If you want to write a historical novel, do you avoid other novels set in that period, or gobble them up? Do you find reading history books a help or a problem?

My take on it -

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2011/11/caution-novelists-historians-at-work.html

and the comments show that others are quite different.

Emma

This resonates with me, Emma. I've just finished the first draft of a YA book set in an English slave port in the 18th century, and someone lent me Celia Rees 'Pirates!' to read. And I just couldn't face it. I started it, but it felt all wrong to be reading someone else's imagining of the same period.

I do - but before writing - as part of my general research, alongside the factual stuff, simply to check out what I think is good or bad about that writing and what I have to compete with.