Novel
Histories
The light side of
writing historical fiction
Latest posts
The scapegoat
Ritual sacrifice in Second Temple Jerusalem
Second temple Jerusalem was a place of music, trade and shared food! We take a walk through the complex (including the forbidden places) and chase the scapegoat out the eastern doorway.
Coming in April 2026
The clay uterus
Birth control in antiquity
Given a choice, how many women put their hands up, and say, pick me, pick me, I want to have 13+ children!? We look at secret, not-so-secret and bizarre contraception in antiquity.
Coming in May 2026
About this blog
Welcome to Novel Histories!
This is a blog about the discoveries I’ve made while writing historical fiction. We’ll look at the expected, unexpected and downright bizarre, and have a laugh doing it.
I am not a historian, but I do have a PhD in engineering, which taught me to study everything in painstaking, granular detail. My thesis and subsequent papers are best described as cures for insomnia. If you need help getting to sleep, you can find them here.
But you won’t be burdened with sterile facts on Novel Histories. Yes, you might learn something (I’ll provide links that may lead you down strange rabbit holes on the internet… ok, to bookshops), but mostly I hope that you’ll get a good giggle out of our sometimes not-so-illustrious ancestors.
As I’m currently studying and writing about antiquity, the posts in the foreseeable future will be on ancient Rome, Jerusalem, and a thought or two on India, the setting for my previous novel. Antiquity was a time of petulant gods, defecating in the streets (the mortals, not the gods), and a prince determined to impress his dad by killing an elephant, standing right under its belly, poking upwards furiously with his sword. Sometimes, fellow humans, I’m amazed that we’ve made it this far.
Happy reading!
