Bringing History to Life by Merry Farmer
Enjoy this guest post from historical romance novelist, Merry Farmer.
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Somewhere around my senior year of high school, after years of memorizing names and dates, it dawned on me that history actually happened. Hard to believe, I know. All those pictures in history books are so static, so distant. And none of it seems particularly interesting, right?
It was halfway through a “current events” history class, when our teacher divided the class into newly independent post-Soviet countries and told us to come up with a form of government for our new country, that I realized all that stuff, all those names and dates and stilted pictures with bad perspective, really happened. I was elected the leader of my group’s country, and after no one could agree on anything I declared myself dictator and did whatever I wanted. The teacher promptly informed me that I had just been assassinated by the head of my military. I was irate. It was all very real.
Then, during the summer after high school, I got a job as an actor at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. Now it was my job to pretend to be a medieval peasant. I had to convince not only the patrons of the faire that it was all real, I had to buy into it myself. And you know what? It was easy.
I’ve always loved history. I could never understand when people complained about it being nothing but boring names and dates. That’s how it was presented in school, true, but it only took a little digging to bring the whole thing to life. The best place to do that digging is through literature. One of the best college history classes I had, Early Modern Europe, involved us reading books written in the time period we were studying. What textbooks can only talk about, historical literature gives life and color to.
It’s no surprise, then, that I write historical romance. I consider it my mission to convey my love of the past to people who mistakenly think it’s boring. This mission is the reason why I deliberately wrote my Noble Hearts series of medieval romance with anachronistic language, modern-feeling characters, and passions that feel as real today as they did in 12th century England. Because to the people living in those times it was all very modern.
The Courageous Heart is a story of betrayal and forgiveness, of selfishness and love. It embodies the very modern idea that when we’ve been hurt by someone we love we make horrible decisions. Those decisions destroy lives. And those lives have to be rebuilt again. The Courageous Heart is a modern story of redemption set against what might at first feel like an unfamiliar backdrop. Did medieval people really jilt their lovers? Were people truly thrown into situations where they had to trust someone they knew had hurt them before? Were the choices faced a thousand years ago as painful as the ones we face today? Of course they were!
Betrayal and redemption are not historical concepts. They’re not modern concepts. They are concepts that transcend all of time. They are human concepts. When I set out to write The Courageous Heart, and the rest of the Noble Hearts stories, I wanted to show that it doesn’t matter what age you live in, love will find a way. Sometimes you need a sword to fight for what you know is right and sometimes all you need is a cell phone.
History is not dull or dry. It is full of all the passion and heroism of the stories we hear on the news every day. Politics were just as vicious back then and love was just as tender. I hope that as you read the Noble Hearts series you get a sense of that.
More books by Merry:
Find out more about Merry here:
Website: http://merryfarmer.net
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MerryFarmer20
Facebook: www.facebook.com/merryfarmerauthor
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Merry Farmer is an award-winning novelist who lives in suburban Philadelphia with her two cats, Butterfly and Torpedo. She has been writing since she was ten years old and realized one day that she didn’t have to wait for the teacher to assign a creative writing project to write something. It was the best day of her life. She then went on to earn not one but two degrees in History so that she would always having something to write about. Today she is a giant History nerd and a hopeless romantic waiting for her own love story to start. Her first book, The Loyal Heart, is a swashbuckling Medieval Historical Romance involving a love triangle that will keep you guessing. Both The Loyal Heart and its sequels, The Faithful Heart and The Courageous Heart, are available wherever eBooks are sold. She has also begun a new Western Historical Romance series set in Montana in 1895. The first of that series, Our Little Secrets, is now available. The second, Fool for Love, will be released in early 2013. Merry is also passionate about blogging, knitting, and cricket and is working towards becoming an internationally certified cricket scorer.
