If you are interested in writing medievalist fiction or epic fantasy, reading medieval economic or military history, or creating your own fictional secondary world, this site’s craft blog and other resources might be useful to you.

This website supports my Winds of Change epic fantasy trilogy. The three books now are available for sale on Amazon. The site adds more fiction (short stories, episodes), lore (fictional facts), and resources. The medievalist fiction blog is intended to support writers and game designers, but history readers will find many good book recommendations here. The medieval period, especially in Europe and central Asia but for other cultures too, fascinates me, and I’ve built a decent-sized personal library about it.

When I was writing the three novels, I generated a lot of stories and supporting materials while I was feeling my way forward through the creative maze. I will share that extra work on this site. I’m playing with multi-dimensional narrative structure.

I’m a professor of English at Illinois College, and I’ve taught creative writing for almost three decades. Creative nonfiction is my primary genre, but my hobbyhorse for years has been an epic fantasy story. During and after the COVID pandemic, I worked on the drafts of three novels. I finished my first proof of book one in June 2024 and my polished version of book three on August 1, 2025.

The obvious question after completing book one was: What now? One option was to build a platform and try patiently for traditional publication. But I lack patience. Another option was to build a website and make the story available to anyone who wants to read it. But I believe that writers give away too much writing for free. Other variants of subvention or self-publishing also were options. But I wanted to acquire new knowledge and skills about publishing and the publishing industry that I could share with my students.

So I considered my options for a while, and then I decide to go the independent, or do-it-yourself, route, but using Kindle Direct Publishing. My project now is a playful experiment in multi-dimensional storytelling. The trilogy of fantasy novels functions as the skeleton of the story. Then, the website adds, and will add, short episodes and stories, a compendium of “fictional nonfiction,” a nonfiction blog about medievalist fantasy and medieval research, a game design, and some resources in support of good writers. My goal is to slowly but steadily build the hyperlinks and navigation paths so that readers can independently explore this invented world through multiple pathways. Building all the content will take me some time because my day job is time intensive, but I’m aiming to complete a first version of the website content by the end of 2025.

For the published books, I’ll make iterative passes through them over time and correct any errors or continuity issues I missed during my proofreading. But I dare say that the texts are in good shape right now. (Let’s not talk too much about the cover designs yet. I’m not a visual thinker, so that hurdle is a high one for me.) Perfection is unobtainable anyway, though, so I’m thinking of this entire project as a living organism. I’m going to tinker with it and try to improve it for as long as I’m able to do so.

But remember that the blog essays and some of the suggested resources are the only nonfiction pieces among this website’s material and among the three novels. Everything else is fiction or fictional lore. I do not believe in hiding real people in fiction. I’m a creative writer trying to tell a good story that dramatizes how awful class warfare can be and that takes place in an interesting secondary world. If you want to read it allegorically, think of its message as something like “Don’t let it happen in your country.” That’s it. I’m not speaking for any organization, or my institution, or other faculty members. But I am drawing on what humanity’s literatures, philosophies, and history show us about human psychology.

Comment Policy: I enjoy interaction with other readers and writers, and I’m happy to discuss and argue about books, history, or politics in a civil way. In particular, I’d appreciate feedback about your favorite characters or plotlines. I like all of them and am generating new material weekly, so I’ll try to give attention to characters or subplots you want to know more about. Of course, I will delete all of the typical troll comments.

Best regards,

Nick Capo