Jennifer Malin's Blog, page 6

Saturn's Day

Happy Saturnalia! The ancient Roman holiday is the source for some of our own winter-solstice traditions, like gift-giving, feasting, lights (candles, back in the day) and general hustle and bustle. The seven-day festival spanned from December 17th to the...



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Ostia: The Other Pompeii

Two thousand years ago, the town of Ostia thrived as Rome's main port on the Tyrrhenian Sea. But heavy silting of the Tiber River gradually moved the sea away, and with it went the trade that provided a living for Ostians. Later, earthquakes and political...



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Italiano a Poco a Poco

The first time I visited Italy, back in college, I hadn't studied the language at all. In Rome, my friend Nancy and I met two local guys, and "mine" didn't speak English. Nancy's date told us that Italian was close to Spanish and I knew a lot of that, so...



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Let the Good Times Scroll

In The Five-Day Dig, TV host Dunk Mortill, determined to save his archaeology show from being cancelled, hopes to find ancient scrolls during an excavation outside Pompeii. At the same time, he suspects a local priest of trying to get to the texts first...



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A Cornucopia of Trivia

When I was a kid, the cornucopia struck me as a strange concept — especially because of its name, which seemed to have something to do with corn. Now, after all of the research I did on ancient Rome for The Five-Day Dig (and just out of curiosity),...



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Bewitched, Roman Style

The concept of the novel isn't really novel at all. Long-form prose fiction has actually been around since ancient times, though only one Latin example has survived intact: Metamorphoses by Apuleius, a second-century lawyer from Madaurus (an ancient Roman...



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Another Seller for The Dig — and a Giveaway!

In case anyone has been waiting for the paperback edition of The Five-Day Dig to go up on Amazon, it's here. (Woohoo!) It should also show up on Barnes and Noble soon. (Of course, the Kindle and Nook versions have been available for a couple of...



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Oxford When You're Not Rich or Rhodes Material

A couple years ago, someone posted on the cool Blogging Pompeii site that its chief contributor Jo Berry would be teaching an online course about Pompeii though Oxford University's Continuing Ed department. Now, I like to think of Oxford the way it...



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"The Dig" Is Up!

The Five-Day Dig is finally here, and you're one of the first to know! Kindle and Nook editions ($5.99) are up at Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and you can get the paperback at Createspace (use the code SQ55F9SW at checkout for 25% off the $12.99...



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Shady Dealings

Did you know that lemurs, those cute creatures from Madagascar (the island as well as the movie), get their name from a Latin word meaning ghost? To the ancient Romans, lemures were restless spirits of the dead who either hadn't received a proper...



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