One of my favorite parts of writing is the research that goes into crafting a great story. When Claire Eliza Bartlett, author of We Rule the Night and the newly released The Winter Duke offered to share what she’s learned, I couldn’t wait to share with all of you! Keep on reading to learn more about some of the historical inspiration behind these two books!

 

What I’ve Learned Writing My Two Books

by Claire Eliza Bartlett

I love taking historical inspiration for my novels, and both my debut, We Rule the Night, and my most recent novel, The Winter Duke, involved some excellent and fun research. As all good novels should! Here are some things I learned while drafting for The Winter Duke:

The Romanov Dynasty began and ended at Ipatiev…but not the same Ipatiev.

In early 1613, a council of noblemen elected Michael Romanov the new tsar of Russia after the death of his predecessor. Now, they had done this without consulting Michael, so once he’d been elected they turned to their second task: actually finding the man (well, boy - he was in his teens). They finally tracked Michael and his mother down at a monastery called Ipatiev, knelt before him, and offered him the crown. Michael refused; his mother wailed at their misfortune. Initially neither of them were keen to take office…perhaps they had some inkling what was in store for the Romanov family?

A little over 300 years later, Nicholas II and his family were imprisoned in Ipatiev house in Yekaterinburg, and executed there in July 1918. History is full of creepy coincidences.

(Learn everything you ever wanted to know about the Romanovs in The Romanovs, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. One of the best histories I’ve had the pleasure of reading.)

The Brideshow was an actual thing

One of the plot points of The Winter Duke is a brideshow, in which potential spouses are paraded before Ekata’s family so that her brother can pick a consort. A couple of Romanov tsars chose their brides via brideshow, though none of them had both girls and boys to choose from, as far as I know. Officially, the tsar chose his own bride from the brideshow. But often meddling family members invented illnesses, questioned virginities or manufactured political disasters to get the groom to change his mind.

Christopher Columbus saw mermaids

Okay, okay. He saw manatees. But I’m always tickled at his disappointment: he declared that the mermaids were “not half as beautiful as they are painted.” People have mistaken dolphins and other marine mammals for mermaids, too, and in designing my own fish people for The Winter Duke’s city Below, I read up on what the so-called experts might say on mermaid anatomy. I may have gone a little more traditional, but maybe the manatee-people will show up in my next book.

 

Now, I also did a lot of research for my WWII-based feminist fantasy, We Rule the Night. I just want to share a couple of ridiculous fun facts that I discovered:

The Polikarpov PO-2 is the only biplane credited with a jet kill

The Night Witches were a group of women aviators who were tasked with bombing German frontlines at night during WWII. What did they use for this job? The Polikarpov PO-2, a biplane used to fertilize crops. Since it’s supposed to be used in agriculture, the Polikarpov flies low and slow - in fact, its top speed is about 94 miles per hour (by contrast, the German Messerchmidt BF-109, the popular plane among the German air force at the time, had a top speed of 250 miles per hour).

The Polikarpov PO-2 was also flown a little during the Korean war, and it was during a skirmish here that a Lockheed Starfire spotted the little plane and decided to take it down. However, the jet was so fast and the Polikarpov was so slow that the Lokheed’s pilot couldn’t actually shoot the thing. When he slowed down enough to catch it, his engine stalled, and he fell out of the sky.

Imagine being so incompetent you run full circle, right back around to being competent!

A woman drove a tank called “Fighting Girlfriend.”

Mariya Oktyabrskaya lost her husband to the enemy in 1941. When the news finally reached her, she was so infuriated that she sold everything she had to fund a tank for the Red Army. Then she wrote to the top brass, asking if she could be the one to drive it! They said yes, because how could they not, and Mariya went to the front. She called her tank “Fighting Girlfriend,” and was promoted to the rank of sergeant before she was killed in action.

 

One of the greatest pleasures of writing a book is learning something weird and new! Thanks for having me on the blog, and I hope you all enjoy The Winter Duke!

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About the Book

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An enchanted tale of intrigue where a duke's daughter is the only survivor of a magical curse.

When Ekata's brother is finally named heir, there will be nothing to keep her at home in Kylma Above with her murderous family. Not her books or science experiments, not her family's icy castle atop a frozen lake, not even the tantalizingly close Kylma Below, a mesmerizing underwater kingdom that provides her family with magic. But just as escape is within reach, her parents and twelve siblings fall under a strange sleeping sickness.

In the space of a single night, Ekata inherits the title of duke, her brother's warrior bride, and ever-encroaching challengers from without—and within—her own ministry. Nothing has prepared Ekata for diplomacy, for war, for love...or for a crown she has never wanted. If Kylma Above is to survive, Ekata must seize her family's power. And if Ekata is to survive, she must quickly decide how she will wield it.

Part Sleeping Beauty, part Anastasia, with a thrilling political mystery, The Winter Duke is a spellbinding story about choosing what's right in the face of danger.

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