It's the most fantastic surprise and a watershed moment in a long journey. It's a real pleasure to relate my heroine's incredible story. It's reassuring to know that I'm not alone in my admiration for her. By bringing such a significant, yet previously unexplored character to life and to the attention of the public, I am living a writer's dream.
The fact that I've been nominated for such a prestigious award only adds to that. I strive to offer my readers my absolute best, scene by scene and book by book, just as they do for me. We're not talking about money here; we're talking about something far more valuable: their time, interest, and attention.
The question of whether or not history is a science appears to be as pertinent as ever. What fascinates me about history is everything that separates it from being scientific, quantifiable by laws, and repeatable. Tsarina could never be a biography since history is essentially human, and emotions affected the world – which is also why Tsarina needed the expansive canvas that only a novel can provide. Good historical fiction honors this innate humanity, with all of its complexities.
The weekly journey to the library was my refuge during my stressed, lengthy, and lonely teenage years. I swept the shelves clean, sifting through classics like I, Claudius, Desiree, and Sinuhe, the Egyptian. No other genre delivers the triple-E of entertainment, education, and escapism like historical fiction. Science is disarmed when the heart reigns supreme.
Marta's transformation from uneducated, illegitimate serf to the first ever reigning Empress of Russia, which grew from a backward country to a superpower, has captivated me since I first read about her when I was 13 years old while reading a book called Germans and Russians. Author Leo Sievers mapped out the shared millennial history of those two people who appear to be inseparable and have a mutual love-hate relationship. No other two countries have endured as much sorrow and beauty in their formation, while having suffered so much historically and politically.
Her memoirs are the obvious solution. Because this was impossible, I lent her a hand. Her life was defined by contrasts as startling as the Russian psyche, which Churchill defines as "an enigma wrapped in a riddle concealed inside a mystery." Overt animosity towards all things foreign is tempered by unselfish kindness to newcomers; frigid, unending winters – zima – confront the summers' beautiful white nights. I filled in the tantalizing voids in her early life with my imagination.