If you dabble in writing, I’m sure you’ve dealt with the overinflated issue of how to start your piece. We call it ‘incipit’ when it’s fiction. We call it ‘hook’ when it’s… well, any other kind of writing, spanning from business to reporting. Only academics have the luxury not to deal with this issue in […]
Marguerite Porete, who was condemned for heresy and burned at the stake on June, 1st 1310, was a medieval Christian mystic who wrote around the concept of agape, the Divine Love, in her book The Mirror of Simple Souls. She’s today’s profile on my Patreon.
For a very small and specific part of the novel, I decided to research the role of a specific kind of dancers in medieval Japan, called shirabyōshi. As it happens, their role and characteristics are highly romanticized (i.e., objectified) by male authors of the time: they’re often portrayed as femmes fatales and seductresses, and this […]
Being set on a Dutch East India Company ship, the story I’m writing has to deal with the appalling crimes perpetrated by this and the other trading companies throughout history. And, since I aim to write a Gothic novel, what’s more fitting than an imprisoned princess? The idea, drawing from literature tropes and aiming to […]
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 […]