Hello everyone! I am still diligently working on the historical fiction novel that I started writing back in February of this year and announced that I was writing in June. Writing the novel has been my main preoccupation for the past few months and I have been spending at least ten hours most days working on it, which is a major part of the reason why I haven’t made many posts on this blog recently.
As I have continued writing, I have made substantial changes from what I originally planned (as writers usually do), but I firmly believe that all the changes I have made will result in a much better and more marketable final product. I am really excited about what I am writing and I think that regular readers of my blog will greatly love it. In this post, I will give an update on my progress and plans for the novel going forward as well as more information than I have previously shared about the novel’s historical setting, premise, and main character.
Update on progress and plans for the novel
I still intend to publish this novel when I am finished with it, but, due to the fact that I am still writing it and the process of publishing a novel takes an enormous amount of time, it will most likely not be available to the general public for another two or three years (and, even then, that’s assuming that I finish it on schedule and find an agent quickly).
My draft of the novel is not yet complete in part because the story has, to borrow Tolkien’s phrase, “grown in the telling,” I have been doing an enormous amount of research for it (far more than I initially thought I would), and I have been revising and expanding it heavily as I have been writing. This need for heavy revision is partly due to the fact that I have significantly adjusted the book’s style several times.
The novel draft is currently 75,000 words (232 pages in Microsoft Word with size 12 font, double-spaced). I am aiming to have a finished and relatively polished draft of somewhere between 105,000 and 120,000 words (probably around 400-some pages) by the end of this year. I think that somewhere around that length will be long enough to tell the story I want to tell (which covers events over the span of over twenty years), but still short enough that it will not be unmarketable to agents and publishers due to its length. The working title of the novel is still Mother of the Gods.
After my first draft is complete, I will read through it and make revisions, send it to a small number of beta readers whom I trust, receive their feedback, revisit the novel and probably make more revisions. After that, I will need to find an agent and then the agent will need to find a publisher who will agree to sell it. If I cannot find a traditional publisher for the novel, then I plan to self-publish it. Whatever happens, this novel will be available for people to purchase and read in some form eventually.
I also have started writing a second novel, but it is very much on the backburner until Mother of the Gods is finished and I won’t reveal anything about it until it is further along.
Historical context
Mother of the Gods takes place in Athens in the second quarter of the fourth century BCE, which is a time period that almost no popular media portrayals of ancient Greece cover. The vast majority popular depictions focus on the mythic age of heroes. When on rare occasions people do make adaptations set in Greece during the Classical Period, they almost always focus on the fifth century BCE or sometimes the period of Alexander the Great in the late fourth century BCE. I, however, think that the middle fourth century BCE is one of the most interesting and pivotal times in Greek history and that adaptations don’t give it nearly enough attention.
By the time the novel begins in 375 BCE, it has been nearly three decades since Athens lost the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE, which is often considered to mark the end of the city’s “Golden Age.” Nonetheless, Athens is still an independent democratic polis and it is still almost four decades away from being conquered by Makedonia.
By this point, all the great Periklean monuments have already been built and the Parthenon is over half a century old. Meanwhile, most of the major canonical works of Archaic and Classical Greek literature have already been composed and are in widespread written circulation. By this period, Greek literary culture has become mainly focused on texts written on papyrus scrolls while oral tradition and performance play far less of a role than they once did.
Division and uncertainty plague the Athenian political and social climate in this time. Many among the aristocrats, who claim descent from the gods and heroes of legend and believe that they are superior to everyone else, resent Athens’ democracy (which was replaced with oligarchy twice in the later fifth century BCE, but was restored within less than a year both times) and blame it for the city’s losses. Meanwhile, others, including some aristocrats, continue to support the democracy.
In this period, Athens’ intellectual culture continues to thrive and is, if anything, at its greatest peak. Sokrates has been dead for decades, but rival philosophical schools that various of his students have founded are growing and thriving. Plato and Diogenes of Sinope are among the many philosophers who are living in Athens at this time.
Athens is also becoming increasingly multicultural. A large share if not the majority of its enslaved people come from various cultures outside the Greek world, intellectuals from other Greek city-states are coming to Athens to teach, both Greek and non-Greek merchants bring their goods to sell at Athens’ port of Peiraieus (one of the largest in the Greek world), and foreign cults such as those of the Phrygian deities Kybele and Sabazios, the Thrakian goddess Bendis, and the Egyptian deities Isis and Ammon are growing in popularity.
More about the novel’s premise and main characters
I am trying to avoid saying too much about the actual plot of my novel publicly at this point for several reasons. The first is because I am still writing it and I may decide to change aspects of it, although I think the overall story arc has become clear enough at this point that I will not make many massive revisions to it after this. The second reason is because I don’t want to give away any spoilers for those who are interested in purchasing and reading it.
I will, however, reveal some information to hopefully pique people’s interest. Everything I am about to say is revealed within the introduction and first chapter, so there are no spoilers here.
The novel has a gothic tone and is framed as though it is a translation of a recently discovered ancient Greek text. It begins with a brief introduction by a scholarly “translator” who describes what is known of the sordid and mysterious circumstances that led to the text’s rediscovery and also provides limited explanatory footnotes throughout the text.
The text itself is the detailed secret memoir of Peisithea, a (fictional, but historically inspired) Athenian priestess of the Mother of the Gods who lived in the fourth century BCE. She, as both the first-person narrator and protagonist of the story, has a highly unique narrative voice and perspective.
Peisithea firmly believes in the ancient Greek deities and understands the world around her and even seemingly universal human emotions in ways that are strikingly different from how most people would understand them today. She frequently interprets supernatural forces as influencing events in her life, but more skeptical readers may be able to interpret the same events in more scientific terms. As a result, depending on how willing a given reader is to accept Peisithea’s interpretations, one can choose to read the novel as either magical realism or realistic historical fiction.
Peisithea belongs to the Eteoboutadai, one of the ancient aristocratic clans of Classical Athens, and lives in Kollytos, an affluent deme (i.e., subdivision) inside the city walls. She would be understood in modern terms as neurodivergent and suffering from an anxiety disorder that resembles the modern diagnosis of OCD, but these are not terms or models of understanding that exist in the ancient society in which she lives. Instead, the people around her and she herself believe that she is possessed by a god, which is how the ancient Greeks often understood people whose behavior they perceived as insane, eccentric, or odd.
She displays savant abilities, including an exceptional memory, hyperlexia, and precocious verbal skills. From an astonishingly young age, she develops an intense special interest in Greek poetry and history by reading and memorizing scrolls from her father’s library.
Throughout the novel, she frequently quotes or verbally echoes Greek authors such as Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Sophokles, Euripides, and Herodotos. Despite her immense book-learning, however, she is remarkably naïve about the world around her (especially early in the story) and often understands the situations she finds herself in by comparing them to the literature and myths she is so familiar with.
Peisithea suffers from tortuous anxiety and obsessions, including religious obsessions, and she sees both her exceptional talents and her mental suffering as manifestations of her divine possession. She is also a lesbian who, from early in the novel, falls in love with her childhood best friend Kallimetis, who is of a very different disposition from her, being less anxious, worldlier, naturally skeptical, and more interested in philosophy than poetry.
There is, of course, much more to the novel than this; this is just a brief introduction of what the main character is like at the beginning of the book. The full story follows Peisithea’s life from when she is six years old until she is in her late twenties. A lot happens over the course of that time and many other characters are introduced.
The story will include (among other things) terrible omens, curses, animal sacrifice, wandering mendicant nonbinary eunuch priests, a mysterious secret goddess-worshipping possession cult, and secret rituals in the woods at night involving altered states of consciousness—and all of this is based on real historical sources.
As readers may guess, the novel is both highly psychological and philosophical, dealing heavily with themes of religion, queerness, how people in the past understood the world differently from ourselves, the oppression of women (and social injustice more broadly), existentialism, and epistemology (i.e., ideas about how we can or can’t know things) and it addresses all of these themes from a unique and original perspective.
As readers can probably guess from what I have described, this novel is very much intended for adults. It is not a YA novel, even though the protagonist is first a child and then a teenager for roughly the first half of it and only reaches her twenties around its midpoint. I initially wanted to merely summarize Peisithea’s childhood and adolescence and begin the main story with her in her twenties, but I realized that there was far too much of major consequence to the story that needed to happen in her earlier years to reduce them to a mere summary.
Historical authenticity and inspirations
As I have said before, one of my foremost priorities in writing this novel is to make it as culturally and historically authentic as I possibly can. Even though I have studied ancient Greece for over a decade now and I have a master’s degree in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, I have still been spending at least as much time doing research for this novel as I have actually writing it.
Every aspect of the novel is deeply rooted in the specific historical and cultural context of Athens in the fourth century BCE. Every location that I describe in the novel is a real place that actually exists. I have personally visited most of these locations and have tried to describe them as accurately as possible according to how scholars believe they would have looked in this period.
All the cultural norms, attitudes, and institutions I depict in the novel are either based directly on ancient historical sources or are reasonable guesses based on limited surviving evidence. (Women’s lives in this period are notoriously poorly documented and it would be impossible to write this novel without some informed guesswork.)
Although Peisithea herself is a fictional character, I have tried to write her (and all my other characters) as a realistic person who could have actually existed in this time period and thinks very much like a person of her time, even though she is certainly not typical for her time.
Peisithea is a real name that is attested in Athens in this period and the character draws some loose inspiration from a few real historical figures, including a real Athenian priestess of the “All-Bearing Mother” named Khairestrate who is mentioned in one inscription (IG II2 6288 = CEG 566), a priestess of Sabazios named Ninos whom the orator Demosthenes mentions in three of his speeches, the poet Erinna who describes her tender relationship with her childhood friend Baukis in her fragmentary poem The Distaff, several ancient sources’ descriptions of allegedly “possessed” individuals, and the philosopher Theophrastos’s stereotyped description of the “superstitious man” in his Characters.
The largest share of my inspiration for her, however, comes from myself and my own lived experience. Peisithea is not a self-insert character and, in some ways, she is a radically different from me, but there is a lot of myself in her. I think of her sometimes as the sort of person I might have turned out to be if I had been born in ancient Athens under her circumstances.
Several real historical figures appear and play prominent roles in my novel, including Lysimakhe (the woman who served as high priestess of Athena Polias for sixty-four years from 430 to 365 BCE) and Arete of Kyrene (the Greek North African woman philosopher who, for a period of several decades in the mid-fourth century BCE, was the head of the Kyrenaic philosophical school founded by her father Aristippos, which espoused an ethical philosophy of unabashed egoistic sensual hedonism and an epistemology of skeptical empiricism). Readers will, however, have to wait for the novel itself to find out what roles these figures will play.
Conclusion
This is probably as much information about the story itself as I will reveal until it is published. I will, however, continue to give updates on my progress in writing the story and in trying to get it published. I hope this post sparks some interest that will last until the book comes out, which, again, may not be for a few years given how slow publishing is.
This sounds fascinating!
Getting us to follow your protagonist from a young age is a great idea – we will feel protective of her and want to know how her life will turn out.
Agents/publishers don’t need a fully completed work- opening chapters and a thorough outline can be enough so don’t hesitate to start that part of your plan if you are confident. You sound organised and determined.
Good luck
Jill
Without revealing any more plot details, what you’ve said in your first paragraph is a major part of the reason why I decided to follow my protagonist from a young age; I decided that audiences would feel more sympathy and attachment to her if I introduced her as a child and showed them what she went through in her younger years.
I have read that a fiction novel should be completely finished and polished before one begins pitching it to agents. Nonfiction is a bit different, because nonfiction publishers often accept books that are not yet written on the basis of a proposal with an outline and sample, but fiction publishers are more risk-averse and generally don’t want to take a chance on a novel that is not yet fully written.
Best of luck, Spencer. Have you read Mary Renault’s ‘The King Must Die’ and the sequel, ‘The Bull From The Sea’? She is very good at bringing the ancient world to life from the point of view of the people living in it, and never falls into the trap of making them merely ‘like us but long ago’.
Gene Wolfe’s ‘Soldier of the Mist’ is straight out fantasy, but superbly written and he too is brilliant at defamiliarizing the ancient world. No one says ‘Spartan’, they say ‘Rope-Maker’, Marathon was ‘the Battle of Fennel Field’, and so on. In fact, if you haven’t read those books you probably shouldn’t until you’ve nailed down your first draft!
Thank you for the positive wishes!
I have read Mary Renault’s books! In fact, her novel The Mask of Apollo is the only modern popular fictional treatment of ancient Greece I can think of off the top of my head that takes place in the same time period as my novel. I’m sure there are some others out there, but I can’t name any of them off the top of my head.
I haven’t read Gene Wolf’s Soldier of the Mist, but I just learned of its existence last week funnily enough. After finding out about it, I read the summary of it on Wikipedia and noticed that it has some incidental similarities to my novel (since both novels deal with gods influencing mortals and both have an unreliable narrator-protagonist whom the Great Mother has affected in a way that impacts their memory), but they are markedly different otherwise. Notably, my book is set over a century later than Wolf’s book is, is much more attentive to historical and cultural authenticity, and is much less fantastic than his is.
Additionally, my protagonist is a girl who becomes a young woman over the course of the story, her memory affection is that she has an extraordinarily good memory, and she has many other unusual characteristics aside from just her memory. The memory thing influences the plot at a few points, but isn’t the driving focus of the story. Meanwhile, his protagonist is a male soldier whose memory affection is that he can’t remember anything that happened more than a day earlier and that is the main focus of the plot. Overall, then, without having read his book itself, it seems to me that our books are quite different.
As for defamiliarizing the ancient world, in the novel, I intentionally use direct transliterated spellings of ancient Greek names with diacritics in part to make the names associated with the past sound a little less familiar. Thus, instead of “Athens,” the novel refers to “Athênai” and, instead of “Spartans,” it refers to “Lakedaimonians” (which was actually the more common ancient Greek name for them).
I was going to mention “The Mask of Apollo,” but Spencer beat me to it. I read all of Mary Renault’s novels back when I was a classics student. I hadn’t thought about it until now, but it’s interesting to note that, from “The Praise Singer” through “Funeral Games,” she covers almost every year of the classical period (i.e. from 510 to 322, for those who like precise and arbitrary limits) and then some, though there is a slight gap between Simonides and the start of the Peloponnesian War. (Also a rather longer gap between Theseus and the Pisistratids, of course.)
Re “Peisithea belongs to the Eteoboutadai”
Experienced readers, when they encounter a word that is not pronounced according the the normal rules of their mother tongue will stumble. If it it just one case in a good long stretch we just make up a pronounceable substitute and continue. If there are too many stumbles, we stop reading. I have no idea how to pronounce Peisithea (pie-cythyia? Cythia being Cynthia without the n) but Eteoboutadai is a major stumble. Even if I could pronounce it, it doesn’t look like it would come falling off of my tongue.
Readers do not have to pronounce the names correctly, but they need an easy pronunciation in their inner voice so as to read freely.
Some historical novels include a pronunciation guide but I don’t know whether that is a turn off for buyers.
I appreciate getting an update on your progress, and now I’m excited for when your book will be published! You are very much equipped to make authentic historical fiction in a Greek setting, I feel. And as a fan of older modes of writing, I’m interested in the framing device of it being an ancient document. At any rate, best of luck in finishing & finding a publisher!
Thanks! I initially tried to model Peisithea’s literary voice closely on those of actual ancient Greek prose writers such as Herodotos, Thoukydides, Plato, Xenophon, Ploutarkhos, and the Greek novelists. In an earlier draft, I had an eleven-page introduction to the text and its historical context by a fictional scholarly translator similar to those one finds in volumes of the Oxford World Classics or Penguin Classics series. After this, the account itself began with the words: “Peisithea, daughter of Demokhares and wife of Kleinias, an Athenian of the deme Kollytos, and priestess of the Mother of the Gods, wrote this account for future initiates so that the memory of the extraordinary deeds that our goddess has performed in my life may not perish with my earthly body, but endure for many generations.” The text stated the years by naming the eponymous archons and was full of hundreds of Greek terms, phrases, and allusions.
I personally thought that this was fun and added character to the narration, but others assured me that it was intolerably boring, that no one other than me and maybe a few other classicists wants to read a novel that sounds like an actual ancient Greek text, and that, if I actually want to get this thing traditionally published, I need to cater to modern readers’ expectations.
In light of this, I have resorted to a compromise and written the book in a modern novelistic style that will be much more familiar and appealing to modern audiences, but I have kept a greatly shortened scholarly introduction, some Greek terms, and some allusions. Admirers of Greek literature will find much that is familiar, but people who don’t read ancient texts for enjoyment will hopefully still find it entertaining.
From your description, I might have preferred your earlier draft! I tend to enjoy details in ancient literature like dates given in archonships (etc.) and distances in parasangs, and would probably include such if I wrote a novel in a historical or fantasy setting. But we’ll see what I think when I can read your work!
I’ve completely rewritten the beginning of the novel over a dozen times now and the current opening is far more attention-grabbing than what I shared above. The first sentence in the current draft is: “Even after all these years, I still remember how I first learned that I was possessed by a god.” I may revise it again, but I think some version of that line is most likely going to stay.
I have kept a lot of historical details, including a few archon references here and there.
If you want to strike a balance between historical realism and ease of reading, you could do like Manzoni did when he ‘discovered’ the original manuscript of ‘The Bethroted’ (a much-studied book here in Italy): write a short passage in the ‘original’ style, and then said that it would probably sound tedious, and that you adapted the source a little creatively.
I do have the “translator” say in the introduction that she has sometimes favored “dynamic over formal equivalence” and am using that as an excuse for any modern phrases or expressions that happen to come up.
I do like this beginning to the narrative although I am a physicist …
Whatever you end up with, I wish you success both in the endeavor and in your classical avocation. I take is that you will have some footnotes in the novel pointing to the sources of your inspiration.
ΕΡΡΩΣΟ
Alexander
The current draft of the novel has footnotes, but they are mostly to explain meanings of Greek concepts and historical background that it would be unrealistic for Peisithea to explain in the text itself, given that she is presumed to be writing for an audience of other ancient Greeks who would already know them. I have been trying to keep the footnotes fairly minimal. Unfortunately, I suspect that an agent or publisher probably won’t like having any footnotes at all and will want me to cut them.
Hey, Tolkien and Pratchett used footnotes, although those might have been a bit different.
I think the more common approach is to have an appendix, although that requires the author to guess which terms will puzzle the reader so that he remembers to check the appendix.
Hi Spencer! Very much looking forward to this book, and I will certainly be among the first to order it when it is available.
Regarding publishing, are you aware of Unbound Publishing, which is I believe what they call crowd-sourced publishing? For you perusal, you can find it here:
https://unbound.com/
I’ve read a number of books from this publisher, including ‘The Scottish Boy’ which is LGBT-themed, as well as numerous books by UK author Tom Cox, who writes about the UK countryside. Just fYI, and good luck in all your endeavors!
As someone remarkably versed (for lack of a better way to put it) in the classics specifically literature, I stumbled across you while doing some research for a lecture I’m giving soon. I personally would take a step back, and not have your protagonist be a woman if you indicated you aren’t sure of how to write a woman of that era due to the lack of info on that in your research.
It is widely known how hard it is for a man to write a female protagonist let alone a female protagonist in a historical fiction novel you’ve made clear is going to be as faithful to the history as possible. That’s a risk I’d tell any beginning writer not to take, and I’ve told many.
I wish you the best in your project, and if I had one piece of advice, write what you want to write and don’t publish your progress here. It’s your novel. If you’re constantly seeking outside approval, you’ll never write what YOU wanted to write.
First of all, I am a woman. “Spencer” can be either a male or a female name.
Second, I’ve spent well over a decade now studying ancient Greece, I have a master’s degree in classics, I know Ancient Greek, and I know the ancient evidence for Greek women’s lives like the back of my hand. I’ve read all the major primary texts as well as quite a few obscure ones, including many of them in the original Ancient Greek, I have read more secondary scholarship on ancient Greek women’s lives than I can count, and, this spring, I was a teaching assistant for a university course on women, gender, and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome. My statement in the post above that women’s lives in this period are poorly documented was intended as a caveat about the limited nature of the surviving historical evidence, not in any way as an indication that I am personally not “sure of how to write a woman of that era.”
Third, I’m not exactly a “beginning writer.” I’ve written numerous previous works of fiction, including multiple complete drafts of a novel while I was in high school. Until now, I haven’t seriously tried to get any fiction I’ve written traditionally published, but I do have significant prior experience in writing fiction.
Fourth, I am not posting these updates to “seek outside approval.” I’m posting these updates because I used to make posts on this blog about ancient history every few days and I have over 700 email subscribers, including some who generously donate money to my Patreon. I haven’t been making posts on this blog as regularly as I used to lately because I am primarily focused on writing my novel right now, so I am giving updates on my progress for my subscribers and regular readers to give them a general idea of what I’m spending so much time working on. I have already written around two thirds of the novel and I have not revealed any information about the story other than its most basic starting premise, the majority of which I only just revealed in this post. No one on the internet knows enough about my novel to give any actually informed feedback on it and the only people with whom I have shared parts of the actual novel are people whom I know and trust in real life; they’re the ones whose feedback I’ve taken into consideration, not random strangers on the internet who haven’t read any of the book.
Fifth, I am not giving updates “constantly.” I have only made a grand total of three posts in which I have mentioned my novel and my most recent update on it before this was in June.
You have a rare ability to make even the most complex subjects feel approachable. Your blog is a true resource!
Thank you so much!