thanks everybody for coming everybody here me ok great i'm going to start by reading a little bit from the book for those of you who have already read the book and other so least a couple  people you'll recognize that i hope and then i'm going to talk about the history and i'm going to keep the readings short because i think that the reading is not as interesting to me as the history of it is so but  also recommend actually the audio book is very funny for me to listen to there's a guy simon vance who has done hundreds of audio books award winning guy i can't imagine how much they paid him to do it and he does all the voices so that is really like very fun for me because their voice i would not have imagined the voice might have sounded like it but that's been really fun so i'm not going to sound as british as he is unfortunately but if you've got an ancient rome book it has to be a brit right wealthiest man in rome and he purchases the slave three seeis to man his kitchens and to basically hopefully give him some gastronomically fame and so this scene is immediately after he's been purchased and they're walking through the market and he's taking him to the altar of fortuna privoxy and she is the goddess of luck and wealth and so he wants to get a pickiest wants to get a divination to determine if three suits w good purchase the priest a bald man with heavy lidded eyes or robes that despite their color could not hide the dark blood stains of his trade as a harris backs one who gave divinations by viewing the and trails of ended its cries with a quick slash across its neck and a push of the knife down its belly scarlet flooded the feathers and flowed into the rose bowl in a rush there was no struggle which bode well for the divination there harris specks rolled the goose over and pushed upon it till the end trails fell into a viscous mess in the bull i have observed my new master wishing i knew what thoughts are going through his mind and iron like smell was did up from the bowl a few more cuts in the  block before the end of the afternoon raised i imagined he had seen the same look in the eyes the wealthy before he cleared his throat the goddess fortuna smiles upon you in some ways but i fear not in others of pickiest wiped his palms on the folds of his toga i held my breath the piece priest pushed around the entrails he lifted up the liver it was larger than normal and very smooth and this i see a life of indulgence and prosperity you will win many hearts and bring pleasure to many people you will have much to love in your life he examined the gall bladder it was swollen and no longer green as it should be but a bright angry red a whirring noise and gold dust a several hundred flapping pigeons swirled through the air a pickiest cursed damn pigeon he glanced up toward perhaps i should have sought an auger to read the birds instead of a duck gaze or i had to wonder as well so many birds appearing at that moment must have great significance the priest didn't look at apparently birds meant nothing to him unless they were sprawled open under his knife and he slashed the gallbladder open and pulled it apart with the tip of his blade it was filled with hundreds of yellowish orange pieces of gravel he grimaced in my stomach lurched what did he see this is most unfortunate a heavy liver a healthy liver and a rotten gall bladder you will feel the blood of life mingling with the pang of death your good fortune will be as a disease throughout your life the more you work towards success the more your sky will darken to her respects job to fat finger toward a particularly large rock glistening with bile to larger pebble stuck to its sides see that the where for every success greater failures will cluster to the sides the priest ignored the pickiest a sharp intake of breath he put the gallbladder aside and turned to the rest of the n trials he lifted the gizzard a double bolt organ and cut it open carefully exposing a cavity full of grass rocks and other debris look here he said pointing to a piece of rounded pale blue glass amid the slimy debris this means unusual judgment what do you mean beads of sweat stood out on a picket his brow means that ultimately you will be judged in the underworld by how our world and the world of the future perceive shoe the harris picks picked up the ball and turned away i felt like it had been a dismal fortune and surely a picket was bound to march me right back to the slave trader i see said a pick yes looking perplexed the statue fortuna glowed in the early afternoon sunlight her eyes painted blue stared at me as he rose to pick us repeated the priest's words over and over in a whisper judged in the inner world by how the world sees me now in the future i glanced so despite the body slave only about his head i wish that i could ask the pickiest what he intended when he sent me back i look toward for tuna and dared to stare into a little bit about the cookbooks that i decided to this is really what got me interested in writing the book at a lot of ways so pick us was a real person he lived in first century a d around the time it had various  sir we know a few particular things about him all of which i tried to cram in here and some sort of way so we know he traveled to libya to find the best prawns we know that he fought over a fish at the market with marcus wagered one of them would win the fish we know that he searched for the best ingredients and that by medieval times people came to know the word a picky and some political intrigue that we know about him as well we know that in his use he apparently slept with a man named such a mess who was somebody that eventually tried to overthrow him for type areas and he paid for that sex too so probable that epic otto is actually a pick is his daughter so i thought to myself well why would he pay said jane s to sleep with him when they were young and then marry his daughter to him later well what was the impetus there so i kind of make up what that might have been  but what we also know about him is all of the recipes that are in the cook book that bears his name and this is the best translation if you're really interested in historical cooking sally granger's version that she wrote with her husband christopher grow cock and there's another version on line back was veiling just a failing it's not as good but you can you can search for the cookbook of pickiest online at least get a sense of it the cookbook is fascinating because there's recipes in here that definitely are from the b c era there's recipes in here that are from potentially a pick is kitchen and have his name on it but the majority of the coop was compiled in the third or fourth century  c cooks would just share recipes and collect them and eventually they all got collected together at some point into this volume and then there they continued to keep this collection together over the years there's the new york medical library actually has a couple manuscripts pickiest one from i think the medieval times and one from a little bit later and in this like fifteenth century or so but the cookbook has really fascinating food in it which i'm going to talk about in a little bit as well i'm going to read a little bit about the food too so start there actually and i'll pass the cookbook around if anyone wants to take a look at it actually and while i'll talk about the vid there's some really crazy food in there and there's some fun stuff we can talk about all that so this particular scene is the first roman kaina and we would meal this this particular scene starts after pickiest has moved his family from the town of by a where they were living into rome and he wants to be part of roman politics and he is very interested in putting on the best face for these ancient romans and so this is part of the planning for the meal the i'm sure you know who everybody is that are going to read about so pick scene there's his body slave is a man named so just who is this monstrous egyptian man that could pick everybody for this room and throw him pretty quick easily there is his wife and she is also in this scene it was four months before we were ready to open the doors to guests of our first roman kaina my master was delighted to be entertaining once more but not all of his slaves were as enthusiastic i don't want to fight with balsam it's such a small thing for me to ask and she's a slave that's in the kitchen i placed a white scarf on the table in front of her lately she had decided she no longer wanted to pull her hair back i like the way i used to wear it before you the aged slave stared at me i didn't understand this new defiance of her her age was catching up to her and of late her behavior had become more erratic i tried a different tactic it's a big night for a pickiest with no time to waste don't make me wish i'd left you  impression by getting them all drunk that some impression i had to smile everyone loves to get drunk isn't that true not everyone loves to clean it up i know that little boy so he gets a pass not everyone loves to clean it up she looked at me square in the morning that she would not be pleased if that's what she ended up doing she nodded the scarf around her hair thank you both i'm a granted a return to the task of weaving laurel leaves roses and hazel flowers into the many reese we would need for the evening i spent a few moments directing the other slaves preparing for that evening before taking up my knife to chop up the bundles of luggage till time and sage in a coma thought joe is drinking party the romas wafted up as a chopped and lost myself in the rapid slices of the knife i thought about the party ahead i agreed concerns at first i was nervous about a picket starting out in a room with a drinking party instead of a traditional dinner while imbibing was something of a past time in the tourist town of by i assume that caesar augustus is austerity would hold more sway and more rome but it pickiest wanted to  invite as many people as possible he had many potential clients in room as well as a few of his own patrons narrowing down the guest list to nine or eighteen would have been nearly impossible not that it was difficult for me to change my mind once i started thinking about all the possibilities for the party we decided to hold the coma stacia with wine in amusements but with a special treat a group stacho a tasting that would let visitors sample the dishes which a pick use and i were particularly proud well it was somewhat unheard of to mix the courses of wine and food eventually i was able to serve small bites of food before the coolness accio my argument was that if the visitor sampled the dishes a pick you should be able to gather clients and patrons who would look to future seats at his table i think you said agreed especially after i had explained how i would dress ladies i was relieved to see he was in a good mood what about those delicious fried her liver she makes some of the boys the market if you need tears i pushed the cutter abs into a small bowl i can do that what about the cabbage at the mention of cabbage so to shift his chair in the scraping noise caused me to look over at the big slave he waved his hand in disgust in front of his nose in disgust i had to agree i think you have been obsessed with cabbage of late and had combed all over him for recipe that i could test and i could modify in the last months the two of us a cook more cabbage than i ever cared to see or smell again plus i wasn't sure the ages all believe that cabbage would prevent hangar of yours held any truth of course pickiest went to  party responsible for diluting the wine leading the libation him and watching the quantity of alcohol consumed by the casts making sure no one got too much or too little the majesty was also in charge of directing conversation and deciding if games got too out of hand in short keeping the peace you need someone who can be both merry and diplomatic in guiding the conversation yes it's a tough decision there are too many people attending to decide by the throw the dice a pick is dropped a handful of cabbage into the crackling oil what about alias cousin lucius alias the janus i don't know him not but dumbest speaks of him well would you make about just or pickiest wrinkled his nose as though he were recalling something distasteful i wondered if i had somehow made him angry finally say he said it's rumored that he likes to enjoy his drink at parties i mean i want to confine him to such a role let's not worry about him for tonight has been kind to me this far she will be again i'll think about it later when little slice from the food and there's a lot of really interesting stuff about the food and for me that was really the heart of what i got excited about when it comes to writing about the book some of the things that i learned when i split started writing it when i first started researching is that our typical three course room three course meal is actually in roman constraint they were the ones that began the idea of three courses they would never have mixed wine and food together the wine was always after the party after the food had been served in much the same way you would always water the wind down and it's a shame my friends that have the little boy he sells wine so he's missing the wine story but they would water their wine down and they were really big on vintages and so they would often have been to one that was one hundred years old two hundred years old it would be sludge in the bottom of the bottle and that they would do is water it down to reconstitute it then they would clarify it with lead or with charcoal and then the other thing that's really fascinating is that everybody they spice the wine in everybody had their own spices that they light so if you went to a party it would be very normal for you to bring your own spice mix because you like your wine spiced in a particular way so i find that interesting meals always began with a and did with fruit and so there's actually a medieval term i don't know the latin for it unfortunately but it's from eggs apples meaning from beginning to end and that's where that term comes from and it's the idea that you always begin with some eggs and some a dish and then you would end with fruit and that's still very much true at least with ending with fruit  italy today you and with something sweet but usually with fruit they eat all sorts of really weird things that we would not want to eat today some of the weird things would be fried flamingos tongs which plainly said  says are the best flavor things like nightingales tong stuff like that they would also eat fried or mice or mice are a little there from the flying squirrel family but i don't think they flew but they lived in trees and they're slightly bigger than a mouse and they would fry them up whole and eat them all crunched up bones and all they love the fried or mice flamingo and peacock me and all of those kinds of exotic birds were popular they would use most every part of an animal where they could some of the pieces of the animal would probably go more specifically to the poor like for example blood and so blood sausage was something that was definitely made during that time but it would probably have been the poor would be more likely to have eaten something like that although there is a recipe for blood sausage in there haggis was actually originally an ancient roman food there's a recipe that's in there for haggis we cannot eat haggis in the united states because long has been outlawed in the u s and so i think seventy one or seventy three because it's too dirty it's too f d a thinks that you can't get it clean enough but they would stuff me into stomachs and into lungs and much like the and then boil it much like we do with with haggis today for gras was not a french invention the romans were stuffing birds in ancient times and a pig is certainly did that but he had a better idea what he decided he would do is he would stuff his pigs with dried figs and then he would get them drunk and then the figs would expand in their stomachs therefore causing them to explode and killing the pig and you'd have these wonderfully flavor of all fatty liver  so yeah so the idea of animal cruelty was not existed back then they had recipes that we were very familiar with to go oh i have to say there's a couple other funny things that the one of the delicacies with boiled south particularly after it had given birth it was the most delicate flavor that they also love stuff like meat had come from a gladiatorial rang they loved that because  the animals particularly that one were prized by the prize so the romans because they had been favored by the gods so therefore they would slaughter them right away anything and that was true as well as if a shepherd had had secure had saved a wolf foods that were very familiar to us things like french toast there's a recipe in the book that's almost identical to the french toast we know and love don't it are definitely a roman invention one of the thing that's really interesting about the way that the ancient rom ans a was particularly people that were not wealthy is that rome was a city of well over a million people and the fact there wasn't a city larger than that of that size again until i think the hundreds it was the next time that a city got that big in the city there were buildings which they called insulate which were apartment buildings and they were often up to five to six storeys high but they were always made out of wood and you can't build a fire on the fourth floor to feed your family so what they would do is they would have they would have a little tavern called the peanuts or thermopile eyes and they were places where you could either have boiled meats or fried foods and so basically it was like the fast foods of the romans and you would go down and if you wanted cooked food you would go to one of these shops and get your food and there's other recipes are familiar to us things like top and nod roman absinthe absinthe has been a drink that they've been drinking for centuries  there's one hundred sixty four recipes for sauces in the cookbook which are really interesting a one thing that is fascinating too is they had this or there's two things that they put in everything but the real cool the best herb w effective and they also used it in all their cooking and it was very similar flavor to garlic and so they became over cultivated because it was so popular and they just couldn't figure out how to grow it anywhere else so they or by the time they realized it was almost gone that it was too late so the last spread was rumored to have gone to emperor nero as sort of an audit he and i in the book actually talked about how silphium starting to become extinct and then the other thing they all the time was was like the catch of the ancient world it's this sauce essentially and it's very similar to fish sauce that you would find in thai or the enemies cooking and you can also find it in specialty shops or on amazon or you can find in e torah which is a fish sauce that they make in italy as close to the ancient methods as they can and the interesting thing about fish sauce is that it was almost a it was something that actually was made in a factory sort of setting they have found ship rocks that have hundreds of em for a garrow that came from factories in spain so it was something that was used very widely by the romans across the empire  and then i'm going to read one small piece from a little bit later in the book and then i'm going to open it up for questions  so this part here is a little bit into the book and there is this is where the political intrigue is starting to happen and so there's a couple people in this scene that have been introduced one of them is livia augustus caesar's wife in livia is the cousin to fannie and fannie a is a pickiest is older mentor a woman that has really mentored him throughout his life and helped him become interested in food and planned parties and phania and livia are cousins and they hate each other and so they're in this the in this scene where they're have they're at a party for  it's a little weird that three so you might wonder why is the cook at a party like this right but it is explained how he got there in the course of the book i promise so livia is talking  two fanny and they're getting ready to watch this drinking game livia had lost interest in the conversation and was staring in the direction of the game watching a pick is he went to sit on the long padded bench next crown of laurel leaves would be placed upon his head and a generous purse from caesar would be placed in his hand i take it the fritters were good fania said testing the waters with livia they were a gift to the bride they were livia tore her ways  thumb toward me you want his food in your kitchen do you not simply convinced to convince caesar to give the pickiest the position that he desires that of gastronomical visor you win and he when's fania shifted her fan to hold better hold her glass she glanced over to a pick in the game the group of men had down there first class were being handed their second was fanny and doing i suspected that the wind had made her tongue loose livia's nostrils flared at fannie a suggestion she turned her attention back to the drinkers her head live to slightly as the men tipped their heads back down to the next glass of wine she closed her eyes as if savoring the idea of drinking the wine herself her voice was soft but clear fania you are a stupid cow number three i was sure that a picket can keep up for at least eight or nine glasses i had no idea how he would manage the last few we watched just a magister of rebels cut the one with water and the slaves once more went to fill the glasses first worried livia might try to poison him but when i saw the wine was directly from the lot of unopened for along the garden wall i relaxed the poet of it appeared beside fanny and i introduced him in the story later earlier leaning over to kiss her cheek in greeting what a toward us in a mock toast as i suspected glasses three through five were no problem for a pick yes to drink down in one long slow draft as required by the rules of the game other rules enclosed had no burping no falling off the bench no declining a drink none of the participants wanted to be just grazed in front of caesar at last five one of the city's more prominent lawyers and one who had begun drinking long before the party started fell off his bench the crowd laughed heartily caesar did not smile a wave of his hand brought two burly men over to delighted to answer questions that you might have yeah i should probably have gone that direction right so i began writing this book it's been it took me almost ten years i may ask me how long it took it didn't take me ten years to write it took me like three or four years i think you it probably took me three or four years on my weekends because i have a day job that pays me money and but then it took me another three years to find an agent once i found the agent then she had to find the publisher one that took her six months or when she found months once i contracted with touchstone that was eighteen months from that day until that was published so the better part of a decade future book should not take so long hopefully so but i began writing it actually i got my master's in critical and critical and creative thinking at u mass boston a few years ago and i was doing a book my thesis was centered around exercises for writers in the middle so writers who were stuck in the middle of their problems i researched all of these business and science exercises and co opted them into writing exercises for writers to brainstorm their own problems and solve their own issues in the middle of their  projects so there's lots of books on writing prompts and things like that nothing for the middle and so when i shopped it around agents all said you have no platform nobody knows who you are and it's all nice that you've got this fancy master's degree but you nobody knows who you are see you should be there teach or you should write a book or somebody should write a book using these exercises so i went on to teach and then i thought i should write a book so i was going to write a book about a celebrity chef who had this magical set of knives and i might write this book at some point but  yes died and so that's the other thing we know about a pic yes and i would say don't google it unless you want to the end of my book but he died in a really interesting way and i thought ok i'm going to write a scene with that as my premise you know in the book that will be where my knives came from so i wrote that scene i thought oh my god this is so much more interesting i want to write the book and so that's where it began and i thought i gotta figure out how to tell the story of how we got from a to the the and so and then i just fell in love with italy i've been traveling back every year for the past like eight years now and romance where my heart than learning the language and studying everything i can and i'm working on a second book which is copy who is a renaissance chef and his cookbook was the bestselling cookbook for two hundred years after was published in fifteen seventy so that is marvelous fun very different kind of book but still food and chefs in italy and i can go to italy to research so the questions i do not actually i do get that question a lot i just love to i love fine dining and i love exploring food when my husband and i when we go to vegas on vacation we're figuring out ok where we're going to go eat it's really and i love i love talking with chefs and talking with bartenders and fear and understanding what inspires them i think that to me is where my background said it's more on that side of things and i've been really fortunate to get to know a lot of really interesting chefs who how actually i've collaborated with me on some of the recipes in fact if you're interested hearing tonight you'll hear again if you go to that but the food i swear is going to be amazing because he's an incredible shop and that's a three course dinner with me all with wine pairings and so that's on june twentieth so that's really  peacock and i don't know why it was on this financial podcast but my friend has just i listened to it so they went about trying to figure out how to procure a peacock so they could eat it because we don't eat peacock and it cost them two hundred fifty dollars for this peacock that they had bought from some farm in california and and he had it shipped to them and then they had to figure out what how to cook it and of course it came with the head on and all sorts of things and it's very funny i think that if i can find peacock i would try it  had beautiful rejections which i think are somewhat worse in a way because then you're like i don't know what to do with this i yeah i really believed in the story and the rejections i were getting were so when you're and this is interesting i think if you're if you're not familiar with the way the process works the publishing industry is such a wacky industry i learned so much about it one of the things that they didn't like about the book when i was shopping it around was that it was too long for a debut author they want your book to be about ninety thousand words which is a little shy of two is around two hundred pages or so my book was one hundred forty three thousand words and came out at four in the eighteen pages and i think it's closer to hundred thirty two now and the good feedback i have is very consistent it's too long but i want you to add all of these scenes i'm like you kind of hand have a half way and so fortunately at the time i also knew that a lot of longer books were starting to be published so i just kept trying i said i had actually set myself a deadline for like like a year or two more that i think maybe even only maybe a year or more where i would decide ok too i want to try to self publish this because i knew that i want to new it so i knew it was an ok book and that i wanted it to be in the world so for me i knew that that was i knew that i wanted it out in some way and i would have been content potentially self publishing i just happened to get lucky enough and i think that one of the other things too is that i've got a good set of colleagues i ever write in groups that we've been meeting for almost ten years and we meet every two weeks and we have heard each other's books so i had like a cheering section for me the whole time and so i think that helped a lot but one of the things so randy susan myers who's also a local author that  she wrote her latest book widow of wall three wall street just came out she once told me she said you can't get you can't complain about your rejections for looking for an agent and tell you about a hundred rejection and so i think i had thirty or forty or so and so i thought i have a long way to go before i can complain about it so yeah it's tough and i think particularly for dave you authors it's there's a lot of noise out there and  self publishing it's a lot a lot noisier than it used to be you know the question oh my gosh i can't believe i forgot that so i actually wrote the book at a bunch of places but i finished the book here i finished it right upstairs actually right above our heads i wrote a lot of this book in the stacks and over the course of those probably three or four years i really love i love this library a lot because it's so easy to go to a coffee shop and get there the rough and rumble of like what's going on out there but sometimes i just need it to be really quiet and and there's something really inspiring about being surrounded by books when you're writing you have and you've got all the research i could just walk over to the shelf with the loeb library and and you know check out playing right there so that was really helpful to know that i was off i did a lot of my research through the library as well so yeah i suppose sitting up there when i finished the book and i just started crying because i had written a book that was kind of a big deal so yeah so this library means a lot to me to be honest so ye really really bad with titles and so my writing partner on julie made her do you actually came up with a title for me i had was pretty sure they're going to make me change the title because the title actually refers to a specific event in the book and they thought one event maybe you don't want to do that but in the end they let me keep it and i was really pleased because i think it it's it's it's really it's me it's the it's the the pinnacle of the book so it makes a lot of sense for it yeah but she's and the funny thing is that she's on her second book right now and getting ready to submit that into her agent and she's struggling for a title so i have to reciprocate so that's my next m next little job that i hope to do with me so this is when i talk about writing part i mean the women in my writing group so there's three other women that are do a beautiful book called faint promise of rain that set in medieval india this for ten years and we just shredded party to others books and so to me like there's so much of them in this book because of the feedback that i've received and things like that so  yeah i'm just really fortunate to be able to work with those ladies and we go on a retreat every year and we write for three days straight off the coast of maine and you know so that's been great and we can see each other through our books so we're all in various stages which is awesome book a lot of library stuff checking out books a lot of working with various i did talk to a few different historians at the time but majority of it  was really reading everything i could about that world i would check out books on everything that from source material i think that was probably the book the core of my research was reading treaties on agriculture by cato and figuring out understanding what their architecture was and the food was one aspect of it but i wanted to know what the religion was like and what clothes they wore and so you know spending time at the met and talking to curators about clothing and things like that so in going to italy of course walking in the footsteps of the people that were there that was pretty amazing i didn't go to italy and to hell the book was almost done  the first draft was almost done and then when i got there i realized there were so many things about it i needed to change because now i knew distance and i knew for example there's a scene that's in a crypt in the book at the cemetery and i didn't know until i went to ostia antica which is thirty minutes outside of rome highly recommend you go there if you go to rome and you don't have time for bombay but one of the things i learned there is that the crips all have two floors and what they would do is every year they would throw a party on the second floor in remembrance of the dead and i didn't know that i had set the whole scene outside like a model like we would do in a cemetery in a mausoleum whereas actually they would have done this scene they're setting a curse on someone they do it actually upstairs and on the in the corrupt so i would have known that so i had to rewrite scenes when i got there realized oh that's not right so going to a place i think is is is invaluable but you can do a lot on google earth these days which is pretty cool you can writing this novel had written a few chapters and i actually started work shopping it through grub street which is an independent writing center here in the city and i took at least a border's class hirsch's a novel right workshop judaeus also she's familiar with grub street so that we met ages ago there and we workshopped it there and then i liked it so i got such great feedback i workshopped it again there was actually a woman in the first class who loved the idea that timeframe and she was jewish and i'm not which is fine but she really thought king herod should be in the book every single class she kept saying you need to add king herod you need to add king herod and i'm like  funny thing she was so adamant that it had to be in there and then when she know it my editors like you need to totally expand that scene so there's a little more king herod in there than i ever anticipated so she got her way so but and then so i worked up to  grub street and nationally i rewrote the first fifteen chapters four times with different points of view i originally why i started with the pickiest as point of view but i realized that if i kept going in his point of view it just wouldn't have the impact for the ending of the book so because you would know what his thinking was and what he was planning and what he was going to do and so i switched it around first person third person and then find the first person was my last resort and when i fell into it with three seeis suddenly became his story he's the one telling it it's his point of view from this point of view as a cook so that was that actually probably took the majority of my time is figuring out that voice i'd never written a novel before i'd published a lot but not in a novel and that getting that down was her now the second book i'm like oh i'm old had at the so i totally know what i'm going to do over it and then my writing group has been really helpful it started i met one of the women at one of those workshops and then i did the second workshop that fall and i met another one of the women and then i met the third person actually group street has a yearly writing conference called the muse in the market place and i met her a few years like two years later at the mews and invited her in and so there's four of us altogether and we meet every two weeks and we usually share least at least one or two of us share or maybe two or three chapters at a time sometimes we share more so for example anjali is ready getting ready to submit her manuscript to her agent so she just printed out although i would have printed out if she had let me but she felt bad making us use all that paper so when there earlier this week she handed me two hundred fifty pages and i have a month to read it but i read really facile a clean that quickly but we will do that but then we also do things like if we don't have any to talk about we'll send our synopsis or we'll talk about  books that we're reading or we'll talk craft issues and so we always have this back and forth about and we talk about the publishing industry and who we know that's doing what and it's been invaluable i could not have written the kind of book i did or felt confident about it without those women so i've been what really fortunate he we agent when all the agents were rejecting me and they wanted me to cut scenes they were like well ok chris lee should cut that scene you should cut that scene and there are scenes in there i'm like i'm not cut and then i'm like and actually the whole cemetery scene was one over and over there like you should just cut that she cut that and i shrank it and i shrank it and i shrank it but that was one darling that i kept in there and when you read the book it's there's a curse and the curse is an actual ancient roman curse and i did not want to lose  that for me though i had found this curse and i used it and it was like cool and i that was my be my darling i didn't but for the most part oh and there was a scene where they go to get the shrimp off the libya they're like i don't know about that  but actually when i was getting ready to cut it and i asked my husband he had been reading it he said if you cut that scene you lose so much about who pickiest is and why why what he knew you lose so much about the man that he is you can't cut that scene so i listen to him in that case but i probably wouldn't cut it otherwise we're we're pretty good at listening to each other and and for them or at figuring out how to if i'm really adamant about something they'll  give me feedback on this is what my impression is you need to just consider it but you know it's subjective we also know that there's often times when two of us will have one opinion the other one will have a different opinion about things and so  what i try to do is like i get all the feedback from everybody and then i put it aside and then when i go back and do edits several months later i think that i have a hole for i don't know who said it i don't know so that helps a lot too and then i have also a different perspective because i've in my head i've always sort of pictured it like you in a movie in a way i mean just how how it's structured and and so i can picture or i can picture it all the way through and i've been really fortunate most of the people that read it are like this is exactly this is a miniseries  like yes so i just need to meet that h b o room yeah i think i yeah i think that has to do with just how i picture things as i write it's just kind of came out that way i haven't really thought about maybe doing any non fiction or anything on it other than articles that i'm writing about that air i've definitely been doing a lot about yeah i wished i could have i wasn't able to because i grew up on the west coast they didn't offer it i probably would taken to it i loved inch in history when i was a kid when i was very young i loved the roman mists and i and i loved learning about egypt and the colosseum and the the real ancient history i always gravitated towards it as a kid i probably would have loved it and so i actually did as much research as i could and then i was really fortunate i met this woman emily hausler who is a classist and she speaks latin and she she found me on twitter  just we just had a conversation and she listens cambridge and she actually has a book that's about the women of troy and it's called for the most beautiful and it just came out last fall and it's gorgeous it's this incredible really interesting book about because all the perspectives of everything that happened in troy were from the men's point of view so she wrote it from the four women in the heart of the story that the women that everyone trades around and things like that so and then her second book is coming out this fall which is the sequel to that and she fortunately was able to look through and help me fix some of the latin so for example that i actually there's a word called switches means cook and i had used a word called the jirus or i think i'm not sure i'm pronouncing it correctly but apparently that is a word that was not an ancient word it's a medieval latin word in she knew that i mean it was a correct word but it teaching currently other than occasional classic grub street i love teaching i really do but i can't afford to teach unfortunately sadly i'm hoping that if i can get more books out that i can go back to teaching i would really love to do that it was hard to do it part time and have a day job this and grading papers because i was teaching writing so that that's hard to do when all your lawyer all your evenings and weekends are just grading papers and i was getting paid for it i wish i had been i wish i knew what it was like to teach when i was i wish i had had that that experience i would have treated my professors and my teachers so much differently if i had known how hard it is and you know how much preparation goes into i would have been a very different student i think anything else i'm so glad you came thank you so much