You #Googled What? RWW Authors reveal! #LoveChatWrite

Romance Writers Weekly is a group of romance authors who have joined forces to help each other in this crazy publishing business. Each Tuesday we host a blog hop where we answer a set of questions or maybe share a piece of flash fiction. RWW also has a Website, Blog, Newsletter, and can be found on Facebook and Twitter (@LoveChatWrite). If you hopped here from Leslie Hachtel’s post, welcome!

This week the lovely Sarah Heggar asked: “What did you Google? The internet is an invaluable research tool for writers, but sometimes we google some searches that would raise more than a few eyebrows if seen out of context. So this week I challenge the Romance Weekly writers to ‘fess up on what the strangest thing they googled was, and then give them a chance to explain why they were grubbing around in that particular search string.”

Because I write 18^th century American historical romance/fiction, I frequently Google for specific details for all aspects of life and war during the American Revolution and the 1700s in general. Most recently, I searched on how a woman would have nursed an infant given the layers of clothing she had to wear for propriety’s sake. To see what I found, visit Maternity Fashions at Colonial Williamsburg. Why did I need to know this detail? Because Evelyn, the heroine in Evelyn’s Promise (coming spring 2016) has an infant and I needed to understand her reality so I could portray it accurately in the story. I mean, how did a woman breastfeed wearing shifts and stays and such? Turns out that they fashioned a gown or two with flaps over the breasts for access by the baby.

I also learned from that search that diapers were called “napkins” or “clouts” and were typically fastened with straight pins. Um… Ouch! In fact, a frequent gift was a pretty pin cushion with pins stuck into it for the new mother’s use. Some women sewed ties onto the diapers to avoid pricking the child. I like that idea much more than pins, I have to say! For my story, I didn’t use this detail but it was interesting to finally locate the information. Who knows when I might need it for another story?

Be sure to hop on over to Collette Cameon’s blog to see what she’s been hunting up on the Internet.

Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts and opinions!

Betty Bolte