THE PURPLE PARCHMENT

—Martha’s blog—

When Rubies of the Viper was published in 2010, I created a free-standing, novel-focused WordPress blog called The Purple Parchment. A year later, when I started building this website, I decided I liked that name so much that I kept it when I imported its posts here.

That original WordPress site still exists on the web, and people do still visit it. Its posts are the oldest ones, however, and I don’t maintain it. This is the blog site that I keep updated. New posts appear here as my life and writing schedule permit.

Learn Why I named my blog The Purple Parchment.

I’ve organized my blog posts into three categories.

Section 1 — FASCINATING FACTS — covers a variety of subjects related to the first century AD: agriculture, cities, houses, language, rural places, slavery, travel, women, etc.

Section 2 — CHARACTERS — gives insights into both the historical characters—Nero, Otho (shown here on the coin), Poppaea Sabina (the beautiful woman in the sculpture here), Josephus, Berenice, and the Flavians: Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, and Flavia Domitilla—and the fictional characters—Theodosia, Alexander, Stefan, Nikolaos, Doros, Lycos, Myrine, and Iocaste—who populate my novels and bring them to life.

Section 3 — WRITING CHALLENGES — discusses issues that arose for me in the course of writing this historical trilogy.

As a writer portraying not just fictional characters but also historical people who actually lived in the time and places I write about — see Real People in Historical Fiction — I often struggled to make their speech sound right. Ultimately, I chose to write dialogue that sounds “real” in modern English — see Avoiding Jabberwocky and So, how would they talk?

In addition, as the author of two fictional sequels, I wrestled with Pleasures and Pitfalls and the Challenges in Writing an Historical-fiction Trilogy.