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 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 »
Laughter does not interrupt a story. It belongs inside it, the way a breath belongs inside a sentence. I learned this not in a craft manual but in the pages of men who lived with the stench of open sewers and the fear of plague and somehow wrote the funniest prose in the Western canon.
What Boccaccio and Chaucer Taught Me About Comic Relief Read More »
—and why the instinct to keep it was correct. I am a relentless line editor. Nothing survives my revision passes by accident: not a clause, not a comma, not an adverb that has wandered in without earning its place. And yet, across three different novels, passages have arrived in single drafts and remained untouched through
The Sentence That Has Survived Every Revision Pass Read More »
I. The Flood There is a flood upon the literary world, and it does not smell of river water. It smells of nothing at all—which is, perhaps, the most accurate description of what machine-generated prose brings to the page: a vast, odorless, grammatical nothing. I am an independent author of literary historical fiction. I write
Why the Independent Human Author Is Disappearing—and What You Can Do Read More »
I. The Bell That Tolled in the Wrong Tower Throughout the writing of A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy, I needed bells. Not as atmosphere—as infrastructure. Cortona in 1450 AD ran on bells the way a modern city runs on clocks: they called the faithful to Mass, to Vespers, to the Compline;
The Research Rabbit Hole: When History Refuses to Let You Go Read More »
The Pressure That Broke By Chapter Eighteen of Asterios and the Labyrinth, I had been sustaining a level of emotional intensity that left even me—its author—in need of air. The novel had given romance, court intrigue, mythic sorceresses, Bronze Age siege warfare, and personal violation. Every scene carried weight. The narrative engine had been running
The Chapter That Wrote Itself Read More »
There is a sentence I keep returning to when I think about how to write the ancient world: a writer must disappear into it, not explain it from the outside. Mary Renault understood this better than almost anyone who has written historical fiction in English, and most novelists who have come after her, myself included, are
What Mary Renault Got Right That Most Historical Novelists Still Miss Read More »
There is a passage in one of my novels where a prince stages his own death at a woman’s feet. He enters the feast hall not as a lord but as a stag—darting, pausing, tossing his head to scent the wind—and when the drum thunders to its crescendo, he falls before her, bares his throat,
On Writing Desire Without Writing Romance Read More »
