Alternate history and the butterfly of doom

A butterfly in the Amazon jungle makes that little extra flutter of its wings and a few weeks later there’s a storm or even a hurricane in the Caribbean that wrecks cities. That’s a little crudely put, but this is the idea behind Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory. In reality, the butterfly’s flapping wing is just […]

Helping to track the timeline of a story

Writing the first book of my Roma Nova stories, I found I needed to develop a tracking system not only of the action but also of its timing. It’s so easy when engrossed in producing any story, let alone a thriller, to inadvertently get events in the wrong sequence or introduce a character to another […]