The Playdough Forgery
Now that I’ve attempted some forgeries, I have extra respect for Lauren and the forgers in The Metropolitan Affair by Jocelyn Green.
This story immersed me into the roaring twenties and ancient Egypt all at once. With Egyptomania sweeping the globe once again after the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, forgers were on the rise.
My piece couldn’t be sold for millions, and it wouldn’t fool Lauren for a moment, but I wanted to see just how difficult it would be to forge an ancient Egyptian artifact.
So I chose my materials—homemade playdough and a skewer (I’m working on a uni-student budget here, okay?), asked AI how to write my name in hieroglyphs and set to work copying.
I was somewhat flabbergasted by my hieroglyph writing skills.
I added some colour pigments, then sent it to the kiln! Which some people call an oven.
As it was cooking, I thought about the extent Lawrence Westlake went with his forgeries to cover his own shame and inadequacy. It seemed to me with the amount of effort he put into his forgeries, he might as well have spent the time either searching for the real thing, or repairing the damage he’d done to his family.
Sometimes we spend so much time pretending and covering up and forging ourselves that we might as well spend that effort refining and searching for our real selves—a better self. Something that can’t be shattered to reveal its faults.
In the Book of the Dead, a spell illustrates the journey of the heart in the afterlife. It is weighed against Maat, the goddess of truth. If the heart is found heavier, it is declared to have been evil, telling lies, being greedy or plotting against the king, and will die forever.
If the heart balances with the figure of Maat, it will be given life in eternity.
At the end of our lives, it isn’t the forgeries we have made…the character we have hidden…that determines our destiny. It is our true heart.
Matthew 23:27-28 (NIV)
"You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”
Click the image to buy The Metropolitan Affair by Jocelyn Green - a riveting historical fiction set in New York in the 1920s, with an infusion of Ancient Egypt
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One of the big mysteries as an unpublished author is the percentage of a final book which is the author’s work, compared to an editor’s. If there’s any published authors here, let me know!
I’ll admit, I have used AI extensively in my novel—mostly, at this point, just to experiment with its capabilities. But AI, like it or not, is the future, and its in our best interest to learn how to use it.
Not as forgery, but as a tool to help us learn and improve.
Share your thoughts on AI!
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Your MC is creating a forgery of something for your FMC. What is it and why?
