Another Blurb!

It's almost exactly 1 1/2 months until the debut of The Secret History, and things are starting to get busy. There will be a blog tour, giveaways (books and Byzantine coins--ohlala!), and I might even have some other excitement hidden up my sleeve. 

(Okay, so I do, but you'll have to wait until later to find out about the rest of the fun). 

I've also received another blurb (publishing-code for the author quotes on the cover and front pages) for The Secret History, this one from Jeane Westin: 

"Loss, ambition and lust keep this rich story moving at top speed. Stephanie Thornton writes a remarkable first novel that brings a little known woman to full, vibrant life...A sprawling and irresistible story."—Jeane Westin, author of The Spymaster's Daughter

If you haven't already read it and you're looking for a great read on Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley (talk about one of the greatest love stories of all time!), I highly recommend Westin's His Last Letter. It's definitely swoonworthy!

And now I'm headed back to the revision cave to romp around the Mongolian steppes with Genghis Khan for The Tiger Queens. School ends this week and then I'm looking forward to some serious editing time! 

 

A Secret History Excerpt: Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day! In celebration, I have for your reading pleasure an excerpt of The Secret History. Let's just say Theodora and her mom have a rather complicated relationship. 


The silence expanded around us. “You didn’t come all this way, with a trunk, to tell me about Vitus.”

My mother sighed and tried to shift in her seat, but she gave up when Tasia stirred. “No, I did not. I’m moving in with you.”

“What? Here?” I gestured to the room, so small Antonina and I could scarcely lie head to head without our feet touching the walls. We’d tried it.

“Your sister has a patron now, some Tyrian dye merchant.” My mother shrugged. “There’s not exactly room for me in his villa.”

My proud, passionate mother. This was not the life she’d envisioned for herself, for any of us. “I don’t know—it’s not my room. Antonina’s gone most nights, and I’m going to find a position as soon as I’m clean.”

“I’ll take care of Tasia while you two are out—God knows she’ll need someone to make sure she doesn’t end up like you. You won’t even know I’m here.”

“Right. It’ll be like sharing a room with a fury.”

She made a noise in the back of her throat, half laugh, half snort. “Sometimes I think I should have drowned you at birth.”

Ah yes. It was so lovely to have my mother back.

An Unexpected Congratulations

I've sent a few letters to my senators in recent months, so when a letter from Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski landed in mailbox, I expected a run-of-the-mill form letter. 

Instead, she was writing about The Secret History!

I'm not sure who told her about my "ability to seamlessly weave history and prose into my compelling narrative," but talk about a pleasant surprise! So cool!

What to Keep and What to Cut: Mongolia Style

Writing The Tiger Queens has presented me with a new and unexpected quandary: too many characters. 

And I'm talking waaay too many characters. 

Granted, there was a fair bit of information on Theodora's family and friends from Procopius' The Secret History which allowed me to cherry pick which people I wanted to focus on. And we have fairly decent records from Hatshepsut's reign that filled in my character list quite nicely. 

However, there's this lovely little tome on Genghis Khan's reign (coincidentally, it too is called The Secret History), but it has a cast list that would make Proust shudder.* Genghis had a good-sized family, several wives, lots of kids, and even more enemies.

So now the quandary: Who to cut?

Let's just say that many characters this weekend have been assimilated. (I've tried to give them clean deaths). Many have been reabsorbed into other characters. At this point I'm not sure if I've got Borg or multi-headed hydras in my manuscript. 


*Proust's In Search of Lost Time has over 2,000 characters. I might have been exaggerating here, but you get the point.  

Who the Heck Was Justinian?

Ask someone to name a Roman emperor and chances are you'll get one of the usual heavyweights: Octavian (can't stand him), Caligula (born on my birthday!), or maybe even Nero (killed his mom, so I'm not a big fan).

Ask someone to name a Byzantine emperor and you'll probably get a blank stare.  

So today I bring you a run-down of the most awesome Byzantine (or eastern Roman) emperor: Justinian. 

(Who also happens to be Theodora's husband. Just saying.)


So what exactly did Justinian do?

1. He reconquered the Italian peninsula and re-incorporated it into the Roman empire. (This is post-Goths, and while he only held the territory for a little bit, that wasn't his fault. See #5.) 

2. He survived the Nika uprising (because Theodora gave a great speech) and went on to rebuild Constantinople on a grand scale. He supposedly built a giant statue of himself that poured wine from his feet on feast days.

3. He built the Hagia Sophia. (A must-see before you die). 

4. His law code, the Corpus juris civilis, revised the sum total of Roman law and become the basis for the modern law system in Europe. (Because it was the awesome). 

5. He survived having bubonic plague. Granted, the Byzantine empire started a free-fall due to all the dead people (you can't tax dead people and that means you can't build cool stuff and conquer faraway lands), but really, anyone who survives plague is downright awesome. 


And just in case you're not already awed by Justinian's awesomeness, check out @The_New_Rome's mini-documentary on Justinian and Theodora. (Trust me, it's worth the extra click and three minutes of your life). 



Enjoy!

Also, Debra is the lucky winner of last week's "Forged by Fate" giveaway! Congrats, Debra!
    

Interview & Giveaway: Forged by Fate

Today I'm happy to welcome one of my longtime blog and writerly pals, Amalia Dillin, to talk about her debut novel, Forged by Fate. I'll also be giving away a copy of Forged by Fate to one lucky commenter on this post through Saturday, March 30th!

1. This novel is a really unique take on a very old story. What inspired you to combine the various eras you did in Forged by Fate?

Any story with Eve as a protagonist kind of begs for a retelling of Creation – but from the start, she was always a woman who would be reborn, generation after generation, life after life, hop-scotching from one historical event to another. It was impossible for Eve to be *every* woman of importance in history, and improbable that she would be, even if they all worked out, chronologically, but some seemed more likely than others. For example, her roles as Moses’s mother, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, made perfect sense. But some of it is also just the periods and cultures I find interesting, like the Nordic Bronze Age – I believe in writing about the things I love, first and foremost, and that includes history!

2. What did you find to be the hardest thing about combining gods from so many different world mythologies?

Managing their egos and finding a way to fit them all together in a way which allowed for the world to actually survive. How do the gods work things out behind the scenes? Who decides which pantheon gets which land mass? Do they divide the world up into specific territories, or do the areas they govern depend upon people spreading the faith? These are impossibly powerful individuals – if two gods who control the sun decide to get territorial, nobody on earth is going to win. But you know there had to be conflicts, and there had to be a system in place for those conflicts to be addressed, and then there are the gods of trickery, mischief, and deceit, trying to break the rules, upset the balance, and get their own way at the expense of everyone else…

3. There are so many memorable characters in this novel--which was your favorite to write?

I love Thor. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about me. But I love him as a hero because he’s impossibly powerful, a god, but still flawed. His virtues are also his greatest faults – loyalty becomes blindness, honor becomes a cage, a reason for inaction in the face of suffering. I love him, because the more I wrote, the more real he became to me, and the more I understood why this was a god that people worshipped, and why he was so, so well-loved among the common people.

That said, Adam really grew on me over the course of the trilogy, too.

4. Ancient history tends to have been written by men, but there are many stories and myths from around the world that include strong women. (I'm a big fan of Athena myself). Which is your favorite of these stories and why?

In history, I think the women who impress me most are the Greeks – when in spite of the cultural repression, they still managed to get their names into history. Women like the Spartan Queen, Gorgo, for example, who isn’t just mentioned, but mentioned and acclaimed for her wisdom in a time when women were really not thought well of, as reasonable beings.

Among the myths – I have a hard time choosing. I think Hippodamia, the wife of Pirithous, is a fascinating character, because she’s “kin” to the centaurs. The possibilities that offers for fiction are really interesting, and I recently wrote a novella about her marriage to Pirithous, so it’s fresh in my mind. But I also find the story of Helen of Troy to be… something.

I guess this is my problem with women in myth – so often, they are the reason for conflict and trouble and the people at fault. These aren’t “damsels in distress” even, they’re women who are perceived as CAUSING problems, sometimes even purposely. But the blame is most often placed on them. Europa is at fault for her rape by Zeus for climbing onto the back of a strange bull and wandering away from her friends to begin with. Helen is at fault for running away with Paris, and staying with him, abandoning both her people and her daughter in the process. Even Theseus’ Amazon wife is at fault for abandoning her people, betraying her vows, and marrying him, and that choice causes a war. Outside of Classical Myth, the Saga of the Volsungs (maybe more legend than myth but still) is full of women who go about making trouble for everyone involved, agents of murder and mayhem in the name of family honor, or personal honor.

There are these sparks of personality and principle that are so quickly snuffed out with some kind of punishment. Ariadne helps Theseus escape the labyrinth, betraying her people and family, then is abandoned on the island of Naxos, or else she helped Theseus to escape Crete and return to Dionysus, and betrayed Theseus, if you want a slightly better spin, or else Theseus abandoned her because of Dionysus or completely on accident – no matter how you tell it, she is either punished for her betrayal by betrayal, or in the best of circumstances, is the betrayer, straight up – but what was going on in Crete that made going against her father and her people the BETTER choice? We don’t know, not really. And that’s what makes them compelling as characters around which one could write a book, but otherwise…

These are hard women to love, and the goddesses are maybe even worse.

That said, Athena is a pretty strong and important character in my FATE OF THE GODS trilogy – but not because I love the goddess she is in the myths. For a goddess of Reason and Wisdom, she’s pretty unreasonable and vengeful a lot of the time in those stories. So if she’s known for being wise, why does she so often deviate from that character trait? It makes her a lot more complicated to work with. But in fiction, that’s never a bad thing!

5. What can we next expect from you?

More of the same! Book two of the FATE OF THE GODS trilogy, A FATE FORGOTTEN is coming, followed by the as-yet-untitled book three, with the distinct possibility of some bonus content in between.

And of course there is my blog, wherein people can keep abreast of what I’m working on lately. Usually the topics of my blogposts can point you directly toward what I’m currently writing, since the blog is where I put all my research for later reference.

***

After Adam fell, God made Eve to protect the world. — Adam has pursued Eve since the dawn of creation, intent on using her power to create a new world and make himself its God. Throughout history, Eve has thwarted him, determined to protect the world and all of creation. Unknown to her, the Norse god Thor has been sent by the Council of Gods to keep her from Adam’s influence, and more, to protect the interests of the gods themselves. But this time, Adam is after something more than just Eve’s power — he desires her too, body and soul, even if it means the destruction of the world. Eve cannot allow it, but as one generation melds into the next, she begins to wonder if Adam might be a man she could love.

Forged by Fate available now, from World Weaver Press!

Super Exciting News!

So...

You guys know I love Kate Quinn's Rome series (some of my all-time favorite historical fiction!) and I can't wait for her upcoming novel on the Borgias. So imagine my excitement (not to mention the state of my nerves), when Kate agreed to read THE SECRET HISTORY.

And then something even cooler happened. She liked it!

“Stephanie Thornton’s Theodora is tough and intelligent, spitting defiance against the cruel world of the Byzantine Empire. Her rise from street urchin to emperor’s consort made me want to stand up and cheer. Her later years as empress are great fun to read, but it was her early struggle as actress and courtesan that really had me roaring: either with rage at the misfortunes heaped on this poor girl, or with delight as she once more picked herself up with a steely glint in her eye and kept on going.”—Kate Quinn, author of Empress of the Seven Hills


To celebrate, I'm giving away another ARC! Entries will be accepted here on my blog until Sunday, March 17th. (Because I'm officially now on Spring Break!) Just leave a comment and you're entered to win. (And yes, international readers are always welcome!)


Also, Svea Love won the first ARC giveaway from last week. Congrats Svea!