This year, it’s a Colonial Christmas for me. Not only is Surrender being reissued a few weeks before Christmas, but I’ll be finishing Defiant right around the holiday. I’ll do a post soon about Colonial Christmas traditions. But for today, I thought I’d share with you why I love writing Colonial American romance.

And I do love it.

Although I do intend to try my hand at a few other periods of history, the one I enjoy most is America’s colonial history. Here’s are 10 reasons why:

10. There was no television. People turned to one another for entertainment, reading aloud, telling stories from memory, playing music, singing songs together at night.



9. It was the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, with science supplanting religious hatreds, Church control and medievalism. People were free to think for themselves, challenge old institutions, and create new ones.



8. The romance of old technology was still there — the chandler, the cheeser, the seamstress, the vintner, the milliner, the butcher, the rope maker, the sawyer, the blacksmith, the baker, the fish monger, the cooper, the poulterer and on and on.



7. The mix of cultures is fascinating, though often tragic. I’m not just talking about American Indians and whites. I’m also talking about the mix of Europeans, too — English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, German, French, Scandinavian, Dutch and so on. They had their own religions, their own customs. And somehow this mix of Europeans — often enemies back in the old country — managed to create communities and, eventually, build a nation.



6. The class conflict. That’s a strange thing to like, I guess, but that’s always something I include in my writing. Despite how it may seem in Romancelandia, most people were not nobility. Lords and ladies made up a tiny segment of society. The stratification was very strong in Europe. It was strong, too, in the Colonies, but the frontier eroded those boundaries, including the boundaries between men and women.

5. The clothes. They weren’t as absurd as the clothing from earlier in the 18th century, nor as ridiculous and comical as 17th-century attire. There’s something about a man with a queue and a tricorn that I find really sexy. Women’s gowns ranged from functional to works of art.



4. The women were strong, brave and skilled. They had to make clothing, cook, can, garden, treat all sicknesses — and give birth to many children at home, often without help.



3. The men were tough, skilled, and strong. They had to farm, care for animals, chop firewood, hunt and fight to keep their families alive.



2. The landscape was true wilderness, giving my characters something else to overcome besides the machinations of mere mortals. The wilderness is like another character in the story.


1. Men with muskets! Need I say more?


Only 21 days till MacKinnon’s Rangers muster once again and Surrender is back on bookshelves!