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12 Books in 12 Months

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caligula

An excerpt

Currently working my way through the possible torture of the many people involved in plots to kill Caligula.

In this entry the praetorian guard have already questioned and tortured the beautiful actress Quintilia, but she’s given them nothing.  The next step has been to bring in the guy she’s sleeping with, Quintus Pomponius.

Pomponius knows something, but he’s not the main guy.  No huge shock, I realise – he’s hardly got the makings of a criminal mastermind.

Still, I subjected him to a little light torture, mainly on the grounds it’s his fault that poor Quintilia is in such a state.  He should never have involved her in this mess.  I’d never use Caesonia in such a way.  Or I hope I wouldn’t, at least.

Anyway, we ended up giving him a full pardon, at which point he kissed my feet in thanks.  It was actually gross, by the way.  I’m going to have to burn these sandals; the slobber of sycophants and traitors is notoriously impossible to remove.  I’m also making sure Quintilia is given compensation money, hopefully enough that she can remove herself from Pomponius’s company as soon as possible.  I do hope she isn’t in love with the man, he’s so not worth it.

The doctors say she may never act again, certainly not in the ‘beautiful heroine’ role.  Her nose is practically on the other side of her face now.  And yet, she seems to bear Cassius Chaera no ill will.  Towards the end of her interrogation she even gave him a little smile, and I’m absolutely positive it wasn’t a triumphant one.  It just seemed warm and kind.  Reassuring, even.  Surely she ought to be furious with him for destroying her livelihood with a few well-aimed blows?

There again, maybe she’s just biding her time.  Her talent for acting has fooled me before.

To fill you in, Cassius Chaera was one of the guards who actually assassinated our hero not long after.  Quintilia was supposed to have made a sign to indicate to him whilst she was being tortured that she wouldn’t give them away.  That’s dedication to the cause.

1

A Day In The Life of Book One

I have recently decamped from Edinburgh to Perthshire, to house-sit for my parents and write Caligula’s Blog in idyllic rural surroundings at temperatures of -6.

The main reason my folks need someone around is because they keep chickens.  Poultry cannot be left to their own devices, as they are deeply stupid.  So here I am, working my way through the freezer, and popping outside every ten minutes to see whether they’ve gone round the front of the house so I can steal their eggs like an ornithological Fagin.  When I do this, I’m supposed to leave replacement eggs so they don’t get suspicious of the vanishing act and go find somewhere else to lay.  But sometimes, they come round and catch me red handed!  Awkward.  More often though, they haven’t gone round the front at all, so I step out of the door and they cluster round me, cooing ineffectually, whilst I  perform a circuit of the front garden, hands in pockets, nonchalance personified.

A writing day in Blairgowrie, then (based on my experience of one day):

9.30ish – Wake up and free the chickens from the coop.

10.30ish – Settle down to write maybe 1000 words of Caligula’s Blog.

11.30ish – Go outside on egg watch.

11.40ish – Come back inside, eggless.  Check email, facebook, twitter.

11.45 – Polly Toynbee has joined Twitter!  And she got like 900 followers in her first ten minutes!  That’s how popular I want to be…

12.30 – Realise I’ve been faffing about on the net for ages.  Go and make a coffee.

12.35 – Looking outside I can see two of the three chickens out back.  One is digging a hole.  Surely this is enough of a distraction for me to carry out operation egg theft?!

12.36 – Other chicken still on guard duty.  Dammit.

12.40 – Digger chicken is sitting in the hole it has just made, not doing much.  Looks happy enough though.

12.45 – Decide I must do the dishes.  NOW!

13.00 – I should shower.

13.30 – Go to co-op for milk.

14.00 – Make lunch.

14.20 – Hear knocking at patio door and am faintly freaked out as I would have seen a visitor go by one of the windows…  Turns out to be fowl play.

14.30 – Settle to write another 1000 words.

15.30ish – Egg watch success!  Ali: 1, Chicken: 0!

15.40ish – Tea/coffee/Twitter/email

16.40ish – Chickens go to bed.  Shut them away so nothing can eat them.

17.00 – Drive to Perth to collect boyfriend from grandparents.

21.30 – Return and watch many episodes of South Park.

23.30 – Discover Dragon Wars on SyFy.  It’s pretty bad, so we fall asleep on the couch.

So there you go, that’s the writing process in action.  Stealing eggs and social networking.  Caligula would be proud.  Perhaps tomorrow will be more productive…

2

The Britons Are Coming

There will now follow my suggestion as to the origins of the story where Caligula was meant to have had his troops collect lots of shells.  Some historians reckon he was nuts at that stage and did it so he could claim victory over Neptune, the ocean and Great Britain; others suggest he was pissed off with the soldiers and did it to humilate or punish them; and still others reckon it very probably didn’t happen at all.  I’m with the latter group, I think, but in the context of the blog decided to relate it to Caligula’s meeting with exiled Catuvellauni prince, Adminius.

In the previous entry Caligula is wondering the best way to greet the prince, who has promised to swear allegiance to Rome if Caligula in turn supports his efforts to become king of Britain.  Or the bits of Britain his tribe runs, anyway.  This would pave the way for invasion quite nicely, and Caligula was looking for ways to prove himself militarily.

Vercingetorix_BC42, you are a genius!  Thanks for the comment you left about greeting Adminius!

As per your suggestion, I got the troops to collect piles of seashells to decorate the beach with.  Work with what you have, right?  It made the place look tres dramatic – loads of shells shining in the sun, a fearsome army at my back clad in red and gold… Adiminius seemed impressed with the picture anyway!  Not quite as good as our marble columns and jeweled finery back home, perhaps, but military men have different aesthetic values.

Someone said it looked a bit like the end of a battle, all that detritus lying in piles everywhere. Maybe that’s what I’ll tell the senate – “I fought Neptune and won!  Here’s the evidence!  In your face, crusty old guys…”  Yeah, I’m totally doing that.  All the shells can come back to Rome with us as the ‘spoils of war’.  The looks on their faces will be priceless.

Some of the men felt a bit silly collecting up lots of seashells like  a bunch of little girls, but I reckon by the end most of them agreed with me that it was totally worth it.  And they can’t really complain, they got some pretty decent donatives for their trouble.  A third of their annual wages, in most cases.

In other news, whilst we were waiting for Adminius to turn up I explored a bit, and I was wondering – why they haven’t had a lighthouse built at Itium?  Anyone know?  It’s a pretty dodgy area, all jaggy rocks and rough waters and potential for horrible death by drowning.  A lighthouse would be useful, and building it would give people something to do other than hanging around on the beach looking for pretty shells all day… (JK – how self referential am I?!  LOL.)

Some of the sources – mainly original, hostile ones like Suetonius – say Caligula built a lighthouse at Itium at around the same point as the shell debacle, but there doesn’t seem to be much compelling evidence that this was actually the case.  Thought I should mention it anyway, for those people who know their Ancient Roman source material!

0

An Excerpt – OMG Seneca

OMG, I actually hate Seneca by the way.  He thinks he’s so clever, but like, my slaves are better trained in the art of rhetoric than him.  If he weren’t such a sickly excuse for a man I’d seriously consider finding an excuse to have him killed, or at least exiled.  My only comfort is that he’s bound to die of natural causes soon with such a feeble constitution.

Ha, I’ve thought of a joke.

The only thing feebler than Seneca’s constitution… is his body of work!  Ha ha.  Must find Helicon and tell him.

 

I am experimenting with bringing in some properly teenage blog elements (eg txt spk) to see if that works.

1

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.

0

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.

1

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