The Nature of Egyptian Belief What did the Ancient Egyptians believe? Contrary to popular recounting, the Egyptian religion was not...

To create a character with depth you need to create a character with internal conflict, a character who has “issues” that they need to...

A story protagonist is not always a hero and an antagonist is not always a villain, even though the terms are often used interchangeably....

It might surprise you to know that the Thriller and the Romance story structure have some things in common. Firstly, and most importantly, both story structures revolve around emotion and a relationship. In the romance the relationship is between the two protagonists or lovers and the central emotional arc is the discovery of love. In the thriller the relationship is between the protagonist and the antagonist and the central emotional arc is the destruction of love and the ex

We all love an Anti-Hero, think Han Solo in Star Wars, John McLane in Die Hard and most of Clint Eastwoods characters. Venom, Lucifer Morningstar, Wolverine, Tony Stark, Rorshach, Magneto and Loki… the list is long. Female Anti-Heroes are less common, but some delicious examples are the Widow from Into the Badlands, Jessica Jones from Marvel comics and Yennifer from The Witcher. The quintessential example of an Anti-Hero from the Egyptian pantheon is Set. The Anti-Hero is a

How to Create a Powerful Anatagonist Want to create a powerful antagonist that readers will love to hate? Read on. Interested in building an anti-hero? See my post on creating an anti-hero character and get the anti-hero template. I always had difficulty with antagonists. They seemed to me to fall into two categories: the melodrama villain, committing evil acts for the sake of it, or sociopaths revelling in their graphic cruelty to the protagonist. Both types repelled me,

Plotting Definitions for Novels Story structures for novels have largely been adapted from the pure story telling structures of film. But there are differences in the way scripts and novels are organised so it can sometimes be difficult to figure out how to adapt one to the other. When working with story structure, you begin at the highest level with the 3 (or 5) act structure which is devolved into story points or plotline elements. These are the points in the story stru

Exploring Story Structure for Plotting Pantsing vs Outlining Pantsers argue that trying to structure their story ahead of time makes...

The Golden Flies of Queen Ahhotep awarded for her gallant defence of Egypt in the Wars of Reunification at the end of 17th Dynasty. The...

Many ancient Egyptian royal women seem to have born the title iryt-p`t, translated as Hereditary Princess, but what does it mean? The...

The Younger Lady The Tutankhamun Family Project lead by Zahi Hawiss conducted extensive DNA testing of mummies purported to be related to Tutankhamun in an attempt to identify the relationships between them. The results of the study published in 2010[i] suggested that the body found in KV55 was Akhenaten and Tutankhamen’s father, the body dubbed Younger Lady from tomb KV35 was both Tut’s mother and a sister of KV55 and the body dubbed KV21a was likely to be the mother of the

The controversial proposal put forward by Schoch[i], that the Sphinx and its associated temples have been weathered severely by water erosion and therefore must be several thousand years older than the Fourth Dynasty, has been rejected by Egyptologists. Schoch’s main argument for the dating of the Sphinx to the period 10,000 BC is founded on the results of seismic sounding conducted around the Sphinx showing sub surface weathering[ii]. The main argument against an earlier da

The Tutankhamun Family Project[i], and the work of Kate Phizackerly[ii], has provided strong support for the identification of Ay as...

Radio-carbon dates collected in three separate studies[iii] suggest that the Great Pyramid was most likely built at least 400 years earlier