Christina here. This past weekend Wench Nicola and I have been attending the UK’s Romantic Novelists’ Association’s annual conference. It was held in Telford this year and the day before we took part in a special meet-the-author event at the local library. There were twelve of us, all authors of historical romance, fantasy, timeslip, time travel, sagas or alternative history stories. And some of us decided to attend the event dressed in a costume befitting the historical eras we were writing about to make it more fun. For me that meant a Viking outfit of course, and I’d made part of it myself.
As a little girl, I loved to play dress-up and I still do. If anyone says they’re having a masquerade or costume party of any kind, I’m in. So whenever there is a chance to dress up in historical costume to do with my books, I get very excited. During the pandemic I decided to put together a Viking outfit on the off-chance I would ever get to do author events again and I’m very glad now that I did. I could have taken the easy way out and just bought one online, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, I started to look at how I could do some of it myself. It was great research, if nothing else, as some of my heroines have to make their own clothes.