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,
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
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
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 »
If you have ever read a novel set in the ancient world and found yourself wondering how much of it is true—how the author knew what a Mycenaean palace smelled like, or how a Minoan priestess dressed, or what Linear B actually says—then you have already crossed the threshold from reader into something more. You
Five Works of Classical Scholarship Every Historical Fiction Reader Should Know Read More »
