I have lived and travelled in most of the countries and regions in which my ancient historical novels take place, and I even use villages I have lived in in the novels. I have also taken many overland and sea travel routes deliberately so I could experience them and use them in my novels, but I have also incorporated many sea and land travel routes anyway since I do a great deal of land and sea travel and put them in my novels while writing them, since the characters travel in that direction. I have lived and travelled throughout Italy, and travelled throughout Greece, Turkey, Georgia, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, and other adjacent regions, and across diverse parts of the Mediterranean Sea, and these are all in my novels. I base neighbouring regions on the regions in which I have lived and travelled, so I am very familiar with these situations, including situations with local wildlife, climate, cultures, interactions with people when travelling, and reactions by people to foreigners travelling through the regions (both positive and negative). I mention sandstorms and other natural events and disasters since I've experienced them myself.
One example I can think of is making friends with wealthy Omani Bedouins and being invited for tea, seated on carpets in their tent, seeing their camels, and so on, and I created scenes like this in my novel, Rise of the Magi. I have used many interpersonal scenes, both positive and difficult ones, from my own experiences, in my novels. Also, the general feel of what it's like travelling overland on public transport through these places, and hearing diverse dialects, haggling prices. So I am doing this all the time and therefore can't recall all incidents. I am very familiar with the city of Rome, and when writing scenes taking place here, I know where the ancient areas are in which the scenes take place and can easily picture them in my mind when describing the characters' locations and movement around the city.
Publishing my first book didn’t fundamentally change my writing process, but it did make me more confident in my ability to complete a novel, especially when I finished my first historical fiction work. Nonfiction was easier to complete because it followed a more structured research-driven approach which I'm already very accustomed to through years of university achieving several degrees, whereas historical fiction required deeper narrative development and character complexity. Having gone through the full publication process, I became more assured in crafting and finalising a story, which made my next work faster to complete—although I always write carefully to ensure depth and accuracy.
I’d tell myself not to be overly perfectionist to the point that I took overly long to finish my first historical novel, and that I should begin writing it while doing the research rather than completing years of research first. It’s important to start writing with the idea of completing the first novel, and that it is not as overwhelming or unreachable a task as I had imagined but something easily achievable with perseverance and in a reasonable amount of time.
I’d also tell myself to write its chapters and scenes in consecutive order and let the scenes, plot, and characters develop organically while being aware of the story’s basic structure. Although some writers advise being overly structured and then writing the chapters at random, the way that works best for me is to develop the story in the order in which it takes place, which makes it easier to get into the characters as though I were acting out their parts in my mind. The story then takes over, and the characters develop lives of their own.
I’d also tell myself to follow the writing method I used as a child, in which I was not self-conscious about my writing nor did I second-guess myself but simply wrote freely, fully aware that I was a good writer with good imagination, and received much commendation for what I had done. I am the same person now as I was then, with the same talents, if not perhaps more developed than before due to life experience.
I grew up telling stories from a very young age—I'm told I created my first stories when I was two years old. Beginning when I was around four or five, my mother, also a writer, would get me to tell my stories to her, and she would write them down for me and save them, acting as my kind of ghostwriter. I enjoyed the process, and whenever I had a new story, I would tell her, "I have a new story," so she would type it for me as well. She compiled them into booklets, and we would read them to my friends when they came to visit.
I find writing and storytelling are closely bound up with acting, and as a child, I would write plays, some of which my friends and I performed for the neighbours. As a teenager, I wrote a play with choreographed dancing for a Christmas school production, for which I also composed the soundtrack music. It was set in the early Roman Empire during the first Christmas. I plan to revamp and rearrange it soon. My mother was a writer, and my father a public speaker, so this also encouraged me to write.
When my mother and I travelled the world from the time I was a small child, we'd keep travel journals intending to publish them. I illustrated mine with sketches, added poetry, and we collected plant samples from different countries, pressing them into labelled books. I always knew I would one day be writing for publication. I published my first article for a newspaper in Tasmania when I was ten—something concerning environmental issues—and that same year, I published a poem I had written while we were travelling through the Canadian Rockies based on my experience there. I’ve incorporated this poem into one of my historical novels, which will be published shortly.
From childhood, I was constantly making up stories, and by early adolescence, I began creating more serious ones inspired by daily experiences or observations while living and travelling through the many countries we visited—most of these were ancient historical. When I was 17 and in my first year of university for my first bachelor's in classical archaeology, I wrote a poetic prose piece for a university class. When I took it out again recently to publish it, the idea immediately came to me for a historical novel, "The Oracle of Delphi: That Which is Hidden". While writing it, I then developed ideas to turn the story into a quadrilogy to further develop one of the characters.
It's interesting that although I was familiar with the general history surrounding the events mentioned in this first novel—and when my mother and I were living briefly in Greece during my early teens, we explored the ruins of Delphi, including the Temple of Apollo, and I personally explored the area under the temple where the oracle would have received her visions—the poetic prose piece I wrote for university was not based on research. It came purely from my imagination, using creative license and impressions I had concerning the Apollo priests and King Kroisos of Lydia. When I recently conducted research to confirm the historical background, I discovered that the incidents I had developed creatively and the spontaneous theories and impressions I formed were substantiated by the ancient historical records of Herodotus and others, as well as ideas published by scholars in the field. I found a similar situation when I delved into the fall of Media for my series.
As mentioned, I was creating serious stories in my mind from my early adolescence, envisioning them as movies, while the stories I created as a child were acted out in my backyard, often with my friends. However, when I was 19, I came upon a historical incident from the early Roman Empire during the Julio-Claudian era that I found so compelling when I envisioned it as a "movie" that I decided it absolutely needed to be written as a book. I then went to the Vancouver Public Library in Canada and began extensive research on the topic. I found that the ideas I developed through creative license worked as legitimate theories, supported by the ancient Jewish historians, but less so by Christian historians discussing that era's events.
I’ve been researching the topic intermittently throughout my university studies, during which the pursuit of multiple degrees delayed my ability to finish the book earlier. Much of my travel and living abroad during this time involved spending periods in the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean to deepen my knowledge for this book. I later wrote a master’s thesis in classical archaeology based on the same research, earning full marks and much commendation for it. Before this, I had also completed several academic papers on the topic, which similarly achieved high praise and grades. My professors told me I knew the subject extremely well and was passionate about it. The research concerns some lesser-known but significant Roman historical figures and events, related from a unique perspective.
Once I achieved my Master’s degree, I proceeded to finish the book, which became the first instalment of my Roman series. The book is titled "The Tower of Malatha: A Novel of Ancient Rome".
