Here's a little preview of a story about Peter the Great (and his pillow man) in the new book I'm working on:

The nonchalance with which people lived their lives in the distant past amazes me.

“I’m going for a ride,” millions of people have said to their loved ones. If I were the emperor of language, which I’m not (I’m currently only a squire) I could find a more accurate, more exciting way to say it. Granted, historical conversations would be a little longer, but it would all be worth it. The past was dripping with danger and adventure, and it was such a shame for people to waste boring language on it.

“I’m going to climb on top of this 1,000-pound, marginally domesticated ungulate - the one over there with the flaring nostrils and eyeballs bulging with fear - the one that could kill me by kicking me, or stepping on me, or biting me, or by me simply falling off of it, and then I’m going to try to balance on its back for several hundred miles,” the olden times man would say.

“Ah, I see. And to where do you go on this fine day?”
“I’m traveling to another country, the one with a healer in it,” he would reply. “I’m hoping he can cure me of my typhoid. And of whatever broken limbs I sustain during the ride there, obviously.”