A friend asked me the other day how the new book was coming along which, as usual, sent me off on another tangent of thought. You see, the new novel is a work of historical fiction, which requires a great deal of research. That’s no big deal for me because I’ve always enjoyed reading about history. The usual response when I say that is, “Ugh. All those names and dates. How boring!”
Well, if all you look at are names and dates, then yeah, that’s weapons-grade boring. But that’s not what history is, not really. History is the story of people and their interactions with each other. For human beings, nothing is quite so fascinating to us as we are ourselves. Properly applied, history shows us what we have done before so as to give us insight into what we might do again. But how can that be? People in the past were so different than us.
Really?
