I’m happy to announce that Bella’s Band is a 2015 RONE finalist in the Historical: Post Medieval category!

What are the RONE awards? This is a subject I blogged about on April 20th, but in brief:

Each year InD’tale Magazine honors the very best books in the Indie and Small publishing industry with the prestigious RONE (Reward of Novel Excellence) award.

Bella’s Band is one of 7 finalists from a field of 34 excellent nominees in the Historical: Post Medieval category. The winner will be announced at the InD’Scribe conference in Palm Springs, California in September.

Many thanks to everyone who voted!

Writing this story required a fair amount of research, and I couldn’t have done it without the amazingly knowledgeable ladies and gentlemen of the Beau Monde chapter of Romance Writer’s of America. Members steered me to references and helped me navigate London neighborhoods, the hero’s wartime backstory, terms of address of the peerage, and coach travel. I consulted with my husband and numerous You Tube videos on period weapons.

Some facts I didn’t learn until after my first draft was complete. My uh-oh moments?

An Earl’s Coronet

Terms of address: I had Annabelle’s friend Rosalyn joke about finding a lord for her so she could be Lady Annabelle. But Annabelle is not the daughter of nobility, and as one Beau Monder said, “Annabelle will never be Lady Annabelle.” Find out the rules here.

The Deaf Postilion

Coach travel: English cross-country travelers generally employed postilions, not coachmen. I didn’t glean this bit of knowledge until after I was fully committed to having Annabelle travel in a coach driven by a coachman and definitely without postilion riders. Fortunately, I learned that the super-wealthy might keep their own horses at staging inns on regularly traveled routes.

Coach design: In a pivotal scene it was essential that the coach have doors on each side. This led to a moment of panic: what if the coaches were like 1980s minivans with an exit on one side only? The pictures of coaches I found online were unclear, but on a trip to Tombstone, Arizona, I verified that this tourist stagecoach indeed had doors on each side. I know, I know, the period is wrong, but this is a work of fiction and I’m reaching for verisimilitude in my story world, not time-travel!

Ultimately, mea culpa, all errors are mine. Have you found any historical errors in Bella’s Band? I would genuinely love to know. There is so much to learn in writing historical fiction!

Images: InD’Tale Magazine, Wikimedia, the Author