One of the most fun things about both reading and writing historical romance is the blending of fact and fiction—finding those nuggets of truth amidst the earth of a novel. Some readers—especially Regency romance readers—expect there to be complete accuracy in the manners and forms of address mentioned in a novel. Fashion choices should align with what was really fashionable, and historical accuracy needs to be kept as close to reality as possible. That is all well and good and I don’t have a problem with any of that, although, as a reader, I do allow for more discretion than many others (it is a novel after all, and if an author wants to move around bits of historical fact I don’t mind so long as they know the truth of it and put in an author’s note at the end). When I was in college and studying British History, I even wrote a paper on the historical accuracy found in one of the romance novels I was reading. To say that professor was shocked at how accurate it was would be to understate his response. With all this in mind, when I set out to create a country for…