We're here!

by Mary Hoffman

Welcome to the brand new History Girls blog! There are 28 of us who plan to put up a new personal post every day, leaving a few spaces at the end of the month for reviews, interviews, guest blogs and competitions to win books by our members.

You can see who we all are by clicking the About Us header above and take a look at our most recent historical fiction - and us - in the slide-shows on the right. Some of us write entirely for Young Adults or younger readers; some for adults and some do both. Some write an interesting sub-genre of fantasy history and you'll be hearing more about that.

There's safety in numbers and we aren't the only writers contributing to joint blogs. There are Crime Central  and Girls Heart Books - both spin-offs from the Awfully Big Blog Adventure (ABBA), started by Anne Cassidy, and many others. It's a wonderful way to celebrate writing within a specific genre and to share information and ideas with each other and with readers.

You have some real treats coming up this month from posts about flying in the theatre to horses in history and lots about objects or places or people that have inspired whole books by our contributors.

There was a time when historical fiction was enormously popular and fashionable, in the days of Anya Seton, Mary Renault and Georgette Heyer, and then it became an absolute no-no with most publishers. But in the year that Hilary Mantel won the Booker prize with the wonderful Wolf Hall, the majority of the books on the shortlist were about periods well before the present day.

When does historical fiction begin? World War Two? 35 years ago? A generation in the past? These have all been offered as definitions. I know I found 1980 harder to write about than 1208, because there are people alive who remember it and can write in to correct you if you've made an error about, say, what month a particular book was published in that year.

And then there is Anthony Beevor who possibly thinks we shouldn't be doing it at all. We'll return to these ideas many times in the months to come, I suspect. Meanwhile, enjoy the blog.

We've had a lot of support and help setting up the blog so thanks to Damian Harvey, Elen Caldecott, Romy Berlin, Anne Rooney and all our wonderful contributors.

And don't forget to Follow us here and on Twitter (@history_girls) and on Facebook (The History Girls). And do please comment; we want to know what you are interested in reading about and what you think of our blog.