2023-01-05

New Year? Where did the old one go?

And just like that … it's 2023. I'm still rather in shock about this sudden change of date, because mentally I'm still in mid-2022. They say that time flies when you are having fun, and it must be admitted that - while most of the world seems to have been going to hell in a handbasket -it's been a pretty good year in my corner of the woods.

For a start I've had some great projects to work on. The sequel to 'Lost and Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World' is 'Lost and Forgotten Cities of the Ancient World' and that one has been as challenging and as much fun as its predecessor. Then my account of the Cimbric invasion of Italy came out with Pen & Sword, and the second in that two-book contract 'Julius Caesar in Egypt' will be out this year. All this has pushed my pet project – a biography of Medea – rather to the side, though I have got her to Corinth where she is getting the divorce from hell with Jason.

At this point, it's also time to step back and salute you, the readers, who have once again made it possible for me to follow my passion and who have been exploring the ancient world with me. Thanks so much for the positive feedback all year on the books, and for the lively responses to postings on my Facebook page. As long as you keep enjoying what I write, I'm going to keep writing it.

Another reason for keeping the news turned off is because when some free time was available in 2022, we headed straight out into the wilderness. There's some backwoods trails I now know by heart, and we broke new ground on others. There's been a new kayak to test on local lakes, snowshoe routes to explore, and when it's been to wet or blizzardy outside, there's always the kitchen to play in. 2022 was the year I mastered the chipatti, and after getting a French bread pan for Christmas, I plan to spend January working on that. It will be 2024 long before I've got to grips with 2023.

2022-12-05

Winter's back...

See how Soracte stands against the sullen sky;
Groaning loud, the snow-piled trees bow
Chained with frost the river's flow

Heap high the logs and melt the cold:
And barman, draw the wine we ask
A mellow Sabine from a four-year cask

The future leave to Jupiter,
Who will still the tempest's roar
And shake the ash and cypress trees
no more.

That's Horace in Odes 1.9. Soracte was a mountain beside the Tiber just outside Rome. While Horace's mountain is ten thousand miles and two thousand years ago, the words describe my present reality. Just yesterday I crossed a plank bridge over a frozen stream while walking through a forest where the weight of snow has bowed the young cedar trees almost double.

Then we retired to a local hostelry where there was indeed a roaring fire, and we sat beside it warming ourselves not with Sabine wine but rather good Irish coffees. Outside the snow kept coming down and not one mountain but an entire range of them stood against a sky that, if not sullen, was definitely rather grumpy.

One difference was that Horace then goes on to the delights of romance in the coming spring. Looking around the bar at the ski bunnies and their swains, I doubt many in the room were prepared to wait that long. Io Saturnalia!

2022-11-04

Just Write, dammit!

Writing a book is straightforward,yes? Not simple, as anyone who has tried it will testify, but a reasonably unconvoluted process. You research the thing, write it up, send it off, and hopefully a publisher accepts it. Then you're done apart from getting the final printed volume in your hands and accepting the accolades of friends and a grateful public. If only it were so.

My position these days is more fortunate than that of many writers in that I'm an accepted author (having twenty-plus books to my name does that). So to most publishers I'm a known quantity. Therefore a book idea is arrived upon when I or a publishing editor gets an idea and we discuss it until the idea has become a potential book that is writeable -for me – and sellable -for the publisher. This then needs to be hammered out into a contract (usually a Memorandum of Understanding) involving some complex legal issues around copyright and royalties.

The next thing is often a dummy. That is, the publisher wants to sell to other publishers overseas, and those publishers don't want to buy a pig in a poke, so they ask for a sample chapter. On occasion I've had the overseas rights to a book sold before I've even started the introduction. Usually though there's one polished chapter produced before the rest of the book and that serves as a model for the rest.

Writing is less straightforward than it should be because it's done on the writer's schedule. And for many people that means that the writer can evidently make time to do some morning shopping, a bit of gardening, an afternoon bridge game … .Perhaps the worst thing about these people taking unfair advantage of the writer's flexitime is that the main culprit is generally the writer him or herself. Indeed as I write this I have bagels baking in the oven, snow to shovel outside, and at least two publishers breathing down my neck for material on various projects.

And as you can see, we've barely started research for the rest of the book yet …

(continued next month – hopefully. Christmas is another major time sink.)

2022-10-03

History … of what?

The other day I was annoyed yet again by the idea that 'history' is somehow a sexist word because – after one inserts an extra 's' - it can be read as 'his story'. The word actually comes from Greek and means 'inquiry'. Should we also excise or amend 'helix', 'hegemon' and 'hemisphere' because they are words from Greek that begin with 'he'?

Nevertheless, what stops this from being another loony idea from the far shores of political correctness is the sad fact that history often is 'his story' – written by males about men who made the record by demonstrating why 'toxic' masculinity also is not just a wokey buzzword. Now I'm not arguing that this sort of history is unimportant – events in Ukraine show that this toxic mentality still exists among world leaders and the implications and consequences need to be studied. However, there's another kind of history that seems to me more interesting.

The development of Roman swords is doubtless fascinating – gory instruments of destruction always have a morbid appeal. Yet even in the Roman legions some soldiers spent an entire career without drawing a gladius in anger. But (for example) how about the development of Roman toothbrushes – implements that they probably wielded every day? How much do we know about them? We know an awful lot about Roman attitudes to warfare, but how did the Romans feel about oral hygiene? This is the sort of thing that is actually fundamental – you can't understand Romans without understanding their society and a society starts with the minor details.

Even if you are a 'big history' enthusiast who prefers to read about the deeds of great men, these details matter. It's the trivial things that shape who we are, how we think and our concepts of the world, and these feed through into how we take decisions and act. If we do not understand the Roman concept of things like honour, love and death, we run the risk of assuming that Romans thought just as we do today – and they most definitely did not.

2022-09-04

Global or Local?

Recently I've been debating globalization with an economist friend of mine. He argues that 'comparative advantage' means that we get cheaper goods from – for example – China than can be produced locally. To which I respond that those cheaper goods enrich American billionaires and the Chinese but don't do much for people locally. And since 'supply chain issues' have become an excuse for all types of commercial failure, his argument is currently looking somewhat weaker.

As a historian I point out that over ninety percent of what was consumed by an ancient city was produced by that city, and that proportion went up, not down as the Roman empire became more established. Why, when our neighbours can grow plums in their back yard, does our local supermarket import them from California?

In short I'm something of a localist – indeed, much of what we eat is grown in our garden or baked my my oven. A lot of our energy comes from solar panels on the roof, and my clothes are sourced locally (from the thrift shop – fortunately sartorial elegance is not a social requirement hereabouts). Nevertheless, as my economist friend points out, my own position is somewhat hypocritical. After all, my books sell in over thirty countries in over a dozen languages. You can't get much more global than that.