The Author

Every story begins with a question. For me, the question was simple: what if the past wasn't gone? I've been fascinated by ancient Egypt since childhood — the scale of the monuments, the complexity of the mythology, the sheer ambition of a civilization that decided the most important thing it could build was something that would last forever. The Great Pyramid is still standing because it was built by people who understood permanence in a way we've largely forgotten. But the thing that moved me most wasn't the monuments. It was the people. We know their names. We have their letters and their shopping lists. They were real people who loved and worried and hoped — and they have been gone for four thousand years. The Neferet Trilogy is my attempt to close that distance.

Egypt sits at a unique intersection of the mythic and the historical. The civilization lasted over three thousand years — longer than the gap between us and ancient Rome, multiplied three times over. Within that span they developed one of humanity's first writing systems, built monuments we still cannot fully explain, and maintained a cultural coherence that most nations never achieve in a century. But beyond the facts, Egypt has always felt like a place where the veil between the visible and invisible worlds is thin. Their art, their religion, their architecture — all of it is animated by a belief that meaning runs deeper than what the eye can see. That's a sensibility I find endlessly compelling as a writer.

Time travel, to me, is the purest form of the stranger-in-a-strange-land story. When John Carter steps through the Eight Gate, he loses every advantage modernity gives him — his language, his technology, his social framework, his sense of how the world works. He is reduced, in the best possible way, to himself. What's left when you strip everything away? Character. Values. Courage. That's what I wanted to test. The romance between John and Neferet isn't incidental — it's the point. Because love is the one thing that seems to survive the passage of time. It's the reason the pyramids were built to last: so that something of the people who made them, and the people they loved, might endure. I wanted to write a love story worthy of that ambition.