I live in two centuries. That’s not a turn of phrase. It’s a reality for me.

A good working day sends me back and forth across 250 years more than once. I spend an afternoon in Birmingham in 1776, engrossed in Matthew Boulton’s household, wondering what they spent on candles and what was on the dinner menu. I feel how slowly the world moved, when the fastest communication between two people was limited by rutted roads.

Then the present calls me back, and I return to a Chicago condo, at my desk with a list of things I want to get done before dinner.

Most historical novelists will tell you some version of this. You go where the book is. What surprised me is how physical the crossing feels and how the two eras begin to comment on each other once you leave the door between them open.

I catch myself measuring one age against the other in small involuntary ways. My phone pings with a message that expects an answer within the hour, and part of me is still in the century where replies were measured in days or weeks. I read about Boulton carrying enormous debt for years on the bet that James Watt’s engines would eventually run, and I look at the present with billions of dollars committed to AI infrastructure playing out in global financial markets.

Exploring that double vision is one of the big reasons I took on this book. It’s also, I’ve learned, a thing a person can lose. Over the last month, the door to 1776 has stayed almost completely shut.

It wasn’t the book’s fault, and it wasn’t a crisis. A website needed rebuilding, and daily life brought its usual mix of demands. Day after day, I stayed on this side of the door, busy and useful and entirely in the present. And 1776 went on without me.

What I hadn’t expected was missing it the way you miss a place. It’s not the way you feel guilty about a chore left undone. I’ve skipped plenty of tasks in my life with no regrets. This was different.

Somewhere over the last year, Birmingham stopped being a topic I’m researching and became a place I live. And a month away from a place you love leaves a specific ache.

I’m building a novel, in the most creative way I know, to carry an 18th-century story to readers. I’m inventing plot lines, character flaws, and moments of crisis and resolution. My fictional story is the bridge across 250 years, guiding and entertaining people living through technological upheavals of their own.

When I finally sat down with the book again this week, the return was nothing dramatic. The world was where I left it. Elizabeth is still fourteen, watching a room full of clever men who remain blind to her gifts.

What the month away taught me was not about discipline or lost time. It’s that I have somewhere else to live, and I’d forgotten how much I need to spend part of each day there.

So I’m back to commuting. Mornings in 2026, afternoons and evenings in 1776. And I celebrate the strange good fortune of a life that can run on both clocks at once.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

Do you have a place or a time you disappear into, one that stops feeling like a subject and starts feeling like an address? I’d love to know where you go. Jot a few words in the comments.

The past ten days, I’ve been reading other people’s mail.

It arrived via interlibrary loan, in a black cloth-covered volume with the borrowing stickers still on the spine: The Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin.

Darwin was a physician, a poet, the grandfather of Charles, and a founding member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, the circle of inventors and manufacturers at the heart of the novel I’m writing.

I’ve spent hours sprawled on my living room couch with this book, absorbed in conversations that took place two and a half centuries ago.

One letter from the spring of 1778 made me laugh out loud. Darwin traveled widely in his practice, and several patients kept him from a Lunar Society meeting at Boulton’s home at Soho, outside Birmingham. Here is the first half of his letter of apology, complete with his spelling and punctuation:

5 April 1778

Dear Boulton

I am sorry the infernal Divinities, who visit mankind with diseases, and are therefore at perpetual war with Doctors, should have prevented my seeing all you great Men at Soho today — Lord! what inventions, what wit, what rhetoric, metaphysical, mechanical and pyrotecnical will be on the wing, bandy’d like a shuttlecock from one to another of your troop of philosophers! while poor I, I by myself I, imprison’d in a post chaise, am joggled, and jostled, and bump’d and bruised along the King’s high road, to make war upon a pox or a fever!1

This letter has been frequently reproduced because it gives one of the few descriptions of what a Lunar Society meeting was like. Read it slowly and the details give things away.

For example, “pyrotecnical” hints that demonstrations at the meetings sometimes involved fire. The shuttlecock imagery lets us know that ideas were batted back and forth for the joy of the exchange. “Philosophers” is what these men called themselves because the word scientist hadn’t been invented yet.

Darwin’s self-pity is earned, but also pure theatre. There he was, bumping along rutted Midlands roads toward patients with a pox or fever, choosing their bedsides instead of the most stimulating gathering in the region.

Other letters made me laugh for different reasons. Darwin recommended William Withering to take up the Birmingham practice of his late friend, Dr. Small, but later they became rivals. A feud comes through in letters across many years.

After spending time with these letters, I realized how often the achievements of great historical figures turn into idealized abstractions, statues in marble. Their mail turns them back into humans.

Amid the laughter, there was also frustration. I long to see the other half of the conversations. Did Boulton write back, and what did he say? Mostly, we cannot know. Darwin’s letters survived because Boulton kept them. But few of Boulton’s own letters from these years were kept at all.

The archive hands you one side of a correspondence, but forces you to imagine the rest. This becomes either a historian’s frustration or a novelist’s invitation, depending on the day.

I must admit the whole investigation feels like snooping. But that is the strange privilege of doing historical research 250 years downstream. I get to eavesdrop on some of the greatest thinkers of the era who had no idea that anyone would ever listen. And Darwin in his letters is funnier and vainer and warmer than any historical account can fully capture.

The book has now been returned, heading back to the shelves of a nearby university library. The scholar who assembled it, Desmond King-Hele, spent years transcribing and annotating Darwin’s letters so that readers like me could sprawl on a couch with them. I wanted to write him a letter of thanks, but he is gone now. So that correspondence stays one-sided, too. I hope whoever borrows the book next laughs in the same places.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,
~ Terri

Long before I wrote a word about Birmingham, I cut mats.

No, not the doormat kind. These mats are the paperboard window that sits between a picture and its frame, cut at a bevel so the inner edge catches the light. If you’ve never done it, it sounds like the smallest task in the world. Choose a color, cut a rectangle, done.

But it’s not small. The color of the mat decides how a viewer reads the picture. A warm cream can heighten the emotion of an image, almost imperceptibly. A cool grey puts a chill in the same image and can make it feel distant. For my art school pen-and-ink drawings, I always chose a stark white or jet black mat to set off the line texture.

If you cut the mat border too narrow, the mat looks weak. Cut it too wide, and the mat overpowers the work. In every case, nothing in the actual work changed. But everything about how it’s presented did.

These days, I’m writing a historical novel set in Birmingham in 1776, in the workshops and households of the Lunar Society. These men were the inventors and manufacturers building the Industrial Revolution before anyone knew it would work. My protagonist is a 14-year-old girl named Elizabeth Thorne.

Cutting mats in art school taught me something I’ve carried into every kind of work since. Presentation is not a coat you slap on afterward.

I learned this first in the arts, where a frame and the light can say so much. Later I put it to work for decades in publishing and business, where one visual choice can tell you what a company thinks of itself, or who the person behind a small venture really is, before a word is spoken.

So now at my desk, I am again focusing on framing and details. The wide view of 1776 is the easy part. The smoke, the hammering, the wagons loaded with buckles and buttons. I can easily paint the late 18th-century town in words. What stops me is smaller and harder. For example, it’s the hem length of Elizabeth’s dress, its fabric, or its texture.

Elizabeth is a ward, which means she’s not a daughter, and not a servant either. She lives in the house of a wealthy manufacturer and belongs to no clear rank inside it. In 1776 her clothing says exactly that, down to the fabric and the cut, to anyone who knows how to look. Too fine, and she is claiming a place that is not hers, a dangerous thing for a girl in her position. Too plain, and she blends in with the furniture.

Elizabeth’s whole situation, the thing that creates the book’s truth, sits in a decision about wool and linen that a reader will feel, even though they may not register it.

That is the color of the mat. Get it right, and the reader believes the room, the house, the century, the girl, without noticing why. Get it wrong, and no amount of coal smoke will save the scene.

There’s also a private joke in all this that keeps me company as I write. The way I’ve read the world for decades, in its surfaces and details, is the way Elizabeth reads hers. She notices the width of a border, the color of a thing, what a detail is telling her that no one said aloud. It seems I’ve been preparing to tell her story my whole life.

I still think about mats. Those choices were never insignificant. They only looked small to people who had not learned what they carried. Neither are the details of a 14-year-old’s dress.

I aim to get them right.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,
~Terri

For 30 years, I sat across from people with a business idea. You could see the lit-up certainty that they were holding something rare.

Part of my job was to tell them, as kindly as I could, that their idea was the cheapest thing on the table.

Not worthless. But cheap, in the sense that everyone has them and having one costs nothing. What is expensive is what you build around it. In business, that usually meant a business model: who it is for, whether they will buy it, and how it turns into consistent ongoing revenue.

An idea is a possibility. A business model is an engine for commerce. Founders spend whole careers learning to tell the two apart.

I believe this completely. I’ve created frameworks for it and taught MBA classes on it. Then I sat down to write fiction and found the same problem waiting for me.

New here? This is a behind-the-scenes look at a historical novel I’m writing, set in 1776 England, in the home of the manufacturer Matthew Boulton and his circle of inventors, the Lunar Society.

I had an idea for this book, and I was proud of it: a girl, invisible the way girls were then, growing up at the edges of the most inventive rooms in England. Atmospheric. I could describe it over coffee and watch people lean in.

But that explanation is only a place to stand, I realized. In fiction, the word for what you build around it is a premise, and a test I picked up from literary agent Jessica Berg keeps it simple.

An idea is a what if. A premise is a person standing in trouble: a want, an obstacle, a cost. A girl in a famous room is not yet a premise. It’s a photograph.

So I put my own work on the table and looked hard. Structurally it held. But the few sentences I would hand an agent only described the doorway. The engine underneath was still hidden.

Fixing that took five drafts (and I know I’m not done yet). In revising, I caught a factual slip that would have promised a different book. I discovered, embarrassingly late, that my description never once said my protagonist is a girl, which is half of why her story is dangerous at all.

The line that survived every cut is this: the proof of her genius is also the proof of a crime. That’s not a setting. It’s a premise. You can feel it wanting to turn.

***

Here’s why this stumble delights me rather than embarrasses me: it’s the central lesson of the period I write about.

James Watt had the idea, a condenser to make the steam engine efficient, and it sat idle for years. It took Matthew Boulton to build the business model around it: the factory, the capital, the nerve to carry the debt until the thing ran. One man’s idea. Another man’s model. Much of the industrial revolution sits in that gap.

Which brings me back to Elizabeth, my 14-year-old sitting in Boulton’s home. For a while she was my idea, my lovely photograph. Now she is becoming my premise: not a girl from a famous house, but a girl whose creative gift is also what could destroy her.

So I’ll ask you what I keep asking myself. Whatever you are building, a company or a book or a project you have watched people lean toward: Do you have an idea, or do you have the engine that makes it run?

They’re not the same. I’ve spent a career examining the difference, and I’m still learning to tell them apart.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

PS: When has an idea you loved turned out to be only a setting? I’d love to know. Hit reply, or leave a comment.

The Tour de France started this week, and it got me thinking about drafting.

If you’ve watched even 10 minutes of this historic cycling race, you’ve seen it happen. A rider tucks in close behind another and lets the leader deflect the wind, which saves the trailing rider up to 40% of his effort.

These are fierce individual competitors, and the smart ones know exactly when to shelter behind a rival and when to take their own turn at the front.

This year’s Tour opened with a team time trial, the first time it has done so since 1971. It’s a masterclass in drafting. Each team rides in one tight line, with each rider pulling hard at the front, then sliding back to recover in the slipstream. Together they move faster than any of them could alone.

Then there’s the other kind of drafting, the kind I am about to spend most of the coming months doing.

Drafting a novel is the exact reverse. There’s no slipstream. No one rides ahead to deflect the wind so I can rest, and no teammate rotates through to take a pull while I catch my breath.

It’s all front, all wind, all the time. It’s the most exposed work I know, and it’s the part of this whole project I’ve been building toward for months.

The book outline is essentially drawn. It keeps shifting as I go, the way outlines do, but the shape is there. Which means the book now demands the one thing it needs most: hours. Real ones. So that’s what I’m going to give it.

Here’s what that means for this newsletter. The Lunar Society Letter moves to every other Tuesday, starting now.

You signed up to watch me write this book. The most honest way I can keep that promise is to go and write it. Fewer letters, more novel. That’s not a retreat from the premise. It is the premise.

There’s also one last meaning of the word, the oldest one, I want to share with you. And, of course, it sits at the center of the story I’m telling.

Long before drafting was about bicycles or manuscripts, a draft was a load pulled by men or animals. Draft horses were a central part of my novel’s 18th-century world. Matthew Boulton and James Watt spent their lives trying to overcome the limits of the draft horse, to trade animal muscle for steam.

James Watt coined the term horsepower so a buyer could measure the steam engine’s output against the animal it was built to replace. The men at the heart of my story were, in the most literal way, working to put drafting out of business.

So drafting has followed me around all week. On the bike, it means shelter. At my desk, it means no shelter at all. And in 1776, it meant the very thing my characters were racing to leave behind. Three meanings, one word, and every one of them comes down to who pulls the weight, and how.

For the next stretch, the answer is me. See you in two weeks.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

P.S. If you know someone who would enjoy watching a book get written, this is a good week to forward this along. I’m a few readers short of 100, and crossing that line on my way into drafting season would be a fine send-off.

I’ve been deep in research, chasing small facts about Matthew Boulton’s 18th-century home, Soho House. Last week, I learned that Boulton named his home after the Staffordshire heath it stood on.

The heath, the story goes, took its name from a sign on a nearby inn with a huntsman shouting “So ho!” It’s a call used for centuries across England, what you shout the instant you see something, before the pack has seen anything at all.

That struck me, and the word Soho would not leave me alone. Because it’s been in my life four times now, and I’d never once stopped to notice.

There is Boulton’s Soho, the one I am writing a world around. There is Soho in London, a mile of theaters and pubs and narrow streets, in the city that has called me back for forty years. There is SoHo in New York City, filled with cast-iron buildings that now house trendy retail, where I spent long stretches during my doctoral years at NYU. And there is the SOHO Summit, an executive conference I produced nearly thirty years ago for leaders who wanted to reach a market the business world hadn’t noticed yet.

Four Sohos. I filed them as a charming coincidence, the way you do. But when I later lined them up, they split cleanly in two.

Two of them are that ancient cry. I discovered that London sits on old royal hunting grounds, and the name was already in use there in the 1630s, the same “So ho!” a huntsman would shout over a field. Boulton’s Soho likely came from the same call.

The other two are not cries at all. They’re acronyms, both young, both invented in living memory. SoHo in New York is South of Houston Street, an urban planner’s shorthand from the 1960s. My SOHO Summit focused on the ecosystem of Small Office/Home Office workers.

Two short syllables collapsed into one word, refilled in each era with whatever it happened to be building.

And then I understood why the word had been following me, because I finally heard what it actually says.

“So ho!“ means I see it. I see it before the rest of you do.

That’s the cry of the person at the edge of the field who has spotted the thing everyone is about to chase. And it is the work of much of my early career. I spent years describing a way of working that I could see plainly and almost no one else could: people running entire businesses solo, from spare rooms and kitchen tables, answerable to no boss. I championed it, wrote books about it, and ran summits on it. The world caught up eventually, and working solo is now an intentional choice for millions.

But that’s only half the meaning.

“So ho!” was never a boast. The huntsman doesn’t shout to prove he sees the hare first. He shouts so the whole field will turn and look. The word is saying: There. Look. Come. It’s a sighting handed to everyone within earshot.

Which leads me to think about my past work differently. Yes, it was about being early. But it was also about pointing toward people who were already there, already working independently, yet unseen.

So I return to my current project and to the fictional girl I’m bringing to life. She’s fourteen, with no money and no name, living in Boulton’s grand Soho House as a ward. Her one gift is that she sees. She watches a pattern assemble itself in a room full of clever and driven men, something not one of them has noticed yet, and she has no power to say so out loud.

That’s the cry she can’t make. So I want to make it for her. There. Look. Come.

A girl is standing at the edge of the field with the hare in plain view. She may not look like much of an inventor, but she, too, is on the hunt and has discoveries to share.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

I’d love to know: Is there a word that keeps turning up in your life, refusing to be ignored?

Hit reply, or leave a comment.

Wedgwood numbered every experiment. Priestley trusted his luck.

When Josiah Wedgwood set out to perfect a new clay body, he didn’t guess. He measured, mixed, numbered, fired, and recorded each trial. His road to jasperware, the stoneware with pale hues and a matte surface that became synonymous with his brand, ran through nearly 3,000 documented tests. He knew where he was going, and he kept the records (as shown above).1

Joseph Priestley worked the opposite way. He poked at the world, followed one odd result to the next, and was the first to admit how much he owed to accident. The man who isolated oxygen and invented seltzer was, by his own account, often surprised by what he found. He didn’t map the route. He wandered and paid attention.

Both men remade the world. They simply took opposite roads to get there.

Writers have names for those roads, and lately I’ve been working out which one is mine.

In the writing world, the two camps are plotters and pantsers. A plotter outlines first, sometimes chapter by chapter, before writing a word. A pantser flies by the seat of their pants, starts with a character or a moment, and discovers the story as they write.

Each road has its recognized champions. Stephen King is a famous pantser. He says an outline kills the surprise. Ken Follett is his opposite. He builds an outline that runs to dozens of pages and organizes the journey before he writes a line of prose. Fine books come from both authors, which is the first clue that neither road is the better choice.

If you don’t write novels, stay with me, because this split is not really about writing.

It’s about how a person meets anything new and uncertain. Some people set off to see what happens and trust the path to appear underfoot. Others step back, study the terrain, and chart a course before they commit their time. You’ve likely worked with both types. You may even have one in your daily life.

I spent 30 years on the strategy side of this, advising companies on innovation and growth. I sat in many rooms where the tension played out in real time. The founder who wanted to charge the hill on instinct, and the board that wanted the strategy first.

I was nearly always the one reaching for at least a sketch of a map. Show me the terrain. I like to know where I’m going.

But I’m not a pure planner either, and that’s what keeps it interesting. There’s a strong Activator (StrengthsFinder) part of me that can’t bear to plan forever. At some point, the meeting has to end and the thing has to get built. My whole working life has been a negotiation between those two impulses: let’s have a direction, and let’s get going.

So my instinct for this book project is clear. Yes, I’m a planner. All five of my nonfiction books began with an outline, although some were pretty rough. And this project requires planning, because the history is real. Boulton, Watt, and Wedgwood already lived their lives in a fixed order. I can’t change the dates. What I invent is the girl who moves through them.

There’s a pragmatic reason, too. At this stage in my career, I’d rather not spend eight or more months discovering my way into a draft and reach the end to find it was not the book I wanted to write. I want to know the shape, even though hazy, before I commit to the year.

Yet every writer who has outlined will tell you the same thing. The story will argue back. Characters will refuse their assignments. A scene you planned for chapter 12 insists on being chapter 7. I expect that, and I welcome it. The outline is not a cage, it’s a direction.

Which brings me back to Matthew Boulton, the man at the center of my story. He built Soho as one organized operation, then bet his fortune on engines that did not yet run. He raised the money, pushed a perfectionist Watt to stop refining and start selling, and carried the debt for years before any of it paid off. A direction, and then the nerve to go. That’s the example I’m holding as inspiration.

My goal for the next few weeks is an initial chapter outline. Not a blueprint. A sketch of the route, enough that I can start walking and know roughly where the road bends.

So I ask you what I keep asking myself: When you take on something new and challenging, do you map it first, or do you start walking and find out? Share your choice in the comments. I’d really love to know which one you are.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

Almost everyone who has heard of the Lunar Society remembers the same lovely detail. They met on the Monday nearest the full moon, so the extra light would guide them home along dark and rutted roads. It explains the name and flatters the men in a single stroke. A circle of brilliant minds, organized around the sky.

It’s also only half true.

I believed the tidy version myself for years. Then I went looking for its source, and the truth was sitting on page 153 of a journal article from 1966.

Let’s start with the day. The Society didn’t originally meet on Mondays. After William Small died in 1775 and the friends decided to put themselves on a firmer footing, they agreed to meet on the Sunday nearest the full moon, at Boulton’s house on Handsworth Heath. The first such gathering fell on Sunday, 31 December 1775. The Monday we all picture came five years later, and it came for two reasons at once.

In late 1780, Joseph Priestley settled in Birmingham and joined the circle. Priestley was a minister of the New Meeting, and his Sundays belonged to his congregation. At the same time, the Lunar friends had grown tired of depending on Boulton, whose engine business kept him away so often that meetings withered whenever he traveled.

One change fixed both problems. The gathering moved to the Monday nearest the full moon and began rotating among the members’ own homes instead of waiting on Boulton at Soho. The day the whole world now associates with the Lunar Society was a shift shaped by one man’s pulpit and another man’s absences.

Then there is how often they met, which is the part the name oversells. The Society meant to meet monthly. In practice, it seldom came close. No secretary kept minutes, no register survives, no constitution was ever written down, so we know the rhythm only because historian Peter Jones rebuilt the calendar from passing mentions in letters. The busiest year he could find, 1776, holds about seven gatherings, not twelve, and the years after thinned out further, running, in historian Robert Schofield’s words, “from regular, to infrequent, to occasional.”1 Named for a monthly moon, the Lunar Society met when life allowed.

This is the part I keep marveling about. The Society had a name its members were proud of, a ritual we still accept, an identity that outlasted every one of them. Yet it had no fixed day until a newcomer rearranged it, no dependable rhythm, and no one keeping the books. Schofield, who wrote the standard history, reads it the same way:

the meetings were the social face of a friendship that actually ran day to day, in visits and a constant traffic of letters. The dinners were the part that showed. The work happened in between.

A name, a moon, and no minutes.

I find all this reassuring as a writer. The version that survives is the tidy one: the moon, the Monday, the legend. The version that happened was improvised, bent around real lives, held together by small human arrangements and lots of correspondence. A minister’s Sunday. A host too often away. A letter carried by hand.

Elizabeth, my protagonist, grew up inside a household like that, where the working truth of things seldom matched the version accepted beyond the door.

A girl who watched closely would have learned early to read both: the story told at the door and the one kept behind it. That's the world I’m trying to put on the page

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

I’ve been reading historical fiction for most of my adult life. I have a few favorite authors I would follow anywhere,1 and a longer list of books I’ve pressed into people’s hands with the urgency of someone who can’t believe they haven’t read this yet.

For a long time, I didn’t stop to ask what I was actually looking for. I just knew when a book had it and when it didn’t. Lately, working on my own novel, I’ve had reason to get more precise.

Here’s what I need from historical fiction, and what I’ve come to believe the best of it reliably delivers:

For a few hours, the present disappears.
It’s not because the news is worse than usual or I’m facing a personal challenge. Rather, I get to go somewhere else entirely, and that mental place has its own weather, its own urgencies, its own rules. This is not escapism in the dismissive sense. It’s the relief of putting down one world and picking up another.

The other world holds.
This is where the trust comes in. I need to believe that the author has done the work, that the streets smell right, that the food on the table belongs there, that the characters are bound by the actual constraints of their time. When a historical novel earns my trust early, I can relax into it. When it loses me on a detail, I never fully return.

I come away knowing something I didn’t know before.
Not in a lesson-learned way. More like: I now understand how anesthesia was developed, and what it felt like to live before its time. Or the realities of receiving a letter that took three weeks to arrive. Or to be a woman of considerable intelligence with no institutional or intellectual home for it. That kind of knowing stays with you.

The present looks different when I return.
This is the part that surprises people when I describe it. The best historical fiction doesn’t take you away from your own life. It sends you back to it with new eyes. I’ve thought differently about technology, about power structures, about the implications of progress, because of novels set in other centuries.

Now, I’m on the other side of the page.

I’m the one building the chair, the reader’s experience. And everything I valued as a reader has become a set of obligations. The present must disappear. The world must hold. The reader must come away knowing something, feeling something, seeing something they didn’t see before. And if I succeed, they’ll return to it with fresh eyes.

My protagonist, Elizabeth Thorne, is 14 years old and lives in the household of the manufacturer Matthew Boulton in Birmingham, England, in 1776. She’s invisible in the way that girls were invisible then, present at the edges of important rooms, absorbing everything, and credited with nothing.

When I write her, I’m thinking about you, dear reader, in that chair. I want you to disappear into her world, trust it, learn from it, and come back to your own life with something you didn’t have before.

That’s what the best historical fiction gives me. It seems only fair to try to return the favor.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

Manufacturers, inventors, a physician, a potter, the chemist who isolated oxygen. More than a dozen men participated in the Lunar Society of Birmingham, England in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Most were famous names, the kind that you find on museum placards or as topics in university courses.

My novel features five of them. And I’m working hard to keep every one of them out of the lead.

When a story features famous people, we expect them to be the focus. We read about Boulton and Watt and Wedgwood because they are Boulton and Watt and Wedgwood. That’s the usual contract. The luminaries take the lead, and everyone else fills in around them.

Not this time.

In my book, the famous men are the room. They set the terms, fill the space, make 1776 England feel real. But the story doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to a girl no one ever wrote down.

Deciding that was the easy part. Making it work is the tightrope.

Lean one way, and Elizabeth disappears. The eye drifts to the famous men by default, because that is where a reader expects the story to be. She has to hold the foreground against that pull. She has to be more compelling, in Boulton’s own house, than Boulton. That is a tall order for an invented orphan with no documentary record behind her.

Lean the other way, and the men go flat. If I push them too far back to protect her, the room stops crackling, and a reader has every right to ask why I set the book among the Lunar Society at all. The men have to stay vivid, but they can’t drive the story.

That is the wire. Too far in one direction, and my protagonist vanishes. Too far in the other, and the world does. The craft is staying balanced between two ways of falling.

I’d love to tell you I’ve solved it. I haven’t. I've planned the scenes that test it, but haven’t written them yet. The balance doesn’t exist on a whiteboard. It exists on the page, line by line, and I won’t know for a while whether I’ve found it.

But I’m clear about why I’m walking the wire. The famous men have had their turn as leads, in fine books by fine writers. The person who has not had a turn is the girl at the edge of the room, seeing everything, recorded by no one.

If you’ve ever been that person in a room, you already know her.

Putting the famous men in the background is the only way to bring Elizabeth forward.

So I focus on my balance, and I keep walking the high wire.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

I visited London this spring to stand in front of a painting.

It hung at the National Gallery, in an exhibition of Joseph Wright of Derby’s candlelit paintings. While I had seen it in books for years, reproductions do not capture its aesthetic power. The canvas is nearly seven feet wide, and the room was kept dark, so the painting attracted visitors like a magnet. You walk toward it the way the figures inside it lean toward their own small sun.

The official title of the painting is A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in the Place of the Sun. (For obvious reasons, it is generally referred to as The Orrery.) Wright finished it in 1766, a decade before my fictional story opens. I think of it as a portrait of the world I am writing.

Let me give you a tour.

An orrery is a moving model of the solar system, crafted with watchmaker precision. Brass arms, geared and turning, carry small spheres for the planets around a center. Wind it, and the planets move in their real proportions, the moon circling the earth, the earth circling the sun. The one in Wright’s painting is the size of a small dining table, ringed like an older instrument called an armillary sphere, so it can also show eclipses. These instruments were named, a little absurdly, for Charles Boyle, who paid for an early one and was the 4th Earl of Orrery.

In the painting, a lamp sits where the sun should be. That lamp, the only light in the room, throws every face into gold and shadow.

Surprisingly, the people gathered around it are not university scholars. They represent a family: a man taking notes, another listening with his chin in his hand, a person in shadow seen from behind, and two children with their faces nearly inside the rings, entranced by watching the planets turn.

The lecture is taking place in a private home. Not a university, not a church, not a royal academy. A home.

The eighteenth century preferred it that way. In the exhibition catalog, the curators make the point directly: scenes like this one reflect a real preference for educating children at home rather than sending them off to distant schools.1 Adam Smith argued for the same approach in those years. Bring the world into your own house and let children learn it there.

Wright painted exactly that, and he understood it was new. Earlier painters had captured this style of single-source light to create dramatic scenes from scripture. Wright painted it to illuminate a brass machine and the faces of ordinary people leaning in to learn. The reverence is the same, it’s the object that has changed.

This is the world my 14-year-old protagonist, Elizabeth, grows up inside. She’s in a household where the heavens and the steam engine and the chemistry of glazes were all live questions, discussed over dinner, investigated in daily life. Her education is the fortuitous result of a child in a house where the adults never stopped exploring how the world worked, and asking how it could be improved.

Painter Joseph Wright (of Derby, England) was not one of the Lunar men of science and invention. He knew their world through a friend, the figure taking notes on the left in the painting, who had ties to the Lunar Society of Birmingham. But Wright never sat in on their experiments or their dinners.

What drew him was not the science. It was capturing the theatricality of it: the darkened room, the single light, the faces caught in the act of understanding. As an outsider, he saw its drama more clearly. Elizabeth is a similar outsider, able to synthesize the Lunar Society discussions because she is present in that world without being counted as part of it.

I lingered in the National Gallery, knowing it might be some time before I saw this painting again.2 I wanted to take in all the subtleties that the artist intended.

Notice how the lamp in the painting stands in for the sun. With the room dark, the lecturer could swing the planets through their orbits and show an eclipse, or the moon moving through its phases.

If you look at the faces around the lamp, you’ll see how the light falls on each. One is turned full into the glow, round and bright. One catches it from the side. One is nearly dark, seen from behind. Yes, Wright lit the audience figures to show phases of the moon, the very thing the orrery was demonstrating!

A decade later, a group of men in Birmingham would name themselves for that same moon. The Lunar Society’s name was more pragmatic than poetic. They met on the Monday closest to the full moon so there would be light to travel home by after their meetings.

When I gaze up at the moon these days, I realize it’s the same bright orb that inspired the Lunar Society men, and so many others over the centuries. And I smile at the thought of being connected to all the thinkers who have pondered it.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

When was the last time you remember driving in dense fog?

You knew there was a road and a destination. But you couldn’t see far ahead. Every instinct told you to slow down. You gripped the wheel a little tighter and fought the doubt about pulling over and waiting it out.

It’s an unsettling experience.

That foggy journey is exactly where I am with writing my book right now.

For new readers: I’m writing a historical novel set in 1776 Birmingham, England, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. It takes place in the household of the manufacturer and Lunar Society member Matthew Boulton. The fictional protagonist is Elizabeth Thorne, a 14-year-old orphan in his care. A theft sits at the heart of the plot.

When you’re writing a novel, there’s a stage before writing. The shapes are there, and you can feel them coming together. But you can’t quite put them on the page. Some are clearer than others. None is fully visible.

Three of the shapes are with me constantly these days.

Boulton, the real historical figure at the center of the household, is most defined. He’s the most documented of the three, and archival records have given me real ground to stand on. There’s his signature with its confident underline. His 1775 diary entries mark the death of his friend, William Small. Weeks of researching his life have built a sense of him that’s not yet a character on a page, but is something I trust. He’s the figure I can see most clearly through the fog because real evidence keeps emerging.

Elizabeth, my invented protagonist, is further out in the fog. No documents anchor her; she’s entirely of my imagination. Her voice, the way she stands in a room, the way she sees what others miss, is being constructed. I sense her now in a way I couldn’t six months ago. But she’s still forming.

The thief. I know I need one. But I don’t know who he is, how he fits, or how the plot point resolves. He’s still obscured.

Three figures. Three emerging shapes in the fog. It’s also three different kinds of work happening at once. But none is completely visible yet.

Some of what I’m building is grounded in historical documents I’ve held in my hands. Some is invented. This stage’s work is learning how those two kinds of material coexist. More on that another time.

When you can’t see far ahead and doubts are high, it’s tempting to pull over. To wait for the fog to lift. To do more research. To read another book. To convince yourself that clarity will come with patience.

I know that temptation well, and I am resisting it.

The road is there. The destination is there. I can’t see either of them with perfect clarity yet. But I can feel the road under the wheels. And the fog, in time, will lift.

For now, I keep driving.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

When was the last time you thought about your signature?

You likely settled into it sometime in your teens or early twenties. Remember trying it out? You experimented with a few versions and chose the one that felt right. Legible or a scrawl? Traditional cursive or closer to printed?

Once decided, you repeated it so many thousands of times that it stopped being a decision and became a reflex.

It’s the habit of your hand. You sign receipts, forms, cards (and more rarely these days, checks and letters), barely glancing down. Your signature arrives without your conscious participation.

And that is exactly what makes it so revealing.

Closing time in the archive

In April, during my research visit to the Archives of Soho at the Library of Birmingham, England, I examined letters and documents of three men I’ve been studying for years: Matthew Boulton (entrepreneur), James Watt (engineer and inventor), and Josiah Wedgwood (potter and master marketer).

At the end of the day, while other researchers were packing up, I had to make a choice. I knew I couldn’t work through a stack of letters carefully. So I chose a few letters and photographed their closings and signatures. I told myself the deeper dive would need to wait for another visit.

I’ve been studying those signatures ever since I got home. Each tells a story.

The discipline of the quill

Before we dig into what I saw, it’s important to understand the writing technology of the era. These signatures were made with a pen we wouldn’t recognize today. In the 1770s and 1780s, the writing instrument of choice was a quill, cut from a goose feather. The nib had to be retrimmed every few pages as it grew too wet to hold a point. Plus, the ink flowed unevenly. The writer had to manage pressure, angle, and a constantly changing point.

Yet these men made their signatures look effortless.

Whatever the man decided his name should look like on paper, that decision became muscle memory. The signature is one of the few marks a person makes without performing. The hand just moves.

Which is precisely why it can tell you something true.

Boulton

Matthew Boulton’s signature reads like a man closing a deal.

The name itself is clear and direct, written without ornament. Beneath it, a confident underline, firm and single-stroke. No flourish. No hesitation. No attempt to impress.

This is the man who built the Soho Manufactory into one of the most technologically sophisticated and celebrated manufacturing complexes of its era. He partnered with James Watt to bring the steam engine to market, ran a business and a professional network simultaneously, and somehow kept all of it moving.

His signature doesn’t waste a stroke. It says: I’ve signed my name. We’re done here. Let’s proceed.

Watt

James Watt surprised me.

The closing salutation before his name is crowded with abbreviations: Your obed & hble servt. The required formalities of 18th-century correspondence, compressed as quickly as possible, as though he wanted to get through the convention and be done with it. The introverted Scottish engineer, impatient with ceremony.

And then the signature itself: a generous, looping flourish beneath the name, its circles echoing the rotating cylinders of his engines. Extravagant where the closing was spare. Expansive where the salutation was clipped.

The same hand. The same moment. Two completely different impulses.

It is a revealing thing to see.

Wedgwood

The closing above Josiah Wedgwood’s signature reads: Your most affecte friend & humble servt.

He meant every word of it.

Wedgwood wrote this particular letter to Erasmus Darwin, a fellow member of the Lunar Society and a man he genuinely loved. The warmth of that closing reflects a real friendship, one that ran for decades through shared ideas and mutual support. It was a prolific correspondence between two of the most restless minds of the age.

But it’s the signature that follows the closing that stopped me.

It is the most elaborate of the three. Look at those loops and counter-loops! It’s an intentional mark that functions almost as a logo. Which, by the time Wedgwood was writing these letters, it essentially was. Josiah Wedgwood had turned his name into a brand, recognizable across Europe. His signature was not merely a name. It was a visual statement of everything that name had come to mean in the expanding world of cultural commerce.

Three signatures, three men of the Lunar Society. Boulton signed like a man of business. Watt signed like a man managing contradictions. Wedgwood signed like an artist who understood exactly what he was making.

Crafting accidental self-portraits

Each of these men sat down once, as we all did, and decided how his name should look on paper. The slope. The pressure. The underline or the flourish. Once that decision was made, it became second nature. Thousands of letters, written across decades, each one closing with the same practiced mark.

They could not have anticipated their writing would be read this closely.

Of course, neither can we.

Every habitual gesture we make carries the same kind of accidental self-portrait. The way we end an email. The phrases we return to without noticing. The style of our prose and how it shifts based on context. All this simply accumulates over years into something that reveals.

The archive holds those accumulations in fading ink on fragile paper. Looking at them, 250 years later, is a sublime privilege. You’re seeing something the writer knew he was making, and something he didn’t know he was making, at the same time.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

PS: If this issue made you think about your own signature, or the signatures of people you know, pass it along to someone who would enjoy the thought. I’m growing this newsletter one curious reader at a time, and I’m grateful for every reader who shares.

Last week, I walked you through the mechanics of visiting an archive. The request system. The pencils-only rule. The pre-pulled boxes waiting on a trolley with my name on it.

Now, here’s what happened once I sat down, and some of what I found.

A feeling I’ve missed for 20 years.

The morning of my archive visit, I felt something I hadn’t felt in 20 years: the anticipation of opening an archive box. My doctoral training came back to me in a wave of memory. The patience. The notetaking discipline. The willingness to spend an hour on something that turns out to be disappointing, because the next hour might reveal a treasure.

But this was a different project, based in a different country and century, with a different version of me. I was no longer the doctoral student building a dissertation. I was an author looking for the texture of a world of emerging science and innovation.

I stood at my assigned table and opened the first grey box.

Five words I almost passed by.

Inside were about 12 manila envelopes, each containing one of Matthew Boulton’s personal diaries. I organized them in chronological order and eagerly examined them one by one.

The first real Lunar Society find came not long into the day, and it was almost too small to be noticed. But when I saw it, I was electrified.

A diary entry in Boulton’s hand, dated April 9, 1781. Five words.

Lunar Society at Dr. Priestleys

That was it. No agenda. No attendees. No notes on what was discussed. A line in a calendar diary that a man wrote to himself so he would remember where he was supposed to be on a Monday evening.

I sat with it for a long moment.

For more than 20 years the Lunar Society has captured my imagination. The monthly gatherings. The brilliant men. The ideas that shaped the modern world. I’ve read about it in scholarly histories, in popular biographies, in academic articles. I’ve filled my bookshelf with volumes on the topic.

But I had never until that moment held physical evidence in my own hands that one of these meetings actually happened. Five words in dark ink. The Lunar Society, at Joseph Priestley’s house, on a spring evening in 1781.

A line that proved it all happened.

A reader who does not know the significance of these gatherings might glance at that entry and see nothing. A social call. A dinner appointment. Five words a man wrote to himself.

But for those of us who understand what the Lunar Society was, the line carries something else entirely. The men who met that April evening were inventing the world we live in.

Boulton was 52, with the steam engine business finally finding its footing. Priestley hosted them at his home, having moved to Birmingham only months earlier and still settling in. He had isolated oxygen seven years before and was deep in the experiments that would fill the second volume of his major work on air.

It’s very likely that James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, and Erasmus Darwin were there, too. Each would have shared his own news and research, which would become the foundation of the Industrial Revolution.

And here was the line that proved it. A calendar entry. The kind of thing someone writes so they won’t forget.

The meeting was not at Boulton’s home, Soho House (where I had imagined most of the Lunar Society gatherings taking place), it was at Joseph Priestley’s. What they discussed that evening, the diary does not say. That is for a later hunt, through other letters, other sources, and a longer return visit.

What mattered in that moment was something more basic, and more profound.

The moment everything became real.

Until this trip, I had been building this novel out of secondary sources. Books I have read. Articles I have annotated. Pages of notes that document a world I have, until now, only known through other people’s interpretations of it.

That is enough to begin the research. But it is not enough to make it whole.

What an archive gives you that no secondary source can is the thing itself. Not someone’s account of Boulton. Boulton’s hand. Not a description of the Lunar Society. A line he wrote to himself, in private, to remind himself to set aside time to ride to Priestley’s house.

The project became real for me in that moment in a way it had not been before. Not real as in researched. Real as in this happened. These men existed. They sat in rooms together on specific evenings. And they’ve left traces.

Marveling at that entry, I leaned back in my chair, grinning.

He wrote it for himself, and I read it centuries later.

Now, a few weeks removed from that visit, here’s what I keep reflecting on.

Boulton, jotting that entry on whatever ordinary day he wrote it, could not have imagined that someone would be reading it this closely two and a half centuries later. He was not writing for posterity. He was writing for himself, so he would not forget where to go on that Monday.

And yet there it was, on a desk in Birmingham in 2026, being read by a writer who is from a country he never saw, and from a city that in 1781 was Potawatomi territory and a marshy trading portage. His words were photographed with technology that would have left him speechless.

The diary has survived. And the meeting, in the briefest possible notation, has survived, too.

I entered the archive with specific questions, and left with dozens more unanswered. I worked with the trolley prepared for me, but there are hundreds of boxes in the wider collection yet to explore. I will definitely return, and for longer than a day.

Plus, there are other finds from this same trolley still working on me, and they deserve their own telling here in future issues.

For now, I am still sitting with a five-word diary entry, in Boulton’s flowing handwriting.

Encountering it, I felt this project become real.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

I hadn’t worked in an archive reading room in nearly 20 years, but the rituals came back fast.

My doctoral research was archive-based, so I know the rhythms. What’s changed is the project. Then I was researching the origins of American food brands in the late 1800s. Now I’m chasing the daily texture of life for Matthew Boulton and other Lunar Society members in 1776. Different questions, similar room.

People are genuinely curious about how archives work. How do you even get inside? What happens when you do? What do you actually walk away with? Most archive guides I’ve seen are written for graduate students, which means they assume you already know things that nobody outside academia has any reason to know.

So here’s the practical version.

1️⃣ You don’t browse. You request.

The first surprise for most people is that you don’t wander into an archive and start digging around. Archival materials live in climate-controlled storage, sometimes miles from the reading room. You must request specific items, often in advance, and an archivist pulls them for you.

This means the most important work happens before you arrive. Every major archive publishes online collection guides and finding aids that describe what’s in its holdings down to the box-and-folder level. You read these the way a writer reads a table of contents, looking for what’s relevant and what to skip. Then you submit specific reference numbers to the archivist.

For my recent visit to the Wolfson Centre at the Library of Birmingham, England, I worked through their online guides before sending Nicola, the archivist, my research interests and archival request list. She wrote back with corrections, suggested additions I hadn’t known to ask for, and pulled everything before I arrived. By the time I sat down, a wheeled cart was already loaded with what I’d come to see. (What awaited me is pictured above.)

2️⃣ The rules are stricter than you’d guess, and there are reasons.

Archivists live with a contradiction. They want their archives to be used. What’s the point of holding a million pages of correspondence and ledgers if no one reads them? They also want the archives protected. Once a document is damaged, it is gone. There is no second copy of Matthew Boulton’s pocket diary from 1775.

Every rule you encounter at an archive is the working out of that tension.

Before they let you into the reading room at the Library of Birmingham, you sign an agreement. Pencils only, no pens. No bags. No food or drink. No flash photography. And, in a list of behaviors I had to formally promise not to engage in: No licking your fingers to turn pages.

I laughed when I read that one. The clerk checking me in didn’t. “You’d be surprised,” she said.

Coats, bags, and water bottles go into a locker. I carried only my laptop, my iPhone, two pencils, and a few sheets of paper. That was it. Whatever you bring to the table is what you have for the day. Gloves, by the way, were not required for what I was reading. They’re reserved for handling photographs, where skin oils can damage the surface.

The rules feel restrictive in the moment. But the archivist enforcing them is also the same person who pulled your cart, suggested additional items you hadn’t thought to request, and held the door open to materials most people will never see. Both sides of the job are happening in tandem. The strictness is what makes the openness possible.

3️⃣ The mental framing matters more than the rules.

The hardest part of archive work is not following the rules. It is holding two opposing ideas in your head at the same time.

You need to arrive with specific questions. For me, these centered on the spatial relationship between the Soho House residence and the nearby Soho Manufactory. Also: What were the daily operations of the household, and what did the household ledger record? What might I learn of the Lunar Society meetings and informal interactions? Without such a list, you flounder.

You also need to remain genuinely open to what you find. The most interesting things in an archive are often the things you didn’t go looking for. If you focus too tightly on your prepared questions, you miss what’s right in front of you. If you focus too loosely, you waste a precious day.

Holding both at once is the actual craft of archive research. I’d lost some of that muscle memory in 20 years away. It came back, but slowly, over several hours of work.

4️⃣ The room is full of ghosts, and a few of them are alive.

The other thing nobody tells you is that an archive reading room is unexpectedly companionable.

There were about a dozen other researchers in the Wolfson Centre the day I was there. Most heads down, no conversation. But there is a quiet camaraderie among people who have all chosen to spend a Saturday with historic documents. We held doors for each other. We helped each other navigate the request system. We exchanged small nods across the room.

And then there is the other camaraderie, the one with the scholars who came before. Every serious book on the Lunar Society cites the Birmingham archives. Jenny Uglow worked with these collections. So did Peter Jones. And a full list of others. The historians whose books made my project possible all sat at tables like the one I was sitting at, holding the same documents I was holding. You feel them. You are working in their tradition, and the room knows it.

That is something the manuals don’t mention. And it ties you to the history of it all.

Next week I’ll share what I actually came home with, including the discoveries that didn’t match anything I went looking for, and how they’re influencing my book.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

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On my whiteboard is an image I keep coming back to. It’s a bar chart from Peter Jones’ Industrial Enlightenment1, created from scattered references in 18th-century letters and diaries. It shows how often the Lunar Society met, year by year.

Almost everyone who writes about the Lunar Society mentions the monthly meetings. The full moon gathering. Genius assembling on a reliable schedule, month after month. I assumed the same. Then I discovered Jones’ chart.

The Lunar Society left no official meeting records. No secretary, no minutes, no attendance roll. Jones assembled this picture of their gathering frequency entirely from offhand mentions in private correspondence and diary entries. Someone writing to someone else about something else entirely says, in passing, “we met last Monday at Boulton’s,” and that becomes a data point. The whole chart is built from crumbs like that.

And here’s what stopped me: 1776 was a peak year. Approximately seven known meetings. Seven. For a group that was actively changing the world. Whether there were others that left no trace, we simply don’t know.

Seven formal gatherings in a year when Watt’s first commercial engines were being erected. When Boulton was stretched financially and creatively in every direction. When Priestley was conducting oxygen experiments that would rewrite chemistry. And when Wedgwood was building what amounted to a modern consumer brand from clay and marketing instinct. Seven meetings, yet somehow this group generated an intellectual density that still reverberates 250 years later.

Which means most of the work happened somewhere else.

It happened in the letters they sent each other between meetings, the ones Jones mined for his chart. It happened during workshop visits, at dinner tables, and on the manufacturing floor. It happened in the informality of colleagues and friends: Boulton watching Watt tinker, Priestley talking chemistry over someone’s shoulder, Wedgwood bringing a new glaze sample to show around. The full-moon meeting was the surface. The real intellectual life was in the daily activities between those gatherings.

I keep thinking about my fictional Elizabeth.

She has been in Boulton’s household since age seven. By the time we meet her in 1776, she has absorbed seven years of this world. Not as a student in any formal sense, but as someone present. In the corridor, when the visitors arrived. In the room where the papers were left out. At the dinner table.

Elizabeth’s education was never a curriculum. It was a mosaic assembled from overheard conversations, glimpsed drawings, and the accumulated proximity to people who thought seriously about how things worked.

What the Jones chart made me see is that this is not a disadvantage. It is exactly how the Lunar men themselves learned from each other.

There’s a version of Elizabeth’s story that could frame her knowledge as stolen, or borrowed, or contingent on the accident of her situation. But that framing gets it wrong.

The Lunar Society members didn’t become who they were because they attended seven meetings that year. They became who they were because they were in constant, wide-ranging conversation with each other about everything they were thinking and making and trying.

Elizabeth was in that same current. She absorbed it the same way they did.

The chart is a record of what was formal and therefore traceable. What it doesn’t show is where the ideas actually lived.

That’s the story I’m writing.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

P.S. As you're reading this, I’m flying home from London and a full day in Birmingham, exploring the Boulton & Watt archives. I can’t wait to fill you in.

If you had only ten minutes with a leading professional in your field, what would you ask?

That was the situation I found myself in at the History Through Fiction conference last month (see my previous issue for details). The organizers had arranged brief one-on-one sessions with literary agents. I matched with Kate McKean, a literary agent with 20 years of experience, and an author herself.1

I was the first of nearly a dozen writers she would see that afternoon. As I entered the hotel meeting room, she sat across from me, papers spread in front of her, calm and unhurried. I perched on the edge of my chair, aware of the clock.

Most writers in the later time slots would be pitching their books. I had a different agenda. I wanted positioning intelligence, the kind of strategic perspective that comes from someone who has spent decades learning what works and what doesn’t in the marketplace.

Here are Kate’s insights and what I learned.

🌔 Stop writing for teenagers. Write for the women cheering them on.

I had spent considerable mental energy on the question of audience. My protagonist, Elizabeth Thorne, is 14. Does that make this a Young Adult novel?

Kate’s answer was direct: focus on the adult reader, and younger readers will find it if they’re interested. The YA market, she noted, wasn’t the right fit.

An unexpected feeling washed over me: relief.

Here’s why. Writing for a YA audience meant constantly asking myself: Was I capturing how a 14-year-old thinks? Was her inner world accurate for her age? Did I hit the right emotional tone for that readership? It added a layer of self-consciousness that became heavier each time I thought about it.

Adult historical fiction changes the equation. My real readers are women who were once girls like Elizabeth. Women who know the feeling of being the smartest person in a room that refuses to notice.

I’m not writing for Elizabeth’s peers. I’m writing for everyone she will eventually become. That’s a story I can tell.

🌖 What historical event hinges on her action?

Kate urged me to view the novel’s opening not as a scene-setting exercise but as a historical hinge point. Something real, something that actually happened in 1776, that Elizabeth’s choices could plausibly affect. Not that she changes history. But that history and her story are intertwined from the first pages.

It reframed something I had been sensing without seeing. Elizabeth is not a witness to the Industrial Revolution. She’s someone whose choices have consequences inside it. That’s a different kind of protagonist, and it demands a different kind of opening.

I’m still working out which event to choose. The first year of the Boulton-Watt steam engine partnership is one possibility, while Birmingham in 1776 offers others. The question has sharpened my thinking about every scene that follows.

🌕 Your comparable titles don’t need to match your time period.

When writers pitch to agents, we’re expected to offer comp titles: recently published books with similar audiences, themes, or sensibilities. It helps publishers understand your book’s placement among others already on the shelves — and its sales potential. The usual assumption is that the comps should come from the same historical era as our work.

Kate disagreed. She suggested looking at the broader arc of business and technology across the 18th and even into the 19th centuries.

The connections between industrial innovation and human ambition, between business and technology, didn’t begin or end with the Lunar Society. They run through the early 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution moved from experiment to transformation, and yes, to the late 1800s industrialists (aka Robber Barons), who are so well-documented in historical fiction that they’ve almost become their own subgenre.

This framing opens a richer shelf for my work to sit on. And it gave me a new perspective on this book. Not just Birmingham in 1776, but the longer story of what happens when brilliant, ambitious people decide to remake the world through commerce and invention.

That story has been told in many eras. I’m writing one chapter from the perspective of a young English girl in the late 1700s.

Ten minutes isn’t long. But a precise question, asked of the right person at the right moment, can do a surprising amount of work.

I walked into that room with three uncertainties. I walked out with three clarities and Kate’s handwritten margin notes in hand.

Time to put them to work.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

Have you ever felt you were in the right room, at just the right time?

That was me last week at the inaugural History Through Fiction conference in Beverly, Massachusetts. This gathering of historical fiction writers was limited to 55 participants. So there were no massive keynotes filling an auditorium, and no name badges lost in a crowd.

Instead, I found a focused group of friendly, enthusiastic writers who have chosen, for reasons only we understand, to spend years of their lives getting historical details right for novels that transport readers across centuries.

I accidentally left my phone at home (yes, I spent the weekend painfully living in 1999). So while I have no photos to share, I have notes, new friends’ novels to add to my reading list, and four ideas I’m still mulling over.

🌒 The solitude struggle is real.
Writers I met spoke about the challenge of loneliness as independent authors. One antidote several shared was their writing groups. These are small clusters of four or five writers who gather regularly, in person or virtually. They write together and read each other’s work, asking questions, giving feedback, and holding each other accountable for their writing goals.

I don’t have that yet, and I’m working on it. If you’re a fiction writer (especially if based in Chicago) and you’re looking for the same thing, I’d like to explore setting one up. Email me or reply to this post.

🌓 This genre has a particular problem: Presentism.
One of the best panels of the conference addressed something every historical fiction writer wrestles with, even if they haven’t given it a name. Presentism is the habit of letting our contemporary values and assumptions seep into characters who couldn’t have held them.

Panelist Shelley Blanton-Stroud (who has her own Substack, An Unlikely Prospect), advised:

Don’t ask whether what your character faces is fair. Ask whether it is consistent with the beliefs and values of the time you’re writing about.

Those are very different questions, and conflating them is where historical fiction goes wrong.

The panel’s advice on dialogue was also sharp: Be especially careful about what you let characters say aloud. Surrounding text can convey a more modern awareness, but dialogue pulls readers directly into the period. If a character speaks in ways that belong to now, the spell breaks and trust is broken.

🌔 “Calculated defiance” is the key to character agency.
This phrase from Shelley Blanton-Stroud stopped me mid-note.

The challenge in historical fiction is giving characters genuine agency without pretending the constraints of their world didn’t exist. The answer isn’t to erase the constraints. It’s to find where the cracks are.

Every society has them. It’s places where the rules are thinner, where someone determined and observant could move through in ways the powerful didn’t anticipate. For example, a midwife had access to rooms that other women didn’t. A servant heard conversations that her employers assumed went unregistered.

For Elizabeth (my 14-year-old protagonist), the crack is exactly that. She has lived in Matthew Boulton’s household since she was seven years old. She has attended dozens of Lunar Society meetings as a quiet presence with a sketchbook. She knows the rules. She knows her place in the hierarchy. And she is beginning, very carefully, to act outside of both.

That is calculated defiance. She doesn’t rebel against her world. She navigates it with a precision her world has underestimated.

🌕 Think about how your writing will be read 100 years from now.
This advice remains unsettling to me, which probably means it’s useful.

The panel asked writers to imagine future readers looking back at our work the way we look back at fiction written in the 1920s. We notice immediately when those authors were blind to race, gender, or class in ways they couldn’t see themselves.

Our own blind spots are just as present and just as invisible to us, which is a humbling thought for anyone writing historical fiction.

We are trying to see clearly into the past while standing in our own moment. Both directions require the same discipline: genuine curiosity about how people actually thought, rather than how we wish they had.

I don’t have a tidy answer to that. But I’m keeping it as a question I come back to every time I write a scene.

The writers who gathered in Beverly last week are all trying to see clearly across time, backward into history and forward into action. That’s a strange and serious thing to attempt. It was good to spend a weekend with people who understand why someone would try.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

Terri

P.S. As I finish this issue, I'm listening to live NASA coverage of Artemis II's lunar flyby, a thrilling backdrop. It's also a moving reminder that it's the same silver disk that called the Lunar Men to gather monthly in Birmingham 250 years ago.

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Last week, I rediscovered a book on my shelf called Industrial Enlightenment: Science, Technology and Culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760-1820. It was written by Peter M. Jones, professor emeritus at the University of Birmingham, and published in 2009. It won the Wadsworth Prize that year for an outstanding contribution to the study of British business history.

I had never opened it.

Does this ever happen to you, too? You acquire a book, with good intentions. It finds a place on your shelf, and somehow the urgency passes. Then if you’re lucky, it captures your attention again at just the right moment.

I spent several hours with Jones’ book, and I came away understanding something about the world I’m writing that I hadn’t been able to articulate before.

Here’s what Jones helped me see.

My novel sits in a historical time gap.

We have a name for the great European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries, built on the belief that reason and direct observation could unlock how the world actually worked. It’s called the Enlightenment. It happened in drawing rooms and universities, in the correspondence of philosophers, in the work of astronomers and naturalists.

We also have named the Industrial Revolution, that transformation of manufacturing and daily life through mechanized production, driven by steam, iron, and scale. That story belongs to factories, railways, and the 19th century.

What happened in between is harder to name. And that is exactly where my story lives, in Britain’s late 18th century.

In Birmingham in 1776, Lunar Society men were Enlightenment thinkers who believed in reason and experiment. But several were also manufacturers who needed their engines to run longer, their factories to produce more, and their materials to hold up under untested conditions.

They were using the tools of philosophy to solve industry’s problems.

Peter Jones gives this era a name: the Industrial Enlightenment. It’s the moment when scientific knowledge, which had been circulating socially among educated men, began to be deliberately applied to industrial purposes. It was the transition, as Jones describes it, from ideas debated to ideas put to work. He calls it “domesticating the Enlightenment.” Taking abstract principles about heat, pressure, chemistry, and motion and putting them inside workshops, kilns, and engines.

I had been writing inside this gap without a name for it. The world Elizabeth (my 14-year-old protagonist) inhabits in 1776 Birmingham is not the polished, drawing-room Enlightenment of Edinburgh and Paris. It is not the elegance of London’s ton of the Regency era (here’s looking at you, Bridgerton fans), which is about 40 years later. Nor is it the grimy, pulsing Industrial Revolution of the Victorians. It is something more emergent: a moment when ideas were being tested, both intellectually and in commercial settings.

One more detail worth sharing. Peter Jones is a professor emeritus of French history. This book was a four-year detour from his primary work, which focused on the French Revolution and the flow of knowledge across 18th-century Europe. He came to Birmingham from the outside, with the eye of someone trained to see how ideas move between contexts and cultures.

There’s something fitting in that. The Lunar Society men were not outsiders crossing disciplinary boundaries, because those boundaries had not yet been drawn. Matthew Boulton could think seriously about chemistry because no one had told him chemistry belonged to someone else. Erasmus Darwin could write about evolution and women’s education because the walls between medicine, natural philosophy, and social thought had not been erected. Josiah Wedgwood could invent a scientific instrument for firing kilns because the line between craft knowledge and scientific knowledge had not yet hardened into a profession.

Jones wrote this book from inside that same understanding. He was a historian of France who spent years in Birmingham, following a question wherever it led. He would not have discovered any of it if he had stayed within the confines of his field.

And now I am a nonfiction writer tackling historical fiction. We all bring something from elsewhere.

The book has been sitting on my shelf for a while. I’m glad I finally opened it.

Is there something waiting for you to discover on your bookshelves?

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

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In creating a fictional historical character, every writer faces these types of questions:

• Would a person of that time have thought that way?

• Could someone from that class have known that?

• Could a woman in that era really have done that?

My version of the question is doubled. Because my protagonist is not just from another century. She is also 14 years old.

And 14 in 1776 is not 14 today.

When I first settled on Elizabeth’s age, I felt the skepticism forming before I wrote a single word. A 14-year-old girl sitting in on Lunar Society meetings? Understanding what she heard? Making technical drawings precise enough to matter?

So I had to ask myself the same question a skeptical reader would ask. I dug into the history, and what I found both surprised me and confirmed my instincts.

The problem is not her intelligence. The problem is her access. These are two different questions, and collapsing them can lead a writer astray.

The intelligence question is actually the easier one. Fourteen-year-olds in any era are remarkably sharp observers. They watch adults with intensity, cataloguing actions and hypocrisies with merciless accuracy. They understand more than they are credited with understanding, and the gap between what they see and what they are permitted to say is a source of constant, low-grade fury.

That is not an experience tied to a specific era. That is simply being 14.
The access question is where the history gets interesting.

By the time my story opens in 1776, Elizabeth has lived in Matthew Boulton’s household since she was seven years old. She has been present at dozens of Lunar Society meetings held at Soho House. The topics at those meetings included steam engine design, canal engineering, pottery chemistry, natural philosophy, industrial espionage, patent law, and the political upheavals reshaping continents. She did not attend as a student. She was more like a piece of furniture — a quiet girl with a sketchbook, beneath the notice of men arguing about the future.

That invisibility is the mechanism that makes the novel’s premise work. Servants and children in households of this era heard everything precisely because the powerful did not edit themselves in front of the help. Elizabeth’s education has been extraordinary and entirely accidental, the result of seven years of being overlooked in rooms where important things were said.

But here is where history forced me to reckon with what being 14 actually meant in 1776.

In that world, 14 is close to the edge of adult responsibility. Girls of Elizabeth’s social position were managing households, nursing family members, and facing serious marriage negotiations. The modern instinct to read 14 as childhood would have baffled her world entirely. Her body and her labor were expected to carry adult weight. What she was denied was adult authority.

That double bind, full competence demanded, any power to act on it withheld, is not a fictional invention. It is a precise description of where girls of her class actually stood.

Which means Elizabeth’s situation is dramatically loaded in a way that does not require me to stretch history. The constraints activate the drama.

There is one more layer I did not expect to find. The Lunar Society’s Erasmus Darwin, a physician and natural philosopher (and grandfather of Charles), wrote seriously about women’s education. He advocated teaching chemistry, botany, experimental philosophy, and what he called money management. He believed women’s minds were capable of serious intellectual work, even if he imagined it as complementary to men’s rather than equal to it. Darwin was not typical, but he was in the room. And Elizabeth was in that room as well.

So, can a 14-year-old really do what Elizabeth does?

In 1776, in that specific household, with that specific history? The more carefully I look at the history, the more I find that the answer is yes.

The harder craft problem is different. It’s not whether she could have done it. Instead, it’s making sure she still sounds like a girl living inside that world, rather than a modern person visiting it. Her knowledge is appropriate to her environment. The frustration is universal.

My work as a writer is to hold both at once, without slipping into either a museum piece or a contemporary teenager in costume.

That tension keeps me sharp every single day.

Yours in the adventure of discovery,

~ Terri

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