The Pericles Commission and Awesomeness

Friend-of-the-blog and all-around awesome guy Gary Corby just announced that he finally has a cover for his debut novel, The Pericles Commission, via his blog A dead man fell from the sky.

Also, the book is up on Amazon for pre-order. Go here to purchase the hardback version of the story. If you've read Gary's blog at all (if you haven't why the heck not???), then you know that Gary's a hardworking, brilliant writer who deserves all the success we can give him. The release date's not until October, but still. Work with me, people.

Foreign Languages in Fiction

On Wednesday, Gary Corby blogged about historical research in writing a novel set in Ancient Greece (or any time period really), and I commented asking about how he handled foreign languages in his book. The Mediterranean of the period Gary's writing in was a happening place, if I remember my ancient history right, and a lot of peoples were flowing in and out of Classical Greece. Persians, Egyptians, etc ... so I was curious how, or if, he handled that in the writing.

I expected him to reply in the comments of the original post. Instead, he devoted an entire post to my question ... and then linked to this here blog. Which is pretty cool, I think.

Like I said above, this all stems from knowing the Classical Mediterranean had a lot of different cultures floating around, and from my own attempts to sprinkle fictional foreign languages throughout my fantasy writing. For one story I take actual languages and write mirror images of the words -- "Nyet" becomes "Tyen" for example -- and in the other one I decided I might as well use the languages proper. Of course, that's also because said WIP is a thinly veiled blend of Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition (which wasn't as difficult as you might imagine).

So thanks for the response, Gary. And for the link too!