Category: Uncategorized
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The Rule of Threes: A Crash Course on the Roman Civil Wars, Part One
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: democracy just doesn’t work. – Kent Brockman While I was trying to decide what to entertain you all with this week, I was thinking back on one of my first my entries about Octavius and the First Settlement, and I realized that perhaps I should have…
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Breath of the Gods: Demons in the World of The God’s Wife
He’s got demons? Cool! – The Great Gonzo, Muppet Treasure Island We’ve talked a little about the gods here, so this week I figured we’d take a look at another supernatural group that exists in The God’s Wife: demons. Specifically, two different cultural approaches to these semi-divine entities – through the eyes of the Egyptians,…
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Modern Myth-Making: The Creation of the Sha
As promised in the last entry, this week we’re going to do a little more storytelling. But instead of a retelling of an old Egyptian myth, I’m going to share with you an entirely new myth I wrote as part of the larger God’s Wife narrative, namely, my interpretation of the origins of Set’s fantastical…
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The Lion Queen: The Creation of Sekhmet (and Hathor)
As I try to wade through my final (no seriously, this one is the last one, I swear) edit of Daughter of Eagles, some of you might be wondering why this part of the writing process seems to take so much longer than, you know, the actual writing. Some of it is simply the battle…
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Sacred Sorcery: Magic in Egyptian Life (and Death)
…The sky encloses the stars, magic encloses its settlements, and my mouth encloses the magic which is in it… – The Book of Going Forth by Day, spell 31 The past couple of weeks I’ve devoted to the physical world, which I know can be a little dry, so I thought this entry I’d devote…
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Forces of Nature and History: The City in the Ancient World
Damned Alexandria, land suited to treachery – Sextus Propertius Writing has many challenges, but properly conveying a sense of setting has its unique problems, particularly when the place is so different, as it often is in a historical novel. This issue is compounded when the places you’re writing about are in various states of decay or…
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Poseidon in the Punjab: The Greeks in India
This week I thought I’d give everyone a break from the Romans and Egyptians, and move back to Arsinoë’s other people: the Greeks. Specifically, the centuries-long presence of the Greeks where perhaps they would be somewhat unexpected: India. As I allude to in The God’s Wife, Alexander the Great’s (356 BC – 323 BC) conquests…
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Roman Holiday: Festivals of the Augustan Empire
Nil adsuetudine maius (Nothing is more powerful than custom) – Ovid, Ars Amatoria, Book II, line 345 As we enter the Labor Day weekend, I thought that the holiday presents an excellent excuse to discuss Roman festivals (fasti), ancient and (relatively) new-fangled. Caught between a modern gaze that sees them either as strait-laced orators in…
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Togs and Togas: Dress in the World of The God’s Wife
I’ve been pushing all of you around with political history and poetics for the past couple of weeks, so I thought here I’d go back to something a little more basic. Let’s talk about period clothing and turn this into a temporary fashion blog! The foundational garment in the world of The God’s Wife and…
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India’s Iliad and Rome’s Odyssey: The Mahabharata and the Aeneid
We sing of arms and the men… This week we’re going to get a little less historical and a little more literary with a dive into two primordial works of world poetry (I know, I can hear you all groaning from here), the Hindu epic the Mahabharata and Virgil’s Aeneid. Partly because they’re interesting, but…
Sarah Holz 