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12 Books in 12 Months

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caligula

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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Caligula’s Adiatrepsia

As January’s book is Caligula’s Blog, today I have mostly been reading a book about Caligula by a Roman historian called Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus.  It’s essentially a massive list of the crazy stuff he did, which is very handy from my point of view because each item can be a blog entry (or several).

I haven’t finished it yet, but some of the highlights have included:

– Caligula having a gold statue made of himself.  Every day some lucky slave got to dress it up in clothes identical to whatever the man himself had thrown on that morning.

– Inviting the moon to go to bed with him every time it was full.  Well, I assume he was after the goddess of the moon rather than the lump of rock, although he pretty much seemed to do anything and anyone that stayed still long enough…  I will look into that.

– On meeting handsome men with good hair, he had the backs of their heads shaved to make them look daft.  He wanted to be the sexiest, you see.  Perhaps making other men look bad would detract from the fact he was a terrifying, all-powerful sex pest.

– He apparently described his maternal grandmother as “Ulysses in a dress.”  He didn’t like her very much.

– He referred to signing execution lists as “clearing his accounts.”  As you may have gathered, he was a sensitive soul.

– He liked to get members of Senate to run alongside his litter for several miles at a time.  A bit like having a performing animal, I suppose.

– Lots more things, but I’m not going to list them all.  They’ll be in the blog…

I don’t know much about Suetonius himself yet, so won’t be 100% sure how reliable he is as a source till I’ve done some more research on him.  I do know that the man had some lovely turns of phrase and that several subsequent biographies of the Caesars were based on his works.  Also, he was mates with Pliny The Younger, which is interesting in the sort of way that makes you say, “oh really?” because you’ve vaguely heard of him.

Which is nice.

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For those expecting the actual writing to begin today I should probably mention that I am Scottish, and as such New Year’s Day is designed exclusively to help me recover from Hogmanay.  However, I will be downloading I Clavdivs* at the same time as sprawling on the couch with crisps and tea and a Doctor Who (new series 5) box set.

Tomorrow, Caligula’s Blog begins in earnest.

*I mean the classic BBC series I Claudius, where they use the roman letter that looks like a ‘v’ instead of a ‘u’  in the title.  But I quite like calling it Clavdivs.

 

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Publicity

At the present time I am sitting in bed (I live in the coldest flat known to man, as is the wont of recent graduates with no disposable income, dependents or things to burn) and attempting to publicise this here project in the book loving world of the internet.  Creating and adding people on the twitter account led to me surfing through 8 million billion book bloggers, which took a large chunk out of my day but was hopefully worth it from a networking standpoint.  Facebook, on the other hand, has been making me want to throw things.  Hard.  At other, softer, living things.

My problem is one-fold.

WHAT THE BLOODY HELL HAS HAPPENED TO GROUPS?!

Time was, back in 2005, you made a group, invited thirty or forty people you knew in real life to join it, that was you.   Then it got a bit more widespread, and I made and joined a ridiculous number of joke pages just for fun.  Who wouldn’t want to echo the sentiment “Disney Gave Me Unrealistic Expectations About Love”, or admit to being one of those, “People Who Don’t Sleep Enough Because They Stay Up Late For No Reason”, or become an officer of “Tom Baker – The Ultimate Man“.  People joined these groups, made a couple of jokes, added a picture or two, then left or stayed at their leisure.

Even as late as about 24 hours ago groups seemed comparatively straightforward.  You could have separate tabs across the top for sections with ‘information’, ‘wall’, etc.  Now, you’ve just got one page for everything.  It’s a sprawling mass of stuff, with no way of highlighting the salient points – ie what 12 Books in 12 Months is and how people can participate.

To add insult to injury, when you attempt to invite people it adds them automatically without asking their permission.  I’d be annoyed if I was just randomly put in a group without my say-so, and I suspect it means people are less likely to look at it because it’s not something they’ve been asked or invited to do.  This upsets me, as 12 books in 12 months is one of the best terrible ideas I’ve ever had, and I want people to take a minute to look at it.

My question now is, should I make a ‘page’ instead? Then people can just ‘like’ it and be on their merry way… but are there other publicity benefits?

Meanwhile, in the world of Caligula research, I’ve just found a TV show made by the History Channel called ‘Ancients Behaving Badly‘, whose first episode is about the man himself.  And I’ve ordered a second hand copy of I, Claudius by Robert Graves online for a bargainous £2.70 so that I may keep it forever and perhaps even read it.

What a productive day.

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January

I initially had a lot of trouble deciding on January’s book.

I thought it would be the ‘friends and family’ volume, and had vaguely planned to email everyone I was close to over the Christmas period to ask for ideas.  However, as soon as I sat down to compose said email, I knew it wasn’t going to work.  Different people were bound to want different genres, which would mean a random cacophony of characters and plot ideas more convoluted than a local authority newsletter.

What I needed was a structure – perhaps I could begin with a genre and expand it from there?  This is the format I have opted to go with, as you can see from the ‘get involved’ page.  However, January is immediate and looming and tangible; so close I can almost smell Snowmageddon 2: Snow Harder.  And I didn’t want to nag people for their ideas over the holidays lest they had been watching too many heartwarming Richard Curtis movies and ended up insisting I write a family saga about an English Rose with a heart of gold.  I’m not ready to become Joan Jonker just yet.

The solution, as it turned out, had been offered by my sister about ten seconds after I explained the project to her towards the end of November.  She thought about it for a couple of minutes, then looked at me and said “Caligula’s Blog.”

I almost dismissed it out of hand because it was too perfect a pitch.  It was a ready formed concept – all I’d have to do is research the life of Caligula and some Roman history, then write it.  Bam.  So much for the group participation stuff.

As it turns out, it’s the perfect first book for this project, because whilst I’m researching and writing it I can get this site off the ground and publicise the project so that I have something to work with for the coming months.  With that in mind, I have downloaded Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire to my phone in five volumes, as well as the Caligula volume of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus’s Lives of The Twelve Caesars which had a rather lovely comment about the legs of one of Emperor Tiberius’s generals…  I am currently trying to source a copy of I, Claudius from the library and have been told to check out Plutarch’s Lives, but if you know any other useful source material, please leave a comment!

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