...no escape from reality

I have the bones of an outline.

I have not, quite, put away my other options, but my little horse is really wanting to see that farmhouse now. It is high time to start writing.

Not-quite-discarded option #3 is to stick with High Fantasy structure. Three or four party members of different backgrounds and skills "meet in a bar" and set out on an epic quest. Which involves magic and gods and high stakes and is generally away from the better-known parts of Bronze Age history (aka, don't spend a lot of time in Egypt.)

The best I can say about this is the research needs are small. And it aims for a larger audience than the more mainstream historical fiction one. But I dislike it because it feels dishonest to the actual history and peoples.



Rather-more-tempting option #2 is Cypriot. Cypress is today a divided nation and archaeological evidence supports that it could have divided during parts of the late Bronze Age. Or, at least, the situation is complex; there are cities that were clearly sacked, for instance, but others that appear not to have fallen.

So Cypress could be used as a microcosm to talk about the Bronze Age Collapse. The characters could meet there and largely stay there, involved in terribly complex palace politics and warring city-states and civil war and incipient collapse and the final evolution from the Palatial culture to the period of the Greek Dark Ages.

It is exciting because it isn't one of the Big Three and hasn't been done to death. But it would be heavy-duty research -- it would be practically impossible without a visit to the modern-day island, for instance -- and equally heavy plotting.



Current-best option #1 is made possible by splitting the party. If I tell the bulk in two independent narratives it opens up the plot to borrowing heavily from existing sources -- and waving some of the more popular elements at the reader. The Egyptian Scribe half of the party cribs heavily from Tale of Setna and large parts of his Indiana-Jones style search for a lost manuscript takes place around Dier el Medineh -- up to and including a run-in with the notorious Paneb. And then he sets out from Pi-Ramses with his charioteers along the Way of Horus.

In parallel (though possibly not in parallel time) the Mycenaean Mercenary half of the party is driven from Wilusa, and after someone burns the boats, has to strike out down the coast towards Miletus (or some other friendly Greek territory). So basically the Anabasis. And our young Mycenaean learning about command and honor and otherwise sorting out his own relationship to the Heroic myth. Oh, yes -- and the Sea Peoples (or someone) is not far behind them.

The party is finally assembled to witness the fall of Ugarit. From there, a quick but far from uneventful sea voyage to the Greek heartland only to discover the ruins of Mycenae and the other great cities. And then? Either back to Pi-Ramses to witness the battle of the Nile Delta, or striking up the Italian Peninsula to vanish into myth.

Among the problems I have with this scheme is that once I am already stealing from Homer and Xenephon and Coptic Egyptian texts from as late as the Ptolemiac period, it becomes far too easy to justify stealing stuff like the First Servile War (during Roman times) with a literal fire-breathing Prophet as a leader, or for that matter the machinations of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus as part of the story of a struggling but falling city of the old order. That is, in short, the temptation and the danger -- inherent in the premise -- of merely re-telling history which would be far too familiar to some of the readership.

It would be a fine line to tread. I like the idea of Easter Eggs for the more canny reader, but the more I use these sources, as well, the more important I get the stuff right. And that, again, is a lot of research.