Have you done/are you doing your research on the period? I am. My thing is a humorous adventure sent in late sixteenth century Europe and, especially, England. John Dee, Walsingham, Leicester, Elizabeth of course, all take their lumps from me and my annoying but adorable protagonist.

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If anyone out there is as into the period as I am, I'd love to bounce ideas off your head, and I'd be happy to do the same for you. I've been reading heavily on those times for twenty years. (That's how long I've been working on this story.) How many biographies of Dudley does anyone need? I've got about a dozen. And, multiples for all the marvelous scoundrels of the period.

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Anyone with knowledge of ship design of that era would be pure gold for me. Below decks layouts are damn hard to come by. The early science is also on my radar. My guy Sly is working on his own whacko theory of gravity, fifty years before Newton. I'll invent something wonderful sooner or later. I may take my cue from a book I scavenged from work, called (I think, don't have it at hand just now) Outsider Physics. Full of weird stuff. Very inspiring. Just my speed.

--edited by Mimi Speike on 9/28/2013, 9:41 AM--

Hi, Mimi,

Yes, I am a Tudor fanatic generally and write just about everything in the period. Kick over some of your ideas and I would be happy to help you out. I was a medieval/renaissance history major and specialize in that period for most of my novels - although I remain a lawyer by profession. My latest novel is set in the modern era but reverts back to the middle Tudor era of Henry VIII. Let me know what I can do to assist.

Man! I am so excited to hear from you! I'm trying to connect with you and can't figure out how to do it. Can you connect with me? This site has not been working properly all afternoon. I've been unable to reply until now, no reply box at all to hit. It finally just reappeared.

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My comic epic is a picaresque novel - episodic - with the big central adventure being the assassination attempt on Elizabeth by Leicester. Robert Dudley is fed up with being played with like a yo-yo. The timeline is crucial, since, denied one route to the throne, he seizes on the idea of a marriage to Mary Queen of Scots. It's, as I said, a screwball plot, I can get away with a certain amount of iffy stuff, but I'd like it to be not too far from (remote, sure) possibility. My hero is one Sylvester Boots, an English patriot, a great admirer of his queen, and a highly accomplished, smart-mouth talking cat. So you can see that I feel I have a certain amount of leeway.

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The version of Sly that I have up now is not the latest, and it also doesn't go into the assassination rigmarole which will be in book two. In book one I'm setting things up and having a great deal of fun, in the spirit of picaresque. (I only recently discovered that concept/term, which describes my mish-mash to a T.) I'll have the new version up in a month or two, or I can email you my latest doc/pdf if and when you have time to look at it. I would be more than happy to read anything of yours, especially if it deals with the Elizabethan period. 

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Or, I can simply outline problem areas and ask specific questions that nag at me. The biggie is: wife aside (he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it) do you know of any reason why it would not have been possible for the son of his father, a megalomaniac with endless self-confidence, and half convinced that the act was nearly a patriotic duty, to seriously consider a regicide? Logistics, anything? He plans to lure Elizabeth to a repeat gala at Kenilworth of the blow-out he threw her ten years earlier, with the idea that no one could suspect that he would be behind an attempt on his own turf.  And that his snatch of the crown matrimonial would be accepted, he being the least horrific of many potential disastrous marriage scenarios.

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I have him importing an assassin/dupe/novice priest from the insurrectionist seminaries in France. I had this section mostly written, but my idea has changed radically. John Dee will now be heavily involved. The meeting of two scientifically-inclined minds, Dee and Sly, is too good to resist. I'm now devouring a bio of Nostradamus, not the fluff we usually see but a serious examination of his work and times, and I see many things that I believe will transport over to Dee very nicely. After I finish, I will immediately jump back on my bios of Dee. I have Dudley on an errand in Northern France in the early summer of 1586. I haven’t got a firm timeline together. Was he in the Netherlands at the time, or where exactly, etc. Could he have slipped into France for a day or two?

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Dudley's psychology, what I know of it, fits my needs. And the attempt comes to naught, obviously. I want to know if I'm making some glaring mistake that those familiar with that court will scoff at. I have a lot of fractured history (shades of Sherman and Mr. Peabody!) woven in and, aside from a wise-cracking cat, and Elizabeth's mini-me, whom Sly falls in love with, her beloved pet monkey, dressed in finery to rival her own, I'm trying to make my portrayals semi-believable.

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I am just thrilled to meet you!

--edited by Mimi Speike on 10/5/2014, 3:55 PM--

So glad that you two have discovered this common interest!

Lisa, your book sounds incredibly intriguing.Will you be posting it (or an excerpt of the book) on Book Country?

I love Henry VIII--or rather, I love reading about his wives. My favorite is Anne Boleyn, of course, but I also love Anne of Cleves.