The Legend of the Great Horse trilogy takes place across many historical eras, from pre-history to modern times, and research was fundamental to telling an accurate story. I followed a method I found enjoyable and fascinating, and which I believe brought authenticity to the work.
Basically, I gathered writings from each era visited in the book, and spent significant time immersing myself in that culture. To an important degree, writing is a distillation of the thoughts and emotions of the society it comes from, and I found that by experiencing (reading) a variety of preserved texts that the ideas and mindset of its society could surface in my own writing. I found a lot of surprises.
For example, one of the historical periods visited in Eclipsed by Shadow is ancient Rome. There is no shortage of writing from our Roman ancestors, but there is a profusion of literary works of quality during the late Republic and early days of Empire. The fascinating Roman “novel” Satyricon was written then, and also the legendary works of the great chronicler Tacitus who wrote scandalous histories of Rome. Reading established facts about Rome along with works of Romans themselves reveals their world in a new and authentic way: through the eyes of our ancestors.
Though no new facts are discovered by this process, in the archaeological sense, what is gained is sense of the day. For example, I learned how Rome grew as a new idea in the hearts of man, that of shared citizenship and the power of harmony, a melting pot of peoples that was gradually corrupted by ongoing appeal to military virtues and primacy of commerce. Tacitus, former Consul who lived through nine emperors, writes bravely as his world is descending into debased madness that would end in twelve centuries of what we call Dark Ages. Western Civilization literally died once before. If I had been taught this history, I did not fully appreciate it in those terms.
I hope that my research provides the reader with something valuable and different in their knowledge of the world. I will say that the experience changed me. History is always what it seems, and it is certainly not a closed book.
