the novel I’m currently completely rewriting

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. Fellow writers—does it ever seem to you as if a writing project is never truly finished? If you have a contract and a deadline, there is a point where you have to say “Enough!” and let the manuscript go. But if you’ve ventured into the Indie field, or have rights back on a previously published book you’ve decided to revise and reissue, getting to that point is a whole lot harder. I’ll probably talk more about fiction at a later date, since revising and reissuing has been my “thing” since I (Hah!) retired a few years back. But today I want to focus on nonfiction, particularly history and biography, where there really is no point where everything is just right and will never need to be updated.

My A Who’s Who of Tudor Women is a perfect example. Boy is it ever! For years I simply posted these mini-biographies at my website and didn’t even attempt a book version. That way I could easily make additions and corrections.

If you’re thinking “It’s history. Facts don’t change.” Think again. New research is being done all the time. Back when I started this project, the concept of Women’s Studies was brand new. Before that all the emphasis in historical research had been on what men contributed. Women barely got a mention and when they did, male scholars often neglected to mention their given names. They were simply the wives or daughters of the important historical figures.

Anyway, things have changed. Digitizing source material made it easier to access. More people, men as well as women, took an interest in the distaff side of history. There was no way I could keep up with every new tidbit of information about the women who had entries in my Who’s Who.

Then came Covid and my realization that I might not be able to keep the webpages going forever. I took the 2300+ entries I had at that point and finally produced an ebook edition. Well, I thought, I can still make changes easily. And I can put up an “additions and corrections” page at the website. Soon, however, there were requests for a print edition. You know this part of the story already. It came out in three huge volumes at the end of last year. But guess what—other writers are still writing new books about the Tudor period and penning biographies of those women whose lives provide enough material for a full-length study. And in every one of those new books, at least one new detail emerges about one of my 2300+ women. Sometimes it just adds information. Sometimes it contradicts what I thought, based on older research, was accurate.

A case in point is a new biography of Anne of Cleves, fourth wife of Henry VIII. I had read only a short way into Accounting for Anne by historian James Taffe, in which he uses Anne’s account books to study her life, when I hit a name, Dorothy Fitzherbert, that sounded familiar. The story of how she had to go to court to enforce her marriage contract with John Wingfield, however, was new to me. Fascinating stuff, but the point is that it’s new information even though it has been around, waiting to be noticed, since the 1540s. I also saw that (oops!) I had assigned John the wrong parentage. Someone else, a reputable scholar, did that first, but still, what’s in my mini-biography of Dorothy is wrong.

There was other “new” stuff in Accounting for Anne too, and I’m talking about just the first third of the book here. I had never seen a list naming the gentlewomen she brought with her from Cleves before. Or how much her English “Mother of Maids” was paid per quarter (£5).

I’ve also recently read a convincing argument for the parentage of one of my favorite Elizabethan figures, Elizabeth’s governess, Katherine Champernowne Astley, written by novelist, Rosemary Griggs, who is working on a biography of Kat Astley. I’d have loved to include her reasoning in Kat’s entry, even though there is no absolute proof it is correct.

The upshot of all this is that the current version of the Who’s Who will have to be the final one . . . but I’ll probably be penciling notes in the margins of my copy till I drop.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.

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