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 »
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 »
—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
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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 »
There is a sentence men have told women for as long as sentences have been spoken: “Here is what you are for.” A daughter is for marrying well. A wife is for bearing sons. A queen is for outliving her usefulness with grace. A princess is for the alliance her body can purchase. None are
Why I Write Women Who Refuse the Story Given to Them 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 »
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 »
Esteemed Reader, It pleaseth me greatly to make known unto you that my novels shall be offered at a discount upon Smashwords during their Eighteenth Annual Summer and Winter Sale. The sale endureth the whole month of July, and ’tis a most propitious season to acquire these volumes, together with works by other worthy independent
Smarshwords July 2026 Summer/Winter Sale 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 »
