Favorite Books: Pride and Prejudice as well as Jane Austen novels, the Twilight series, The Host, Harry Potter series, Ender's Game, Tasha Alexander's series starting with And Only to Deceive, Tale of Two Cities, Brandon Sanderson's series beginning with Mistborn, The House at Riverton

Currently reading: North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell, and Royal Harlot, by Susan Holloway Scott
Favorite Movies: Atonement, Pride and Prejudice, Moulin Rouge, The Painted Veil, Phantom of the Opera, Becoming Jane

About my writing:
My goal for That Place By Me is to write legitimate historical (fan)fiction. I stumbled upon this in a forward by Philippa Gregory: There are two kinds of writing thought to be historical fiction. There's "romance fiction" which "has no authentic interest in different times and cultures." Real historical fiction "includes characters whose base humanity engages our empathy... who are entirely congruent with the known conditions of their time, yet sufficiently independent in thought to stand out from the crowd, and we identify with them. They are well rounded characters because they exist in a recognizable time and place and their circumstances work on them. A good historical novel is always conscious of our shared humanity—and of the ways our deep-rooted instincts are molded, repressed, or even denied by the society into which we happen to be born."

I try very hard to make my writing based in fact, and I feel that anyone with a story set in the past should try to capture the feel of the time. I hope the footnotes I have at the end of chapters help you out.

Stories
That Place By Me: my imagining of the wonderfully romantic tale of Esme and Carlisle Cullen.
I'm going to juxtapose Esme pre-vampire 1910-1921 to her 1921-onwards and make this story a character study of how she became who she is. The narrative will alternate, for the most part. Before 1921, an independent Esme is brought low by an abusive marriage. Post 1921, however, I get the fun of writing how they fell in love; while having an interest based on a decade-old chance encounter is cute, that's not real love. Esme had lost a lot, and it was a broken woman that Carlisle turned. They fell in love quickly and easily, but with the blemishes of their pasts still blotting their relationship. Post-1921 is about how Esme and Carlisle found in each other the missing pieces of themselves.

The title "That Place By Me" comes from this sonnet:
Sonnet from the Portuguese XXXV
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange
And be all to me? Shall I never miss
Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss
That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,
When I look up, to drop on a new range
Of walls and floors... another home than this?
Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is
Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change?
That's hardest. If to conquer love, has tried,
To conquer grief, tries more, as all things prove,
For grief indeed is love and grief beside.
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.
Yet love me, wilt thou? Open thine heart wide,
And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.