I grew up on a potato farm eight miles outside a small town in southeastern Idaho. But I traveled extensively by way of the books I checked out from my modest hometown library. Through them I survived cholera in India with Mary Lennox, painted in grand European salons with Amy March, chased a great whale across the Atlantic with Captain Ahab and climbed Mount Doom with Frodo. Their stories shed light on places very different from the sage-covered plains and snow-capped mountains that surrounded me.

If you’re reading this, I assume you also love to discover new worlds through books.  At Paper Lantern Writers we aim to serve as your travel agents and tour guides by introducing you to less familiar places, people and eras through our own writing and other resources we love.

The five of us all write historical fiction. But each of us puts our own spin on stories of the past.

Ana Brazil grew up reading Little Women, Nancy Drew, The Boxcar Children, and The Secret Language as a child in the Bay Area, devoured Charles Dickens and Marvel Comics (Thor!) as an adolescent in Northern Virginia, and dedicated herself to Jack Finney’s time travels and Dorothy L. Sayers’s mysteries during her high school years in Central Florida. Today she writes historical crime fiction celebrating bodacious American heroines and her WIP is a mystery set in the vaudeville theaters of 1919 San Francisco. 

 C.V. Lee grew up living in the woods about 30 miles from Seattle reading the Little House on the Prairie series, books about Clara Barton, and the whole Tarzan of the Apes series. She also read lots of mysteries: Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and when she finished those, the Hardy Boys series. In her WIP, Roses & Rebels, CV explores how the Wars of the Roses affected the people on the Isle of Jersey in the late 15th century. 

Katie Stine grew up caught between the wide-open spaces of the Midwest and suburban California, with two library cards and a backpack full of reading material; whether it was Encyclopedia Brown mysteries or VC Andrews, the written word always kept her entertained. She tackles matters of the heart in her award-winning pugilist Regency Romances—look for A Lady’s Revenge to be released in February 2020 and The Boxer and The Blacksmith in late 2020.

Linda Ulleseit grew up reading Nancy Drew, Bobbsey Twins, and fantasy series by Lloyd Alexander and C.S. Lewis. She read a half dozen library books a week nestled in the treehouse her father built in the almond tree in their backyard in Saratoga, California. She has written novels set in Wales and early California. Her new novel, The Aloha Spirit, is set in Territorial Hawaii and will also be released in August 2020.

As for me, I’ve been a journalist for many years.  But I just completed my first novel, The Casket Maker’s Other Wife, a story about the second wife in a polygamous marriage. The novel is set in 19th century Switzerland and the American West—including that same part of southeastern Idaho where library books introduced me to the rest of the world. 

Researching our own books has taken us many places and taught us much. We hope to cast light on worlds you’ve yet to see. We can’t wait to share the journey with you.

Look for bi-weekly posts on historical topics and our own writing practices at paperlanternwriters.com. Be sure to “like” our Facebook page, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram. We promise to entertain and enlighten.