Elsewhere on this site I've described my earlier (false) belief that I would never write a work of nonfiction. Not false, exactly, just later proven untrue--witness the upcoming publication of my memoir Love is the Thread. I never thought I would write a work of historical fiction, either.
One of the key members in the first writers group I ever joined wrote historical fiction. I admired and respected her. Her books carried me back into the past. Because of her, I read other historical fiction, from mysteries to the occasional romance novel. (Without realizing it, I had savored a historical mystery fairly early in my reading career. Agatha Christie's Death Comes as the End, set in ancient Egypt. Quite a trend setter, Dame Agatha.)
But I recognized the weight of research needed to underpin that type of story. Delving into my characters and their feelings, drafting, revision and editing provided me with more than enough work to do. That was my opinion.
What happened? I found the women of the Apocrypha fascinating from the first time I discovered they existed, one rainy day when I was nine years old. Stuck inside the house all afternoon, I tugged an old book out of the shelves built beside the fireplace, and the heating duct my sisters and I always fought over when the weather turned chilly.
As I turned the stiff, oversized pages I had no idea I had just embarked on the research for my first (only?) historical novel, to be written a number of decades later. I only knew these women from long ago, in a time and place I could barely picture, set my imagination alight.
Today I walked beside one of those women as she approached the encampment peopled with her tribe's enemies. Judith and her friend and maidservant Abra left their village to weave their way past hundreds of Assyrian soldiers. Would they reach the safety--and graver danger--of the general's pavilion?
Even though I spent a week in a university library earlier this year studying the type of swords, the kind of armor worn by the Assyrians, and even though I am on the seventh or eighth version of the chapter, I trembled along with those two ancient women, and had to squint at the clock in the corner of my computer screen when an incipient headache and rumbling stomach brought me back to the present era.
I don't know why I ever doubted a foray into historical fiction. I love my character. And I love traveling with her deep into the past.