Heather Terrell has certainly established herself as an author --- she's written several historical novels for adutls, the young adult novels ETERNITY and FALLEN ANGEL, and RELIC, the first book in her new YA series The Books of Eva, came out this fall. But she didn't always know she wanted to be a writer ---she actually wanted to be an archaeologist since her early days watching Indiana Jones! In Heather's post, she tells us how she went from digging ancient dirt in far-off lands to weaving enchanting tales for all ages...and how the two careers are more similar than you might think!
When I was growing up, I didn’t exactly have your typical girlish heroes. No princesses for me. Nope, from a young age, I read about Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankamun’s ancient Egyptian tomb, and watched Indiana Jones. I wanted to be an archaeologist.
Naturally, when I headed off to college, I studied history and archaeology. I remember well the exact moment when my professor dimmed the classroom lights to show us images of his summertime dig in Turkey. The possibility of uncovering some monumental secret from the past? It seemed so impossibly glamorous and important and exciting.
Until I got there. Day after day, all I unearthed were dirt and rocks and bugs. Endless species of bugs, in fact, each one perfectly adapted to the scorching heat. Unlike myself. And suddenly, when someone suggested that my history degree would be a perfect fit for law school, the idea seemed appealing.
For a decade, I became a lawyer and an armchair explorer. I spent my not-so-copious free time reading about other people’s earth-shattering discoveries and the still hidden mysteries of the past. After a while, I needed more; it wasn’t enough to just read about others’ expeditions or visit their finds in museums.
That’s when I made my own discovery. I didn’t have to sit waist-high in ancient dirt and modern bugs to excavate the past. Holes in our understanding of history abounded; I simply needed to survey and sift and sort and recover and analyze the original source material, as if I was actually on an excavation. And then fill in those gaps in our knowledge with fiction. For me, writing and excavation turned out to be quite similar.
I guess, in some ways, I became an archaeologist after all.
