As most of you know, I love reading news about discoveries from ancient Rome. This post collects some recent articles, as well as a short piece I wrote for Virtual FantasyCon event about using real historical detail as background colour for storytelling. First, a bit out of In Numina. I use a lot of real […]
History
National Maritime Week – two millennia ago
A few weeks ago, Mary R. Woldering has asked me to contribute a piece for her blog, with the theme of National Maritime Week. I have chosen to address the issue of the life of ancient galley-slaves, and who really rowed the naval war galleys. Below I reproduce the full post. Hi, and welcome to the […]
Live(ly) bickering with my protagonist!
UPDATE! The interview is now posted on YouTube for your enjoyment – and for a chance to win a signed copy of Murder In Absentia or an ebook copy of Anais’ latest release! See the interview and comment on YouTube with the answer to the trivia question posed in it 😄 Anaïs (of anaisbelieve fame) has […]
Dressed to Kill (no, really!)
This is about historical clothing, not about clichés 🙂 It’s inspired by Marie Brennan’s post on Tor.com: How to Do Karate in a Victorian Dress. I suggest you read the entire post! Replace ‘dress’ with ‘toga’ and this is totally something I should be doing! I am happy to say that I do pay close […]
Epic World Building
Over at Our Epic Worlds, a blog dedicated to fantasy world-building, M.L. Spencer was kind enough to interview me about creating the historical-fantasy world of Egretia. I got to answer a few questions about Felix and the magical world he lives in. Here’s a short extract: How does the landscape or geography of your world […]
The Immortality of the Mystery
A guest post I have written as part of Mystery Thriller Week, originally published on Rae’s “A new Look on Books” blog. What’s in common between the latest scientific research about virus propagation, genetic modification for interstellar colonisation, and ancient priests poking about in animal entrails to predict the favour of the gods? More on […]
Life up a Creek
This is a different style of creative writing, hopefully reminiscent of Gerald Durrell (whose books I admired as a child). As some of you may know, we have recently moved houses. The new place is wonderful, with a large backyard that has a creek running through it. You can see it in the background in the […]
Historical Facts as Inspiration for Fantasy
As part of Virtual FantasyCon (that awesome event where Murder In Absentia received an unprecedented five awards ;-), we did a blog hunt. As an introduction to this site, I did a post about the historical inspirations behind the fantasy lighthouse of Egretia. This post was originally published on L.D. Rose‘s site, and is replicated […]
Indie Books Worth The Read – part 2
I don’t think I would ever tire of this image 🙂 Muder In Absentia has been voted as the NUMBER 1 Indie Book Worth The Read!!! That you again SO MUCH to everyone who voted! You have no idea how these small wins are important to us indie authors, and how encouraging it is. Now I think […]
Virtual Book Fair
This post is part of the Virtual Book Fair. Like to know more? Head on to this event on Facebook, or head on to the Virtual Book Fair Home Page. Welcome to Egretia! This is the home of Felix, the protagonist of his eponymous mystery series. Egretia is based on ancient Rome and a few other ancient […]
