Welcome to the Origins Blogfest!

Courtesy Wikipedia

On Mondays I usually have my series Medieval Mondays. Today, though, I'm participating in the Origins blogfest, telling the world how I got into writing. Medieval Mondays will actually be on Tuesday this week. I'll be talking about the Hexamilion, a six-mile wall the Byzantines built to try to stop the Ottoman Turks. Did it work? Come back tomorrow and find out!

My story is a pretty typical one. I got inspired to write because I grew up on science fiction, fantasy, and roleplaying games (anyone else out there a Gamma World fan?). I didn't write for a long time, though, because most of my creativity got sucked into my archaeology studies. Archaeology couldn't quite satisfy me, though. So much is left unknown. When you visit a place such as Avebury or uncover some spectacular find like the Sutton Hoo ship, pictured above, you're only learning a tiny percent of the story behind it.

So I got into writing to tell my own stories. One thing my readers often notice in my tales are the layers of personality my protagonists have. They are conflicted, multidimensional, often hypocritical, and nobody knows them completely, not even themselves. This is what makes people interesting, and as much as I love my field of study, archaeology will never be able to give us this.