Before I ever touched a computer, I touched lead. I was a child in Brazil in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember the weight of a form in my hands, the steel frame holding rows of metal letters and the thin strips of lead spacers that gave a line its breathing room. The compositors […]
Why Book Design Is an Apprenticeship, Not a Weekend Course Read More »
The prose is the most important element—everything else is complementary. The purpose of book design is not to make pages beautiful. It is to make the prose beautiful to read. Most conversations begin one step too late: which font, how much margin, what goes on the cover. Those considerations are downstream of a prior one
How To Design Your Book Read More »
Why Human Writing Gets False Positives I. The Accusation An author submits a passage to a detector. The passage is his own, drafted and revised across weeks. A verdict displays on the screen: ninety percent AI-generated. He reads the number twice, certain some error has occurred, and finds none. The tool has not misread a
Are AI Detectors Accusing You of Writing With AI? Read More »
Writing Divine Presence in Bronze Age Fiction as Lived Reality Rather Than Abstraction. Mythological fiction has a problem that most writers fail to solve: the gods are either too large or too small. Made too large, they do not inhabit the story; they furnish it. Artemis stands for chastity, Aphrodite for desire, Athena for wisdom,
Gods Who Are Not Metaphors Read More »
What the Mythological Tradition Preserves and What the Novelist Discovers Beneath It. There is a kind of silence in ancient sources that is not absence but compression. The authors who mention Atalanta—Hesiod in fragments, Pindar, Apollodorus, Diodorus Siculus, Pausanias, Ovid, Hyginus—do not bother to explain her. They assume their audience knows who she is. The
Atalanta Before She Was a Myth Read More »
The question arrived before I wrote a single page of Asterios and the Labyrinth. I was standing by the reconstructed Tripartite Shrine at Knossos, watching other visitors move past without pausing, and I thought: I have to put a character here. He has to believe something about what he sees. And I do not know
Writing the Unknown: How Historical Fiction Reconstructs Ancient Greek Religion Read More »
On the distance between the Bronze Age world of Atalanta of the Wild and the Classical Greece readers bring to the page, and why that distance matters to the fiction. Most readers arrive at a Bronze Age novel carrying Greece with them—the Greece of the Parthenon, of the city-state, of the agora, and of the
The Mycenaeans Were Not the Greeks Read More »
For those who wish to explore the relationship between Homer, the Bronze Age, and the archaeological record—and to understand why the distance between them matters to anyone who writes in that world. A historical novelist working in the Bronze Age Aegean faces a problem no amount of imagination alone can solve: the world he is
Seven Books That Will Make You a Better Historical Fiction Writer Read More »
On the distance between The Iliad and The Odyssey and what archaeology reveals—and why a historical novelist must navigate between them. Every reader who comes to Bronze Age historical fiction arrives carrying Homer. The wine-dark sea, the rage of Achilles, the cunning of Odysseus are the furniture of the Western imagination when it turns toward
Homer’s World Is Not the Bronze Age Read More »
On antagonists who operate from a coherent internal logic and whether historical fiction can afford a pure villain. There is a kind of antagonist who appears in lesser historical fiction with reassuring frequency: the man who enjoys being cruel, who oppresses because oppression pleases him, whose motives require no further excavation, as the author has
The Problem of the Villain Who Does Not Know He Is One Read More »
