Sep 10, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
Broadsides: the Posts and Tweets of Renaissance England When I moved to Edinburgh in 1995, I experienced something of a cultural shock. The language was different than anything I’d be taught at school (ach, hawd yer whisht, my good friend Mike might say to...
Sep 4, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
It was the end of a particularly taxing day, and Canal, a prominent 14th-century Venetian merchant, was baffled. A friend had posed him a simple-sounding mathematical problem, but he still couldn’t figure it out. The problem went like this: the distance between...
Aug 22, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
One of my favorite Pearseus characters is Teo Altman; the power-hungry despot who lies and kills his way to the top. As most of my characters, he is based on a real-life person from ancient Greek history. Cylon of Athens is associated with the first reliably dated...
Aug 13, 2016 | Blog hops tours & reblogs, Fun Historical Facts
Fantasy Tip from the Past: Poisons and the Bezoar Since July, my epic fantasy series, Pearseus, has had a new intro: the scene where the mysterious Whispers hand Styx the poison that will make her justice. Once again, the inspiration for this was taken from history,...
Aug 10, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts
In Kingston, a small village in rural Cambridgeshire, a stolid tenant farmer is wiping moist eyes. His three children had survived the 1507 outbreak of the ‘sweats;’ a sickness that could see you hale and hearty at lunchtime, and dead before supper. But by...
Aug 1, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts, Random Musings
Six-year-old Onfim stifled a yawn. His teacher was droning on and on about Old Russian alphabet, but Onfim had had enough scrawling letters onto his birchbark notebook. His mind wandered to the really exciting things that Novgorod in 1220 AD had to offer: brave...
Jul 26, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts, Random Musings
The year is 2099. A group of people is preparing to celebrate New Year’s Eve aboard the brand spaceship, Pearseus. Instead, they end up castaways on a remote planet. Three hundred years later, most of the original technology has disappeared. People have...
Jul 14, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts, Random Musings
I debated posting this for a while. I hate standing on a soap box, and this is a blog about books, not politics. But there’s so much going on worldwide at the moment that I’ve started feeling like an ostrich, hiding my head in the sand. What gave me the...
Jul 8, 2016 | Fun Historical Facts, Maps and Infographics
East is placed at the top. The sun and moon hold lush forests. Jerusalem is the center of the world. And dragons hold the globe up at the bottom. But there is one aspect of the Psalter World Map, created in the 1260s, that is even stranger: a line-up of grotesque men...
Jul 4, 2016 | Events and Giveaways, Fun Historical Facts
I interrupt my multi-part series in ancient and Medieval wonders for a quick nod to my friends over the Atlantic. In honor of today’s Independence Day, here is the amazing tale of one of the best-known symbols of all time: the dollar, or $. No keyboard is...
