and murder around the Shelley Circle. I love writing about the creative minds of the nineteenth century and learning more about the era before modern policing.
QC: What is your favorite Jane Austen book?
Pride and Prejudice, with Northanger Abbey a near second.
QC: What advice would you give to writers just starting out?
The best possible advice is simply, “finish the book.” Just keep going to the end of that first project because it is the best learning tool possible, and you can’t publish something that isn’t complete.
QC: Tell us about your current project or latest release.
My newest Heather Redmond title is my upcoming series starter, Death and the Sisters. It’s the first in my Mary Shelley mysteries. Mary Shelley famously wrote the novel Frankenstein when she was only 19, but my story takes us back to May 1814, when she was just sixteen and living across the street from Newgate Prison in London, England, with her family. They lived above their bookshop. One night, she finds a young man face-down on the bookshop floor with a knife in his back, and another in between his legs…
QC: What comes first, plot or characters?
For me, it is a character, and these past few years, it has actually been historical figures – real people – rather than just characters I made up.
QC: Do you have a daily writing schedule and goals? What are they?
When I’m drafting, it’s a minimum of a thousand words a day, preferably seven days a week until I’m done.
QC: What did you want to be when you were ten or twelve?
I wanted to be a writer from the age of seven.
QC: Who was your favorite author as a child?
I was a voracious reader, but probably the multiple authors of the Trixie Belden mystery series.
QC: If your newest book is being made into a movie, who would you cast as the hero?
The main characters in my new series are heroines, not heroes, but I would cast the first supporting male character (Percy Bysshe Shelley) with Timothée Chalamet.
QC: What is the most surprising or amazing thing you discovered while researching a book?
When I was a younger writer, I was very intimidated by historical fiction. I didn’t have the confidence to think I could do it myself. Even when my second professional sale was a fantasy-type Victorian short story, I didn’t think I could do it. After years of dabbling in shorter history-set stories, I finally worked my way up to full novels set in the past, and I’ve never looked back. The research is fun and we have to accept that we will make mistakes, but if it is hard for us to research, very few readers, if any, are going to know the absolute truth anyway. Besides, we can write to what we know, and write around what we don’t. The ultimate goal is to tell a good story.
About the Author
Heather Redmond is the author of the A Dickens of a Crime and the upcoming Mary Shelley mysteries. She has also written many works as Heather Hiestand. Website: www.heatherredmond.com
Thanks for telling us about yourself, Heather
