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 »
I have said this before and will say it again: I am not a writer who builds worlds from nothing. Pure imagination is not enough for me. Without a foundation of something real beneath my feet, my creativity has nowhere to stand. And because my purpose is to carry a reader into another time and
The Novelist as Archaeologist Read More »
There is a figure who appears in the novel without apology. He steps through a mirror of black smoke at the edge of a glade in November, sits upon a fallen trunk in the waning afternoon light, and speaks of forgotten siblings and a world that has ceased to remember him. He is Erebos—and if
Who Is Erebos in A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy? 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 »
People sometimes tell me that archaic English is unnecessary. That it creates distance. That modern readers want transparency, immediacy, a prose that gets out of the way of the story. I understand the argument. I disagree with it not on grounds of taste, but of accuracy. When you set a novel in the fifteenth century,
Dead Languages and Living Prose: Why Archaic English Is Not an Affectation Read More »
To this day I have not written a villain who is purely evil. I do not believe such a creature exists—not in life, not in honest fiction. At some point even the worst among us had a parent or a sibling who loved them, a pet that did, a life punctuated by trauma and loss
Writing Villains Who Show Their Human Side 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 »
