Back when I was in 5th grade, one of my favorite things that we studied was Ancient Greece and Rome, and even to this day it’s been something that’s stuck with me. I remember learning about Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns and how to identify each, even learning a little song and dance to remember the column types. But the part that probably stuck with me the most was learning about the Greek and Roman gods. Each person in the class was assigned their own god to learn about for that module, ultimately culminating in a class play where we acted out scenes from Greek mythology.

When we started learning about Ancient Greece, the god assigned to me was Hermes, and as we moved on to study Ancient Rome and got to pick a Roman god, I picked Mercury because of how attached I had become to Hermes. I loved the winged shoes and hat, I would even try to run everywhere as quickly as I could, pretending I had wings of my own on my feet. The next year in school I even began my journal with a letter saying that if we were going to study Ancient Rome again I’d want to be Mercury.

The obsession ran deep, and if a book like The Lightning Thief had been out when I was in 5th grade, I would have definitely been obsessed with it too. However, when I started writing books of my own, I found a lot of the things I had learned about in Ancient Rome creeping into my stories. In Wardenclyffe, all the towns have fountains with statues of the greek gods in the middle of them, reminiscent of a statue of Mercury we had in my house growing up.

And the inspiration came back in an even bigger way in my second book, Mercury. With even the very name being a reference to the same god I studied back in 5th grade. But it went deeper than that. When designing the setting of the second book, a colony ship drifting in space, I wanted to imagine something a little different than the traditional spaceships with their metal corridors and futuristic look. Instead of that, I imagined a ship styled like Ancient Rome, still with plenty of sci-fi elements, but also some things to make it feel like the inhabitants had brought a piece of the Earth with them. So we get living quarters modeled after the stone streets of an Italian city, complete with little cafes and tables lining the streets, and transportation systems named after bridleways and chariots and other things you would’ve seen in Ancient Rome. And scattered throughout the ship are large marble statues of the ship’s namesake, Mercury.

I think one of my biggest joys of writing is to be able to take the things I’ve loved in my life, like studying Ancient Rome in 5th grade, and weaving them into the stories I write. In a way, it’s like I get to share pieces of all my memories with anyone who reads the stories.