This month I’ve gotten two very different messages in my inbox. One reader asked, “Why should I even bother with the historical parts? It’s fiction, after all.” Another said the opposite: “We should stick strictly to the facts. It’s history, so we owe it that respect.” Both of you are right. And both of you are only seeing half of the picture. So as August closes, I want to give you the whole thing.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

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The past is not a fact. It’s a theory we keep revising

Here’s something I believe with my whole chest, as both an archaeologist and a historical fiction writer: we will never know what truly happened in the past. We can only assume what may have happened. Unless someone invents a time machine, every single thing we say about history is a best guess built on physical remains, patterns, and inference and honestly, if time travel ever happens, I think we’re going to be shocked at how wrong we were about almost everything.

That’s not a flaw in archaeology. That’s the discipline working exactly as it should.

So let me break down what archaeology actually is, in my own professional opinion, built from years of fieldwork, research, and yes, plenty of humbling moments:

10% hard scientific knowledge. This is everything from the degrees, the theses, the peer-reviewed research, the textbooks. Real, tested, foundational knowledge.

20% independent research and experimentation. This is the part most people don’t see. The experimental archaeology that happens outside academic requirements, where you’re testing, replicating, and trying things nobody assigned you to try. I believe experimental archaeology is one of the most fundamental parts of the entire discipline, and it doesn’t get nearly enough credit.

70% theory and imagination. Yes, seventy percent! Some colleagues would put this number lower and the “hard facts” number higher. I don’t. I think that’s dishonest about how the discipline actually works. Archaeology isn’t a locked vault of certainties. It’s a living, breathing organism that evolves every time someone reopens a question we thought was closed.

The Cycladic women who might not know what they were

Let me give you an example I love. The small white marble figurines of the Cycladic civilization. The ones with the folded arms and the tilted heads that show up on postcards and museum posters across the Aegean. I adore them. I have one drawn on my pencil case, that’s how much.

But study them closely and you’ll find archaeologists have sorted them into precise categories: early period, late period, “the harpist,” “the flute player,” figures believed to represent women, believed to represent something ceremonial. Neat. Confident. Categorized.

And yet, marble doesn’t move for you. You move around the marble. The hand shapes it, not the other way around. So here’s my honestly uncomfortable question: did the people carving these even know exactly what they were making? Are our categories describing their intentions, or are they scaffolding we built afterward because a discipline needs order to function?

I think our categories are useful. I don’t think they’re the truth. I think they’re what I like to call an imagining truth. Not a false truth, because that implies we know the alternative. Just a truth we can’t actually confirm.

This is exactly where fiction walks in

If archaeology is mostly theory and imagination already, then historical fiction isn’t the enemy of accuracy. It’s the discipline’s natural extension. The remains and the research give you the walls of the room. Fiction is what furnishes it, lights it, and puts people inside it who breathe.

But here’s the part I want you to sit with if you write historical fiction: the word “historical” is doing real work in that phrase. If this were just fiction, we wouldn’t call it historical at all. So you owe the past something. Not certainty, because certainty doesn’t exist, but respect. Respect means researching like an archaeologist would: gathering what’s actually known, understanding where the evidence ends, and being honest with yourself about the line between the two.

That’s the whole balance. Not “ignore the facts because it’s fiction.” Not “never deviate because it’s history.” It’s: research like a scientist, then imagine like an archaeologist already has to, every single day of their career.

Don’t be afraid to challenge what you “know”

Some things are true because the remains say so. Everything beyond that is a gap and gaps are not failures, they’re invitations. Historical fiction h structure. It has research. It has responsibility. But past that responsibility, it’s your imagination’s job to fill what the excavation, the archive, and the historian never could.

So here’s what I want you to carry into your next project: When you write historical fiction, use your imagination to fill those gaps. Approach history, and archaeology, with respect. And never, for one second, believe that archaeologists are gods who know everything.

We’re not. We’re just really committed guessers with really good tools. Welcome to the club.

Not metaphorically. Not in the soft, poetic way writers sometimes exaggerate for effect. I mean it almost literally. Avoice that keeps arguing with me after the file is saved, a face that keeps looking at me from across a room that doesn’t exist.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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And for years, I told myself this was just part of the job. Structure. Craft. The mechanics of building a story. I have built my whole professional life around structure. As an archaeologist, as a writer of historical fiction, as someone who tells other writers and game developers how to build credible historical worlds. I believe in research. I believe in frameworks. I believe that historical fiction, more than almost any other genre, demands discipline: you cannot simply invent a world, you have to excavate one, layer by layer, and decide, consciously, how much truth you owe it.

But somewhere along the way, in a conversation with a friend, in the comments of a Note, in yet another debate about whether historical fiction should be “accurate” or “just fun”, I realized something uncomfortable.

We talk endlessly about structure. We talk about accuracy, about pacing, about frameworks and beat sheets and research rabbit holes. And in all that talking, we quietly forget the one thing the whole structure exists to hold up: the person inside it.

A character is not a branch on a plot tree. A character is not “Note 2” or “the mentor archetype” or a symbol wearing a costume. A character is a living being who was born, fully formed in some strange corner of your mind, who breathes, who dreams, who grieves, who falls in love, who wants a home, an apology, a war to end. And here is the part we almost never say out loud: that character is also us. Some fragment of the person writing them is alive inside every single one.

I did not fully understand this until I looked back at my own work. Almost eighteen main characters, and easily twice as many others who have names, backstories, private griefs I’ve never even put on the page. For me, the environment itself is never just a backdrop. It is the characters who make a place feel alive; they react to their world, and their world reacts back to them. None of it means anything without the people breathing inside it.

Take Onar the Wise, from my saga The Chronicles of Earth Mortalmh, which I began writing thirteen years ago and still return to, the way you return to an old friend’s house. Onar comes from nothing. He fights for every inch of his place in the world. He dies and still, even in death, his spirit stays close enough to guide the people who come after him. I have tried, more than once, to give him more flaws, to make him messier, more human in the broken sense of the word. I couldn’t quite do it. I think now I understand why: Onar is who I hope to become. Not who I am but who I am reaching for. A person who suffers, mentally and physically, and still rises, again and again, with a kind of greatness that pain cannot touch.

Then there is Sian, from my graphic novel Nostrandor. Readers sometimes tell me Sian and Onar feel alike, and they’re right, in a way. But Sian carries something Onar never could, because Sian is built from my grandfather. My mother’s father. A wise man, a Keeper of peace in the land he guarded. Sian also dies before the story even starts and he also stays. Through stories and memories. Watching over his granddaughter, who becomes the next Keeper after him. My grandfather was not humble the way Onar is; he was simply him, and some of that specific, unrepeatable him now lives permanently inside a character in a book. When I write Sian, I am not inventing. I am remembering and continuing.

But if you ask me which character I love most, the answer is Seymour Callaway. Seymour will always hold the first place in my heart, because he isn’t just a character in a historical novel. He is a piece of my own soul on the page. I created him during the darkest stretch of my life. As a depressed teenager and later as a young adult who had lost her father, and then lost her grandfather in a way too cruel and too sudden to make any sense of. I didn’t believe in people back then. Some days I didn’t even like them. Seymour was born from that place: closed off, distrustful, barely holding on, trying to survive in a world he didn’t trust. Because that was me, trying to survive in mine.

It has been almost ten years since I started writing his story. I am a different person now. One who has done the long, slow work of healing, who has learned to trust again, who has built a self she can actually stand beside. And I’ve come to believe Seymour, together with Eliza, the other half of that story, is the truest thing I will ever write. Their story, Dark Matter, is history with fiction and psychology folded into one tale. But really, it is a letter I wrote to myself without realizing it. And now, ten years later, it feels like they’re writing back. As if Seymour and Eliza are saying: look what we survived. Look what we became. If we could do it, so can you.

This is what I mean when I say we forget what we’re actually doing when we write. We think we’re building plots. We’re not. We’re giving pieces of ourselves a place to live, breathe and be witnessed. Sometimes without even meaning to. A grandfather who is gone comes back as a Keeper of an ancient world. A depressed, distrustful girl becomes a man surviving history’s cruelty and, eventually, surviving himself. This happens whether we notice it or not. The only question is whether we honor it once we do.

So here is what I want to leave you with, whether you’re writing historical fiction, epic fantasy, a graphic novel, or building a character for a video game no one has played yet: your characters are not notes on an index card. They are not there to serve your outline. In more ways than you probably realize, they are you. The you that you were, the you that you’re afraid of, the you that you’re still becoming. Give them that truth. Give them the weight of a real, breathing life, because on some level, they already have one.

I love my characters. I have given them so much of myself, like my grief, my hope, my grandfather, my darkest years, my slow return to the light, that I believe, in whatever strange way fiction allows, they love me back.

I hope you start believing that about yours, too.

I have to confess something a little unusual for an archaeologist: one of my favorite Disney movies is Brave. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it, thrilled by how close it came to capturing this magic, this wildness, this mythical side of Scotland and its northern islands. It’s not “accurate” in any strict sense but it feels true to something real. And that something real is exactly what I want to talk about today, through the Orkney Islands.

My own research recently brought me even closer to this place. I just completed an experimental archaeology project on the long-handled bone combs of Orkney, so this region is fresh in my mind in a very hands-on way. But today I want to introduce you to it more broadly: not just the technology, but the inspiration. How we can take these powerful archaeological facts and monuments and let them feed our own historical fiction writing.

Let me start as the archaeologist first. The writer comes after.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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The Archaeology: What’s actually there

Orkney’s human history stretches back to the early Neolithic, but most of its surviving monuments and settlements date from the late Neolithic through the early Bronze Age, continuing into the early Iron Age. The best-known sites form what’s called the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, a UNESCO World Heritage group.

The Ring of Brodgar is, for me, the most striking. It’s a henge with an internal stone circle. Unusual, since most henges don’t have one. It sits on a narrow strip of land between the Lochs of Harray and Stenness, and it’s considered one of the most atmospheric prehistoric monuments in Britain. It was built roughly between 2500 and 2000 BC, originally around 60 standing stones set in a 104-meter circle. Thirty-six survive today, some over 4 meters tall, carved from reddish Orcadian sandstone. It’s surrounded by at least 13 burial mounds and a large rock-cut ditch. We don’t know exactly how those mounds relate to the ring, but we know this place mattered enormously to the people who built it.

Nearby are the Stones of Stenness. The smaller of the two circles, and likely the older. It’s enclosed by a ditch and tied more closely to Neolithic tombs, while Brodgar connects more to Bronze Age cairns. I find it telling, as an archaeologist, that the smaller, older circle sits beside the larger, later, and structurally unique one as if the place kept being rebuilt into something grander.

Then there’s Skara Brae, one of the best-preserved archaeological sites in the entire UK. A stone-built Neolithic settlement on the Bay of Skaill, occupied from around 3180 to 2500 BC. It’s Europe’s most complete surviving Neolithic village.

Ten one-room stone houses survive, each about 40 square meters, fitted with stone dressers, beds, and storage. No weapons have ever been found there and the settlement wasn’t defensively sited. This was a peaceful community of farmers, hunters, and fishers, likely around 50 people. The homes had indoor drains and clay-sealed, waterproof storage boxes: evidence of careful engineering, not a rough camp. This was a proper, settled village. It was uncovered by a storm in 1850 and confirmed as Neolithic by radiocarbon dating in the 1970s.

And finally, Maeshowe, a large Neolithic chambered tomb, part of the same UNESCO group. Its name likely comes from Old Scandinavian mað (”meadow”) and Old Norse haugr (”mound”). But the Orkneyinga Saga calls it Orkahaugr (“Orkney Mound”), the name the Vikings themselves used. Maeshowe, in other words, carries two names from two different peoples, thousands of years apart, both still speaking through the stone.

The Mythology: What we feel, even when we can’t prove it

Here’s where it gets even more interesting to me. We don’t really know what the Neolithic builders of Orkney called themselves, or what they believed, or how they worshipped. But through early Scottish and Irish literature, both historians and archaeologists are fairly confident that older, unrecorded mythological beliefs sit underneath the later written legends.

Take the Stoor Worm. A giant, plant-poisoning sea serpent of Orcadian folklore. The moment I first read about it, Jörmungandr, the Norse Midgard Serpent, came straight to mind. It’s likely connected to a much older belief, shared across Scotland, Ireland and Scandinavia, in vast sea serpents. Those are the ancestors of every sea monster that came after.

Then there are the selkies. Shapeshifting seal-people, best known through the tale of Sule Skerry, a remote island west of mainland Orkney. When I first read about them, I was fascinated, and I still am. This myth radiated outward from Orkney to Iceland, the Faroes, Shetland, western Scotland, and parts of Ireland, making it the clearest thread connecting Orkney directly to wider Gaelic and Irish mythology.

The Finfolk are sea-dwelling sorcerers with strong Norse folkloric roots, said to abduct mortals to their hidden islands, living in a submerged kingdom with the vanishing isle of Hildaland as their summer home. And the trows, Orkney’s own, more settled version of trolls or fairies, said to dwell inside ancient burial mounds, feel distinctly local, more grounded in this landscape than the fairies of other parts of the UK.

What strikes me most is this: the monuments and the mythology aren’t separate stories. They’re the same story, told in two different materials. One in stone, one in words.

Writing it: A little respect, a lot of imagination

The Orkney Islands and the northern Scottish Isles have been a source of rich historical and mythological material for centuries. Reflected in Norse literature, in Scottish literature, and later in film and art. It’s a place that inspires writers again and again.

If you’re setting a story here, or drawing on this material anywhere, use it but use it with a little respect. It should get your imagination wild, because it got the imagination wild of the people who lived on this land thousands of years before us. That’s the real connection: between the storytellers of the past and the storytellers of today. We’re doing the same thing they did, just with different tools.

So….

Have you ever imagined the Orkney Islands, or the Scottish Isles, like this?

Or have you ever read a book or seen a film shaped by their history and myth?

I need to research everything first.

That fear stops more historical fiction writers than any plot hole ever will. Beginners especially freeze at the starting line because they believe historical fiction is, first and foremost, an act of research. Read enough books. Study enough timelines. Get every detail right before daring to write a single line of dialogue.

Here’s something that took me years to fully understand, and that I now repeat to almost every writer, narrative designer, and game developer I work with: historical fiction is not mostly research. It’s research and structure, balanced.

Research gives you the historical elements. Structure gives you the writing itself. The story, the characters, the shape of the thing. And too many beginners collapse the two together, so “starting” a historical fiction project quietly becomes “starting a research project,” and the story never gets written at all.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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History is not the beart. It’s the bones

Here’s the misunderstanding at the center of all of this: historical facts are not the essence of your story. They matter enormously but they are not the heart.

Think of your historical fiction project as a body.

The story is the heart. It’s what keeps everything moving, what the whole body exists to serve.

The characters are the muscles. They’re what makes the body do things. Act, want, fail, change.

The historical elements are the bones. They give the body structure, shape, weight. Without bones, nothing stands. But bones alone don’t live. Bones don’t want anything. Bones don’t have a heartbeat.

None of these three can carry the whole project alone. A heart without muscles can’t move. Muscles without bones have nothing to pull against. And bones without a heart are just a skeleton in a museum case. Accurate, maybe even beautiful, but not alive.

This matters because history, in good historical fiction, is not a dry backdrop. Not scenery painted behind your characters like a static theatre set. It’s organic. It’s active. It pushes back against your characters, shapes their choices, closes doors and opens others. When historical elements interact with your story instead of just decorating it, that’s when historical fiction starts to breathe.

So how do you actually get there? I use a simple, four-question framework. One I’ve used since I was a teenager writing my first attempts at this genre, and still use today with the writers and game developers I work with.

The four questions

The order matters. Don’t skip ahead, especially not to the last one. I promise you, there’s a reason.

1. What is my story about?

Before anything else, before a single historical fact enters the room, ask yourself what story you’re actually telling. Set history completely aside for this question. What happens? What’s the shape of the narrative? What’s at stake? This is the heart, beating on its own, before it has a body around it.

2. Who are my characters, and what are their goals?

Still no history here. This is about the muscles. Who is moving through this story, and what do they want badly enough to act on it? A character’s goal is what turns a historical setting into a living plot instead of a costume drama. Figure this out before you let a single historical detail influence them.

3. Where is my story set?

Now the bones enter. This is where you set your timeline and place: medieval France, WWII Poland, Mycenaean-era Greece, you choose. This is the only one of the four questions that is explicitly about historical elements, and that’s intentional. You’ve already built a heart and muscles that can stand on their own. Now you’re giving them a skeleton to move through.

4. How can the historical elements affect my story and my characters?

This is the question I consider the most important and the most dangerous to start with. This is where history stops being a backdrop and becomes interactive. How does the setting push your characters toward or away from their goals? How does it complicate the story you defined in question one? This is the organic relationship between history and narrative that separates historical fiction from a history lesson with a plot stapled on.

If you start here before answering the first three questions, you’ll fall into the research rabbit hole almost immediately, and it’s very hard to climb back out. Keep the order. One leads to two, two to three, three to four. Trust the sequence.

Back to the body

Heart first. Muscles second. Bones third. Only once all three exist do you ask how the bones move the rest of the body. How history interacts with the story and characters you’ve already built. That interaction is where historical fiction stops feeling like a research assignment and starts feeling alive.

This framework is deliberately simple. It’s meant for beginners, for the writer who’s terrified of the genre because they think it means becoming a historian before they’re allowed to become a storyteller. If that’s you, I hope this gives you a way in.

But I’m genuinely curious what the rest of you think, too.

If you’re new to historical fiction, does this four-question structure feel like something you could actually start with? Does setting history aside for the first two questions feel freeing, or strange?

If you’re an experienced historical fiction writer, novelist, or narrative designer, what do you think of this framework? Do you use something similar, or completely different?

I’d love to hear the framework that works for you, so we can compare notes and maybe help the beginners among us find the approach that clicks.

Drop your thoughts in the comments.

We still don’t know why.

This is Göbekli Tepe, and if you write historical fiction — novels, graphic novels, video games — I think it might be the single most useful archaeological site on Earth for you to know about. Not because it’s exotic set dressing. Because of what it represents: a hole in the record. A place where the accepted story runs out and the guessing begins. Archaeologists have a quiet, slightly uncomfortable term for sites and finds like this: an archaeological anomaly. Something that doesn’t fit the pattern we’ve built our understanding of the past around. And I’d argue that no single site is more responsible for that term existing than this one.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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What Göbekli Tepe actually is

Göbekli Tepe sits in Southeastern Anatolia, not far from the modern city of Şanlıurfa. It was first noticed by a survey team back in 1963, who saw broken slabs poking out of a hillside, assumed they were looking at a medieval cemetery, and moved on. It took until 1994 for German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt to look at the same hill and realize he wasn’t looking at gravestones. He was looking at the tops of enormous carved pillars. Excavation began the following year, and it hasn’t stopped changing the story since.

The oldest structures date to around 9600 BCE. That’s roughly six thousand years before Stonehenge. Massive T-shaped limestone pillars, some over five meters tall, arranged in circles up to thirty meters across, many of them carved with intricate reliefs of animals. Foxes, boars, vultures, snakes. And the people who built them were hunter-gatherers. No pottery. No metal tools. No cities. No chiefs that we can identify. No surplus food economy that should have been able to support this kind of coordinated, monumental labor.

And yet, there it is. Still standing. Still carved. Still asking the question.

Why it counts as an anomaly

Here’s the part that actually matters and it’s not the age. It’s the order things happened in.

The conventional story of civilization goes: people learn to farm, farming lets them settle down, settling down builds villages, villages grow into towns, towns eventually build monuments and temples because now they have the spare hands and spare food to do it. Farming first. Monuments last.

Göbekli Tepe suggests the opposite. There’s no clear evidence of cultivated crops at the earliest phase of the site. Bone fragments show people were still living on wild gazelle and wild wheat. Hunter-gatherer food, in other words, at a site that required settled, organized, sustained labor to build. One foot in the old world. One foot in something entirely new. It’s possible, not proven, but seriously proposed, that people organized around a sacred site before they had agriculture to support permanent settlement. That the need to gather and build might have come before the need to farm, rather than after.

And then there’s the burial. At some point, the people who built Göbekli Tepe chose to fill it in completely. Not abandon it and let time do the work. Deliberately bury it, layer by layer, with the same kind of collective effort it took to raise it. Nobody knows why. A closing ritual? A decommissioning? Fear? Reverence? We genuinely don’t know. Whatever the reason, that same burial is what preserved the site so beautifully for eleven thousand years, which means the very decision that hid it from history is also the reason we get to study it today.

Then there’s the scale of the thing, which is its own kind of evidence. These aren’t a few standing stones. We’re talking about circles up to thirty meters across, pillars weighing tons, carved with careful, repeated animal imagery across dozens of individual stones. That takes more than a few motivated people with free time. It takes planning, coordination, probably some form of shared belief strong enough to pull labor away from the daily work of survival. We tend to assume that kind of organization requires hierarchy. Chiefs, priests, someone giving orders. Göbekli Tepe doesn’t show us any of that. Just the result.

What was it for? Ritual site, proto-temple, gathering place, astronomical marker. All proposed, none confirmed. And that’s not archaeology failing. That’s archaeology being honest. Somewhere around ninety-five percent of everything we’ve excavated from the human past falls into this same category: we have a theory, sometimes a good one, rarely a certainty. Archaeology isn’t a flat encyclopedia of settled facts. It’s an evolving argument, and the ground keeps handing us new pieces that don’t fit the old picture.

Why this is a gift, not a gap

If you write historical fiction, I want you to sit with that uncertainty for a second, because I think most writers instinctively treat it as a liability. Not enough evidence. Not enough sources. Nothing solid to build on.

I’d argue it’s the opposite. An archaeological anomaly like Göbekli Tepe is one of the rare places where the truth itself is doing the work of good fiction for you. This site is real. It existed. People built it with their hands, for reasons we can’t fully reconstruct, and then they walked away from it, or buried it, for reasons we also can’t reconstruct. You don’t have to invent the mystery. You just have to decide how to fill it.

That’s the difference between writing “based on history” and writing into history’s actual unanswered questions. A settlement built around a purpose instead of a harvest. A monument its own builders chose to erase. A civilization doing something civilizations, by our rules, aren’t supposed to be able to do yet. These aren’t plot devices you have to force. They’re already sitting in the record, waiting for someone to give them a reason.

And that’s really the whole point of anomalies like this one. We assume the past is settled because it happened already. But we only ever have the pieces and the pieces keep multiplying faster than our certainty does. Maybe the real anomaly isn’t Göbekli Tepe at all. Maybe it’s how confidently we talk about everything else in the ancient world as if it were solved.

So, have you ever heard the term archaeological anomaly before today?

And if you had a site like Göbekli Tepe to build your next project around, what would you decide happened there?

I’d genuinely love to know. Tell me in the comments.

The researched version reads like a museum placard with dialogue attached. The lived-in version, the one that makes a reader stop and think wait, was this actually real?, has something else going on underneath it. And after ten years of writing historical fiction and, before that, digging up the actual dirt historical fiction is built on, I’ve come to believe it’s not about how much you know. It’s about which three piles you sort your knowledge into.

I’m going to give you that sorting system today. It’s the first thing I hand every writer, game developer and narrative designer I work with. The base layer everything else gets built on.

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The problem: History as wallpaper

Most historical fiction treats history as setting. A backdrop. Something the characters stand in front of while the real story, the one that’s totally detachable from the period, happens.

Here’s the thing: setting isn’t the enemy. A dry setting is. I write a graphic novel series set in 1590s Prague, and my two leads are entirely fictional but the Prague around them is organic. It pushes back. It has weather and rumors and rules that don’t bend for the plot. That’s the difference between background and wallpaper.

And this is exactly why I called this publication Think Like an Archaeologist. Not because you need a trowel. Because an archaeologist doesn’t read a civilization. They excavate a life. Every layer of soil is someone’s Tuesday. That’s the mindset your world needs, whether it’s on a page, in a panel, or rendered in an open world a player is about to walk into.

You’ll feel it immediately when a creator has it. Think of Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. The Renaissance Italy isn’t a screen you look at, it’s a place your feet know. That’s not an accident. That’s a framework.

The Framework: Known / Discoverable / Unnecessary

Here’s the base layer, in three words.

Known — The handful of facts you need to hold as the creator, so everything you build sits on solid ground. Not twenty-five facts. Five, maybe. The load-bearing ones.

Discoverable — The facts your reader or player gets to find. In a novel, this is what you reveal through scene, not summary. In a game, it’s what a player stumbles into. A location, a custom, a detail that rewards curiosity. This is where immersion actually lives.

Unnecessary — This is the one nobody wants to hear. Most of what you’ll find in your research doesn’t belong anywhere near your story. It’s real. It’s fascinating. It’s also noise.

I’ve lived inside this loop myself. Researching prehistoric Santorini, a civilization we genuinely know very little about outside of what survived the Thera eruption. It’s tempting to pull in every adjacent discovery you find. A Minoan comparison here, an unrelated Cycladic artifact there. None of it touches my characters. None of it changes my story. It’s unnecessary, no matter how good it sounds on a research card.

Same story, much bigger topic: medieval France. Search “Charlemagne” and you could fill a shelf, not a chapter. The question was never is this real. It’s does this belong to the story I’m actually telling.

Sort ruthlessly. Your world doesn’t need everything you learned. It needs the right five things, told through the right discoveries, with the rest left on the cutting room floor.

Where novels, comics and games split

The framework holds across mediums but discoverable behaves differently depending on where your audience lives.

In a novel, discovery happens through your words alone. The reader can only see what you choose to describe, which means every detail you reveal is a deliberate act, not a coincidence.

In a video game, discovery is active. A player finds things, a place, a custom, a fact because they went looking, not because you told them to look. That agency is what makes game world-building its own craft, not “a novel with graphics.”

Graphic novels sit in between. You get the visual, like a costume, an architecture, a texture the reader’s eye catches, plus the written word. But the reader still can’t wander off and discover something you didn’t draw.

Same three words. Three very different jobs.

All of this — the framework, the sorting, the medium-specific choices — is exactly what I work through with every writer, game developer, and narrative designer who comes through the Studio. If you’re building a historical world right now and something isn’t clicking, that’s usually the known/discoverable/unnecessary split gone sideways somewhere, and it’s the first thing we fix together.

If you’re just getting your footing in historical fiction, or you want a couple of solid tools in your kit before your next project, I’ve got two things that might help:

• The Complete Historical Fiction Writing System, a bundle of three Notion templates, built specifically to help historical fiction writers organize a project from research to draft.

• Make History Playable, a mini-guide for anyone designing historical video games.

Both are small. Both are enough to get you moving, without doing the digging for you.

This is Part 2 of our journey through alchemy and dark academia. In Part 1, we went back to the roots. Hellenistic Egypt, Newton’s secret notebooks, Nicolas Flamel’s borrowed legend and the difference between the real discipline of alchemy and the aesthetic we now call dark academia. If you haven’t read it yet, start there.

Today, we go somewhere much more specific: Prague, at the very peak of alchemy’s power, and what all of this means for those of us who actually want to write it.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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The King who chased the Stone

Between 1576 and 1612, the court of Rudolf II gathered mathematicians, alchemists, artists, philosophers and astronomers around him. A court some historians consider even more influential than Elizabeth I’s contemporary English court. I’d go further than “some historians.” I’d say it myself.

In 1583, Rudolf made an extraordinary move: he relocated the imperial capital itself from Vienna to Prague’s Hradčany. Think about what that means. The seat of the entire Holy Roman Empire, moved to satisfy one ruler’s fixation. Alchemy was treated as a respected science in Prague at a time when alchemists were unwelcome elsewhere in Europe, England included, and we’ll get to why that matters in a moment. Rudolf treated finding the Philosopher’s Stone as his life’s mission. Not a hobby. A mission. He saw himself as its guardian, its rightful seeker. He was an amateur alchemist himself, and he had large laboratories built directly inside Prague Castle. You can still visit one today.

The cast of characters (because this court reads like fiction already)

Every great historical setting needs its cast, and Rudolf’s court hands you one, fully formed. John Dee, the English astrologer and Kabbalist who fled England for Prague. Giordano Bruno, the hermetic philosopher, later burned at the stake. Tycho Brahe. Johannes Kepler. Yes, that Kepler, the one the space telescope is named after.

But the character I want you to sit with is Edward Kelley. Kelley is, in every sense a writer could want, a dark academia horror figure walking around in real history. He was a scryer. Someone who claimed to see spirits through a crystal “shewstone”. And claimed to possess a tincture capable of transmuting metal. He and Rudolf became close. Rudolf rewarded him with nobility and wealth, which, honestly, tracks. And here’s the detail that should go straight into your notebook if you’re building a scene: Kelley reportedly administered an elixir to Rudolf himself, meant to grant eternal youth. We don’t know if it happened exactly as reported. I believe something like it did happen, just not with the result anyone claimed.

Hold onto that mood, because it matters for how you write this era. Rudolf was solitary, prone to melancholy, and consumed by the belief that everything in existence was part of one hidden, harmonious order, accessible only through alchemy. And this wasn’t just the private delusion of one strange king. Across central Europe, at the time and for long after, people believed alchemy was the way, the actual method, to understand not just nature itself, but human nature and human destiny.

Why this era is a gift to historical fiction writers

Here’s the thing about alchemy that I think gets missed: it was a discipline built on imagination as much as method. Its central question was never just “what is this substance.” It was what if. What if this transforms into that, what if the soul purifies the same way metal does, what if the hidden order of everything is one door-height away. The scientific method was the tool. Imagination was the engine.

That’s exactly why this era, late 16th, early 17th century Europe, Prague most of all, is one of the richest possible settings for historical fiction. The mystery is genuine. The unknown was unknown to the people living inside it, too. That’s what makes it different from writing about eras where the outcome is settled and known: here, even the people at the center of the story were guessing, obsessing, and hoping.

Not Practical Magic

I’ll show you how I’ve used this because I’m currently living inside it. Not Practical Magic is a graphic novel mini-series I’m creating with my best friend, set in Prague in 1591. It follows two protagonists, a girl alchemist and a girl painter and translator, through their small adventures in that world.

Here’s what matters about it, and it’s not simply that one of the leads is an alchemist. It’s that the series blends real historical fact with fiction the way a stage blends a real set with invented characters. The background, Prague, the court, the mood, the science, is accurate. Researched. Real. But the people walking through it, the roles they play, are entirely fiction. History as the best possible backdrop, not the plot itself.

When I started writing it, my friend gave me advice I didn’t expect: don’t make it too accurate. If I get bored chasing every historical detail, the readers will too. So I tried it. Kept only the details that mattered, let the rest go and something loosened. My imagination actually flew, in a way it hadn’t when I was gripping every fact too tightly. It’s become some of the best writing I’ve done.

If you want more from this world specifically, extra pages, deeper dives into the making of it, that lives over on my Ko-fi.

Over to you

Have you ever created a character who is an alchemist, or a sorcerer, or someone straddling that line between magic and science?

Have you read one that stuck with you?

And is there a part of this world you’d want me to go deeper on? The psychology of obsession at Rudolf’s court, cabinets of curiosities and how they connect to all this, or how alchemy was seen differently in other parts of Europe?

Tell me in the comments. I read every one of them.

This is Part 1 of a two-part deep-dive. Today, we’re going back to the source: what alchemy actually was, who really practiced it, and how a genuine centuries-old science ended up compressed into a modern aesthetic. In Part 2, coming in a couple of days, I’ll show you how to take all of this real history and turn it into something you can actually write. Including a look at my own graphic novel project, Not Practical Magic, which lives inside exactly this world.

But first, the foundations. If you’re a writer who wants your historical fiction to feel earned rather than decorative, this is the part you can’t skip.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

Alchemy wasn’t a metaphor. It was a discipline.

Alchemy didn’t begin as candlelit mysticism. It began in Hellenistic Egypt, under the Ptolemies, as a genuine blend of Egyptian craft knowledge and Greek philosophy about the fundamental elements. It pursued two goals at once, and this dual nature is the key to understanding everything that follows: physical transmutation — turning base metal into gold — and spiritual purification of the soul. The hands and the spirit, working the same problem from two directions.

Two figures anchor this origin story, and they sit on opposite sides of the fact/fiction line that will keep reappearing throughout this post. The first is Hermes Trismegistus, “Hermes the Thrice-Great”, credited with alchemy’s foundational principle, as above, so below. He is entirely mythical. No evidence he ever existed. The second is Zosimus of Panopolis, working in Alexandria around 300 CE. The first alchemist we can actually name, whose writings survive, and who is credited with introducing the very concept of the Philosopher’s Stone into the tradition.

From there, alchemy traveled. As it faded in Europe, Arab scholars preserved it, developed it, and eventually reintroduced it to the West through translation. The Corpus Jabirianum, attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan, and the works of Al-Razi represent the high-water mark of Arabic alchemy and it’s through Latin translations of these texts that alchemy re-entered central Europe.

Even the word carries this journey inside it. “Alchemy” likely traces back to an Egyptian term for the black, fertile soil of the Nile, filtered through Greek, absorbed into Arabic as al-kimiya, and finally Latinized into the word we use today. Egyptian craft, Greek philosophy, Arabic scholarship, Latin science, stacked into a single word.

And here is the point worth underlining for anyone writing in this space: alchemy was not pseudoscience by the standards of its time. It was treated as a serious philosophical and experimental discipline. The hunt for the Philosopher’s Stone produced real chemistry. Real isolated substances, real recorded procedures. The magic and the science were not opposites. They were the same activity, understood differently than we understand it now.

The man who wrote a million words in secret

If you need proof that alchemy occupied serious minds, consider Isaac Newton. Over his lifetime, Newton wrote roughly a million words on alchemy. Private lab notebooks, transcriptions, textual commentaries and a comparative index of alchemical authors he called the Index Chemicus. He did all of this in near-total secrecy. For centuries after his death in 1727, almost nobody knew the scale of it. Most of the papers only surfaced at a 1936 auction, bought by economist John Maynard Keynes, who reframed Newton, memorably, as the last great magician rather than the first modern scientist.

Newton built a working laboratory, furnaces and glassware included, and reportedly worked through the night, keeping meticulous records of temperature, timing, and color change. Picture that scene for a second: not a wizard, but a man half-mad with rigor, logging every shift in hue by candlelight. That’s a gift to any writer building an immersive alchemist’s lab. The discipline is the drama.

What drove him wasn’t greed. Historians argue Newton was chasing a unifying vision, forces connecting the macrocosm and the microcosm and a belief in hidden ancient wisdom waiting to be recovered through careful experiment.

If you want to go deeper, the Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project at Indiana University and the Newton Project at the University of Sussex have digitized and transcribed his manuscripts. Real primary sources, freely available.

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The man who might not have been an alchemist at all

Then there’s Nicolas Flamel. The figure where documented history quietly hands the story off to legend. What we actually know is thin: Flamel was likely born around 1330 near Paris, and worked as a bookseller and scribe near the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie.

The legend is far bigger. An alchemical book published in Paris in 1612, and later in London in 1624, was attributed to Flamel, claiming that he and his wife Perenelle decoded an ancient manuscript, used it to produce silver in 1382, then gold, and ultimately achieved immortality through an Elixir of Life.

That legend’s authenticity was first challenged in 1761 by Étienne Villain, who traced the book back to a 17th-century publisher writing under a pseudonym. In other words: the myth was manufactured nearly three centuries after the real Flamel died, almost certainly to sell books. A real, obscure historical name, borrowed and inflated into legend.

What’s solid: Flamel and Perenelle were real people. What’s fiction: the Stone, the Elixir, all of it. It’s one of the cleanest case studies you’ll find for where historical fact ends and historical fiction begins and it’s worth noting that even Newton referenced Flamel’s alchemy by the mid-1600s, a real historical thread connecting these two very differently-verified men.

So what is Dark Academia, actually?

Here’s the important distinction: dark academia is not a historical period. It’s an aesthetic. A mood, a curtain, an umbrella draped over real historical fragments like the ones above (I even use this term in some of the images on this post!). Formally, it’s an internet-born aesthetic and subculture centered on higher education, art, and literature, drawing its visual language from classical Greek and Collegiate Gothic architecture, traditional academic dress, and classic literature.

Its fictional origin points are clear. Peter Weir’s 1989 film Dead Poets Society, starring the late Robin Williams (genuinely one of the great films, watch it if you haven’t) and Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History. One film, one novel and a mood was born.

Its online origin is more recent and more traceable. The “dark academia” tag started around 2015 on Tumblr, functioning initially more like a book club around The Secret History than a full aesthetic. It exploded in late 2020, as locked-down students searched for “dark academia aesthetic” in growing numbers across TikTok, Instagram, and Tumblr and the aesthetic, as we know it now, was born from that surge.

So, dark academia is the mood. Alchemy, Newton’s secret notebooks, Flamel’s borrowed legend, that’s the real texture underneath it, the history the aesthetic borrows from without necessarily engaging with it. Old libraries, secret manuscripts, obsessive scholarship deep into the night.

Dark academia gives you the feeling. Real alchemical history gives you the substance.

Coming in Part 2…

In the next post, we’ll turn all of this into craft. how to take real alchemical history and build immersive settings and characters from it, in novels, graphic novels, and historical video games. I’ll also introduce Not Practical Magic, the graphic novel mini-series I’m co-creating, set inside exactly this world.

For now, I’ll leave you with the question that started this whole post for me. Have you ever thought about the difference between real alchemy and dark academia?

Have you written or read, a character who is an alchemist?

Where do you think the line between historical fact and historical fiction should sit?

I’d genuinely love to hear your answers in the comments.

So I decided to go looking, through the earliest chronicles, the archaeology, and a century of academic argument, to see how much of the Arthur we know from books, films, and video games actually survives contact with the evidence. Come explore it with me.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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The world Arthur would have lived in

When Rome withdrew from Britain in 410 AD, the island didn’t become one kingdom. It fractured into a patchwork of smaller British territories, some more Roman in character, some more Celtic. Into this fragmented world came the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, gradually pushing in from the east. The window historians actually look at for a possible “real Arthur” is narrow: roughly 435 to 530 AD, the gap between the end of Roman authority and the loss of most British territory to Anglo-Saxon settlement.

And here’s the part that matters most for us as writers: recent DNA and settlement studies suggest this was a gradual migration, not one dramatic invasion requiring a single savior-hero. It’s the same instinct behind the Pied Piper. A story about vulnerable children and outward migration that got remembered as a magical figure literally stealing them away. The idea of one heroic leader single-handedly holding back an entire people is a romantic simplification, added later. It’s an incredibly attractive shape for a story. Which is exactly why people kept adding to it.

What the earliest writers actually said

Strip away the romance, and there are really three (or four) foundational sources.

Gildas, writing De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae around 540 AD, is the closest we have to a contemporary voice. He even claims to have been born the year of the Battle of Badon. And crucially, he never mentions Arthur at all. The leader he credits with rallying British resistance is Ambrosius Aurelianus. (Look at those initials for a second — A.A. It’s probably nothing. But I noticed it, and once you notice these things, you can’t stop.)

Nearly 300 years later, the Historia Brittonum, attributed to the Welsh monk Nennius (c. 830), is the first text to name Arthur at all and even then, he’s called dux bellorum, “leader of battles,” not rex, king. Nennius credits him with twelve battles and has him single-handedly killing 960 men at Badon in one charge. That number alone tells you we’ve crossed from record into legend.

Then there’s the Annales Cambriae, the Welsh Annals, compiled around the 10th century, which places Arthur at Badon and records his death at Camlann. (Camlann… Camelot? Probably coincidence again but the echo is fun.) Scholars note the chronicle likely wasn’t even begun until the late 8th century, so it isn’t an early independent witness either.

And then there’s Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (early 8th century), which never mentions Arthur at all. Some read that silence as damning. I hold that argument a little more loosely than the others.

What’s actually in the ground

Here’s the plain truth: no inscription, artifact, or structure has ever been found that names Arthur or confirms he existed. None. But two sites keep the conversation alive.

Tintagel, in Cornwall, is popularly tied to Arthur as Lancelot’s castle in later legend. Excavations there reveal something genuinely remarkable: a high-status, literate trading site with Mediterranean pottery imports from the 5th and 6th centuries. Real wealth, real international connection, right in the “Arthurian” window. The famous “Artognou stone” found on site sparked headlines linking it to Arthur but linguistically the names simply aren’t related.

Cadbury Castle in Somerset is the other candidate. Leslie Alcock’s 1960s excavations found an Iron Age hillfort reoccupied and refortified in the post-Roman period. It’s tempting to call it Camelot. As an archaeologist, I’d urge caution: there’s nothing there that names an occupant.

Even Badon itself, the one battle almost every source agrees actually happened, can’t be pinned to a location. Bath and Liddington Castle are the leading guesses. Think about that: our most “certain” Arthurian event still has no address.

The academic split and the one thing everyone agrees on

David Dumville’s 1977 critique pushed mainstream academia firmly away from treating Arthur as historical fact, and that skepticism held for roughly two decades. Today, historians like Nicholas Higham represent the mainstream view: Arthur is best understood as unhistorical or semi-legendary, likely an amalgam of oral tradition and folklore, possibly folded together with real figures like Ambrosius Aurelianus.

A minority position still argues for a real, much humbler figure. A Romano-British or Celtic war-leader whose victory at Badon actually happened, with everything else, like the kingship, Camelot or the Round Table, added centuries later as pure invention.

But both camps agree on one thing: whoever this person was, he wasn’t a king in his own lifetime. Kingship was a literary upgrade, added long after the fact.

From war-leader to literary king

This is where it becomes, unmistakably, a story about historical fiction. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (1136–38) is the true turning point. He invents Arthur as a continent-conquering king, undone only by his nephew Mordred’s betrayal, all while insisting he was simply translating an “ancient book.” Wace’s Roman de Brut (1155) gives us the Round Table as a symbol of equality among nobles. And Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (c. 1470) finally synthesizes centuries of accretion into the version that still underpins the books, films, video games, and graphic novels we consume today.

What fascinates me most is this: somewhere in that chain, monks. people we’d call historians, were writing what was, functionally, historical fiction, and calling it history. That’s not a flaw in the record. That is the record. Oral tradition and folklore twisted and retold a real, uncertain past again and again, until legend and history became genuinely inseparable. I find that both absurd and completely wonderful.

And since you know how much I love music through my writing, I’m leaving you with a little dose of inspiration and nostalgia for a “lost kingdom” that may never existed…

So, did Arthur exist? I don’t think there’s a clean answer, and I’m not sure I even want one.

Have you come across any of these sources before?

Did you already know Arthur was never called a king in the earliest texts?

And what part of the Arthurian circle, like Merlin, the Grail or Camelot itself, would you want me to dig into next? Tell me in the comments. I’d love to build the next piece around what you’re curious about.

Its name is Shambhala. And unlike most “lost cities,” I don’t think this one is pure fiction.

Let me explain why, as an archaeologist would, evidence first, imagination second.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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A place older than the culture that made it famous

Shambhala is a Sanskrit name, generally translated as “place of peace” or “place of silence.” It shows up in the Kalachakra Tantra, but its roots reach back even further, into the Zhang Zhung scriptures. A culture that existed in western Tibet before Tibetan Buddhism itself. So while Shambhala is culturally inseparable from Tibetan Buddhism today, it’s technically older than the religion it’s most associated with.

According to tradition, the Buddha taught the Kalachakra at the request of a king named Suchandra, ruler of Shambhala. The teaching itself is described as operating on three levels — outer, inner, and alternative — which tells you something important right away: this was never meant to be read as a simple travel account. It’s explicitly a layered, symbolic teaching, not a place marked with an X.

This is where I can’t help but think of Plato and Atlantis. As a Greek, I’ve always argued that Plato wasn’t handing down geography. He was handing down a warning about human greed, dressed as a sunken city. Shambhala carries some of that same DNA: a “kingdom” that may have started life as a philosophical container, not a literal capital with a mailing address.

Buddhist tradition even gives the Suchandra story a date. The meeting is placed around 878 BCE, near Dhanyakataka in southern India, after which the king reportedly returned to Shambhala and made it a Buddhist stronghold. It’s a legendary chronology. Precise, almost administrative in its detail and yet there isn’t a single archaeological data point behind it.

So where exactly is it?

Here’s where the myth gets genuinely strange: nobody can agree on the geography, even within the tradition itself.

The older Zhang Zhung sources place Shambhala near the Sutlej Valley in Himachal Pradesh. Mongolian tradition, on the other hand, locates it in valleys of southern Siberia. Different cultures inherited the myth and quietly relocated it to their own backyard, which tells us as much about the myth’s function as it does about its location. A legend that shifts depending on who’s telling it usually isn’t functioning as a historical record. It’s functioning as a promise.

And the descriptions of the city itself only reinforce that. Shambhala’s capital, Kalapa, is described in almost mandala-like architecture: shaped like an eight-petaled lotus, each petal an administrative district, each district home to as many as 120 million villages, the entire kingdom ringed by impassable snow mountains, its palace built from gold, silver, turquoise, coral, and pearl. Read that back to yourself. It’s gorgeous. It’s also, unmistakably, myth-shaped, built for meaning, not for a surveyor’s map.

Has anyone actually found it?

No. Flatly, no. No archaeological evidence for Shambhala has ever been produced, and reputable sources are explicit that it remains undiscovered, Treated, much like Atlantis, as a legend rather than a verified site.

But that hasn’t stopped people from looking. The Hungarian orientalist Sándor Csoma de Kőrös was the first to bring the Shambhala legend to Europe. In 1856, the theosophist Helena Blavatsky reportedly traveled to India hoping to find it herself. And the most academically documented seeker of all is Nicholas Roerich, an artist, writer and mystic, whose 1926–1928 Tibetan expedition and 1934–1935 Inner Mongolian expedition are examined in peer-reviewed journals not as archaeology, but as geopolitically and occult-motivated ventures. Scholars still debate what Roerich was actually chasing.

And that political entanglement runs deeper than you’d expect. At one point, an advisor convinced the 13th Dalai Lama that Russia itself was Shambhala, and that Tsar Nicholas II was the reincarnation of the great teacher Tsongkhapa. Compare that to El Dorado or Atlantis, legends that stayed, more or less, in the realm of adventure stories. Shambhala got pulled directly into real Central Asian power struggles. That’s a very different kind of afterlife for a myth.

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Shambhala and Shangri-La

If you’ve heard of Shambhala at all, you’ve probably heard it under a different name: Shangri-La. But these are not the same thing, and the difference matters.

Shangri-La is a 20th-century literary invention, not an inherited mythic tradition. It comes entirely from James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Scholars generally treat any connection between the two as inspiration at most, Hilton may have drawn loosely on the older Shambhala myth, but not equivalence. And modern literary criticism increasingly reads Shangri-La through an orientalist lens: an exoticized vision of Tibet, used as a device to deliver Eastern philosophy to a disillusioned Western reader. Shambhala, by contrast, comes from within the tradition it belongs to.

Myth, symbol or simply not found yet?

Here’s my honest take, as someone who researches this territory for a living: not every “lost city” belongs in the same drawer.

El Dorado was very likely pure invention, fueled by colonial greed. Atlantis, I’d argue, was never meant to be dug up at all. Plato built it as philosophy wearing a city’s clothes. But some lost places turn out to be real: Machu Picchu was dismissed as legend for centuries before it was simply found. Sitting exactly where it had always been, waiting.

Shambhala might belong closer to Machu Picchu’s category than Atlantis’s. Or it might be a purely symbolic kingdom that was never meant to be located at all. What I don’t think it is, is nothing. Too many real historical figures, explorers, theosophists, even a Dalai Lama’s court, took it seriously enough to act on it.

That’s precisely why this myth is such rich material for historical fiction, graphic novels, and video games. A city that shifts location depending on who’s telling the story isn’t a dead end for a writer. It’s an invitation. You’re not constrained by a confirmed set of ruins the way you would be writing about, say, Pompeii. You get to decide, within the bounds of what the tradition actually says, whether your Shambhala is a hidden valley waiting for satellite imagery to catch up, or a spiritual state no expedition could ever physically arrive at. Both are true to the source material. That’s rare.

So I’ll leave this one open, the way any good archaeological mystery should be left open.

Have you ever come across the legend of Shambhala before today?

Have you heard the name Shangri-La and assumed it was the same story?

And — genuinely — do you think Shambhala is a place we simply haven’t found yet, or a symbol we were never supposed to go looking for, in the same way Atlantis was?

Tell me in the comments. I’d love to know where you land.

Welcome to the third and final post of Pirate Week here on Think Like an Archaeologist. We’ve talked treasure, we’ve talked codes. Now it’s time to go where the maps run out. Because piracy was never just about ships and gold. It was about fear, silence, and the enormous, unmapped ocean pressing in on every side. And out of that fear came some of the best stories humanity has ever told itself.

I picked four of them for you today. Not because they’re the only ones (I deliberately left several out, more on that at the end), but because each one sits in a different place on the line between legend and history. Some are folklore wrapped around a real era. Some are pure invention. And one is inspired by an animal that is, against all odds, completely real. Let’s go looking for the seam where history ends and the story begins.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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The Flying Dutchman: A curse born from an era, not an event

If you know only one sea legend, it’s probably this one. And if you’ve met it anywhere, it was likely in Pirates of the Caribbean. Though the myth is centuries older than Davy Jones’ tentacled face on the big screen. (Keep that name in mind. We’re coming back to him.)

The legend: a captain, usually named Van der Decken, tries to round the Cape of Good Hope during a violent storm. Warned to turn back, he refuses, swearing he’ll make it around “even if it takes until Judgment Day.” That’s exactly the kind of line the universe punishes. He and his crew are cursed to sail forever, never making port, and any sailor who spots the ghost ship on the horizon is marked for disaster.

The earliest print reference we have dates to 1790, in John MacDonald’s travel writing, though the story was almost certainly told on decks long before it was ever written down. It became genuinely famous in 1843, when Wagner turned it into the opera Der Fliegende Holländer, which is really why we still know the name today.

So what’s the historical anchor? There’s no real Van der Decken, no single doomed ship we can point to. But historians consistently trace the legend back to the 17th-century Dutch East India Company (the VOC) and the golden age of Dutch maritime dominance. A period when Dutch ships dominated the most dangerous trade route in the world, and losses at the Cape were common enough to breed exactly this kind of cautionary tale. It’s not folklore about one ship. It’s folklore about an entire industry’s worth of fear.

Davy Jones’ Locker: A mystery of language, not history

And here he is. The “locker” that gave Pirates of the Caribbean its most iconic villain.

Long before Hollywood gave him a face made of coral and crab legs, Davy Jones was simply the name sailors gave to the devil of the deep. A spirit who claims drowned sailors, and whose “locker” is the ocean floor itself. It’s less a place and more a way of saying someone died at sea without saying it out loud.

The earliest documented use is from 1726, in the Defoe-attributed Four Years Voyages of Captain George Roberts, and the phrase was fixed in print as we know it by 1803.

Here’s the honest answer: we don’t have a historical anchor for this one at all. The theories are all over the map. A corruption of the Welsh Saint David, a garbled reference to the biblical Jonah, even a folk tale about a real pub owner who allegedly drugged and kidnapped sailors before becoming a pirate himself. None of them hold up under scrutiny. Unlike the Flying Dutchman, this isn’t folklore hiding a real era. It’s a linguistic cold case. I actually love that about it. Somewhere in etymological archives, there might still be an answer waiting.

The Kraken: The legend that turned out to be real

Now we leave ghost stories behind for something far more delightful. A monster that is, in a roundabout way, completely true.

The Kraken is described across centuries as a colossal sea creature, dragging entire ships beneath the waves. The earliest written account goes back to 1180, in an account by King Sverre of Norway. Long before the golden age of piracy even began. It was formally written into natural history by the Danish writer Erik Pontoppidan in 1752.

And here’s the twist I love most in this whole survey: the Kraken is almost certainly inspired by the giant squid. A real animal, scientifically confirmed after a specimen was examined in 1853. That’s it. That’s the whole secret. A slow-moving deep-sea creature, glimpsed rarely and half-drowned or dying at the surface, became — through centuries of retelling — a green, furious, ship-swallowing beast. This is the case that shows exactly how the human imagination works: take one strange, real animal, add isolation, darkness, and fear, and let the story do the rest.

Mermaids and sirens: Beautiful beings we still can’t fully explain

Half woman, half fish (or, originally, half bird), sirens and mermaids are some of the oldest sea beings we know, tracing back to Greek mythology, where sirens were first depicted with wings rather than tails. Centuries later, in the Christian era, the fish-tailed form we recognize today took over. Hans Christian Andersen gave us the version most of us grew up with in The Little Mermaid.

But this legend also has one of the best-documented “real” encounters in maritime history: in January 1493, Christopher Columbus recorded seeing three mermaids near the Dominican Republic. They were almost certainly manatees. An animal whose entire scientific order is literally named Sirenia, after this very myth.

And still, I have to say it, we don’t actually know these beings never existed. Maybe it really was only ever manatees, tired sailors, and imagination doing its work. Or maybe not. That “what if” is exactly why this kind of research is so addictive.

Where history ends and legend begins

Four legends, four very different relationships with the truth. The Flying Dutchman is folklore wrapped around a real industry. Davy Jones’ Locker is a mystery of language more than history. The Kraken is a real animal transformed by fear and darkness into a monster. And mermaids sit somewhere in between. Documented, explained, and yet still faintly, wonderfully unresolved.

This is exactly why I love this kind of research and why I think it matters so much for anyone writing historical fiction, graphic novels, or games set at sea. The most immersive stories aren’t the ones that pick either pure history or pure myth. They’re the ones that understand exactly where the seam is, and write right along it.

I couldn’t fit every sea legend into one post. I left plenty out on purpose. So tell me: which of these four do you think has the most truth hiding in it, and which do you think is pure invention?

Is there a sea legend I deliberately (or accidentally) left out that you wish I’d covered?

And would you want me to go even deeper into one specific thread? A full post just on ghost ships, real ones this time, like the Mary Celeste?

Drop it in the comments. I read every single one.

Last time, we talked about three women who lived somewhere between legend and reality. Real pirates whose lives were rewritten so many times that fact and fiction fused into one story. Today I want to zoom out and ask a bigger question: why does piracy, of all the criminal enterprises history has produced, keep colonizing our books, our comics, and our controllers? Why not smugglers? Why not highwaymen? Why pirates?

Here’s my theory, as both an archaeologist and someone quietly drafting my own pirate ghost story novel: piracy was never really about crime. Yes, technically, legally, it was theft on water. But what actually drew people to that life, and what draws us to it now, is the freedom. A pirate crew wasn’t chasing outlaw status for its own sake; it was chasing the unclaimed, the unsettled, the not-yet-charted. The real history of piracy in the Caribbean, in the American colonies, in Europe, is mostly hunger, disease, short brutal lives, and men who died broke or hanged. It’s humble. It’s often ugly. And yet buried underneath all of that is something genuinely romantic: people who refused to belong anywhere, and so belonged, briefly, to the whole sea. That contradiction is why writers can’t leave pirates alone. So let’s go looking for where that contradiction shows up on the page and, later, on screen.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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Part I: Literature that built the myth

If one single book is responsible for the pirate as we know him, like the parrot, the peg leg, the treasure map with an X on it, it’s Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, published in November 1883. Say “pirate” to almost anyone and this book is the first thing that surfaces, even if they’ve never read it. Stevenson gave us Long John Silver, Billy Bones, Captain Flint, and young Jim Hawkins, and in doing so, gave every writer after him — myself included — a debt we’re still paying off. No nonfiction account of the Golden Age has generated a fraction of the legends this one novel did.

But Treasure Island wasn’t alone, even in its own era. Ten years later, in 1898, Italian author Emilio Salgari published The Black Corsair. The story of a vengeful nobleman-turned-pirate roaming the Caribbean and Port Royal, crossing paths with real historical corsairs of the age. I have a personal soft spot for this one: I grew up on the children’s TV series and film adaptations built around it, including the storyline of Yolanda, the Black Corsair’s daughter. I still put one of those films on occasionally in 2026, which says something about how deep that hook goes.

Move forward to the mid-20th century and pirates jump into comics. Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese, beginning with The Ballad of the Salt Sea in 1967, gave us a half-English, half-Gibraltarian sailor and occasional pirate wandering through real early-20th-century history with an unmistakably swashbuckling lens. This was one of my father’s favorite characters, who was a sailor himself as a young man in Greece, and I think he recognized something of his own restlessness in Corto. It’s one of the most influential adventure comics ever created, and if you’ve never encountered it, this week is the excuse to start.

And since we’re talking comics: Treasure Island itself has been redrawn many times, and comparing the versions is its own small pleasure. My favorite is Tim Hamilton’s 2005 Puffin Graphics adaptation. It keeps much of Stevenson’s original language while leaning into darker, more atmospheric artwork. Marvel Illustrated put out its own six-issue version in 2007, with art by Mario Gully and Pat Davidson, but for me it doesn’t reach the same heights.

More recently, Michael Crichton’s Pirate Latitudes (published posthumously in 2009) picked the thread back up for modern readers. Set in 1665 Port Royal, it follows privateer Captain Charles Hunter on a raid against a Spanish treasure galleon and deliberately refuses the Errol Flynn glamour. It’s grimier, more mercenary, and soaked in the legal fiction that separated a “privateer” from an outright pirate. If you want proof that this genre still has life in it, start here.

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Part II: Pirates who escaped the page

Now, video games! And before anyone asks: no, we’re not talking about Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag again. We already gave it a full post. It’s brilliant, but it’s not the whole story, and I’d rather point you toward the games that made it possible.

Start with Sid Meier’s Pirates! (1987 and remade in 2004). The grandfather of the entire genre. You begin as a cabin boy and work your way up to captain: raiding ships, trading goods, dueling rival captains, and yes, dancing with the governor’s daughter. Nearly every pirate game made since owes it a silent debt, and the 2004 remake is still, by most fans’ accounts, the best pirate game ever made. If you haven’t played it, this is your sign.

Then there’s a lineage most Western readers have genuinely never heard of: the Sea Dogs / Corsairs series, running from Sea Dogs (2000) through Sea Dogs 2: Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales, and community-driven follow-ups like Corsairs: Return of the Legend and Caribbean Legend. Mostly built by Russian and Ukrainian studios Akella and Seaward. These games blend open-world naval combat, land-based swordfighting, trading, and dense RPG systems, and the tradition is still alive: it’s currently being revived as Corsairs Legacy, an in-development historical pirate RPG simulator explicitly chasing that older, grittier pirate-sim feeling.

Here’s the point I really want to leave you with: Black Flag didn’t invent the pirate game. It inherited naval combat, trading systems, and historical pirate cameos from a whole lineage most players have never touched. The polish is Ubisoft’s. The foundation isn’t.

Why we keep coming back, again and again

I don’t think the Golden Age of Piracy is done inspiring us.

Not in fiction, not in games, and, if I’m honest, not in my own work either, since I’m knee-deep in a pirate ghost story of my own right now. There’s something in that romantic, unsettled, never-quite-legal spirit that keeps calling writers and game designers back to the same stretch of ocean, three hundred years later.

So tell me: have you read Treasure Island or The Black Corsair?

Did Corto Maltese ever cross your path?

Have you played Sid Meier’s Pirates!, or lost a weekend to the Sea Dogs series?

And is there a pirate book, graphic novel, or game I haven’t mentioned that deserves a place on this list? I’d love to hear what’s flying your flag this week.

This isn’t a coincidence of three interesting lives. I chose these three women deliberately, from three different corners of the world, because together they tell you something bigger than any one biography can: how history actually remembers women who broke the rules. One of them survives almost entirely through legend. One is the best-documented pirate of either sex that we have. And one lives in the strange, foggy space between a real ledger book and a ghost story. Put side by side, they map the whole spectrum of how the past gets written down and how much of it gets invented when the truth isn’t dramatic enough on its own.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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Anne Bonny: The Caribbean outlaw built on one unreliable book

Anne Bonny is probably the name you already know, and that’s part of the problem. Almost everything popularly “known” about her traces back to a single source: Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates, published in 1724. A book historians widely regard as a mix of fact, hearsay, and outright invention, written by someone who may not even have been who he claimed to be.

According to that account, Bonny was born around 1698 near Cork, Ireland, the illegitimate daughter of a servant woman and an attorney, before the family emigrated to Charles Towne (modern Charleston, South Carolina). None of that has ever been confirmed by an actual record. What we can say with more confidence because it’s corroborated outside Johnson’s book. Is that by 1720 she was sailing with the pirate John “Calico Jack” Rackham, and that when his crew was finally cornered, most of the men were too drunk to fight while Bonny and her crewmate Mary Read fought fiercely, refusing to surrender.

Bonny and Read were tried together that November, found guilty, and sentenced to hang and both claimed to be pregnant. That claim bought them a stay of execution. Whether it was even true, we will never know; no medical record survives, because none was ever likely to have been made. Read died in prison the following spring, recorded simply as “Mary Read, Pirate” in a burial register. Bonny simply disappears from the record after that. No execution. No release. No grave anyone can point to with certainty. Historians have speculated everything from a father’s quiet intervention to a long, ordinary life lived out under a different name but speculation is all it is, and it always will be, unless a document surfaces that has almost certainly never existed.

If you want to go deeper, David Cordingly’s Under the Black Flag (1995) is the serious starting point. It lays out the trial transcripts and sources with far more care than the popular legend usually bothers to.

Ching Shih: The woman who commanded a navy

If Bonny is legend wearing the costume of history, Ching Shih is the opposite and she may be the best-documented pirate, of any gender, that we have.

Born around 1775 in Guangzhou, she began her working life on a floating brothel, where she built a reputation as a sharp, capable businesswoman before marrying the pirate commander Zheng Yi in 1801. When Zheng Yi died in 1807, she didn’t step aside. With the backing of his adopted son (and later her own husband) Zhang Bao, she took direct command of the Red Flag Fleet and grew it into a confederation of roughly 400 ships and tens of thousands of pirates, organized into disciplined squadrons flying different colored flags.

In 1808, the Qing government sent a massive naval force to crush her once and for all. She didn’t retreat. She sailed straight at them and left half the imperial fleet burning, taking dozens of captured ships home as prizes. No navy — Chinese, British, or Portuguese — ever managed to capture her. The confederation only ended when she chose, on her own terms, to accept a government pardon. She spent the rest of her life running a smuggling operation out of a gambling house in Canton, and died at 69 in 1844. An extraordinarily long life for anyone from that world, let alone a pirate.

The scholarly backbone here is Dian H. Murray’s Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790–1810, built from actual Qing dynasty archives, memorials, and edicts. Her follow-up essay, “Cheng I Sao in Fact and Fiction,” is worth hunting down too. It’s essentially a study of how even a well-documented woman still gets mythologized the moment popular culture gets hold of her.

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Ingela Gathenhielm: The Baltic shipping queen History almost forgot

The third woman I want you to meet almost certainly isn’t on your radar at all. She wasn’t on mine either, until brought her up.

Her husband, Lars Gathenhielm, was a Swedish privateer, granted a royal letter of marque in 1710 by King Charles XII to seize enemy Danish and Russian ships during the Great Northern War. A hip injury kept him largely off the water, directing operations from Gothenburg instead, and he was, at least once, accused of piracy against Swedish vessels too. An accusation the king simply chose to overlook. Make of that what you will.

His wife, Ingela Olofsdotter Gathenhielm, married him in 1711. Both came from established seafaring families in Onsala, and together they built one of Sweden’s most successful privateering operations. She gave birth to five children in five years, though only two survived to adulthood. When Lars died in 1718, Ingela didn’t step back and took over. She kept the privateering business running, managed the couple’s Gothenburg properties, and was granted permission to operate a bakery, brewery, distillery, smithy, and sail-making business, on top of a ropeworks. The Crown later confiscated part of their holdings amid political infighting between old and new nobility, but she held onto what she could and kept working.

Locally, she earned a nickname that tells you everything: the Shipping Queen of Gothenburg. Her story sits in that uneasy space between verified record and Scandinavian folklore, part ledger, part legend, which is exactly why she belongs alongside the other two.

What these three women actually tell us

Put Bonny, Ching Shih, and Gathenhielm next to each other, and a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with luck or exception. In every version of their story — the well-documented, the half-invented, and everything in between — the throughline is the same: when women crossed into piracy, a world built entirely on male violence and reputation, they didn’t survive by blending in. They out-fought, out-organized, and out-lasted the men around them. Piracy was never a man’s exclusive trade. It only became remembered that way.

If you want the earliest surviving account of Anne Bonny or Mary Read in something close to its original form, Charles Johnson’s 1724 A General History of the Pyrates is freely available to read. Unreliable as it is, it’s the closest thing we have to a firsthand pulse of how her contemporaries told her story.

Now I want to hear from you.

Which of these three surprised you most?

Do you know a female pirate, from any sea, any century, who deserves a place on this list?

And if you’ve got an academic source or a book I should be reading, drop it below.

This is exactly the kind of conversation I started Pirate Week to have.

I did what I thought a responsible writer does. I researched. Article after article. Book after book. This was before AI, before half the archives you can now open in three clicks. So I dug by hand, for months, chasing every thread a footnote handed me.

And somewhere in that pile of research, I got bored of my own book.

Not “stuck.” Not “blocked.” Bored.

I remember the exact feeling of thinking: I don’t want to write this anymore, because it’s never going to be as good as what’s in my head. The story had been buried under its own research, and I couldn’t dig it back out.

It took me a long time to understand what actually happened. So let me save you eight years.

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The fear underneath the research

If I’m honest with you. As someone who works in this professionally, as an archaeologist and a heritage copywriter, most historical fiction writers aren’t actually overwhelmed by facts. They’re overwhelmed by a question they never say out loud: what will the experts think?

Here’s my answer, and I say this as one of the experts: they shouldn’t get a vote. Not like that.

We are not writing a thesis. A thesis is a dry thing. It runs on citations and caution, and it has, by design, close to zero emotional temperature. Historical fiction is the opposite animal entirely. We’re not writing history with a few fictional decorations on top. We’re writing fiction that happens to have historical moments in it. The emotion is the point. The history is the terrain it moves through.

That reframe is the whole article, honestly. Everything below is just how to actually do it.

Think like the archaeologist, not the historian

Here’s the method, and it’s a real one. The same one I use on actual sites, and the same one I now use with the writers I coach.

Archaeology always starts with evidence, not certainty. You spot something promising, and you start digging. Literally, and through stratigraphy, the study of the layers of ground itself. The deeper you go, the older the layer should be. Should. Because ground isn’t obedient. Agricultural activity, erosion, later construction. The layers get disturbed, mixed, sometimes younger material ends up looking older than it is. You are never fully certain what you’re looking at. You’re building the most likely interpretation from what’s actually in front of you.

I’ll give you a real example. Recently, near a large metropolitan park close to my house, I found several broken vessel fragments. A few miles north, there’s a known Macedonian tomb. My brain immediately wanted to connect the two. This must be part of the same site. But it isn’t my job to decide that from a handful of shards. If that assumption were right, something more would already have surfaced. Probably, I’m wrong. And that’s fine. That’s the job.

Now translate that directly into your manuscript: you don’t need to prove the market square, the battlefield, the tavern, before you’re allowed to write in it. You need enough fragments — enough real, textured evidence — to build a plausible layer, and then you write the scene that layer suggests. You are not obligated to excavate the entire site before a single character is allowed to walk through it.

Use experimental archaeology on your characters

There’s one more tool I lean on constantly, both in my own writing and in my consulting work: experimental archaeology. In the field, that means physically reconstructing and doing the thing, weaving the cloth, firing the kiln, wearing the sandal, because some knowledge only arrives through the body, not through a textbook.

For a writer, the translation is simple and, I think, genuinely liberating: stop researching at your character and start researching as them. What does she feel in her hands doing this task. What does he notice first when he walks into that room. The smell, the cold, the sound of someone else’s dialect. That’s not something a survey of secondary sources gives you. That’s something you have to feel your way into. And it’s far more alive on the page than a paragraph explaining fourteenth-century guild regulations.

That’s really the whole shift, underneath everything: research so you can feel the past through your character, not so you can prove it to a reader who was never going to fact-check you anyway.

Let me make it concrete. Say your scene is a market. The “overwhelmed researcher” version explains the guild system, lists every good sold, dates the founding of the square, and footnotes the currency exchange rate, before your character has said a single line. Your reader learns a lot and feels nothing. The “experimental archaeologist” version gives you the smell of fish left too long in the sun, the ache in your character’s shoulder from the basket she’s carried since dawn, the particular way she lowers her voice near the tax collector’s stall. One paragraph. No lecture. And somehow the reader now knows far more about that market than the first version ever taught them because they felt it happen to someone, instead of being told about it by no one in particular.

That’s the fragment principle at work. You don’t need the whole vessel. You need the one shard that tells you how the pot was held.

Every story is its own excavation site

If there’s one thing this job has hammered into me, it’s that no two sites are the same. Even when they look nearly identical on paper. The method stays consistent. The tools stay mostly the same. But the approach has to be built fresh, every single time. I tell museums and cultural institutions this constantly: I can’t give two of them the same service, even when their collections seem to overlap, because the underlying “site”, the story they’re trying to tell, is never actually the same story twice.

Your manuscript deserves that same respect. Not a template for “how historical fiction should feel,” but an approach built for your specific site, your specific characters, your specific fragments of evidence.

So I want to ask you what I ask every writer I sit down with:

Have you ever gone that far into the rabbit hole? Researched until the story underneath it went quiet?

What pulled you back out, if anything did?

And if you’re in it right now, what would it actually look like for someone to help you dig, without letting the dig take over the writing?

If you want to talk that through properly, that’s exactly what The Studio is for. It’s where I sit down with writers, game developers, and narrative designers one-on-one, treat your project as its own excavation site, and help you find the layer where the story actually is. You can find the details and book a session through the link at the top of this publication.

Come tell me about your own Little Highlander moment in the comments. I promise you’re not the only one who’s had one.

I’ve been an Assassin’s Creed fan for a long time, and I’ve written about this franchise’s tangled relationship with real history more than once on this publication. So when Ubisoft Singapore announced they were rebuilding Black Flag from the ground up, I knew it deserved its own post. Not a full deep-dive yet (that’s coming next month, I promise), but a proper introduction to what makes this remake worth talking about, both as a game and as a piece of historical storytelling.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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A return to the real Golden Age of Piracy

Let’s start with the history, because that’s always where my heart is first.

Black Flag is set during the Golden Age of Piracy, a period historians generally place between roughly 1650 and 1730. But the game, both the 2013 original and this remake, zeroes in on the sharpest peak within that peak: 1715 to 1722, the years when piracy in the Caribbean was at its most concentrated, chaotic, and consequential.

The geography is real, too. You’ll sail between Spanish Havana, British Kingston, and the pirate-controlled Nassau. Home of the short-lived but very real Republic of Pirates, a period when Nassau operated almost entirely outside formal colonial law. Edward Kenway’s personal base, Great Inagua, is a real Bahamian island as well.

And the cast of historical figures woven into the story isn’t invented for flavor. These were real people. Blackbeard, born Edward Teach, prowls these waters. Benjamin Hornigold, one of the most influential pirates of the era (long rumored, never confirmed, to have hidden a treasure that was never found), plays a central role. And two of history’s most notorious female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, are here too. Figures who defied nearly every expectation placed on women of their time.

This is what I love about Black Flag: the Assassin-Templar conspiracy is fiction, obviously, but the stage it’s built on is not. The timeline, the ports, the pirates, they’re pulled straight from the historical record.

A remake with the soul of the original

Now, onto the remake itself and I’ll say upfront, I’m not here to give you a full breakdown of every mechanical change. That’s for the deep-dive. But there’s one thing about this remake that I genuinely need to talk about.

Built on Ubisoft Singapore’s modern Anvil engine, The same technology behind Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Resynced isn’t a simple graphical polish. Game director Richard Knight has been open about the fact that the team couldn’t reuse a single line of the original 2013 code. As he put it, that codebase was built for a completely different technological era; trying to run it on 2026 hardware simply wasn’t realistic. So they rebuilt the entire game from scratch, using the original only as a reference point.

And here’s the part that matters most to me: the modern-day Abstergo Industries storyline and the Desmond Miles lineage framing are gone. Completely removed. For the first time, Black Flag exists purely as a historical experience. No modern-day interruptions, no Animus-lab detours, just Edward Kenway and the Caribbean. As someone who has always been drawn to Assassin’s Creed specifically for its historical bones, I can’t tell you how much this decision means to me. This is, in the truest sense, Assassin’s Creed with the soul the series was built on.

Not every change has landed well, of course. The removal of the classic Hidden Blade multi-kill combat has been genuinely controversial among longtime fans, and Ubisoft has said it’s “listening” to that feedback. I won’t pretend that criticism doesn’t exist. But even with that, the overall spirit of this remake, a team clearly determined to honor the original while making something that stands on its own, is hard not to respect.

And because I really enjoyed it, I would like to share with you the officail website of Ubisoft about the remake of Black Flag!

Over to you

I’ll be doing a proper deep-dive into Black Flag Resynced next month, once I’ve had more time to sit with it and pull it apart the way I usually do. But for now, I want to hear from you.

Have you played Black Flag Resynced yet? Did you play the original back in 2013? And honestly which one do you prefer, and why?

Drop your thoughts in the comments. I read every single one, and this is exactly the kind of conversation I started this publication for.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: that city never existed. Not once, not anywhere. And the real story — the one that actually happened — is smaller, stranger, and far more human than the legend it created.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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Three conquistadors, one obsession

To understand how El Dorado was born, you have to understand the men who went looking for it. By the 1530s, Spain’s conquistadors had already torn through two empires. Hernán Cortés had brought down the Aztec in Mexico in 1521. Francisco Pizarro had done the same to the Inca in Peru in 1533. Both had come home with mountains of gold, and both had proven, brutally, that the “New World” could make a poor Spanish soldier into a wealthy man overnight.

So when a thirty-six-year-old lawyer from Granada named Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada set out from Santa Marta in April 1536 with nine hundred men, he wasn’t chasing curiosity. He was chasing the same dream as Cortés and Pizarro: find the next rich civilization, take its gold, make history.

It didn’t go the way he planned. After months of brutal jungle marches, disease, and starvation that killed off most of his expedition, Quesada’s surviving men stumbled onto the high plateau of the Muisca. A wealthy, organized people who farmed the land, worked gold and cotton, and had never seen anything like a Spaniard before. The Muisca, by some accounts, treated the strange, armored newcomers as if they might be divine visitors. They offered food. They offered shelter. It’s the same beat you might remember from the 2000 animated film The Road to El Dorado. Ecept here, there was no happy ending.

The conquistadors repaid the hospitality by ransacking Muisca temples and homes for gold. When the Muisca tried to resist, their weapons stood no chance against Spanish steel and firearms.

The story that may have saved a people

And this is where it gets interesting. According to the legend, one elderly Muisca man, faced with conquistadors who were clearly never going to stop taking, never going to leave satisfied, told them a story. Somewhere else, he said, far from here, there lived a tribe by a sacred lake. Every year, their chief covered his entire body in gold dust and sailed out onto the water on a small raft. Then he dove in, washing the gold away as an offering, while his people threw jewels and treasure into the depths behind him.

The Spanish had a name for this kind of man within minutes: El Dorado. The Golden One.

Notice what that phrase actually meant, originally. Not a city. Not an empire. A person. A man made of gold, ruling over a lake full of treasure that was always somewhere else. Always one more valley over, one more river down.

Was the story true? Maybe partly. Maybe it was invented on the spot by a man watching his people get slaughtered for gold they didn’t have enough of, buying time and distance the only way he could: with a rumor irresistible enough to make armed strangers walk away and keep walking. We’ll never know for certain. But it worked exactly the way you’d want a desperate lie to work. It sent the conquistadors chasing shadows across an entire continent for the better part of two centuries.

What actually happened at the lake

There was a real lake, Lake Guatavita, in the Colombian highlands, and there was a real ritual. The written source for it comes from Juan Rodríguez Freyle’s 1636 chronicle El Carnero, written a full century after Quesada’s expedition, describing a Muisca investiture ceremony: a new ruler, coated in gold dust, rowed into the lake to make an offering.

Modern archaeology backs up a version of this. A 2023 survey of the lake’s shoreline found evidence of a genuine ritual shrine, with modest, small-scale offerings. Nothing like the “reservoir of gold” the legend promised. The researcher behind that dig, Juan Pablo Quintero-Guzmán, suggests the ceremony may have happened only once, or rarely, then lived on for generations in Muisca oral memory long before any Spaniard heard of it.

One ritual. One lake. One gold-dusted man. That’s the entire kernel of truth inside a myth that eventually swallowed Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and the Amazon.

The lake that got protected from us

Europeans spent centuries trying to physically drain Lake Guatavita to get at the gold they were sure was down there. In 1545, again around 1580, again in 1898 with British engineering money. Each attempt recovered a little gold and a lot of ruined machinery, and each failure only convinced people the real treasure must be somewhere else, deeper, further, still hidden.

In 1965, the Colombian government finally stepped in and declared Lake Guatavita a protected national monument, banning any further excavation or gold-hunting there for good. Four hundred years after one man’s story sent the first expedition into the mountains, the lake was finally left alone.

So what does that make El Dorado, really?

Not a lost city waiting to be found. Not really even a place. It’s a mirror. One that reflected back the greed of everyone who went looking into it, and somehow just kept growing the more people stared. Maybe that’s the real reason the story never dies, in books, games, and screens alike: it was never about gold. It was always about what gold does to the people chasing it.

If a single invented rumor could send armies across a continent for two hundred years, how much of what we call “history” is really just the story that worked?

And something to inspire you!

I have to confess something: I love this series. Not just as a gamer, not just as a writer, but as an archaeologist. And after years of following Drake from jungle to desert to mountain, I’m ready to make a claim that might ruffle some feathers among my fellow pop-culture nerds: Uncharted is more archaeologically accurate than Tomb Raider. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, because it deserves saying twice.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

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A brief history of Drake

Uncharted was developed by Naughty Dog, and across six games it built one of gaming’s most beloved treasure-hunting sagas. It began in 2007 with Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and closed out Nathan Drake’s personal story in 2016 with Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. Ten years of chasing myths across the globe. The series didn’t stop there: 2017’s Uncharted: The Lost Legacy shifted focus to Chloe Frazer, Drake’s sharp, capable counterpart, proving the world Naughty Dog built was bigger than any single protagonist. (Full disclosure: the PS Vita spin-off is the one entry I haven’t played. No console, no judgment.)

But it’s Nathan Drake who lingers in the cultural memory, especially after Tom Holland brought his origin story to the big screen a few years ago. And it’s Drake’s adventures that double, quietly, as a surprisingly rich survey of real archaeological mysteries.

Real places, real legends

Here’s where the series earns its stripes. Drake’s Fortune, the 2007 original, sends players chasing the legend of El Dorado, the mythical city of gold that obsessed conquistadors and explorers for centuries and still hasn’t given up all its secrets. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves takes Drake through the Himalayas of Nepal and into China on the trail of Shambhala, the mythical kingdom of Tibetan Buddhist tradition. One of the most enduring lost-city legends on Earth.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception goes even further, sending players into Saudi Arabia’s Rub’ al Khali — the Empty Quarter — in search of Iram of the Pillars, sometimes called the “Atlantis of the Sands.” This isn’t a Naughty Dog invention: Iram is tied to real historical searches by actual explorers, a lost city whose existence has been debated for a very long time. The same game also threads in the Hashashin, the historical Order of Assassins, adding yet another layer of real medieval history to the fiction.

Then there’s the recurring geography: Panama shows up again and again across the series, layered with references to Spanish colonial sites. Scotland contributes a network of catacombs and a ruined cathedral rendered with genuine care for the real architecture. Taken together, the series draws its treasure maps mostly across Latin America and Asia. The two regions that, not coincidentally, host some of the world’s most enduring lost-city legends and richest archaeological mysteries.

Compare that to Tomb Raider, a series I also enjoy, but one that leans far more heavily on invented mythology than real archaeological groundwork. Uncharted, by contrast, keeps returning to places and legends that real explorers, historians, and yes, real archaeologists have spent careers chasing.

Why this matters (to me, anyway)

As a gamer, Uncharted is thrilling. As a writer, it’s a masterclass in tightly plotted, cinematic storytelling. But as an archaeologist, it’s something else entirely: a rare chance to explore genuine historical mysteries interactively, through the eyes of characters who treat the past the way we do, as a puzzle still worth solving.

That’s the real appeal of archaeology, isn’t it? Not dusty museum cases, but the sense that the past is still challenging us, still hiding things, still leaving room for mystery. Uncharted understands that instinct better than most games that claim the “historical” label, and it wraps that understanding in globe-trotting adventure and genuinely excellent writing.

I’ll admit my favorite entry is still the first one. There’s something about Drake’s Fortune and its take on El Dorado that keeps pulling me back and here’s a small tease: the real history behind the City of Gold might be even stranger, and possibly more real, than the legend suggests. I won’t promise a follow-up post about it. But I won’t rule one out, either.

The official trailer of the movie of Uncharted, released 2022.

Over to you

Have you ever played any title in the series?

What did you make of it?

And here’s the real question I keep coming back to: when you were chasing El Dorado or Shambhala or Iram of the Pillars alongside Nathan Drake, did you ever stop and wonder how much of it was real?

I’d love to know what you found and whether, like me, you walked away from this series looking at lost cities a little differently.

The Piper of Hamelin is one of them. It might be my favorite story of all time. One I loved as a kid, and now, knowing what actually sits behind it, love even more as an adult.

You probably know the version with the rats: a mysterious piper rids a town of a rodent infestation, the town refuses to pay him, and in revenge he lures away 130 children, never to be seen again. It’s the kind of story that sticks with you long after childhood. Colorful, cruel, and strangely specific for a “fairy tale.”

That specificity is exactly why historians and archaeologists have spent centuries picking it apart. Because underneath the fantasy, something real seems to be buried. And the deeper you dig, the stranger and more human, this story becomes.

➡️If you want to sharpen your craft, explore my writing systems to find the right tools for your project. And if you’re ready to take your own historical fiction or game project even further, the Studio is where we work together one on one.

➡️ If you’d like to support my books, graphic novels, and creative journey directly, you can always find me on Ko-Fi. Every trowel-sized contribution helps me keep building the worlds I write about.

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It wasn’t the Brothers Grimm who invented it

Here’s the biggest misconception about this legend: people assume the Brothers Grimm made it up. They didn’t. They weren’t even the first to write it down.

What the Grimms actually did was collect an already centuries-old legend and publish it as Die Kinder zu Hameln (”The Children of Hamelin”) in their 1816 collection Deutsche Sagen (German Legends). That distinction matters more than it seems. Deutsche Sagen wasn’t a book of fairy tales for children; it was a collection of historical legends, compiled for adults, at a time when stories like this were treated less like bedtime entertainment and more like folk memory.

So if the Grimms didn’t invent it, where does it actually come from? And more importantly, is there any evidence something really happened in Hamelin?

Hamelin, by the way, is a real town in northern Germany, not far from Hamburg. And surprisingly, yes, there is evidence. Not of a magical piper. But of a town that believed, and remembered, that something traumatic had occurred.

The evidence trail

The earliest known reference comes from a stained-glass window installed in Hamelin’s church, believed to date to the late 13th or early 14th century. It depicted a colorfully dressed piper leading children away. The original window was destroyed in a fire in the 17th century, but multiple independent written descriptions of it survived. Enough to convince historians it genuinely existed.

Then there’s the town chronicle itself. An entry from 1384 reads, chillingly: “It is 100 years since our children left.” Count backward, and you land on 1284. Notice what’s missing. No rats, no revenge, no magic flute. Just a flat civic statement of loss. Historians consider this one of the strongest indications that a real event underlies the legend, because this isn’t a storyteller’s flourish. It’s a community’s memory, recorded as fact.

By the mid-14th century, the Dominican scholar Heinrich of Herford was also recording a version of the story. Describing a mysterious youth playing a silver pipe who led children away. Still no rats. Still no confirmation of who or what this figure actually was.

The rats weren’t original?

No. And this tends to surprise people who grew up with the story.

The oldest versions mention only a mysterious stranger, music, and the disappearance of roughly 130 children. The rat infestation, the whole “we didn’t pay him so he took revenge” plot, only appears in later medieval and early modern retellings, the same versions that eventually fed into the Grimms’ account. Many historians believe the rats were added later specifically because they gave the story a tidy moral: broken promises bring divine punishment. Satisfying storytelling. Not necessarily history.

Did 130 children really vanish?

This is where it gets genuinely fascinating and where translation matters as much as archaeology.

Medieval German is not simple to translate into modern language, and some of the words used in these early sources — often rendered as “children” — could also mean young people, adolescents, or unmarried townspeople: the sons and daughters of the town, not literal small children. That single linguistic detail changes everything. If the sources are actually describing young adults, we’re not looking at a kidnapping. We’re looking at a mass departure.

Which brings us to the leading theories.

Eastward emigration is the strongest, and the one I personally find most compelling, because it’s grounded in actual documented history rather than inference alone. During the 13th century, German nobles were actively recruiting settlers to colonize territories further east. Places like Transylvania, Silesia, and Pomerania, land that had been won, cleared, or opened up and now needed people to work it. Professional recruiters, sometimes called locatores, traveled from town to town gathering young, able-bodied people willing to resettle. They were often persuasive, sometimes theatrical, and occasionally remembered by the communities they emptied out. One such recruiter, skilled enough with music, charisma, or sheer persuasion, may have been the seed of “the piper” in local memory.

Under this theory, the 130 “children” represent a large group of young emigrants who left Hamelin permanently for a new life further east. Not stolen, not vanished, simply gone. And because they left rather than died, there would be no bodies to find, no burial site to excavate, no catastrophe to trace archaeologically. Just an empty gap in the town’s younger generation, and a story that had to explain it.

Dance mania is another theory, drawing a comparison to documented medieval outbreaks of mass compulsive dancing, like the infamous Strasbourg dancing plague of 1518. A charismatic musician could theoretically have triggered something similar. It’s an intriguing parallel, but purely speculative.

A local catastrophe, like a flood, a cave collapse or an epidemic, has also been proposed. But archaeologically, this doesn’t hold up well. An event that killed 130 young people would likely leave physical remains or mass burial evidence. None has been found.

The plague theory is the most ironic, given how central rats became to the legend later. But the timeline doesn’t work: the Black Death didn’t reach Europe until 1347, more than sixty years after Hamelin’s traditional date of 1284. There’s no supporting evidence for an earlier, localized plague event either.

None of these theories is proven. That’s the nature of working this far back, Certainty isn’t really on the table. But the eastward migration theory currently holds the most scholarly weight, because it’s the one grounded in actual historical record rather than folkloric pattern-matching.

A town that never forgot

What strikes me most, after spending real time with this story, isn’t the mystery itself. It’s how long Hamelin kept it alive. This wasn’t a story told once and forgotten. The town maintained traditions tied to it for centuries, including a street reportedly known as the one where music and dancing were forbidden, because it was believed to be the route the children took out of town.

That’s not typical fairy-tale behavior. Fairy tales get told and retold for entertainment. This was different. A community encoding a real, specific loss into ritual and civic rule, generation after generation, long after the exact facts had blurred into legend. You don’t ban music on a street for seven hundred years over a story you made up for fun.

Maybe the piper existed as a real person. A recruiter, a musician, a stranger passing through at the wrong moment. Maybe he didn’t, and he’s simply a symbol for something the town itself could no longer fully explain, but refused to let go of. Either way, something happened in Hamelin in the summer of 1284. The details didn’t survive. But the grief, apparently, did.

For me, knowing the real history behind it hasn’t diminished the story at all. If anything, it’s made me love it more, because it stops being just a fairy tale, and becomes a genuine historical mystery, one still unsolved after eight centuries.

Some interesting links:

The Museum of Hamelin

The Brothers Grimm version from the City Hall of Hamelin

Have you ever read the tale of the Piper of Hamelin?

Or gone looking for the historical truth behind the fairy tales of your own childhood?

I’d genuinely love to know.

If you write or want to write, historical fiction, historical thrillers, or even historical video games, Dan Brown isn’t just entertainment. He’s a case study.

Before we dive in, a little something for fellow dark history writers!

If today's post gets you thinking about codes, conspiracies, and the shadowy corners of the past, you'll probably love my Historical Horror & Dark Fantasy Writing Prompt Bundle. A curated set of prompts built to help you mine history's darkest moments for fiction that actually feels alive.

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The man behind Robert Langdon

Born on June 22, 1964, in Exeter, New Hampshire, Dan Brown is an American thriller novelist, even though his name sounds like it could belong to an Oxford don. Before he became a full-time author, he worked as a teacher and a musician. Two professions built entirely on holding an audience’s attention, which, in hindsight, explains a lot about his instinct for pacing and tension.

Brown’s international breakthrough came with The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003. What many readers don’t realize is that the book everyone associates him with wasn’t actually his first Langdon story. Angels & Demons (often nicknamed “Illuminati” because of the later film) came first, and it’s packed with the same DNA: a Harvard symbologist, a ticking clock, and institutions hiding centuries of secrets. The numbers around his work are staggering. His novels have sold over 250 million copies worldwide and have been translated into dozens of languages. That’s not luck. That’s a writer who found a formula that genuinely works.

What makes his storytelling so addictive

Brown’s signature style fuses historical mystery, religious symbolism, cryptography, archaeology, and art history into a fast-paced thriller engine. He doesn’t just drop research into a chapter and move on. He weaves it into the chase itself, so that the history is the plot. You’re not pausing to learn a fact; you’re racing through a museum, a cathedral, or an archive because the fact is the next clue.

That’s the part worth studying closely if you write historical fiction. Brown doesn’t just tell you there’s a mystery. He puts you inside it. He gives you just enough detail to feel like an expert, then yanks the rug out from under you on the next page. Whether or not you’ve read every Langdon book, the effect is consistent: readers report the same thing. Once they start, they can’t stop turning pages, because Brown structures revelation like a drumbeat, one clue at a time, never quite letting you catch your breath.

But here’s the catch: Dan Brown doesn’t think lan archaeologist

And this is where I want to be honest with you, as someone trained in archaeology and not just as a fan of his books. Dan Brown can absolutely make you fall in love with history and historical mystery. But he doesn’t reconstruct the past the way an archaeologist does. Through evidence, context, critical analysis and (in my own work) experimentation. He does solid research on the topics he chooses, but what he ultimately produces is a reimagining of the past, not a reconstruction of it.

In Brown’s hands, history becomes a living puzzle: symbols, artifacts, and relics connected into a dramatic sequence designed to serve the story first. That doesn’t make it dishonest. It simply means it operates in a space we can’t always prove or disprove. It’s his imaginative interpretation of real research, filtered through a storyteller’s instincts rather than a scholar’s caution. He often works alongside historians or art historians for accuracy, but he is, at his core, a novelist. Not a member of either profession. And that distinction matters enormously for how his work should be read, and how we, as writers, should learn from it.

Here’s the nuance I keep coming back to: that lack of an archaeologist’s mindset is part of what makes Brown’s writing so propulsive. If he wrote with the caution and qualification that real historical or archaeological research demands, the pacing would likely suffer. But I also believe that if Brown thought a little more like an archaeologist — grounding his “reveals” in process as well as drama — his work could be even more immersive, not less. He tackles genuinely heavy material: religious mysteries, the secret histories of the Church, centuries of art history that real scholars spend lifetimes untangling. Replicating even a sense of truth around subjects that dense is incredibly difficult and Brown doesn’t really attempt strict replication. He aims for dramatic resonance instead, and largely succeeds.

Why you should still read him

None of this is a takedown. I’m not here to fact-check Dan Brown or relitigate the controversies around The Da Vinci Code. I’m here to say something simpler: if you write historical fiction, historical thrillers, graphic novels, or historical video games, Dan Brown is required reading at least once in your life. Study how he turns research into momentum. Study how he makes a fresco or a cipher feel as urgent as a bomb threat. Study how he never lets you forget there’s a clock running.

He may not think like an archaeologist but he thinks like a storyteller who knows exactly how to make history feel dangerous again. That’s a skill worth learning, even if you intend to handle the past more carefully than he does.

If you’d like to explore his work and research further, you can visit Dan Brown’s official website.

Now I want to hear from you.

Have you read any of Dan Brown’s books?

What’s your own take on the way he writes history? Inspiring, controversial, or a bit of both?

Not metaphorically. Literally. Pages on one side for a dark historical novel. A notebook on the other side for a graphic novel idea I couldn’t shake. A third pile, somewhere underneath my coffee cup, for an epic I’d been “starting” for months. I was juggling three books and two graphic novels at the same time. Five different worlds, five different casts of characters, five different timelines. All competing for the same two hands and the same twenty-four hours.

You can probably guess how that ended. I wasn’t writing five books. I was writing almost nothing.

If you’re a writer, especially a historical fiction writer, where you’re not just inventing a world but also wrestling with real events, real questions, real gaps in the record, you’ve probably felt some version of this. And here’s the part that surprised me when I started talking to other writers about it: this kind of overwhelm isn’t rare. It isn’t a personal failure. It’s almost the price of admission for having a mind that generates ideas faster than you can act on them. The more ideas you’re capable of having, the more likely you are to drown in them. Unless you build something to hold them.

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The peal problem was never “Too many ideas”

For a long time I thought my problem was that I had too many ideas. It wasn’t. The problem was that none of those ideas had anywhere to live. I had a dozen notebooks — genuinely, a dozen — and notebooks weren’t the answer. What I needed wasn’t more places to write things down. I needed one place where everything could talk to each other.

So I built it. Slowly, stubbornly, and with more frustration than I’d like to admit, I created a system in Notion that became the backbone for every project I was juggling.

The first piece was a master template that tracked every project (novel, graphic novel, historical video game concept) by stage: drafting, revision, type. For the first time, I could see all of my chapters and storylines in one place instead of scattered across desks and devices.

The second piece is the one that genuinely saved me. As I wrote, questions kept piling up. Philosophical questions a character raised, an artifact whose fate I hadn’t decided, a thread I’d opened in chapter two and forgotten by chapter nine. So I started logging them: what kind of question it was (character, artifact, philosophical), and in which chapter, it got answered. It sounds almost too simple to matter. It mattered more than almost anything else I built. It was the difference between a story that holds together and one that quietly falls apart underneath its own ambition.

Then I built the piece specific to historical fiction

Writing historical fiction adds a layer general fiction doesn’t have to deal with: the research itself can overwhelm you. Working on a historical dark fiction nover, Dark Matter, I had to track threads like the Irish Question. When it surfaced, what kind of historical thread it was (verified social/political fact, not just background noise), and whether it was working as setting or as something closer to a character in its own right. Historical fiction is full of these half-verified, half-mysterious threads — facts, artifacts, places and without a system to sort the confirmed from the contested, you end up either over-researching forever or quietly getting things wrong.

Alongside that, I built a simpler structure for character and world-building — one table for every character across every project, one table for every world and location. Not because it’s a new idea (every writing teacher tells you to track your characters), but because having it visible, in one place, across everything I was working on, changed how much mental weight I was carrying around every day.

A system doesn’t remove the ideas. It removes the chaos

Here’s what I want you to take from this, even if you never look at the product I eventually built: the ideas were never the enemy. The chaos was. If you don’t have a system, the overwhelm doesn’t go away on its own. It just loops. Same five projects, same scattered desk, same year passing without a finished draft.

I eventually packaged these three templates together after a writer I was mentoring asked, half-joking, “can you just give me the whole thing?” So I did. And it helped her. It’s since helped a few other writers I work with, too, which is honestly why I’m telling you all of this instead of keeping it to myself.

The bundle is built around three workspaces: the Writer’s Dashboard (the general system with project tracking, the question log, everything that holds a manuscript together regardless of genre), the Fiction Writing Workspace (character and world-building, for any story), and the Historical Fiction Writing Workspace (the historical-fact and source-verification system, built specifically for writers working with real events, real artifacts, real history).

If you want to see the whole bundle and figure out whether it fits the way you write, you can access it here.

So, what about you?

Have you ever hit this wall? Three projects deep, ideas everywhere, nothing finished?

Have you built your own system to get out of it, or are you still living on scattered notebooks like I once did?

If you’re where I was three years ago, I want you to know: you’re not disorganized, and you’re not alone in this. You just haven’t built the system yet. That’s exactly what this publication is here for.