WHEN TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION

Why I study ancient history obsessively, and why it makes my thriller trilogy more terrifying than anything I could invent.

​

I’ve often been asked where I get my ideas. They expect me to say something writerly, a dream, a moment in the shower, a news headline that sparked something. Instead, I tell them the truth. I get my ideas from science and from the past. Specifically, from the parts of the past that most people have never been allowed to see.

​

I am a fiction author. But before a single word goes on the page, I am a researcher. I haunt online university libraries, I study archaeologists, linguists, and biblical scholars who work in the shadows of institutions that would rather their findings stayed buried, and I read texts that have been sitting unread in Project Gutenberg archives for centuries. My thriller trilogy was not born in my imagination. It was excavated.

​

“The most dangerous thing I have ever encountered is not a villain I invented, it is a fact that someone powerful decided the world should never know.”

I don’t need to make things up. Not really. The ancient world is so relentlessly strange, so full of civilizations that shouldn’t have existed, technologies that shouldn’t have been possible, and knowledge that was supposedly lost but was never actually lost, just suppressed, that pure invention would actually produce a tamer story.

​

Take the megalithic stonework scattered across the Lazio region of Italy. Modern scholars walk past these structures dating back thousands of years before the Romans, before the Etruscans, and say almost nothing. The building techniques mirror those of the pre-Inca civilizations of Peru with uncanny precision. Two cultures. Two continents. No known contact. And yet, there the stones sit, bearing mute testimony that something was happening in our deep past that we do not yet have the language to explain.

​

When I put something like that into my trilogy, readers write to me saying it feels unbelievable. And I have to smile, because that detail is not fiction. And so…with that in mind…I’m rewriting my Fallen Race trilogy and I expect it’s going to be incredible!!!

​