Susanna Kearsley

Brantford was the fixed point of my universe, growing up. Both sets of grandparents lived there, with various cousins and uncles and aunts, and no matter how far we'd moved off, we came back there for regular visits. In a way no other houses have ever been, my grandparents' houses were 'home,' and the sale of the last of those houses was hard.

In my book 'The Winter Sea,' set north of Aberdeen, I couldn't just ignore the fact some people there - especially the people in the past - would speak the Doric.

People didn't just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn't hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit's incomplete.

I grew up in a very small town where nearly everyone knew each other, and odds were that whatever you said about a person would make it back to them by nightfall - something incomers learned, to their frequent embarrassment.

One of the more interesting challenges I face when doing research for my novels is to trace the lives of women who are vital to the narrative and try my best to give them back their voices.

When you say that you write romantic fiction, there are a lot of people who have an image in their mind of the 'bodice ripper.' It's the one term that most romantic fiction writers absolutely hate because it has no bearing on what people are writing.

As a former waitress myself, I know firsthand how a simple smile from someone can improve your day and how a single harsh word can destroy it. Being courteous and thoughtful costs you nothing and can sometimes pay you dividends in unexpected ways.

Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.

Even a writer like me, who, in 'The Firebird,' is telling the story of people who've been dead for nearly three centuries, needs to take care. Those people may not be around any longer to tell me what actually happened, but neither are they able to defend themselves against unjust portrayals.

After the loss of my sister - my darkest time - I tried to think of the beauty she'd brought to this world and the lives she had touched and the love she had left behind.

Romantic fiction, in the broader sense, can be any novel that has a love story somewhere in it. It can be a mystery or a historical novel, as long as it has this very strong romantic thread running through it.

In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.