Then waiting for their feedback after I’ve finished and given it to them to read. My answer is usually just to push through, running ideas by my critique partner and/or my husband as I’m writing it. These sorts of things almost always come up. As usual, my climax demanded a rewrite, and I had to insert a whole new villain. In this one, one of the major things I slaved over-both in the first round of writing and at the request of my editors-was finding a satisfactory balance for the suspense, especially toward the end. Though almost all my books have a suspense/mystery thread, that is SO not the part that comes naturally to me. While writing A Name Unknown, did you run into any snags? Maybe in the research portion of the writing, or the writing itself? If so, what did you do to overcome this issue? (I teach Freshmen 9 and AP Lit Seniors, and I always have a few budding authors, what would you recommend to students who run into snags in their writing?) I absolutely love how the characters came together!Ģ. V to propel each member of her family on the tasks that lead them into their adventures in each book. I decided to create a mysterious employer known only as Mr. I’d just finished reading a book my best friend/critique partner wrote that included a thief, which is no doubt why I decided that Rosemary and her family should be a gang of street thieves with an unusual code of honor.

This combined with my above idea until I had a reclusive writer of adventure novels, who chose to use a pen name so no one knew he was of German descent.

For instance, artists-painters, writers, you name it-were employed by the British government to include pro-war propaganda in their works. What if, I wondered, there were other Englishmen of German descent who considered doing the same?įrom there I just started doing some general WWI English research and happened across more tidbits that intrigued me. That was the starting point of my inspiration for A Name Unknown. While researching for the Ladies of the Manor Series, I came across the information that King George V of England changed his surname during WWI from the Germanic Saxe-Coburg to the more English-sounding Windsor.

The Number of Love by Roseanna M. White