In this premiere episode of the Premium Pulp Fiction Podcast, I pull the camera all the way back on Ghost Emperor and show you where this whole thing actually began—not in a library, and not in a writing workshop, but under a red desert sky.
The story opens in Wadi Rum, in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, where the sandstone canyons feel less like a backdrop and more like an older intelligence watching you move through it. From there it moves to Petra, where the carved façades sit in a silence that feels almost surgical, and on to Hegra in northwestern Saudi Arabia, where Nabataean tombs stand in the heat like stone lungs. Somewhere between Sela and Mada’in Salih, a spark lodged itself in me: a half-erased war, a people empire tried to treat as a footnote, and the sense that the version of “Western Civilization” most of us were handed in school had quietly skipped entire chapters.
In the episode, I tell the story of Antigonus Monophthalmos and his son Demetrius, Diadochi generals who decided that the Arabian Shield and the Nabataeans were theirs to plunder. Only a few years after Alexander’s death, they pushed three campaigns into Nabataean territory, seized twelve tons of silver, and dragged women and children off as slaves.
The Nabataeans answered with something the Greek imagination had no real category for: an eight-thousand-strong camel cavalry, mastery of the terrain, and a kind of logistical discipline that turned the rock-cut passes into a killing ground. They broke the Greek columns, then met them again, and again, until the message should have been impossible to ignore. Yet the story sits mostly in the margins, smoothed over by later historians who preferred their empires heroic and their deserts empty.
That forgotten conflict became my entry point into the Wars of the Diadochi as lived experience instead of timeline. In the episode, I talk through how that single, brutal footnote became the seed for Ghost Emperor, and how I treat it—and the entire Diadochi period—as history behaving like omen. This is the material that sits behind the Author’s Note and the historical appendix in the book, but here you get the connective tissue: what I was looking for in those deserts, what I began to see, and why it refused to let go.
From there, the episode moves into something I teach in my Wonderdog Story Workshops: the idea of a story spark and the process I call the spark funnel. I walk through the questions that took that one fragment of history and turned it into a full-blown saga: Who were the Nabataeans, really? What kind of world produces men who try to rule through a dead body? What happens when a corpse becomes the most valuable object in an empire? How do you build a novel that can hold that kind of psychological and geopolitical weight?
I also spend time on the worldbuilding, because Ghost Emperor didn’t come out of a vacuum. I talk about my time studying Arabian landscapes and history with archaeologists like Dr. Samer Saleh of King Saud University in Riyadh and Dr. Guillaume Charloux of the CNRS, walking Nabataean, Greek, and Neolithic sites, and learning to read the desert as a layered archive. Their work on caravan routes, inscriptions, defensive structures and buried settlements pushed me to treat the Hejaz and the wider Hellenistic world as ecosystems, not scenery. Then I bring in my work with Alex McDowell, the worldbuilder behind Minority Report and other major films, and how his worldbuilding mandala reshaped my approach: build the world as a living system—landscape, culture, infrastructure, myth, conflict—and let the story emerge from that ecology instead of bolting plot onto a backdrop.
Finally, I dive into creative liberties and the problem of the ancient sources. Writers like Plutarch, who comes centuries later, are invaluable and also deeply shaped by their own agendas. In the episode, I talk about treating Plutarch as a kind of in-world, unreliable narrator from the future—someone who has already tried to tidy these men into moral lessons, long after the blood dried. The novel steps into the spaces his version leaves blank: the private conversations that never made it into the record, the rituals behind the curtains, the camp followers and servants and women who carried the cost of empire without ever being named. That is where Ghost Emperor lives, in the overlap between what the record preserves and what it can’t.
If you’re curious how a stray historical footnote becomes a 286-page prestige epic, how deserts shape story even when the action is in Babylon and Macedon, or how to treat an ancient historian like both a source and a character, this episode is the deep dive. It’s the story behind the story, and it’s also the first real articulation of what Premium Pulp Fiction is meant to be: a multiverse of epic, gothic, and futuristic narratives that doubles as a living curriculum in the craft of storytelling.
