Dear Mr. Cornwell,
my name is Maurizia and I am Italian.
I apologize in advance for my bad English but I haven’t spoken it or writing it for years.
I’m a great lover of fantasy and historical novels.
I must admit that I discovered a passion for historical novels after reading The Saxon Stories that you masterfully wrote. No novel has ever fascinated me as much as these. I must admit that a part of the credit goes to the TV series that they have drawn from the novels because if it were not for it I would not have known her works.
Surely I will also read the other sagas, I do not promise them all, because not all the historical periods you tells fascinate me and this is a strong deterrent for me. I’m a little “taliban” in this sense.
I am also a budding writer even if my genre remains fantasy for now. However after reading his novels I decided to make the world in which I set my story much more real, because I realized that there have been periods in history when reality was better (or worse) than fantasy.
Thanks for the great inspiration.
I wanted to compliment you on the historical research work she has done in order to have the information to use in her novels.
Although it is his job to be a historian, it must not have been easy to retrieve information that is not of a common nature.
I’ll explain.
I would like to write a novel that has been buzzing in my head about the Celts for some time, but the only historical sources we have about them are the Roman writings, primarily the De Bello Gallico. It is a partisan narrative and we do not know if this was really the case. So how to create a novel that has the Celts as protagonists without falling into Roman stereotypes and without abandoning oneself to the romantic but unreliable visions, perhaps, that many have about Celts from 800 d.c. onwards?
The author’s imagination has a fundamental importance of course, but in my opinion it takes a right balance between historical facts and fantasy.
How do you manage these doubts?
Thanks for your attention and good work.
Maurizia