Sinking of the Titanic Illustration by German artist Willy Stower (1864-1931), 1912 watercolor with digital enhancement.

How gratifying it was to read a recent review of my novel Sheltering Angel from a reader who recognized the work that went into writing the narrative. “Having read books about the sinking of Titanic,” she writes, “and gone so far as to visit the final resting places of some of the ship’s victims in cemeteries in Halifax, I am in a position to appreciate the colossal amount of research the author must have done to make this book as authentic as possible.”

I admit to some deep research—eight years, in fact, of reading dozens of books, both nonfiction about the Titanic and novels recreating the experience aboard ship. The 1954 Steward’s Manual and the autobiography of second-class steward Violet Jessop helped my understanding of what it was like to crew on a passenger ship. The online Titanic Encyclopedia with photos of passengers lent a sense of appearance and style to those aboard.

My radar was up for anything about twentieth century cruise ships and I spent hours watching James Cameron’s Titanic and Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember as well as documentaries and videos of how the ship was built, theories for why the “unsinkable” sank, details of its design and décor, and videos of submersible trips to the wreckage. I pored through transcripts of the Senate hearings held in New York after the sinking and waded into archival newspaper articles for primary resources.

To set the tone of the novel, it was important to understand the circumstances of the greater world in the early twentieth century, so I read that automobiles were becoming common and air travel was in its naissance, World War I was on the horizon, and the U.S. was in economic trouble. Before the Sixteenth Amendment requiring income tax came into law in February 1913, a year after Titanic sailed, enterprising citizens accumulated staggering amounts of wealth they expended on mansions in Newport, Philadelphia, New York, and Ashville.

During those months that stretched into years, I toured Titanic exhibitions and visited Titanic museums in Belfast where Titanic was built and Cobh in Ireland, the last port of call before sailing into the North Atlantic. In Southampton, England where the ship first launched, I toured SeaCity Museum’s interactive Titanic exhibit. At Southampton Central Library, the librarian let me browse shelves full of volumes in the Titanic section and found background on steward Andrew Cunningham whose story unfolds in the book.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, I walked around the Harvard campus to get a sense of where the story of Florence and Bradley Cumings began. In New York I found the Cumings brownstone. When I knocked on the door and no one answered, I sat on the front steps and imagined living there.

After endless drafts, rewrites, revisions, and copyediting, I sent out the manuscript. Then I raked in the rejections—over a hundred of them. But I believed in the novel and knew in my soul it was a story needing to be told. Finally, editor Reagan Rothe at Black Rose Writing took the manuscript, and Sheltering Angel immediately rose to #1 on Amazon Kindle’s Biographical Literary Fiction list.

Time spent on Sheltering Angel, my eighth book, hasn’t ended there, however. Marketing involves submitting to a variety of media, pulling together a visual presentation for libraries and bookstores, sprucing up for interviews, both in person and via video, and publishing blogs and newsletters. The years of research has stretched into a dozen years of nose-to-the-grindstone work.

During that time I’ve put effort into other projects as well, but for me bringing to life a period of history is its own reward. Reading historical fiction is like time traveling. In a sense, you get to live in two worlds—you’re safe in your reading nook while you don a life vest, leap into frigid water, and swim for your life.

To buy Sheltering Angel, click here:

Recently released: Second edition of While In Darkness There Is Light, a Vietnam era nonfiction story of young ex-pats in Australia. To buy, click here: 

Forthcoming: Rum Running Queen, based on the true story of Willie Carter Sharpe, Prohibition era’s most notorious female bootlegger.