Colossus: Map of Rome

Feb 23, 2013 | Books - Publishing

Here's the map of the area around the Forum Romanum in Rome, around 66-69 AD. It covers many of the places mentioned in the course of the novel. For this map, we took an existing one in the public domain and overhauled it completely. The Fish Market and the...

Cover Art for THE FOUR EMPERORS

Feb 19, 2013 | Books - Publishing - The Novel - Writing

Cover art is a tricky business. It can make or break a book. And it's always dangerous for authors to have too much say in their covers. But, as with other Sordelet Ink books, I get final say. It was bad from the start. I walked into this art design thinking I...

A Community Loss

Feb 6, 2013 | Books

Last night the Historical Fiction community lost a great voice in Margaret Frazer. The author of two dozen historical mysteries, she was writing and promoting right up to the end.  I only knew her as Margaret, her pen name, not as Gail, in life, so I'll...

Truth, Motive, & Tone

Jan 30, 2013 | Books - Essential Posts - Shakespeare - The Novel - Writing

A huge component to what writers of Historical Fiction do is write about real people. That’s a huge component of what the readers are looking for – not just the clothes and habits of a distant time, but the flesh-and-blood beings who wore those clothes and had those...

Love is Love

Sep 7, 2012 | Books - Shakespeare - The Novel - Theatre

Here's a guest piece I wrote for Bilerico.com that ran last Sunday.  I’m getting some lovely praise for my new novel, HER MAJESTY’S WILL. I wrote it as a tongue-in-cheek spy story starring Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe, and it seems to be received...