Once Upon a Time It Was Now

Description

A historian will stand firmly planted in the present time and carefully look back into the past. But a historical novelist has a greater challenge: to set readers in the midst of bygone events and lead them forward, allowing them to live and feel the astonishment, fear, hope, victory, and pain as if they were in the very midst of the situation being written.

Learning historical stories is easy, creating stories based in history is thought-provoking.

In Once Upon a Time It Was Now, best-selling author James Alexander Thom (Follow the River, From Sea to Shining Sea, Sign-Talker) offers you information to implement a believable work. He gives you the tools you need to research and create stories born from the past that will move and inspire modern readers. His comprehensive approach includes lessons on how to:

• Find and use historical archives and conduct physical field research
• Re-construct the world of your novel, including people and voices, physical environments, and cultural context
• Achieve verisimilitude in speech, action, setting, and description
• Seamlessly weave historical fact with your own compelling plot ideas

With wit and candor, Thom’s detailed instruction, illuminating personal experience, and invaluable insights culled from discussions with other trusted historical writers will guide you to craft a novel that is true to what was then, when then was now.

About the Author

James Alexander Thom was an Indiana-born Marine veteran, and was a newspaperman, magazine freelance writer, and Indiana University Journalism School lecturer before he became a full-time historical novelist, known for his thorough research in archives and in the field. His American frontier and Indian war novels have won national awards and sold more than two million copies. Two were made into television films, by Hallmark and Ted Turner. Thom’s family history drew him to the Civil War era.  His namesake was killed in the Battle of Fredericksburg, and his great grandfather survived the deathly Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp. Several years as Ohio River historical lecturer for the Delta Queen line provided technical knowledge and riverboat lore for this book. The author was also an artist and sculptor.

James Alexander Thom lived well and left a legacy that will earn him a spot in the pantheon of great Hoosier writers. He was a very lucky man who had an enviable career and an essence of peace always within himself and the family and friends that surrounded him.