Judith Starkston has spent too much time exploring the remains of the ancient worlds of the Greeks and Hittites. Their myths and clashes inspire her fiction and open gates to magical realms. She has degrees in Classics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cornell. She loves myths and telling stories, and her novels imbue fantasy with the richness of ancient worlds. The first book in her Trojan Threads Series, Hand of Fire was a semi-finalist for the M.M. Bennett’s Award for Historical Fiction. Priestess of Ishana, the first in her historical fantasy Tesha series, won the San Diego State University Conference Choice Award. Judith is represented by Richard Curtis.
Review of Tita, a novel set in 1950’s South of France: Tita is not an exercise in blind nostalgia for a lost past. It is a rich and warm, yet open-eyed portrait of a place and time just beyond our current reach. It’s a book worth savoring.
Can we say with reasonable certainty that we know where the real city of Troy is located and what life was like there during the period of a possible Trojan War, that is, the Late Bronze Age?
My favs around the web this week: interview with Ann Weisgarber, Helen Hollick on pirates, Nancy Bilyeau on Richard the Lionhearted, how to write real people into fiction, wondering if Achilles had ptsd, archaeological excavations of an ancient shipwreck and a tomb. A lot all in the same week Hand of Fire launched!
The Hittites left behind large libraries of cuneiform clay tablets. I discuss the nitty-gritty of ancient systems of writing.
How the evidence shows surprisingly powerful ancient women to portray in my novel. Thought women were marginalized until the modern period? Think again!
My favorites around the web this week: news about Hand of Fire, 19th C sisters who make fortune with their long hair, mysterious boulders solved, & BA copper smelting.
Publication events for the original edition of Hand of Fire
Kim Rendfeld talks about what happens when “the enemy” starts to feel like a real person in her latest release The Ashes of Heaven’s Pillar.
Writers on their writing process: a blog hop with Marylee MacDonald, Judith Starkston, Nancy Bilyeau and Faith Justice
My weekly favorites around the web: Macedonian tombs & Canaanite wine cellars, the Iliad and China policy, writing teenagers in historical fiction (Deb Swift), and debunking medieval myths (Kim Kendfeld), and 17th C witch-hunting (Anna Belfrage).
