One of my main characters is basically my version of a lycanthrope: at a cycle approximately coinciding with the full moon, they go berserk and transform into the most fearsome creature their subconscious self can think of. In our case, the character is from the Yoruba Empire (around current Benin) and therefore the predator par […]
My main character uses silly rhimes a lot, both as a trick while thinking and when he has to time something. Since the novel is set in 1701, and many nursery rhymes and tunes were not collected until a century and a half later, I had to ask myself which ones I could refer to […]
«He tastes like salt and sweat, flavored with hop like a Dutch beer». This was supposed to be the sentence in my WIP.Gothic Novel. But historical fiction is tricky and I like to get things right, so I had to ask myself the question: did they use hop for beer in the XVII Century? I […]
Born in 1598, Giovanni Riccioli was a Jesuit Italian astronomer who liked to throw stuff down from towers (we can’t say he experimented with gravity: in the Western world, we’ll have to wait for Newton in 1684). Among his researches, he introduced the scheme for naming lunar geography that we still use today, a system […]
When we think about Court Fools, the mind immediately associates them with jesters. We might think of capers, jokes and, eventually, physical disability. This is, however, a concept that was consolidated in Elizabethan times, and there’s a portion of Early Reinassance in which another kind of fool was mostly popular: the innocent. Today we take […]
Qin Shi Huang was the guy who basically invented the concept of “Emperor” in China, around 250 b.C., and I’m sure you’re familiar with his grand Terracotta Army. A thing you might be less familiar with? His love for mercury. In order to boost some of his shapeshifting abilities and when the shit hits the […]
You might be familiar with the fact that in the original versions of chess — the Persian hatranj and the Indian chaturanga — the overpowered omnipotent Queen was respectively the ferz, the counsellor, and the mantri, the general. Go figure, you might think. What you might be less familiar with is that originally all the queens […]
When researching the usage of tea in a British environment around 1700 sharp, one can’t help but stumble onto the puffy smiling face of Samuel Pepys. He was the first Englishman ever to record drinking tea, and bless his compulsion for recording everything. His experience, though, wasn’t particularly exciting, and it’s fun to see how […]
One of the main characters, in the Gothic Novel I’m writing, is a shapeshifter who’s unapologetically pansexual and occasionally gender-fluid, so this was a question I was bound to ask myself. 1701: could you be killed for being gay? Specifically, we assume the character left England in the wake of the 1542 “Witchcraft Act”, being […]
There’s the widespread narrative that transsexuality is something new and we’re all wound up around something we invented yesterday. And to that narrative we say: fuck you. Representation has never been so important and this is why I’m publishing this string of notes on LGBT+ characters throughout history. Because we have always existed. And we’re […]