I am a retired journalist - mostly production work such as editing, page-planning, headline-writing and rewriting. I live in Somerset, in the West of England and want to join the forum so that I can (maybe) get some help in digging out authentic historical background for a novel I would like to write.
For example, we know that English criminals were sentenced to be transported to America and later to Australia and we know a lot about their sea voyages(for example, from Robert Hughes' book, "The Fatal Shore"). What I have found hard to discover is how they got from the towns where they were sentenced to the ports from which they sailed.
It's a funny thing how some writers worry about authentic backgrounds while others don't give a toss. Edgar Rice Burroughs had a fantastic background for a writer: Indian hunter, bronco buster, gold prospector, etc, but he absolutely did not want to visit Africa because he was afraid that a dose of reality would turn off the Tarzan fantasy tap.
