Greg Steinig

The Man Who Died at Poitiers is set during the Black Prince's chevauchée of 1355, the two months when an English army rode out of Bordeaux and burned its way to the Mediterranean and back, not to take ground but to make southern France too expensive for its own king to hold. It is told from the baggage train. The man telling it builds the engines, counts the fodder, and keeps his head down, which is the vantage the genre almost never uses and the one from which this kind of war is actually run. I wrote it because I wanted to read it and could not find it. I chose this war because it is the rare campaign where the strategy and the crime are the same act, and nobody inside it could pretend otherwise.

Before this I spent twenty years in technology sales, and ran sales for a company as it went from $20 million to $100 million. That is not a writing credential and I am not going to dress it up as one. What it left me was a method. You do not finish 130,000 words on inspiration; you build a pipeline and you run it. This book had a production schedule, drafting sprints, dialogue audits, a commercial audit, and a day by day historical spine underneath every chapter, because that is how I know how to finish things. The route in the book is the real route. The sources are named on this site so that you can check me.

The prologue and the first three chapters are free. That is the best argument I have.