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12 Books in 12 Months

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Flash Fiction

100 word story on the writing process:

The halogen heater of Korean extraction was slowly but inexorably melting her shins as she tapped out her search terms, first into Google, then the less popular Alta Vista.  Perhaps she should have visited the library, but it was snowing again and her trainers were wet and cold from previous excursions on the ice.

“Fevers in ancient Rome,” she wrote, turning up eight trillion pages about Malaria and an ancient goddess named Febris – not to be confused with the cleaning product, Febreze.  But what did Caligula’s sister, the enigmatic Julia Drusilla, actually die of?  No one knows for sure.

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Please LIKE Me…

I have now deleted the rather pushy facebook group in favour of a page.  Click here to ‘like’ 12 Books in 12 Months, and please pass it on to other people.  I’ll work out how to put a button directly onto this page at some point, but I’ve lost the will to live for the moment, facebook-wise.

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Revisionism and Excerpts

As I suspected a few posts back, Roman historians like Suetonius were pretty biased against Caligula, and had a tendency to write down the most outrageous rumours without assessing their validity in any way.  So whilst what I have written so far is stuff a bit like:

Had to have a consul executed today.  He forgot to announce my birthday in the public records.  Seriously.  A child of five could have remembered to do that.

Now I’m wondering whether he was actually as bad as all that.  The gaps in historical evidence make it hard to judge, but it seems pretty clear that it was in the interests of all the sources that survive from the time (Suetonius, Dio, Claudius, Seneca) to make Caligula out to be an evil nutjob.  So, the question is really whether to go with them and write him in a sort of cartoony, madder than a box of snakes type of way, or to take on board the revisionist work available and write him with a bit of empathy. 

My answer to this is to try both.

Perhaps I should use Incitatus [the horse he was meant to have made a consul, according to Suetonius] to upset senate a bit more.  That’s always fun – I still get a kick out of the time I made them run alongside my litter for ten miles in the blazing sun.  Served them right – all that time feasting and sitting indoors and conspiring to kill me makes them pasty and unfit.  They should try going to battle, see what that does for them.

I think I will commission a legion of men to carve Incitatus a stable of marble.  And he will have a collar blazing with precious jewels, and a manger of ivory.  I’ll have the grooms mix flakes of gold into his food, too.  He will live in as lavish and decadent a manner as the gods themselves.  Senate will be furious!  But frankly that horse is twice as clever as all of them put together.  Self important, plotting dunderheads that they are.  They’ll soon learn that they can’t have any effect on me.

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An Interview

I did an interview for the STV website yesterday, which you can read here if you’d like a little more information on this project.

One of the questions asked that didn’t make it into the article – possibly because I was a little thrown and babbled a bit! – was ‘what do you hope to achieve with this project?’  I found it interesting because it made me think.

If I’m being completely honest, I’m doing it because I want to be noticed.  More than that, I want someone to notice and go “hey, she’s good, maybe we should pay her a sum of several pounds to write some things.” In fact, I blogged on the subject of freelancing and its frustratingly voluntary nature here only a week ago.

I am slightly worried that this answer is too cynical for a quirky project like this.  I’d love to say I’m doing it purely for my love of telling stories, but I’d be lying.  I do love telling stories, but ultimately I have rent to pay. Sorry, idealists.  Having said that, I want to pay it by doing something I love, which is pretty idealistic…  Oh, but I also hope to improve my writing style immeasurably in a comparatively short period of time.  So there’s a less materialistic concern for you!

In news more pertinent to book  one, why do I know nothing about Ancient Rome?  According to the laws of childhood – as set out in the finale of the last series of Doctor Who – everyone does ‘Romans‘ in primary school.  So why is all my research new to me?!  Amy Pond is not significantly younger than I am!  I think maybe we did Tudors and Stuarts an extra time…

And it’s not particularly useful, but I liked the line in I Clavdivs that Livia Drusilla (Caligula’s grandmother) was once bitten by a snake, which promptly died.  Because she’s venomous, do you see?!  Siân Phillips did a cracking ‘evil schemer’ in that show.

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Diarists

How many words are there in The Diary of Adrian Mole?  I have googled it, but no joy.  Meanwhile the auto-filling-out search bar function would much rather I was looking for Diary of a Wimpy Kid.  Which is around 20, 000, for those who are interested, and has a very yellow website.

I’m unlikely to find myself lacking the Caligula material to make 50k, but have been idly pondering that the diary/blog format seems to naturally be shorter than the average novel.  Bridget Jones, for example, is around 36k.  Diary of a Nobody is just under 40k.  I’m nowhere near either of those totals, mind you, so perhaps I should stop pondering and get on with it.

On which subject, does anyone know any good internet quizzes a crazy emperor might do?  I reckon he’d definitely have a go on the love calculator, which gives him and his sister (Julia Drusilla, the one he really loved – after she died he swore on her divinity and nothing else) 72%.  Pretty good.  Although Dr Love, owner of the love calculator, says the relationship would suffer good and bad times and that a lot of communication would be required to overcome potential problems.  I don’t get the impression that’s how Caligula tended to resolve things.  I think Dr Love might have been flayed.

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Procrastination In Disguise

I read an interesting post on Nicola Morgan‘s blog today in which she was talking about research, and the fact that doing too much can hinder the writing process because you get bogged down in details that you could add later.  It’s essentially a slightly different take on my own advice to myself (as seen in the ‘about’ and ‘FAQs’ on this very page), and it’s reassuring that a proper published author feels the same way.

This is especially relevant to book one because obviously I can’t write from Caligula’s point of view without knowing anything about him, but I’ve got so much material to read/watch that if I go through all of it first, I’ll get to the end of January without having written a word.  Essentially, because I don’t know very much about him, or Ancient Rome, I need to be conducting light research as I go, but only enough to get things in the right order and the right sort of shape.  Then I can change stuff and add detail at a later date.  2012, maybe.

So there we have it.  Research is nothing more than an insidious method of procrastination, making you think you are doing srs work when actually you’re putting off the task at hand – namely, writing.  I need to nip it in the bud, before I get to the point of having 3 days left to write 49,000 odd words.

I’ll get on to it right after I’ve watched all 12 episodes of I, Claudius and read all 5 volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire…

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