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
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I. The Problem Omniscience Does Not Have The omniscient narrator goes where he pleases. He enters rooms his characters have left, overhears conversations no witness reports, and delivers information to the reader with the authority of a god. He has no obligation to justify his presence. He is simply there, and the reader accepts him.
Why Give a Minor Character a POV? Read More »
I. A Word Most Readers Have Never Encountered Ask a hundred readers what a colophon is and perhaps three will know. Ask those three whether they have seen one in a novel published in the last decade, and the number will shrink further. In most readers’ minds, the colophon, that brief inscription at the end
Why Does an Author Need a Colophon? Read More »
Early in Atalanta of the Wild, there is a moment where her father’s warriors lead her out of the Arcadian mountains and onto open ground, and the prose names it plainly: “the golden fields of fertile Tegéa.” I did not plan that sentence as a statement about her arc. I wrote it because that is
What the Landscape Knows That the Character Does Not Read More »
On the difference between historical fiction with mythological elements and historical fantasy—and why the distinction matters I. A Question of Ontology This is the governing principle of my fiction, and it took me some years to articulate it: I do not write the ancient or Renaissance world as we understand it. I write it as
I Did Not Invent the Gods 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 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 »
I knew some of this before I began. Not in depth, and not as a coherent body of knowledge—more as fragments encountered at random, in craft books read out of sequence, in advice absorbed before I had the experience to evaluate it. What the novels themselves taught me was different in kind: not information, but
Lessons Learned Writing Novels: What Each Book Taught Me Read More »
I confess at the outset that my experience of other kinds of readers is limited, and what little I have is not encouraging. My dearest friend Yolis, whose loyalty and warmth I would not trade for anything this world has to offer, finds my novels a considerable trial. She endures them when I give her
Why Historical Fiction Readers Are the Best Readers To Write For Read More »
